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184

Dispelling the myth of a universal "Lemmy" community, and discussion of what the fediverse really is (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Cipher@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.

I've been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to "lemmy" as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.

For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw's communities are "owned" by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances' content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw "owns" the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.

This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.

Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren't going to read technical documentation?

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[–] hazelnot@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem with the idea that each community should be its own instance basically comes down to cost, both financial and time. If I want to make a community about something I'm passionate about I'd have to shell out money I don't have on hosting, buy a domain, learn how to actually host and administrate a Lemmy instance, and then spend like half of my time and energy maintaining it.

Not everyone is a programmer with programmer knowledge making programmer money.

[–] Packopus@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

@hazelnot

Not everyone is a programmer with programmer knowledge making programmer money.

That's true, but then we run back in to the problem of what I saw in early kbin days (before Reddit influx) thinking that there should be many instances all having unlimited communities. But this is basically duplicating communities that are now visible thousands of times. There should at least be a theme/community to each instance and have micro-communities in that.

My example would be current-day forums. There are "instances" for just about everything. Most of the time when I buy a new car/motorcycle I join whatever forum site made for that specific vehicle. So that's what I was thinking when I think it's feasible to make fediverse instances of current sites. Mainly just make federation features the de-facto standard so people can subscribe to their conversations.

I've already seen how Wordpress can federate with a plugin, and every blog post is like any other post. Forums can be similar depending on their backend software the site is running.

@Cipher @trachemys