this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Dispelling the myth of a universal "Lemmy" community, and discussion of what the fediverse really is (beehaw.org)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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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[–] Cipher@beehaw.org 23 points 2 years ago (1 children)

People need to understand what lemmy is. This is not monolithic social media like facebook or reddit. People need to understand that, or the mismatch between how they think it works and how it actually works is going to cause a lot of mental anguish that could be avoided.

As they say in software development, 8 hours of debugging can save you from one hour of reading the manual.

[–] Alfredo_Boyardee@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I’m reading this on kbin(new transplant from an old Reddit account) and I have little idea what this is about lol

[–] Cipher@beehaw.org 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Sure, and I should've been more clear and said people need to understand what the Fediverse is.

This is, ultimately, about what federation means and how this platform operates. Its deficiencies, and the way things work currently to address those deficiencies. What I have posted is just as true for kbin as it is for lemmy.

[–] Mithra@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Personally, with a background in software/programming, but little to no knowledge about how ActivityPub and the interactions between federated instances work, I really appreciate this post and the discussions. Learned a lot today!

[–] Cipher@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago

Thanks, I really appreciate that. Education was the foremost goal of this post, and I'm glad some of that may have come through

[–] Dav@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Here’s an analogy, hope it helps:

Kbin.social and beehaw.org are like really advanced email servers (e.g. outlook.com, gmail.com)
The content you’re seeing on kbin is like viewing an email sent from another server, in the case of this thread you’re getting content from beehaw.org.
These aren’t just normal emails, they’re super advanced emails with comments, replies, categories, votes etc.
The content is downloaded to the kbin servers for your viewing pleasure, and you can send an ‘email’ back to beehaw by engaging in their posts/communities like you’re doing now. That will send what you’ve done back to beehaw so it’s all synced up for their users.

If beehaw ever goes down/gets unlinked from kbin you’ll still have the old ‘emails’ (content) but you won’t be able to engage with them anymore. Like if someone deleted their email account it doesn’t delete all the emails they sent to other people.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm new here and not up on the history, but I have a couple of questions:

  1. When an instance defederates, does it disconnect from all other instances? Or can the administrators choose which other instances they no longer want to sync up with?

  2. In the case of content remaining on my local instance that originated on another instance that has since defederated, would I be able to tell? Would it be possible for Lemmy to add a visual indicator that this content had become disconnected from its originating instance?

[–] Dav@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago
  1. They can choose who to defederate, pretty sure beehaw has already done so with lemmy.ml and others.
  2. I think every instance is different but on some if you try to sub to a defederated community it’ll get stuck on ‘pending’, also you’ll probably see a lot of posts about it. It doesn’t seem to be something that’ll happen often.