Lurker refugee from reddit here. Being a network engineer, I'm somewhat tech-savvy. But I'm having a hard time getting to grips with lemmy, or I should say the fediverse. I understand that it's a bunch of servers/instances that connect/federate with each other. I also just learned or understood why I can't login with my user account from lemmy.world on lemm.ee. It's like email providers :)

But I've got a few questions that maybe someone who knows more about lemmy and the fediverse can answer.

What happens to accounts, communities and posts when its instance decides it's been a fun few months and decides to shut down?
Can someone register with my username on other instances, or is my username "taken" across the fediverse?
If so, how are spoofing and/or scams using my username but on a different instance handled?

I'm starting to understand that it's not my data that is federated, but only links to the data in other instances. Would that be a good understanding on how the federation technically works?
All my account data is located on my "home" instance, but in turn my posts are stored on the instance where I posted or commented and linked to all other federated instances.

I could try my 2nd question myself, but I don't like creating more accounts than what I need.

Thanks!

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[–] durd_@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks, I remember when everyone was leaving Twitter for Mastodon. I couldn't understand why all the different servers and what they had to do with anything. I do understand more now obviously.

Is federation automatic or do I have to apply to each instance? I'm thinking I could self host and only rely on my own eptitude and internet connection.

[–] Vittelius@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

Kind of both. You get to decide who you federate with but deciding who ferdarates with you is opt out. By default your server doesn't know any other server. But you can search for communities on other instances by taking the url of the community on the other instance and entering it into the search field. This way the other server gets indexed by your server and after that federation is automatic