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Think of it like email. If you have an email account at gmail.com you can still send and receive mail from people at mit.edu or wherever.
Here, the instance your account is on will fetch posts and comments from other instances on behalf of you and other subscribers.
I think that's what the "federated" part means. Your account has "citizenship" on your instance/server, but had freedom to travel and correspond everywhere within the federation of Lemmy. Did I get that right?
That's the best explanation I have been hearing about how this all works, what happens if an instance goes down or disappears? Would all your comments and posts on another instance disappear ? Or does it sort of take a snapshot of it and becomes part of that instance you commented in ?
Instances take snapshots of text and comments from federated posts, but not media links and embeds so that federation won't take up too much storage. The posts from an instance that shut down will still be there but the post becomes "archived" as any new comments or edits cannot be federated.
You only use one account. The one you created on Lemmy.world.
You can use the search function to find communities in other instances, you can upvote and comment on them too! No need for more than one account!
Thank you, that explains a lot. Since I already got your attention, maybe you can answer one more question for me. Let's say I've created another instance of lemmy on my homeserver, people have joined it, there's some content. And then I decide to pull the plug, my server fries, whatever - does that mean all the content goes too? Or is it possible for multiple people to host the same instance so we always have a backup?
All the content will die with the server if the server fries. Itβs common for hosts to do regular data backups.
But as far as I know you can only have 1 of the same instance at a time.
Just make one on one instance, then use that instance to communicate to other Lemmies
What happens if that instances goes down? can you then login or re register on a other instances and keeping all your comments/communitys you are subbed to?
It is unlikely for larger instance to go down, but if it did go down, theoretically you should be able to migrate before the instance shutdown. Unfortunately, AFAIK Lemmy haven't implemented account migration yet: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985
However, other fedi service like mastodon do have that feature, so it should work similarly. I imagine once it is implemented, you will be able to keep all your subscriptions (basically like exporting your communities, and automatically clicking "subscribe" on each one) and likely your account settings. But I don't imagine your post/comment can migrate to your new account.
Where you create one matters for local rules and policies, and who they federate with or donβt.
You do all of your browsing on your home instance, including the viewing and commenting on posts from other instances.
Accounts are local to each instance. There is nothing stopping you from creating the user account, "dabu" at multiple instances, but there is little point in doing so. They are independent of each other, and currently, there is no concept of karma within the platform.
Your lemmy.world account can be used to post/reply on other instances (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.), and you can subscribe to communities on any other available instance so long as that particular instance is not blocked by your home instance.
My "concern" is what happens if the Lemmy instance I'm on goes down for whatever reason - let's just say lack of funding/donations. Suddenly my account is gone.
Most big instances in Mastodon gave agreed to giving 3-month notice in case they shut down to give time for people who don't wish to go down with the ship to migrate their accounts to other instances. I can imagine it being the same in Lemmy, adding possible community migration
In theory, that is true for reddit as well
