this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Your ID doesn’t need to be tied to any given server. You can move around and change your “home” server at will. Or if preferred you could stand up your own server for your usage, hold your identify on there, and still engage with the rest of Lemmy / fediverse.
It’s less a design mistake and more a technical constraint. A users identify exists as, at a minimum, a database entry. That database needs to live somewhere that the various fediverse servers can talk to. But you have complete freedom in where that database entry is, and can change your mind later.
So it already doesn’t matter if you’re on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server - they all federate with each other (to varying degrees but that’s a slightly different conversation)
It matters in terms of keeping track of your subscriptions though, unless I'm missing something. I essentially need to decide if I'm going to use my account on server A and subscribe to all the federated content I want on server B, or vice versa. If A goes down or if I lose interest in it, I'll need to re-establish somewhere else and resubscribe everything.
I guess the answer is to host your own instance and federate everything, but federation isn't terribly reliable and then you lose the local view.
How does that work? I know that it's an option on Mastodon, but from what I understand, this is yet to be implemented into Lemmy.
Edit: spelling
It’s something of a manual process for Lemmy right now, you’d need to set up on another server and manually add your communities but the point is you can still “move home” and still interact with the same communities and people. If you don’t like having your stuff on Reddit, on the other hand, your options are put up with it or no longer be able to be part of that community.
So if you join a fediverse server of any flavour and the admins reveal themselves to have view incompatible with your own, or the server goes to shit, or it just has to shut down due to lack of funds or whatever you don’t get locked out of the places you have been hanging out in.
That's not moving your identity though, that's creating a new identity that subscribes to the same communities. There's an important distinction there, there's no way to clearly identify yourself as you having moved, which conversely also means there's no way to be assured that some other account is not an impersonator.
Don't get me wrong, it's good to know that if a server were to disappear that I could just create an account on another one but it's still a distinction that causes some issues today that will need to be ironed out in future.
Depends on how we define an identity.. the dataset doesn’t move (would be a great feature if that gets added similar to Mastodon and others, but we have to appreciate Lemmy is young and developed entirely by volunteers) but “you” do.
Regardless it’s still a significant conceptual improvement over Reddit where you’re either there on the centralised service or you’re not there at all.
I think you’ve some valuable insights though, and would genuinely encourage you to get involved in their GitHub. If you can code, and have time to offer, you can even start to build the functionality. If not you can raise the question or check for it already being and add your comments to it to make the use-case :)
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy