this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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General Discussion
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Welcome to Lemmy.World General!
This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.
🪆 About Lemmy World
🧭 Finding Communities
Feel free to ask here or over in: [email protected]!
Also keep an eye on:
For more involved tools to find communities to join: check out Lemmyverse and Feddit Lemmy Community Browser!
💬 Additional Discussion Focused Communities:
- [email protected] - Note this is for more serious discussions.
- [email protected] - The opposite of the above, for more laidback chat!
- [email protected] - Into video games? Here's a place to discuss them!
- [email protected] - Watched a movie and wanna talk to others about it? Here's a place to do so!
Rules
Remember, Lemmy World rules also apply here.
0. See: Rules for Users.
- No bigotry: including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘silly’ questions. The world won’t be made better by dismissive comments to others on Lemmy.
- Link posts should include some context/opinion in the body text when the title is unaltered, or be titled to encourage discussion.
- Posts concerning other instances' activity/decisions are better suited to [email protected] or [email protected] communities.
- No Ads/Spamming.
- No NSFW content.
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I've been here for a few weeks now... And I'm still not entirely sure how fediverse works. I was under the impression that it didn't really matter which instance you sign up for, they would still communicate with one another.
I think there needs to be a better/simplified explanation on the website of how everything works.
It's like email. When you sign up for Gmail, you get all the Gmail features, use the Gmail website to access your email, and can send email to any other email, like Proton or Hotmail or whatever. But if Gmail goes down you can't read or send any email.
With Lemmy, you can see communities from any other server, like lemmy.ml or tchncs.de. But some servers might have a different interface, slightly different features, and if your instance goes down you won't be able to access log in unless you have an account somewhere else.
The extra cool thing is this extends beyond Lemmy. Some other social medias like Mastodon and Pixelfed communicate the same way that Lemmy does, they just look different. You can see Lemmy communities on Mastodon, and see Mastodon toots on Pixelfed.
Ideally speaking, it shouldn't matter much which instance you pick, but that's one of the biggest miscommunications about how all this stuff works, speaking ideally rather than realistically.
Realistically instance choice matters both regarding technical stuff like how well it handles traffic and social stuff like whether folks are discussing anything that interests you to begin with and whether the instance's moderation style appeals to you. When all of this pans out, the tech should fade into the background, but as we've seen, it's early days yet in that regard.
Lemmy uses a queue to send out activities. The size of this queue is specified by the config value federation.worker_count. Very large instances might need to increase this value. Search the logs for "Activity queue stats", if it is consistently larger than the worker_count (default: 64), the count needs to be increased.
I’m with you except for the “whether folks are discussing anything interesting to you.” So maybe I’m not understanding that part. On Memmy, or Wefwef, or a variety of apps, I’m fed posts from all different instances so it really doesn’t matter to me what instance is my home base provided that I agree with the moderation style and they are fully federated. Is it just because I’m using a third-party app that my choice of home base doesn’t matter as much?
So, it's a subtle detail and may not matter for many folks, but your instance choice affects your remote communities via the All feed, as the people there choose which of those to subscribe to & presumably discuss the posts there & post there themselves. It's something that isn't as clear on Lemmy yet as many instances are more general subject than focused at the moment and communities are still in the works, but it's really clear on smaller Mastodon instances.
Easy example would be like a tech or programming instance that strictly limits the creation of their local communities, e.g. programming.dev. Off the bat you know a lot of discussion there's to do with programming, and in turn there's a decent chance that many of the communities people follow through there may also be programming or tech related, so the all feed may have a largely tech/programming focus to it.
As time goes on, you may see more focused instances with stricter sign-ups specifically to ensure their all feed relates more to their community's focus, but honestly probably not too many as people enjoy flexibility in their posting.
A complete lack of documentation has made the whole process of converting to Lemmy a massive pain in the ass.
Another main problem is that it's not working how it's designed.
If an instance gets bogged down, or an instance is misconfigured, then data doesn't always replicate. Comments go missing from certain instances, etc.
The most basic explanation I can give is that: yes, instances can communicate with each other, but the don't share data automatically. A user from instance A must go interact with data from instance B by directly browsing to it via the correct URL string (instanceA.com/c/[email protected]), and then interact with content in that community. Data from that specific community will then show up.
That's a large part of the reason that smaller instances have partial data from larger ones. Their users haven't interacted with enough communities outside their own instance.