Found a good image explanation of this whole thing.
Edit: update image to use light theme.
Credit goes to @[email protected]
You rock!! As soon as I find a way to pin this I will.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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I didnβt make this. I found it from a comment. I was going to credit the poster but couldnβt find it.
Edit: found it. credit goes to @[email protected]
Thank you for the credit and spreading the word!
Happy it can help :)
Great graphic - the point about each instance being like a mini Reddit was one I eventually grasped the other day, and it really made things click into place for me.
Will try to remember to credit you if sharing it!
No need to credit, just share it if you see someone struggling with these concepts.
Thank you for making it. Just showed it to some friends so they can understand the fediverse better
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Sorry what I meant to say was, Great post YOU THIEVING PILE OF GOODNESS
Copy that. Ok well fair enough. Thanks for the honesty!
I changed the screenshots to a light theme, someone here said buttons are difficult to read on dark, can you please see if you can update the link in your post? https://imgur.com/a/fiLOmI7
Honesty is a great trait. Good post nonetheless. I hadnβt seen it yet buts it very well put together to give you the basic idea!
Great post, but here are some questions those graphics raise, that I couldn't find an answer to, and which have only my experience with email, usenet and irc for reference (all of which are federated, easy to abuse, had a host of problems, and have slowly migrated to centralized versions to solve these issues):
- how do you ban someone?
- what stops him from spinning 100 amazon ecc instances, federating 100 servers and spamming his thing 100 times from 100 different instances?
- how do you even block an instance?
- what happens with the federated content once the source instance goes down?
- say lemmy.ml and memes goes down, how do you post a new reply in [email protected]? does it even work?
- i haven't found any info for syncing accounts across instances (to prevent this loss) or if this is even possible at low level
- what happens with comments and pictures once a federated instance goes down? say, if i selfhost and i crash without backups, does my content and posts disappear?
- can i pull it back?
- what kind of capacity planning would I need to selfhost say, a decade worth of reddit browsing? assuming I only care about my posts and what I save, would they be accessible for me?
I'm a little worried Lemmy may not be ready for prime time. I've already had a few times where my post to another instance just vanishes. But when I made an account on the other instance that worked fine. It seems like choosing the right instance is more important than I initially thought.
Is this because the admin of one of the instances blocked the other from posting? Does it federate by default or is it on an approved basis? I'd like to spin own instance as well but depending on how interop works between instances that also seems like a poor decision.
I'll keep looking but a more informative FAQ would be great
It may not be "prime time" but obviously the increased attention and user base will incentivize the tech and hosts to catch up quickly. From what people are saying, it has already been a dramatic change in the past few weeks.
I was thinking today that it's actually weirder that I stuck with Reddit for so long without really thinking about it when I was consistently switching platforms before. Google Reader, Fark, StumbleUpon, bulletin boards, various smaller blogs and stuff...
Now that I've made the switch it reminded me how nice it can be to find and explore new platforms and communities. Kinda wished I woke up a bit earlier to these possibilities.
i havenβt found any info for syncing accounts across instances (to prevent this loss) or if this is even possible at low level
Not possibly or very difficult from what I heard.
what happens with comments and pictures once a federated instance goes down? say, if i selfhost and i crash without backups, does my content and posts disappear? Everything is stored in a database, so crashes are no different than any other site. It comes back and its accessible again.
what kind of capacity planning would I need to selfhost say, a decade worth of reddit browsing? assuming I only care about my posts and what I save, would they be accessible for me?
You mean like host an instance for just your own account? The smallest instance for $5 a month should be enough.
I also really feel people are starting to better grasp what the Fediverse is, I mean people dont seem to be as lost as during the massive Twitter exodus to Mastodon!
Uhh... What happens when I do create the same username + email on several servers?
it would be a bit like making multiple email accounts with multiple email providers. for example, if you were to signup "[email protected]" and also sign up "[email protected]", all you've done is made 2 accounts called "eskimofry" at the two different providers.
it works the same in fediverse. your account is @[email protected], but you could just as easily sign up @[email protected], or @[email protected], or @[email protected], all you would be doing is making more accounts.
these accounts don't conflict with each other in the exact same way that "[email protected]" and "[email protected]" don't conflict either. if these 2 emails are owned by different people, then it is the user's job to know which is the intended recipient.
I had the same question as eskimofry. I'm brand new here, and was under the assumption that one login was good across the fediverse. However, I am unable to login to comment or subscribe to other servers, so I've ended up with multiple accounts. Is there something I'm missing here, or do I need to create an account everywhere?
Attempting to log in to a different server is met with a spinning login button that does nothing, no matter how long you wait.
You have to search for the community you wish to subscribe to from on your server's search page. You'll navigate to it from within your server's instance and give you the ability to subscribe to it that way.
For example, if you go to the lemmy explorer: https://lemmyverse.net/communities
You'll note that each entry there has a link to the community, as well as an identity listed below it that you can copy.
Like so: [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) This is the identifier url to the selfhosted community at lemmy world. If you navigate directly to it: https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted but you don't have a lemmy world account, then you'd have to sign in to lemmy.world to subscribe. But if you are on another server, and you search [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]), you should be taken to it from within your instance and you can subscribe from there.
The same url would also be: https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
So if you get the identifier of any community, you can navigate to it from within lemmy.world with that url scheme: https://lemmy.world/c/<identifier> (minus the exclamation point).
Example of navigating to a non-lemmyworld community from lemmy world: https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the reply! I have since downloaded the app, and things are running much more smoothly. Appreciate the help!
Something I think is missing from the email analogy:
We're all getting a little more confused because every server basically looks the same, so it's easy to think you could log into any of them with the same login. This is misleading, it's because all the different instances are running the same core software even though they're separate instances. It would be like if the Gmail interface was open source and people created servers on Gmail.com, Gmail.world, gbin.com and even if each of them looked the same, you could only log into the one where you created your account. And regardless you could email friends with accounts at any of them.
Hope that helps.
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Another useful definition that comes up is "Federation". As I understand it's referring to the whole set of mini-Reddits for example, and multiple Federations exist in the Fediverse, correct me if I'm wrong.
You're not wrong :) It's the whole set of mini-Reddits + the whole set of mini-Twitters + other similar federated platforms/sites.
Fediverse = federation + universe.
Might be a dumb question and not sure how to ask this but.. If I spin up my own instance, what happens with my posts if I decide to tear down the instance? Like, will the delete get propagated to other instances where I may have commented?
From what I hear, your instance will send the delete request to the other instances but they may or may not listen to it
This is helpful! Does anyone know what it means when you try to subscribe to a community and it just says "Subscribe Pending"? That has happened to me 2-3 times, and it just seems to stay like that.
I do not know for sure but I'm assuming that whoever set it up required sub approval, similar to how some instances require you to apply before being admitted. I've seen it too, but most/all went through within a few hours with no rhyme or reason, so that's my best guess.
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Just click it to cancel, then try again. It can take a few tries. I think it's an effect of overloaded servers.
This is the visual presentation breakdown Ive seen so far! Finally grasping this!
Thanks for the easily visualiser, needed something to explain it to friends.
I saw a post yesterday about it, and someone said it was a known issue.
I'm more concerned about how the votes on this post are bouncing up and down between 4 and 818 as I'm typing this reply. Seems like there are some problems here...
I think I know what thread you were trying to reply to, and I'm pretty sure the reason your comment appeared on a different post is caused by the same root cause fyi.
Haha good thing Ruud is a db expert. I think he's going to need to be!
Uh... yeah, I had this tab open on an completely different post yesterday and then this morning I tabbed over to it and it switched to this post as soon as I clicked the tab. Very weird stuff going on.
Hello, thank you for the post,
This clears up a few things for me, because the concept of Fediverse are still "abstract" for me.
When i first join, I created multiple accounts on lemmy.world, beehaw, lemmy.ml, because i thinks its mini Reddit, with its own content, and its own account.
Now i know that i only need one account, and i can still see the post from another instances.
There's still some questions that i can't understand
-
The decentralized nature of the Fediverse, how does one search or now what community on another instances?
-
Say when in Reddit, we have /r/aww for example, it means that lemmy, beehaw, or another instances can have their own /c/aww ? does it means that we have multiple instances of /c/aww or, we have one single /c/aww but distributed between multiple instances
Sorry for the bad English :D
Good infographics! It is better to change the screenshots to light theme (instead of dark) since the links and buttons are hard to read in the photo.
Great post!
Right now i've had an issue myself where the potential answer to my issue is in a privated subreddit. So, i had to search even more. Frankly, it highlights the downside of having this become a thing. So i am on the fence whether i want that to happen at all.
If you see the Google results on reddit for what you are looking for, you can click the three dots and look at the cached pages of reddit on Google
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Thanks for sharing and props to the creator of the image, puts it over really well
Thanks, I was so confused with everything but this answers a lot of questions.
Thank you for this! But unfortunately I'm very stupid, and I have more questions!
I joined Fedia as my server (instance?), so I should be able to use this account in other servers too, right? And I should be able to see other communities from Fedia? How do I start to like... aggregate all the communities I want to follow in one place? I also get the message that posts may be missing when I look at communities through Fedia, so I'm worried I'm doing it all wrong ;-;
You can't login on another website with your fedia account but on fedia you see and interact with content from other instances.
This post you commented on right here is from lemmy.world, so you're already doing it.
Don't worry about the missing posts thing.
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On your home page at Fedia there should be a 'subscribed' tab that's how you see all the communities you subscribed to. To subscribe to a community there should be a 'subscribe' button in the 'sidebar' menu which you can find at the top of the community's page.
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Great find. Appreciate you posting it.
Awesome post. Cleared things up so much for me
that image is a good start but we've got a long way to go in order to simplify it enough for the average reddit user :D
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