this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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I found a major communication problem with public perception of Lemmy. they seem to think a community is tied to a particular instance (www.reddit.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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This is a big problem. It creates the illusion that /c/cats on one particular instance is the real /c/cats.

This is the root of re-centralization and it must be pulled out.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There is no 'real' cats. That's part of the point.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

there are alive cats and dead cats at the same time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think this is incorrect - federation depends on a "true" version. A community is tied to an instance, that's where the true version is. When you're logged into another instance and you comment in that community, your comment gets copied to the true version, as do comments from other federated instances, and all of them get copied from the true version to a version on yours.

When one instance defederates with another, that copying stops happening. If a copy of that thread is still on your instance, and you comment on it, your comment won't get copied to the true version, so it also won't get copied to other instances; only users on your instance will see it.

That's my understanding, but I've only been here a few weeks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That is essentially what happens and it's a technical issue, not a philosophical one. If one instance is denied posting to another, the user should be notified at some point about that. There are a lot of silent errors right now with the setup. If you disable signups for example, users can still try but never see that it will never work.