this post was submitted on 02 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.
πͺ About Lemmy World
π§ 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!
π¬ 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!
- [email protected] - Want to talk politics apart from political news? Here's a community for that!
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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 βsillyβ questions. The world wonβt 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.
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- No NSFW content.
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I've signed up to lemmy.world don't know what an instance is or why it might be important to sign up to something different. Want to help as much as possible. Please educate me!
The best analogy I've seen is "think of your lemmy instance as your email provider". Your account "lives" in your home instance, but no matter which instance you are you can see content and interact with all instances that are connected.
Since the instance you are doesn't matter much, people recommend spreading simply to avoid overloading one instance with too many users.
Email analogy is good to explain the systems architecture, but it still doesn't communicate ethics of proper use (decentralization). Just look how many people have gmail or outlook as their mail account.
What happens if, through no fault of their own, an instance that a user has been investing their time in decides to rift against the other instances? In the future there could be many disconnected factions of Lemmy instances and users struggling to manage several different accounts if they want to see content across them? In that case they may also see many duplicates as people cross post across the disconnected instances?
That does appear to be a problem with the model, yes. Time will tell I guess. The other side to that coin is "what if I want to interact with other federated platforms, like Mastodon, from the one account?". I believe that's what Kbin is trying to achieve. All of this technology (ActivityPub) is in it's infancy still.
Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon instances and accounts already connect to one another.