this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Lemmy.World Announcements
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You're in lemmy.ml, so you can still see lemmy.world posts and comments. lemmygrad.ml users cannot interact with lemmy.world users at all.
Every post or comment is first hosted at the user's instance. So, even though you're from lemmy.ml and commenting in a lemmy.world thread, your comment itself is actually hosted at lemmy.ml first and then federated everywhere else. Similarly, if you were to make a post in a lemmy.world community, that would be hosted at lemmy.ml first and then federated to lemmy.world, even though the community itself is in lemmy.world.
This means that in order to see content you must meet 3 criteria:
Where it gets interesting is when there's a third party involved. So, if a lemmy.world user were to make a post in a lemmy.ml community, then a lemmygrad.ml user would not be able to see it - even though lemmygrad.ml is federated with lemmy.ml, and the lemmygrad user can see the community, they will not have the post federated to them as the federated post is in an instance they cannot connect to. Similarly, if a lemmy.ml user made a post and a lemmy.world user commented on it, then the lemmygrad.ml user would still see the post but not the lemmy.world comments. It gets a bit janky, the website doesn't let you go down the tree from the first missing comment, but apps might give you some of the comments beneath that were still federated (the same as when a user deletes their comment). You get that "5 more replies ->" thing but when you click it doesn't expand.
Thank you for this explanation. I wish this were more streamlined, as many users are going to find this confusing and frustrating. In terms of user experience, if something requires this level of explaining, it's probably bad design. I suppose it's really on the app, in this case, so I may write an enhancement request to if I can get Booost for Lemmy to handle this better.
I mean, users don't really need to have this explained to use the site, these are just the intricate details of how the site functions. Broadly speaking, users can only interact with users from instances they're federated with.
You can almost always dig in a bit and find confusing functionality behind the scenes. On the surface, though, the user will just see a list of comment threads as normal. Yes, there's a bit of a bug when comments are deleted or not federated everywhere, but hopefully that will get addressed as lemmy continues its development.
If lemmy.world hadn't made this announcement, there's a good chance you wouldn't have even noticed they'd defederated.
It's nothing to do with any apps, though. This is purely server side.
Lemmy.ml is generally unlikely to be defederated because it is the main instance, it's run by the developers who are in charge of the lemmy codebase. If the instance were to become particularly problematic for others then maybe it might happen, but generally the devs have been aware of that and they've moved their politics over to lemmygrad.ml.
Personally, I chose lemm.ee because it seemed like the main admin really knows his stuff. He's contributed to the codebase, been a key helper when things have gone wrong and generally had his instance working well when others were having loading issues. It's also quite widely federated with almost everyone, for better or worse. I actually made several accounts all over, then settled on this one - I have a lemmy.ml one also.
While it may be something of a flaw, it's also an advantage. Many people have chosen to run their own instance, some just for themselves as the sole user. Obviously this creates significant overhead for you, but it has the advantage of having complete control in which instances are federated.
In any case, the reality is that your accounts are all temporary and can be taken away at any time almost everywhere you go online. That doesn't mean it's particularly likely, and while it is perhaps more likely to happen on lemmy it's still not very likely.
FYI though most instances will publicly post about major defederations (although probably not for defederations of spam instances). Also, there's a mod log at the bottom of the web page, so you can see literally everything that moderators of that instance have done.