Seems to me the fear of overloading one instance over another will not happen after all.
But I do hope the Threadiverse can hit 500,000 consistent active users by the end of summer.
Give me that hopium guys! 💉
Seems to me the fear of overloading one instance over another will not happen after all.
But I do hope the Threadiverse can hit 500,000 consistent active users by the end of summer.
Give me that hopium guys! 💉
deleted by creator
I don’t fully understand the instances, other than it provides the whole idea behind this, being multiple servers, no one master that can run and change and whatnot. But if I join one of these other servers (I’m on world), do I have access to the same things or does it change? My reason for staying on world in spite of some of the hiccups is my subs are here and it’s where I’ve been active.
From my understanding, you can subscribe to & view other communities regardless of the instance they’re hosted in.
I’ve only been using Lemmy for a couple days, since Boost finally shit the bed. My only gripe so far is that there are multiple communities with both the same name and purpose but on different instances.
And that’s good. No more “subreddits” monopoly. If a mod or mod team goes against the will of their users they can just move on another instance without needing to use another name (and it’s easier to find afterward). As a user, you just need to subscribe to these redundant communities (or not if you don’t care about federation but if not why are you on Lemmy) and it will appear in your front-page as if it was one and only community.
Without multiple instances, Lemmy would effectively be more like reddit (one entity controlling the whole thing). If that instance goes down, or it decides you can’t talk about topic X, or it does anything that affects you as a user – you have no option but to love it or leave it.
With multiple instances, if one becomes trouble, you just move to another. You can read and post to other instances from any other federated instance, so you get some freedom in that regard, and you’re not really tied to any one entity (you’re always beholden to the rules of your home instance, but you can also freely instance hop).
The best reddit analogy is probably using subreddits: imagine if one subreddit actually ran the whole site. R/spez one day decided to change the rules on yoiu, and you disagreed-- what option do you have? Well, in that setup, you simply start interacting on other subreddits. Lemmy kind of works this way, but there the subreddits are instances which control your login info, and there are communities within those instances that everyone elsewhere on the site can access.
The related technical advantage is still that no one instance runs the whole federation. Lemmy.world is big (likely because a lot od ex-redditors thought it was the one to switch to), but it doesn’t control the rest of the federation. If it got shut down, for example, users on it would need a new instance, but the federation itself would be exactly as it was.
It’s kind of like grass-roots networking, if that makes sense to you. One could also argue it’s a bit like like bittorrent for forums.