One thing I’m not clear about is the impact my home instance has on me. I joined lemmy.world and am currently using the connect for lemmy app. I know when I sort by Local it will only show me posts from lemmy.world, but beyond that are there any things to keep in mind?
I have read that lemmy.world has been hit by DDoS attacks but I’ve never had any problem using connect for Lemmy during those times as far as I know.
Really the biggest effect your home instance has is who you’re defederated with. Your instance admin can choose to defederate with an instance at any time, blocking your communication with that instance.
For most instances this isn’t a real problem because nobody defederates without a clear reason, but in some cases like Beehaw users were upset that the admin decided to defederate with instances they use.
I recently signed up and didn’t know where to park myself. So I got accounts on both lemmy.world and beehaw.org.
From lemmy.world I’ve added to a few of the beehaw subs that I’m subscribed to there. But I can tell you I see different content in my lemmy.world feed.
Don’t know why. A delay in the content making it over from beehaw to lemmy? But my home feed certainly looks different in both (even subscribing as closely is I can to the same feeds).
So for now I’ll stick with both and see how the dust settles.
or you can join a smaller instance that beehaw has not defederated and interact with both beehaw and lemmy.world communities
Doesn’t defederated mean cut off? Because I certainly get beehaw content at lemmy.world. Just when sorting by “hot” seems different. Then averaged over a bunch of subs, my home feed is quite different.
Anyway 🤷♂️
that should be because lemmy.world did not defederate with beehaw, it only happened one way.
federation is not perfect, it might take a while for posts and comments to sync up so you might be able to see differences because of that. also in a smaller instance you might have to search the community by it’s full name to start federation (if nobody subscribed to that community first from your instance), luckily lemmyverse exists so you can search there first then look it up.
hope this helps :3
Appreciate the explanation. Let me see if I understand. Beehaw defederated, which means you can stay in the beehaw bubble and never have to connect with/put up with the outside lemmy-verse.
Whereas from lemmy.world, all content is viewable, including beehaw …?
If that’s the case I might stick with my lemmy.world account as I can see more of the fediverse from there.
so let me try to explain more clearly, beehaws defederation makes it not very useful to stay subscribed to beehaw communities from lemmy.world
you can still see posts from beehaw communities but you can not see any votes or comments, for example look at this post from beehaw and from lemmy.world as you can see from lemmy.world’s side it looks like a wasteland
what i meant was you can sign up to another small instance which is not defederated from beehaw like the one i am in, lemmy.zip and participate in both of the communities, also lemmyverse is a website that you can use to discover communities to subscribe to or instances to sign up.
feel free to pm me if you have more questions
I appreciate the explanation, and I understand exactly what you’re saying. My confusion though is that it doesn’t match what I’m seeing. I’m using the Voyager web app if that makes a difference.
An example: I can see posts and comments at gaming@beehaw.org from lemmy.world. So I don’t see a wasteland. I just see a smaller number of and different posts, compared to looking at the same sub from beehaw.org. It’s the same place, looking at the sidebar. Just that different content appears to be available depending on the home location gaming viewed from.
Could it be that what I’m seeing from lemmy.world are just the crossposts (if such a thing exists here)? And perhaps comments from non-beehaw.org users? That’s why it’s not total empty, just reduced?
Also: when an instance defederates, is that from everywhere or just selected instances? For example, what you’re saying is that beehaw is blocking lemmy.world but not other smaller instances. And so I should sign up at a smaller non-blocked instance which will then see everything …?
those comments and votes and are all from lemmy.world users though, what you are seeing is like lemmy.world users posting to that community and talking in their own little bubble that will never get seen outside of lemmy.world because it never will reach beehaw and distribute to other beehaw subscribers outside of the beehaw
To kind of answer one of my own questions after rereading all the comments here, defederation seems to be per-instance, not from everywhere.
So picking a smaller, well run, non-controversial instance for you account can be an advantage, as you should be connected to everywhere.
The risk seems to be that smaller instances have a higher risk of shutting down unexpectedly and/or not being as well maintained (updates, security etc).
Beehaw just cant see what you post i think
It’s because Beehaw defederated with most of the popular instances. Their communities still exist but none of the posts will come through to Lemmy World and vice versa, they can’t see any new posts in Lemmy World communities.
IMO just stick to lemmy world and avoid beehaw communities (they’re effectively dead for us) unless you want a “safe space” and live in the small Beehaw instance.
That’s a little harsh. I was here before beehaw defederated, and the content over there was high quality. Some bad actors spoiled it for everyone over here.
Hopefully they’ll be back once the mod tools for cross-instance content management improve.
No need to sneer at them, it was a community decision. You can still interact wth the content on most other instances than .world and .itjust.works
I think they were being a bit unreasonable in expecting everyone else to have verified sign-ups. It would be prohibitively difficult to verify all of the users especially with the recent influx.
If the other instances had tried that I think Lemmy would be dead on arrival. It would have taken so long to verify each user that most people would have got bored by the time they’re approval came through and would never have even bothered signing in.
Honestly, it’s not that I find a reason in particular to dislike Beehaw users or their content, I just really got tired of weirdly aggressive philosophies regarding content discoverability and community sizes on Mastodon, and I can’t have that shit started again and I know there’s ways that it might once people get defensive either way.
Hearing Beehaw start to go down the path, just makes me mentally check out and choose to ignore them. I’m sure that whatever or another can be said of them, but my statements will be “oh, those don’t matter anymore, join these other ones and leave them alone” and, honestly, it’s probably the effect of the Beehaw admins intended as well.
But I still see some posts at eg gaming@beehaw.org from lemmy.world. And comments and votes. But maybe 20% of what I see if I’m looking from my beehaw account.
Could these be crossposts and comments from non-beehaw users? Ie stuff that hasn’t originated at beehaw?
So basically anything posted in defederated communities won’t be federated. So someone on Lemmy World posting on Beehaw communities can only be seen by Lemmy World users and nobody else. Everyone should find alternative communities instead.
Same here. One when I want to keep it polite and the other when I want a little more freedom.