Hi,

Lurker refugee from reddit here. Being a network engineer, I’m somewhat tech-savvy. But I’m having a hard time getting to grips with lemmy, or I should say the fediverse. I understand that it’s a bunch of servers/instances that connect/federate with each other. I also just learned or understood why I can’t login with my user account from lemmy.world on lemm.ee. It’s like email providers :)

But I’ve got a few questions that maybe someone who knows more about lemmy and the fediverse can answer.

  • What happens to accounts, communities and posts when its instance decides it’s been a fun few months and decides to shut down?
  • Can someone register with my username on other instances, or is my username “taken” across the fediverse?
  • If so, how are spoofing and/or scams using my username but on a different instance handled?

I’m starting to understand that it’s not my data that is federated, but only links to the data in other instances. Would that be a good understanding on how the federation technically works?
All my account data is located on my “home” instance, but in turn my posts are stored on the instance where I posted or commented and linked to all other federated instances.

I could try my 2nd question myself, but I don’t like creating more accounts than what I need.

Thanks!

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    1 year ago

    Oh, I see. I guess, similar to email, you have to trust that people can tell the difference between durd_@yourmail.com and durd_@othermail.scam.

    You could also make it clear at work what your Lemmy account is, and that other accounts with possibly similar names aren’t yours. I guess that’s not feasible or wanted.

    Or you could choose to use a completely different name on Lemmy.