As a new reddit exile, I may be misunderstanding this.
In theory something like a !gaming community could crop up on multiple large instances, especially during the mass exodus while instances are getting hammered with spikes in volume.
If that’s the case, we’ll have fragmented communities across instances. Is there any way besides subscribing to each of them to combine them into a sort of multi-reddit type aggregation? Or is this considered a temporary (albeit important to adoption) problem during the crazy stages?
I’m just trying to subscribe to as many of the duplicates as I come across for communities I see and like. I suspect eventually some will become the most popular ones and ‘win’ the unofficial title as the ‘main one’ if the overall user base continues to grow. Am I right in thinking it also depends on which instances your ‘home instance’ continues to federate with (IE admins don’t block) or have I totally misunderstood and overcomplicated how it works in my mind?
If I’m understanding this whole thing correctly: an instance that your ‘home instance’ (where you signed up) has federated with might host a larger user base for one community, but if their admins blocks your home instance or vice versa, you lose the ability to interact with that community(?) I would think this means ideally you want your home instance to host the community that ‘wins’ so you’re less likely to lose access, right?
So if hypothetically for whatever reason lemmy.world or lemmy.ml blocked the other, users who signed up on lemmy.world would lose access to the communities hosted on lemmy.ml and vice versa. So duplicates would still pop up if the most popular community is hosted somewhere your home doesn’t have access to, right? I’m far less likely to create multiple accounts just to access an unofficial ‘main’ cat community than I am to just click ‘subscribe’ on any available sub with the word ‘cat’ in it.
I am also still trying to wrap my head around how all this connects, right now just testing things out on lemmy.world while my friend is setting up their own instance that I might hop onto. Just interested to see how all this plays out!
I think defederation is an interesting element to Lemmy, but I wouldn’t sweat too much over it. It’s highly unlikely that any large instances are going to defederate from each other without a good reason. Namely NSFW content (so boobs don’t show up on your “all” feed) and major political differences (so tankies and fascists and others with extreme political views don’t bombard your communities). If you do want to subscribe to an instance with extreme political views or with boobs, then you’ll probably need to have a few accounts for those different exceptions. And they can both be logged in at the same time. You can go to lemmy.world when you want regular content and lemmynsfw.com when you want boobs. But I really don’t think you’re going to feel defederation very much. Only in those exceptional cases. And there will always be instances that allow both the regular content and the nsfw/extreme content. If you disagree with your instance admins, you just need to find an instance that better matches what you want to see.
For what it’s worth, lemmy.world seems pretty committed to not defederating. They haven’t defederated from lemmygrad.ml (communist lemmy) like many other instances have. The only instance they’ve blocked explicitly approves of people posting loli (underage anime porn), which is pretty damming.
Yeah I’m actually really glad we are defederated with that instance, I definitely don’t want to see those things and it made me think pretty highly of this instances admins. There are definitely lines that shouldn’t be crossed and it seems the admins here understand that while still wanting to be open which is pretty cool.
So while lemmy.world probably won’t block them, if lemmygrad.ml blocked lemmy.world would I still be able to see posts from communities I’ve subscribed to from there or would everything be cut off? I’m not really here to participate in online politics but I like reading it. American politics is an interest and I am a socialist so I enjoy seeing different opinions, but I try to keep my political activities to irl local politics in my own country, I just want memes and to be able to read differing opinions of Americans even if I don’t engage directly with them.
I’m pretty sure that when one instance blocks another, both become unreachable to each other. Mind you, that doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to see lemmygrad if you go there manually. One nice thing about Lemmy is that you don’t need an account to see everything. You just won’t be able to vote or comment without an account. Which to be honest is how it should be. One of the main reasons an instance would consider blocking another is if they don’t want to be brigaded by people that aren’t interested in having an honest conversation within their community. With that said, if instance A blocks instance B, there will almost certainly always exist an instance C that can still reach both other instances. So if lemmyworld ever did get blocked by instances you’re really interested in, there should always be a way to have both.
I’ve had my first opportunity to see how this works first hand now actually with beehaw defederating with us and it seems to confirm this, except I can’t seem to see new posts added which answers the question for definite lol.
So when on my lemmy.world account I can no longer see new posts from communities I’ve subscribed to on beehaw, but I can still see the posts from before defederating if I go to them directly. This is true at least using the jerboa app, maybe it’s different on browser but I’m a phone user so I don’t use the browser lol. I had to switch to my feddit.uk account to see new beehaw posts on my subscribed communities to confirm it wasn’t just a slow community.
Hopefully it becomes easier to subscribe to communities on the app sooner rather than later so I can actually have the energy to join these communities on multiple accounts so if more defederation happens I can still just read them haha
Aaaaaand I’m already eating my words…