What’s the difference between all those instances?
We have Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, I think even yiffit.net. If I log in using wefwef it asks me where I want to login. And when I make a new account using another instance, it says ”… Lemmy is federated, so you can interact with everything on lemmy.ml even if you’re registered on a different instance.“ So if I’m registered on lemmy.world, how can I interact with lemmy.ml?
You can use Lemmy Explorer to explore. Type your home instance in the top by tapping the home and it will create all the proper links for tapping and getting to other instances.
Essentially a link like !asklemmy will get you there from any instance. The first part being the community and the second being the instance.
Also if you sort by all on an instance that’s populated well you should see most of the fediverse as it is already and can just search within it for what you’re looking for.
In the context of Lemmy, an instance serves as a collection of communities with various registration processes, rules, identities, and more. Lemmy.world and Beehaw are general-purpose instances that accommodate communities on any topic. Beehaw stands out by removing the downvote button and limiting community creation to moderators exclusively. On the other hand, Yiffit is a specific instance dedicated to queer and furry art.
To engage with communities on an instance, you don’t necessarily need an account. For instance, to interact with lemmy.ml, you can browse the list of communities on that instance without creating an account. If you wish to subscribe to a particular community and view its posts, you can search for the community on the instance where you have an account. For example, if you want to subscribe to the “asklemmy” community in Lemmy.ml instance, simply search for “!asklemmy” on your Lemmy instance and subscribe to it. The posts from the subscribed community will then appear in your subscribed tab.
The comparisons to email are a good analogy. Your email is hosted on a service (e.g. @gmail.com or @hotmail.com) each has its own rules and setup. They also run independently. However, you can happily email someone at a different host. The hosts sort it out in the background. It’s completely transparent.
With Lemmy, the instances are the equivalent of email hosts. You might use your work email service, or use a free one, or even pay to host your own. They will all play happily.
De-federation even has a good comparison. If an email server is sending masses of spam emails, the other hosts can decide to not accept emails from them. They get cut off. The decision is made on a host by host basis however. This contains power tripping to individual instances.
From a user’s point of view, there are 2 main things to note. Local and All. Local only shows you posts on the instance you are logged into. This can be useful, of the instance is specialized, and you want to focus on that specialty, but not be limited to just 1 channel. This could be something like programming.dev, furries, or a NSFW instance.
All does what it says. It shows all posts on both the instance you are logged onto, and any your instance is federated with (basically everyone, other than those your admin has blocked).
As for which instance to choose? 3 main things matter, Focus, Ideology, and Stability. Focus is for if you have a specific interest. You are aren’t limited to it, but a programmer basing themselves in a programming instance makes local channels more useful. Ditto for someone posting NSFW content.
Ideology is related, but slightly different. Different instances have different mentalities. E.g. Lemmy.world is the “default” while beehaw is more focused on providing a safe space over open access. Lemmygrad is full on tanky communist, and de-federated from Lemmy.world. Each has pros and cons, producing unique internal cultures.
Stability is likely the most important right now. Instances are run by individuals right now. This means they can only scale so far. One of federations goals is to spread the load. By using a smaller instance, you can gain a lot of stability, while losing little to nothing in access. Lemmy isn’t one thing supreme, it is a legion under 1 banner.
On top of what other people have already said each instance has different rules. One instance might have rules against NSFW content and defederate from NSFW instances while others may be fine with it.
you can interact w/ lemmy.ml through lemmy.world. for instance, you can subscribe to furry_irl on yiffit witj your world account, if you visit that something like lemmy.world/c/[email protected] (url may be incorrect, it’s just an example)
Think of them as different email servers. It’s all federated and connected. As long as you’re looking at the “all” timeline it will show you posts from across every instance. And you can follow communities across instances. For example I’m on a different instance than you but I can see your post and comment on it. Just start subscribing to some. check out the list below for a couple migrated subreddits.
From what I’ve heard, only communities from other instances that users in your instance are subscribed to will show up. This is because (as far as I know) the instances only request data from other instances of what users have requested, and not a constant stream of updates that no one has a need for.
The analogy isn't meant to reflect who receives the message, but how communication interacts.
Each lemmy/federated instance uses a prefix and a suffix to create a name. So for example, I'm [email protected] here, where Melpomene is me and kbin.social is where I reside. This is similar to email because it works similarly.... I might be Melpomene on Gmail, but my actual user name reflects both me (Melpomene) and the email instance I call home (gmail.com.)
If you want a specific analogy to messaging, though... when you send a message to a lemmy community, you're basically responding to a distribution list. [email protected] is akin a distribution list, the distribution list is (technically) visible to anyone on the instance, so anyone can see the message. If you're on a federated instance that allows private messages, though, sending to an individual user would still function like email in that only the person messaged would see it.
Edit: The comparison is not exact, granted. It's meant to de-mystify the prefix/suffix format of federation, not to offer a one to one comparison to email.
Another way of looking at it is cross platform videogames where Kbin.social is playstation Lemmy.world is xbox and a third one would be Nintendo Switch. If the game has a chat feature what one person posts from xbox would appear for the playstation players and visa versa. Federating is basically when they first connect to each other to become multi platform.
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