Federation is pretty cool

I noticed my feed on Lemmy was pretty dry today, even for Lemmy. Took me a while to realize lemmy.ml has been going up and down all morning, and isn't federating new posts.

But, since this is all still federated, I can still create and read posts on other instances while I wait. Even this one! Any other service would just be unavailable completely right now.

I do miss the larger communities on lemmy.ml - asklemmy, memes, and I really wanted to watch the reddit fallout on /c/reddit. Maybe I'll look around for some good replacements for those. Open to suggestions!

pankkake,
@pankkake@lemmy.world avatar

Can someone explain to me what is the link between Mastodon and Lemmy? From the Wikipedia chart, it looks like ActivityPub links them together in some fashion; I just don't get how.

chart

julianh,
@julianh@mas.to avatar

@pankkake @ubergeek77 I'll actually use this as a an opportunity to test something - I copied your comment's link into mastodon and am replying to it with my mastodon account. I can see the thread in mastodon, and in theory, this reply should show up properly in Lemmy too.

Trekman10,
@Trekman10@sh.itjust.works avatar

Do you have any idea how upvotes/downvotes get mapped to boosts and vice versa? I "followed" a couple of lemmy subs and I can see that they are boosting certain comments on posts in my mastodon feed.

Setarkus,

It looks no different than any of the other comments to me. Though I haven't been here for even a day, so... :))

julianh,
@julianh@mas.to avatar

Yeah so it seems to work! Pretty cool that I can do that.

davidflett,

@julianh @pankkake @ubergeek77 I, too, am testing this mechanic

Ghast,

It's all a little arbitrary. When you create a new service (like Lemmy, or Mastodon), you can have them link with anything, in any fashion you like. The defaults are mostly sensible.

For example, I've just made a mastodon post asking /r/casual a question. Once that synchronizes across, you'll see the topic over there.

anders,

@ubergeek77 @pankkake you can comment and make lemmy posts from Mastodon and others. I'm on Friendica for example and made this comment from my Friendica profile.

pankkake,
@pankkake@lemmy.world avatar

How did you find this post ?

anders,

@pankkake I'm subscribed to the Lemmy.world community so it showed up on my timeline.

bruhduh,
@bruhduh@lemmy.world avatar

I would like to add to your picture yggdrasil and matrix based messengers, as this will help infrastructure to be more robust and expand

ubergeek77,
@ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat avatar

In theory, Lemmy and Mastodon are compatible with one another, as they both use ActivityPub.

In practice:

Mastodon users can only see Lemmy posts as Boosts ("retweets"), and from what I hear, it's fairly annoying and not a good experience

Lemmy users can't see anything on Mastodon at all, Lemmy doesn't have a way to federate with Mastodon instances yet.

This is the first time Lemmy has seen this many users ever, so I'm confident both of these issues will be fixed sooner or later. When they are, you'll be able to see Lemmy posts on Mastodon as if they were posts ("tweets"), and you'll be able to see Mastodon posts on Lemmy as some kind of post (not sure if the format has been decided yet).

pankkake,
@pankkake@lemmy.world avatar

Okay, so it's not really implemented yet. Can't wait until federation is more profoundly implemented then!

Thanks

true_blue,

I'm really interested in the idea of these different kinds of websites being interoperable because of ActivityPub. Like the different websites are basically different frontends for people who prefer link aggregators or micro-blogs or other kinds of websites. It's a really cool idea!

TeaHands,
@TeaHands@lemmy.world avatar

Just to clarify, Mastodon users can already make posts to Lemmy communities, just not the other way around yet.

Definitely agree it's not a good experience yet though.

bruhduh,
@bruhduh@lemmy.world avatar

It'll be great when fediverse will become interconnected open ecosystem

jcb2016,
@jcb2016@lemmy.world avatar

Create a username on some other instance then search for the intsnace on lemmy.ml and just subscribe and post and comment. So much easiter. When i started yesterday i started with lemmy.ml but was like why is it so slow. realized that it just goes up and down so i created a username and lemmy.world and haven't looked back

root,
@root@lemmy.world avatar

I did the same. Started on .ml then moved to .world to spread the load. Also heard some things about the mods on .ml

z500,
@z500@startrek.website avatar

So can you use the same username on a different instance, or do they have to be globally unique? I decided to be polite and pick a small server to sign up on, but it seems to have limited connection to other instances.

mitchacho74,

I believe the names have to be unique on the instance-level, but not on the federal-level. So test@lemmy.world and test@lemmy.ml are two different and valid usernames.

hevyhammr,

Federation was very hard for me to comprehend at the beginning, but it all clicked once I read a little of the documentation.

randomperson,

For me it clicked instantly after reading e-mail analogy.

purplepony,

I'd love to hear this e-mail analogy.

gronapa,

This is the one that clicked for me credit to Matthieu@piaille.fr

You can think of it like emails.

A lemmy community is like an automated mailbox that sends everything they receive to all subscribers.

You can host a mailing list/community on gmail.

Then you can subscribe to the mailing list from outlook.

Then a user can send a post to the mailing list from yahoo.

The automated mailbox at gmail will receive the message from yahoo and send it to outlook and all other subscribers.

harbo,

The only problem with federation is duplicate communities, and I don’t even see that as being necessarily a bad thing. I’ll subscribe to multiple communities for the same thing and if, over time, I end up getting annoyed with some of them I’ll just unsubscribe.

impulse,

It's not necessarily a bad thing, but especially with the amount of news users (and subs) migrating from Reddit there is a certain potential for chaos for sure.

However, for me the pros of this approach still outweigh the cons as, like you said, it also provides more choice with which community you want to interact.

Like chess, but are a bit tired of googling en passant? Just find a community, that is more focused on the game on a different instance.

PotjiePig,

Yeah, I think it has a certain charm. However I fully agree, without it being addressed this will lead to issues and setbacks in the future trying to build communities. For now I'm subbing to all and trusting the process that creases will eventually iron themselves.

I think, kept this way, instances should be more clear what kind of 'country' they want to form. For example a group that has tech as the primary interest, should go about starting the instance as such, and setting ground rules for communities therein. Tech related, even if loosely, and differentiated from the masses. Or a better example would be, a European - English Instance could require a suffix like EU or UK like newsUK or photographyUK simply to attract the more locally relevant audiences.

A more involved solution could be to tag your community like Twitter into topics it wants to show up in feeds for (as well as tags that exclude it).. like 'technews' tagged in the 'news' and 'technology' but excluded from 'politics' and 'finance' and 'onion'

Another one could be to allow communities to federate with one another. If a news community spots some large news audiences in other instances, the moderators for each community could federate with one another and create a supercommunity (like a multi on Reddit), allowing the super to operate on both instances but share hosting of something along those lines.

You could also have moderators agree to join forces by migrating one community over to the larger server and closing up shop. This may happen naturally with time.

Debo,

We have to solve the content curation problem IMO. If we all love lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works and post 1000's of hours of content to either and one of them just "shutters" the server then all that content is GONE. Or, am I missing something about how all this works?

If we want to "join" servers we need some type of content migration tool that allows the user to determine where their content is actually "hosted".

We may see individual servers for heavy content creators as they'll want some way to ensure that all of the federated servers can continue to access their content right?

PotjiePig,

Yeah good point actually. Independent servers is a strength but not future proof. Allowing larger servers to store back ups that other instances can link to in the event of down time, or allowing themselves to be absorbed if they shut down would keep the place running, there would just need to be a system in place where an instance can nominate another instance to hold a spare set of keys, so that duplicates don't start fracturing the system.

Debo,

It's fractured by design. There are good things about being fractured. What we actually need is a "fractured" system with an aggregator to ensure the best user experience. You've heard of a system like this before: Cryptocurrencies are by nature 'fractured' but they use the term 'decentralized' and it's what brings safety and security to digital assets. What we need is a "Coinbase" or a "Binance" who "aggregates" all of the "coins" so that a user can just go to the exchange and see ALL of the digital currencies without having to know each of their names and server addresses in advance.

captainastronaut,
@captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.org avatar

Agreed! I was intimidated by it at first but it's fast, I love how decentralized it is (although finding THE sub-lemmy you want will take some hunting) but I think it's pretty brilliant. I'm proud and excited for all our communities who are taking control of their own destiny!

Hhffggshn,

Can you tell me how I can search for a sub-lemmy? There are a few I think have been started, but I don't know how to search for them without knowing what instance they are on.

mnemonicmonkeys,

If you haven't figured this problem out yet, you want to go to your home instance, click on the communities tab, and then search for a topic or community name that you want. The results should include all instances that your home instance is federated with, and you'll often have communities from multiple instances to choose from

Hhffggshn,

Thanks for responding. That is how I was searching, but there was a problem with the indexing across instances.

mnemonicmonkeys,

Could you have been searching for communities on defederated instances?

Angius,

On one hand, yeah, federation is cool. On the other, I've already seen two @Technology communities on two different instances, and I can see this issue becoming even worse.

A good solution would be to have some mechanism of merging same-named communities of multiple instances. But, alas, nothing like that afaik

wit,

I think you guys are entirely missing the point of a decentralized community and want to make it centralized. You come to lemmy with the expectation that it is something else, and when finding that it has some differences, you want to change it to fit your view. Come with an open mind and see the strong points. Because what you get is much more than what you miss.

Having two (or even more) communities/subs for the same topic is a feature. I understand that you think that having the community split in 2 might not be ideal, but that is the price to be paid for decentralization. And decentralization is the way to go. If one actor stars misbehaving, we easily have alternatives. One community starts being too draconian? Go to the other one. Start a new one. One community goes down due to too much bandwidth? You have the other one. Decentralization is so so good. I suggest watching some videos on the topic. You will grow to love it.

Now, the 2 technology communities: Pick both if you want. Interact with them, in different ways. Don't spam of course. But it will sort itself out. One of the communities will prevail as the bigger one and the other as the smaller. See it as a sort of evolution of communities.

Merging the communities would be wrong. That would defeat the purpose of decentralization! What could be done, is some sort of "tagging" for easier subscribing. If both of these communities were tagged as "technology", than you could subscribe to the tag "technology" and it would subscribe to both subs. Just some UX thing. But they need to remain 2 separate subs!

Angius,

Fully merging them, sure, bad Idea.

Having way to browse both at the same time, though? Basically, some sort of a multi-community system that lets me see posts from both communities easily, and post to both (or selected few) at the same time.

Posts could even be "merged" by the hash of the content, so that there are no visible duplicates.

psilves1,

That'd be a pretty cool feature. Sounds like it could be a front end "fix" too

WooChooTrain,

Although this issue might be more severe for Lemmy, I think it still occurs on Reddit, but it ends up working itself out. For instance, there's also a "r/tech" and (at some point) there was a "r/technologynews" subreddit, which you could view as redundant and possibly confusing to new users. But r/tech seems to have focused on longer-form more in-depth discussion while r/technology is certainly the larger and more general of the two, so most users will probably just sub to the larger one and maybe others will decide they like the vibe of r/tech more. In the long term, I'm sure a similar thing will happen to communities with the same, or close to the same, name.

Debo,

Yes, but the problem is that your analogy isn't a 1-2-1 comparison. You are correct that at reddit we had r/tech, r/technology, r/technews, etc etc etc, but on lemmy, ALL OF THOSE can be named "Technology" with exactly the same spelling. So, when I'm trying to refer someone to a "specific" Technology, I also have to include the server. A conversation may go, "Hey WooChoo, you gotta check out the posts over on Lemmy. They have the best Technology content on the internet" Then you go to some rando "Technology" on a new lemmy server and you don't see any posts. What are the chances that you come back to me and say, "Hey Debo, remember that referral you gave me 6 weeks ago when we were talking? I went there and there wasn't any users." "Oh, sorry WooChoo, I forgot that you have to go to "THIS SPECIFIC SERVER of Technology" and then you're in a federation conversation when you were just trying to share a hot tip.

WhoRoger,
@WhoRoger@lemmy.world avatar

But on Lemmy you can also give your comm a name (and change it later), so you can have /c/technology on multiple instances and each may have a different name indicating its purpose.

Debo,

Yes, and this is part of the problem. The great thing about an aggregation site is that it's a collective place for ALL posts about a single topic, say /r/Technology. With Lemmy, you might have DOZENS of /c/technology communities and for you to get the VALUE of the MASS of users, you'd need to subscribe to them all. This is a significant barrier to mass adoption as "my wife" won't be bothered to go out to many servers and subscribe to many communities just to get a reasonable flow of content.

WhoRoger,
@WhoRoger@lemmy.world avatar

I don't think it will be as much of a big deal as people think. Before the major aggregate sites, there's been web forums. Nobody had a problem with it, even novices users.

Second, it's not like it wasn't happening on Reddit anyway. For example there was r/askscience and r/sciencediscussion. Splinter subreddits were very common, and you might want to sub to 3 or 4 to keep up just with one topic.

It may actually be a good thing, because similar looking places may have a different feel/scope.

I mean, on Lemmy you can also specify a display name, i.e. a short description right on the home screen.

Finally, it tends sort itself on its own. I've already seen one example where 4 communities with the same name popped op, and after one ran away with popularity, another one shut down and the last two just link to the now "main" one. I suspect it will often be the case that just one or a small handful will grow to be major, and the rest will wither off.

Let's wait a bit, these are just the super early days remember.

WooChooTrain,

I think you’re totally right! That’s partially why I said it’s a bigger problem on Lemmy. Tools like browse.feddit.de will be pretty important; it’d be great if they were placed prominently somewhere.

Debo,

I didn’t even know browse.feddit.de existed until you posted it!!! Hot tip right there. :)

Barbarian,
@Barbarian@sh.itjust.works avatar

All those users who were told "Please move from lemmy.ml to somewhere else. It'll crash. Please spread out" are now seeing why :))

timkmz,

I saw a reddit post about alternatives and lemmy was what stuck out the most, and then there was another about how it works (not that indepth) and from there I got to lemmy.world and been here since yesterday

julianh,

I'm honestly surprised at how useable Lemmy is as a whole. Mastodon shit itself during the Twitter migration. Idk if it's just a lower volume of users or what.

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