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Dispelling the myth of a universal "Lemmy" community, and discussion of what the fediverse really is (beehaw.org)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.

I've been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to "lemmy" as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.

For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw's communities are "owned" by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances' content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw "owns" the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.

This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.

Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren't going to read technical documentation?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Is there a reason for working like this and not simply be a portal to the other instance's community?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

I'm not a lemmy dev but my understanding is that doing it that way would end up exponentially increasing latency once you start getting nested links to communities - accessing a post on lemmy.world that was linked to lemmy.nz and then finally read through a beehaw account, for example, might have to jump through at three servers on opposite sides of the world before getting to me rather than just being served directly across the pacific from beehaw's server to me!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Probably for reliability and stability — otherwise, every view from every federated instance would create a new request to the hosting instance. The protocol itself would basically DDoS smaller instances. Also you can still read the cached version on your home instance if the remote instance is temporarily down.