I like that Lemmy can post on other instances (communities on other instances), but thinking about it, would that not present a potential issue with centralizing information about a topic on one instance?
I know it’s kind of similar to having themed Mastodon instances (and I also don’t really understand those), but it seems like a potential issue?
I know multiple instances can have the same communities, but that then seems like fracturing the conversation?
Could this just be due to my limited knowledge/use of the fediverse?
So, while a given community is overseen from a host instance, the actual content you’re reading isn’t. By subscribing to a community, the content there gets delivered to the instance you’re on, creating a local mirror.
On Mastodon and the other microblogging platforms, this subscription is done on the user level. If one person on your instance subscribes to a user on another instance, that users’ posts are available to everyone on your local site. Here? I’m not totally sure at what level content gets shunted and shared around.
But it’s definitely not centralized. You’re not reading posts on other websites. You’re just reading posts from other websites.
Oh yes, right, that is how it works with subscribing to a community.
Though, if I’m on my instance, and select a community from another instance to post in, the post ends up on that community and I have a copy of it (it seems, that’s what I did in this case).
Another comment mentions that if the community went away, I’d still have a copy of the content, which is interesting, though not entirely useful for picking up where the original community left off?
Fracturing the conversation also isn’t a super bad thing. From my end, I subscribe to many of the same type of topic across multiple instances, and it’s seamless to me for reading and replying. If one instance suddenly went away I’m sure users would quickly migrate to one of the duplicates.
That’s true, it has been pretty seamless.
Though, for example, my instance doesn’t seem to have any of the comments from this thread, and I’m not really sure why…I might have spoken too soon, checking again and I can see them now. Also, interestingly, my mastodon account is following my Lemmy account and also able to see my main post plus the comments/responses, which is pretty slick.
I run my own, so I know this pain well. One thing I had to do was make sure I selected EVERY language in the admin settings, and in my user settings I selected nothing. Then it took about a day for my server to federate out better and stabilise. Now I get new posts no problem, though stuff from the past doesn’t show up.
I know the language issue is a weird one, and it’s being actively worked on in newer releases.
Yup, there isn’t any sync for content. Only push. No rss feed.
Ah, maybe that’s part of the problem I’m seeing. I’ll have to check my language settings. Do you select a language per comment/post then? I’m not entirely sure the port of that…
I don’t even touch the button right now to avoid problems until things are fixed up. You can also see what instances you’ve federated with by clicking the “Instances” link on the bottom of your instances page. Eventually the list grows pretty large all on its own and content comes in faster I find.
Huh, apparently I’m up to 70+ instances, that’s pretty cool!
Yeah the list keeps growing! There are a lot of us with single-user instances that exist. I prefer it because even when one instance falls down from load I can still read some stuff, and I have a copy of the posts in the event one fails/shuts down so I never lose any tech knowledge I may refer back to later.
That makes a lot of sense! Awesome, I think that negates a lot of the concerns I had at the start of this thread. Turns out people have already thought about these issues lol
Any posts sent to a community sync to everybody subscribed to the community. The original instance may go away, but you still have a copy of the data on your instance.
Ah okay, that’s not terrible, but would make a large instance going away a bit of a pain. At least the data’s not gone.
sorry for hijacking but i’ve always wondered: if the original instance goes away, does that mean search engines like google would have to reindex the content under a different url so it shows in the rankings again?
I believe the content would just vanish.
It’s not like reddit is any better about fracturing. There’s two different San Diego subreddits because the mods hate each other. There are plenty of other examples but they are rarely talked about.
That’s a good point! Most of the subreddits I use aren’t too fractured, but that being the case for larger ones, it’s not too different from Lemmy.
What would be the best way to search across lemmy instances. When searching through duckduckgo, I often add “site:reddit.com” because the otherwise the search results are garbage. But using a domain name wouldn’t work with lemmy since each instance has it’s own domain.
I’m wondering if search indexers like DDG won’t try to index various parts of the fediverse. I’m not entirely sure how that would work (probably not very well).
For Lemmy specifically, there is a site (I don’t have the link right now), that holds a list of all of the communities on the published instance list. But instances have to manually be added to that list.
