this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Dispelling the myth of a universal "Lemmy" community, and discussion of what the fediverse really is (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Cipher@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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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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[–] Rakn@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

Nah. I don’t think it’s an education issue. E.g. I do understand how it works, but see defederation as the nuclear option. As a user in a federated system I don’t care where the communities are hosted that I frequent. As long as it works. That’s the entire point of federation. Otherwise we could just remove federation all together and have everyone create a separate account per instance.

I get where the beehaw admins are coming from and it’s understandable. But it’s not good and chips away at what Lemmy is and could be.

This is one instance now where this happened and I’m not on either of these instances, so I’m unaffected. But if I see more of these defederations (no matter where), the Signal it sends me is that for my needs I likely still have to bet on Reddit and at max this will become an occasional visit.

We are still far away from this point. Just saying. And a normal user can’t be expected to understand it or relate to it. It’s bad UX if they have to. Arguing for them to be educated about it is nice in theory, but misses in reality of how things just are.