You're viewing a single thread.
Sooo, I'm still wrapping my head around the Fediverse as well, but my understanding is that you kinda have to plan for instances going down on a regular basis. I don't mean server outages, I mean somebody saying screw it, I don't have the time or money for this, anymore, I'm out, and shutting it down, effectively forever.
The theory of it seems to be that we expect this as the price of the Fediverse and build it into the design of the whole thing. Thus, you should be able to lose an instance while still keeping most of what you're here for, thanks to being able to do weird-seeming things like follow Lemmy threads that show up in your Mastodon feed, if you know how to set that up.
Mastodon is specifically designed so that you can migrate all your follows and everything else to a new instance, literally pack your little bags and move along. Because somebody might decide they're done paying server fees on your instance, or maybe the community just sucks, and you'd rather move. I've not had to do that, yet, that's just my understanding.
It's how you design around the servers (instances) basically being user-hosted for kicks. I don't think Lemmy is quite so elegant about it, though. It's like 50 guys standing up saying, "I am Spartacus!" except they're all Lemmy. Sorta gets the same job done. If one soldier in 50 goes down, 49 still stand, and that works, too.
So yeah, go ahead and follow five instances. It's kind of your only option when a favorite instance decides to de-Federate, but you still want to be on the rest of Lemmy, too. I think we got a Pokemon model, here. Gotta catch em all.
Its easy enough to make a new account on another instance if mine goes away, and just follow all the same communities again. But what about communities I've started on my home instance? How does everyone regroup?
That's true but after this comment I went looking for the Lemmy instances and boy, they are thin on the ground. We're like, 500ish souls on this instance, and its mostly Gondor calling for aid, you know?
I don't know how everyone regroups. We're all from Reddit and don't know what the f we're doing.
Honestly I'm lost. This complexity may stunt Lemmy's growth
It really isn't all that complex. Just read without the parentheses first, and then read with the parentheses a second time:
Anyone can host their own reddit (lemmy) and all the reddits (lemmys) are connected (federated) for the most part. Some reddits (lemmys) block (defederate) others for any number of reasons but for the most part you can access other reddits (lemmys) from the reddit (lemmy) you signed up on and read posts in their subreddits (communities).
Anyone hosting a reddit (lemmy) can decide to just not do that anymore. That's ok because everyone else is still hosting their reddit (lemmy) so you can just sign up for their reddit (lemmy) instead, and access most of the same subreddits (communities). The only ones that you can't access anymore are from the reddit (lemmy) that shut down, but people will probably make new ones somewhere else too.
Thanks for the eli5
It's not intrinsic to the platform, nor is it forever. It's grown incredibly fast from reddit imploding and people are still catching up.
I know its probably not for everyone, but you could also just host your own instance of Lemmy, so you have control of what happens on your instance.
Granted, you do pay for hosting and some people might not be technically knowledge or interested in self hosting. But it does allow you to at least have some assurance that your user won't just disappear if some other instance goes down.
Been using it for the past week, so I don't understand much. But from what I think I understand...This is my biggest worry with this platform. A community you create can vanish from its home instance when that instance implodes. It may be present on other instances, but you won't be able to administrate it. Your account with its curated list of subscriptions can disappear. Are there any tools or safeguards to mitigate this? An option to sync or link accounts across instances, for example.
Are there any tools or safeguards to mitigate this? An option to sync or link accounts across instances, for example.
I think I recall there were talks about this on GitHub for Lemmy, so it'll likely be implemented at some point in the future. So we'll just need to sit tight for now.