this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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i have a question: i've made accounts on multiple instances thinking i won't be able to post on them otherwise, is that okay?
You can make an account on each instance. That's OK, too!
but then i am a bit confused, if i can use an account on every instance, why is there an option to make accounts per instance in the first place?
Why isn't there a centralised account log in, and then you select what instances you want to browse?
Also what happens if say, two people have the same username, but are on different instances?
sorry for the myriad of questions i am still new to this whole thing
Instances do not care about users on other instances like that.
A user is not unique by username alone. A user is unique by username AND instance. There may exists another skye on another instance, created by someone else. But only you can be [email protected]
Think of it like email addresses.
You grab the name abc on gmail, giving you the user [email protected]
Some other person can grab the same name on another mail provider (ie. instance), say [email protected]
You don't need to have an account on every email provider to be able to send mail accross providers. But nothing is stopping you from making an account on every provider, it's just that it's redundant
Then there is a central authority that encompasses the Fediverse/Lemmy. That also means one single point of failure, eg Login system goes down. Right now if one instance goes down then all of the others are unaffected.
that makes sense, i didn't think of that.
Another caveat with instances is that some instances block each other. If you made your account in Instance1 that for some reason blocked Instance2, you can not interact with or even see any content from Instance2.
So that also fragments the world here. It may well be that if you actually like some communities in both Instance1 and Instance2, you are forced to have a separate account on each (happened to me already)
The username thing is the one lingering question I have not seen answered as well. I suspect there's just going to be duplicate people.
I dont understand this part either. Should just be a single login across the whole fediverse
using the email address analogy - every server maintains its users. You can't log in to Gmail with your yahoo email either, but you can still email a yahoo user.
Having multiple servers that you can sign up for helps keep things decentralised. If all the logins are centralised, then either one of two things need to happen:
One single entity controls all the logins. And if that entity decides to go on a power trip (say... a completely fictitious example where he decides to start charging all servers a ridiculous monthly fee to use the login, then gaslights people who call him out, and doubles down when presented with call logs that show otherwise), the fediverse is dead.
Everyone has to keep a copy of the same userbase. When 1 person signs up on 1 server, every server needs to acknowledge that signup. This is going to create massive problems if/when the fediverse becomes huge - imagine thousands of people trying to sign up across thousands of servers.
Makes sense, thanks
Pretty sure this is okay, but absolutely not necessary. You should be able to use the same account to access everything, but also like Reddit, you are allowed to have multiple accounts.
An account on an instance is like an email address - if you have a @gmail.com email and a @yahoo.com email, you can interact with people from both. The spam filtering might be slightly different (different instances have a variety of ways they get configured), but both generally get the same job done.
There are reasons you might want multiple to separate things, or you can abandon ones you don't need and just pick one to stick with!