this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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Think of instances (lemmy.world, kbin.social, sh.itjust.works, etc.) like planets. Each planet contains cities (or ~~subreddits~~ communities). Most of these planets are federated meaning that if you were born on one planet (have a login) then you can travel and participate the galaxy of cities and planets. If a planet defederates, then you can no longer travel there if you were not from there.
I think that still confuses people. It may be simpler to relate it to email. You are on one email domain like gmail.com or yahoo.com and can email other servers. Bad servers that are sending spam or hate speech can be blocked.
What is the major difference between something like Lemmy vs Kbin, etc., compared to just two different Lemmy "planets"?
Also, how do other platforms in the fediverse fit into this analogy? Something like Mastodon, would that be considered another galaxy? Is there any travel between these or do they require the birth of a new fedinaut within that galaxy to interact with those worlds?
Mastadon is like a galaxy of federated planets that can speak/travel to Lemmy planets when they want to, but lemmy can't really understand anything they say to each other and can't really travel to their planets (mastadon is 'people' based like twitter, whereas lemmy is 'subject' based like reddit)
I dont know how kbin fits into this analogy. I think it basically is the same as lemmy and can talk/travel to lemmy but also only understands some mastadon
Can you decide to change your "home" planet?
The best you can do right now is recreate it on another planet. Hopefully someday there will be a way to migrate (or a way to export/import).
Sign up for a new account at a different instance. While you can transfer your account to another instance in Mastodon, you can't do it for Lemmy right now.
What is the difference between the All view and the Local view?
Local shows posts posted on your planet, All shows the entire federation (galaxy).
If I understand correctly, local only shows your planet and you can participate fully.
All shows the entire galactic federation (though you may only get to sightsee other planets, but not talk to the locals without getting a visa (login credentials for that planet))
Not quite right. All would be the entire galactic federation that allows free entry with your planet, like the countries in the EU. There is no way currently to see the entire galactic federation, and probably never really will be because of the enormous amount of data that would need to be kept on a single instance.
Not quite right. All would be the entire galactic federation that allows free entry with your planet, like the countries in the EU. There is no way currently to see the entire galactic federation, and probably never really will be because of the enormous amount of data that would need to be kept on a single instance.
Local view only shows posts hosted on this instance (planet). So only communities hosted on lemmy.world for example.
All view would include posts from other instances as well.
So should I have accounts on more than one instance? Which instance has the most communities?
No, where did you get that idea? If you want to view as much random content from everywhere as you can just browse by All. If you want a more curated experience, stick to your subscriptions. Local is sort of a weird limbo unless you're on an instance that has a dedicated topic (like the Star Trek instance, for example).
Ok got it.
One interesting thing I found is I have a reddthat.com account and also a lemmy.world account. Using Jerboa, somehow browsing with the reddthat.com account is faster than using the lemmy.world account even if I'm browsing lemmy.world communities.
Yeah as far as I understand it, reddthat will have a local-but-regularly-updated copy of the community and that's what you're seeing when you view it from there. So makes sense that it would load a lot faster. The problem is that with all the strain .world has been under, we had some issues federating new posts and comments out so they weren't actually making it to other servers local copies.
I know this recent upgrade was supposed to help with that part. Lots of growing pains at the moment!
All shows communities on all planets. Local shows only the communities on your planet.
What if they defederate so my visa expires and now I am stuck in the spaceport limbo?