Support / questions about Lemmy.
No, it doesn't matter. In fact the username itself doesn't matter because you can set whatever display name you want anyway.
But basically it's like email addresses: [email protected] and [email protected] are two different addresses on two different servers and they talk to eachother just fine.
The only exception is if one of the two servers has chosen not to federate with the other. In that case, you would want one on each account. However, that's pretty rare as of right now.
The other exception is performance. If you register on a very overloaded server, or one that has insufficient resources, you're going to have a bad time.
Oh great. Thank you very much!
Generally no, but it can make a difference depending on which communities you want to participate in. For example beehaw.org blocks lemmy.world so if you log into lemmy.world and want to participate with a beehaw.org community, you'll have issue. Though it's usually not a problem, beehaw is an outstanding offender.
You can check for blocked instances by selecting the Instances link bottom of any page. For example you would go to beehaw.org and check their instances page to see if your login instance is blocked. Then you would check the instances page on your login instance to see if beehaw.org blocked.
There's some network and performance considerations in selecting an instance. You want one regionally close for best network speeds. Then you want one with good server response. For example lemmy.world and lemmy.ml are heavily loaded so you might get better server performance with a less populated instance (see https://the-federation.info/platform/73). Instance admin settings and quality can also be a consideration.
That’s interesting, because I ve noticed that, that I didn’t find the communities on Lemmy.world of beehaw. But.. why or what’s the reason they block each other? Doesn’t that makes the community interaction quite complicated?
As I understand it, Beehaw was basically being brigaded by spam accounts on Lemmy.world, and Lemmy doesn't yet have moderation tools to deal with that kind of issue. If what I read is correct, Beehaw and Lemmy.world both agreed that, for the moment, defederation is the least bad option.
Yes it does make things complicated. I think there may be a number of potential users intimidated by the complexity of the Fediverse. On one hand it kind of filters out the lazy ones which mitigates lazy posting, but on the other it makes growth more difficult.
However it's really only Beehaw causing the defederation drama (neglecting Meta of course). Most if not all the other instances block only for abuse or extreme content (like lemmygrad). Beehaw blocks other instances just because they don't like the looks of them, literally. They don't approve of the admin policy at lemmy.world so they blocked the biggest most popular Lemmy instance, boo!!!
Well as Lemmy users we do have some control. If we unilaterally disapprove of what Beehaw is doing we can reject them into obscurity. Based on the lack of growth in user numbers over there I'd say that's happening already. At one time they were top five in total users, now they're not even on the first page.
I see! Well, the reason why they block the Lemmy.world, sounds pretty counterproductive, but as I understand Lemmy, they are free to do so.
Your answers gave me a deeper understanding of fediverse and Lemmy in general. Thank you very much.