ou might have seen that we’ve been defederated from beehaw.org. I think there’s some necessary context to understand what this means to the users on this instance.
How federation works
The way federation works is that the community on beehaw.org is an organization of posts, and you’re subscribed to it despite your account being on lemmy.world. Now someone posts on that community (created on beehaw.org), on which server is that post hosted?
It’s hosted on both! It’s hosted on any instance that has a subscriber. It’s also hosted on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, etc. Every instance that has a subscriber is going to have a copy of this post. That’s why if you host your own instance, you’ll often get a ton of text data just in your own server.
And the copies all stay in sync with each other using ActivityPub. So you’re reading the post that’s host on lemmy.world, and someone with an account on beehaw.org is reading the same post on beehaw.org, and the posts are kept in sync via ActivityPub. Whenever someone posts to that community or comments on a post, that data is shared to all the versions across the fediverse, and these versions are kept in sync. So up until 5 hours ago, they were the same post!
“True”-ness
A key concept that will matter in the next section is the idea of a “true” version. Effectively, one version of these posts is the “true” version, that every other community reflects. The “true” version is the one hosted on the instance that hosts the community. So the “true” version of a beehaw.org community post is the one actually hosted on beehaw.org. We have a copy, but ours is only a copy. If you post to our copy, it updates the “true” version on beehaw.org, and then all the other instances look to the “true” version on beehaw to update themselves.
The same goes for communities hosted on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml. Defederation affects how information is shared between instances. If you keep track of where the “true” version is hosted, it becomes a lot easier to understand what is going on.
How defederation works
Now take that example post from earlier, the one on beehaw.org. The “true” version of the post is on beehaw.org but the post is still hosted on both instances (again, it has a copy hosted on all instances). Let’s say someone with an account on beehaw.org comments on that post. That comment is going to be sent to every version of that post via ActivityPub, as the “true” version has been updated. That is, every version EXCEPT lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. So users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works won’t get that comment, because we’ve been defederated from beehaw.org. If we write a comment, it will only be visible from accounts on lemmy.world, because we posted to a copy, but our copy is now out of sync with the “true” version. So we can appear to interact with the post, but those interactions are ONLY visible by other lemmy.world accounts, since our comments aren’t send to other versions. As the “true” version is hosted on beehaw, and we no longer get beehaw updates due to defederation, we will not see comments from ANY other community on those posts (including from other defederated instances like sh.itjust.works).
The same goes for posting to beehaw communities. We can still do that. However, the “true” version of those communities are the ones on beehaw, so our posts will not be shared to other instances via ActivityPub. And all of this is true for Beehaw users with our communities. Beehaw users can continue to see and interact with Lemmy.world communities, but those interactions are only visible to other Beehaw users, since the “true” versions of the Lemmy.world communities (the ones sent to/synced with every other instance) is the Lemmy.world one.
Communities on other instances, for example lemmy.ml, are unaffected by this. Lemmy.world and beehaw.org users will still be able to interact with those communities, but posts/comments from lemmy.world users won’t be visible to beehaw.org users, as defederation prevents our posts/comments from being sent to the version of these posts hosted on beehaw.org. However, as the “true” version is the one on the third instance, we can still see everything from beehaw.org users. So we see a more filled in version than the beehaw users.
I think fragmentation is more susceptible on Lemmy due to the instance design, i.e. there are unlimited instances on Lemmy, each with multiple communities (“subreddits”), but only one instance on Reddit. So there could be 100 c/gaming on Lemmy, but only one r/gaming on Reddit.
It could just be the subreddits I’m subscribed to, but I don’t have any fragmentation on there. The most fragmentation I have is something like r/games (discussion) and r/gaming (pictures), so they serve different purposes.
Maybe we are just seeing teething issues on Lemmy right now though, but seeing something like this is disappointing (spoken from someone who is on neither instance).
EDIT: spelling
That’s not quite true, there is r/gaming but also r/pcgaming and other similar subs created because people didn’t like mods on r/gaming or other reasons, there are many cases of reddit subs of the same thing “multiplied” because of mods “power-trips”, that’s why they made the multi-reddit feature on reddit, so each user can combine multiple of the same on a single feed.
Think of instances as subreddits and you’ll se what’s happening is not dissimilar to what happens on reddit.
Reddit as a platform thrives regardless, Lemmy will be perfectly fine as well.
Lemmy is even better, because if mods of a sub go crazy, people will simply create a new sub, while if admins go crazy (like they’re doing with the API), noone can do anything about it, here on Lemmy you have solutions to both.
instances aren’t like subreddits in this example though. if i don’t care about drama, i can subscribe to both r/tumblr and r/curatedtumblr and have them both appear in my feed. i can’t do that with instances without creating two accounts, and browsing both separately
Yea, it’s going to be a problem if a lot of large instances start defederizing from each other. People aren’t going to want to have 4 different accounts to interact with communities they were contributing to before they defederized. Sure you can have 2 gaming communities but if you are on lemmy.world and like beehaws gaming community more you are now stuck with just the one on lemmy.world unless you make a beehaw account.
The whole point of federation is that you can browse all federated instances using one account and one homeserver.
That’s true, but they still serve different purposes, i.e. r/pcgaming is specific. Using that example, it’s not like we have r/gaming2 which serves the exact same purpose as r/gaming, and has a similar size user base.
I think things will settle as you say, but this isn’t a good start when the user base is exploding. I’m only just getting my head around it all and I’m a fairly tech minded person for someone who doesn’t work in the field. Something like this is just going to put a lot of people off, which is a shame.
Reddit has (or at least had, I haven’t been keeping up) r/truegaming and r/games, both of which splintered off from r/gaming because they didn’t like how the former was being run. Having communities on different instances would basically be the same, except they wouldn’t have to come up with a new name.
We do have r/gaming2 it’s just not called r/gaming2 but something else (this is an example), it doesn’t happen often but it does happen on reddit.
I understand your concerns, they’re pretty valid, all this new stuff is already confusing enough as it is, adding drama to it doesn’t help at all, there is indeed the risk of putting people off, I just hope that most won’t care about the drama and give themselves time to see what’s happening is not actually a big deal for us (it is a big problem for beehaw users tho).
Actually there is a r/gaming2, it’s called r/games
There are also general purpose gaming subreddits with a slightly different purpose like r/truegaming or r/patientgamers/ which aren’t about specific games or types of games, but want to focus on a different community of people.
I really hope we will get some kind of “Community federation” in the future, where two or more communities can merge and the same content will be shown in all of them.
I posted about it elsewhere in the thread but there’s an active discussion about implementing something like multireddits, that could be the solution. On the whole, though, I think fragmentation is kind of the point of federation and probably a good thing, given that we have a way of browsing through all of the communities without having to go through each individually. It means no one person can really decide that “actually, fuck games, /c/gaming is a bong smoking community now” cause then we just go to the gaming community on another instance. Perhaps a multireddit you can subscribe to that will automatically subscribe you to all the communities without having to update?
Thanks for posting the link, cool that there’s already discussion around this topic!