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What’s the difference between the different Fediverse services if they’re interconnected anyway? (feddit.de)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I‘m not sure if this is the right place to ask this, please excuse if it’s not. As many people rn, I’m new to Lemmy and that’s my first venture into the Fediverse at all. Lemmy is sometimes regarded as an alternative to Reddit (hope this phrasing doesn’t offend anyone here, you know what I mean😅), like Mastodon is to Twitter. I’ve also heard about Kbin but tbh I haven’t looked into that at all so I have no idea what it is about. Also, I read in some comments, that they’re all interconnected the same way different Lemmy instances are. So you have people reading Lemmy content on Mastodon, people reading Kbin content on Lemmy etc. That’s where my confusion comes in: What’s the difference in these types of services then? Is there a reason why I would want create an account on a mastodon instance, if I have a Lemmy account already? (Other than the „I don’t like what the instance I’m currently registered at is doing, so I’m moving somewhere else“, but that could be another Lemmy instance ofc). What is the benefit of switching between/having multiple accounts on these types of platforms? Thank you!

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (3 children)

It's pretty much the same as with email. If you create an account at Mastodon, you are user@mastodon. If Mastodon goes down, that account is gone. If Mastodon gets sketchy, spams, posts NSFWs, etc. it might get blocked by other hosts and your account won't be able to participate on other server.

If you just use throwaway accounts, it doesn't matter, just create one on each host. If you want a permanent account, either create it on one of the bigger servers or in a community you trust and expect to survive for a long time.

Accounts also only work on the server they were created. While you can post with your feddit account on lemmy.world, you have to do so on feddit, you can't login on lemmy.world with your feddit account.

The idea of making accounts transferable has been around, but so far isn't possible:

I hope that the whole Fediverse can switch to crypto identities (as in GnuPG, no need for blockchain) sooner or later, it would make this whole thing way more robust and easier to truly decentralize. What we have right now is not much different from lots of individual websites with a little bit interconnection for easier discovery.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Question is for most of us, how do we know which servers we can trust? I think I lucked out here and on Mastodon, great hosts on both.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

No way to tell in the long run. The pragmatic way is to simply go with whatever server hosts most of the communities you participate in, as when that server runs into issues things have to move around anyway.

Though in the end, I don't think there is a way around multi-accounting, see lemmy.ml, the biggest instance there is and it was down for the majority of the blackout.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

This is a really good explanation, I don't know if there is an FAQ or something, but this should definitely be in one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thanks for your response! It's a very good explanation of the concept of federation, although that wasn't what I meant. I get why switching between instances of a certain platform (like Lemmy) can make sense, for the reasons you mentioned. But not what the differences are between having an account on Lemmy vs. Mastodon for example, if they're interconnected.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Even the different service still operate on the same underlying protocol and can communicate with each other. But due to the different ways they display their information messages from one service might not make a lot of sense when viewed on another service, e.g. here is your account viewed from mastodon.social:

https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]