Alternative Accounts:

  • @AngryClosetMonkey@feddit.ch
  • 1 Post
  • 6 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Let’s say I create an account on LemmyMusic.com because that was the first instance that piped my interest. Later I discover a community on LemmyNSFW.com and I want to subscribe, but I can’t because LemmyMusic decided that they don’t want to federate with NSFW instances? For LemmyMusic this makes perfectly sense, but for my user it might not.

    People usually don’t create accounts because they want their data to be handled by music enthusiasts, but because they simply want access to the communities.

    Other example, my account is still on LemmyMusic.com but now I want to create a community for a thing that I came up with, it has nothing to do with music, so the only option I have is to create a different account on an other instance that is willing to host my community.


  • These platforms (Lemmy, Mastodon [twitter], Pixelfed [instagram], Friendica [facebook], PeerTube [YouTube], Funkwhale [Spotify-ish], etc…)

    This is the issue though. Pixelfed is not equal to Instagram, because Instagram is a platform while pixelfed is a software and once it’s being hosted on a server it becomes a new platform (every instance is it’s own platform). For things like pixelfed or mastodon which are one dimensional (I.e. users interacting with users) this is not much of an issue because federation opens up full access to the other platform.

    For lemmy and similar concepts this does not entirely work though, because they are two dimensional, users and communities. This creates an internal relationship between the two dimensions that is not equal to the relationship users from other instances have with the communities on the local instance.

    User accounts are also subjected to all the community rules an instance has chosen when (de)federation decisions are being made.

    There is really no reason why users and communities should live on the same instance, but it creates confusion and inconvenience for many users.


  • The problem, though, will be that you and your users have to create communities on your server as there is no way for them to create one on let’s say lemmy.world. This makes your instance yet another general purpose reddit clone which people have to discover to join your local communities. Or your users have to create alt accounts on lemmy.world just so that they can create a community, and that doesn’t sound great either.

    Ideally, the distribution would be the opposite of what you described and lemmy.world and lemmy.ml would be user servers, while there are many smaller community servers that focus on a particular topic, like infosec, memes and jokes, Q&A, tech, politics, NSFW and so on.