You're very welcome, I'm glad it was helpful. I'm still learning about all this myself.
PrinceHabib72
joined 1 year ago
So the answer to your original question is yes, some instances are closed off from others, but you didn't mess anything up. Instance A can "defederate" from Instance B, which makes it so that users of either instance cannot see or interact with content or users from the other instance. This is unilateral- even if Instance B does not defederate Instance A, it is still blocked from seeing or interacting with Instance A.
However, with regards to your later questions, you didn't mess anything up. It's simply that federation is not retroactive. When the first person from Instance A subscribes to something from Instance B, the two instances are then federated, and content begins being shared from that point forward. It does not retroactively add old content from Instance B to Instance A. For now, it matters relatively heavily, as instances are being federated constantly, even though the content flow is somewhat light. As content flow increases and new instances begin to stabilize, it will matter less. As time goes on, the content "before federation" will be vastly outweighed by the content "after federation".
This is all somewhat compounded by the fact that lemmy instances are absolutely slammed right now. Kbin.social had to defederate entirely for a while just to keep from crashing. Give it time for the spike to stabilize and it will work more smoothly.
I don't really need this, I've already swapped all my apps and home page to lemmy, but seriously, I had to applaud the name. lemmyreddirectyou... 10/10.
Yes, but remember the 1% rule. 90% of users lurk, 9% comment, 1% contribute. The power users upset at this change are at least in the 9%, if not the 1%, and enough of them go, the site grinds to a halt for the other 90%.
At least here they're being shit on like the weak-willed idiots they are.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1494sa8/gaming_is_now_public
Well that was a frustrating read. I don't get it. Why are people so okay with reddit treating them like garbage?
As far as I know, no. Hello from someone who was trying to click a different link and this one popped up. I do know they're working on it on github.
I'm not on an instance with no downvotes, as I do think they have SOME purpose (though you're right that it is usually a bit of a disagree-so-shut-up button rather than anything else), but I agree with the rest. The content here is certainly slower. On reddit, I could just refresh the main page and have dozens of new posts to interact with- here, not so much. I don't think that's a bad thing, though. I still get my mindless scrolling when I'm poopin or something like that, but I'm spending a lot less time online than I did. I'm reading more, I'm working on my novels, I'm WAY more productive at work. I used RiF exclusively on my phone, and so I decided pretty soon after the API announcement that I was done. All the protest and reddit's hilariously mismanaged response has done has cemented my resolve.
The only reason federation wasn't working was because they had to turn on CloudFlare protection just to keep the site from crashing. That interfered with federation. Assuming they're able to upgrade enough to handle the traffic, they'll federate as easily as lemmy does.
The part that confused and pushed me away is the fact that depending on which email server you sign up for, you may not be able to send or receive an email to a server that may or may not already exist. If the person/group that runs the instance you signed up for defederates something, you're out of luck if you wanted to use that instance without making a dedicated account over there. It also doesn't help that the federation of different instances isn't automatic or retroactive. Someone on your instance has to subscribe to something on another instance for the federation to start, and it only starts pulling content from that point forward. If you want to see older content you have to go to that instance at a minimum, and maybe sign up for that instance depending on what it is. Those are the biggest factors against the Fediverse, in my opinion.
It's not a silly question at all, and it's one of the most unintuitive parts of the Fediverse. The most straightforward way is to go to the community you want to subscribe to (you can see a fairly comprehensive list at browse.feddit.de). Copy the URL from that community. Go back to Kbin and paste that URL into the search bar. If it doesn't show up immediately, wait a few seconds then refresh, and it should.
There is some shorthand to how you can search- for example, searching "!(community name)@(instance home URL)" works as well, but Kbin in particular is a bit odd because it uses an @ for both community and instance, instead of the rest of Lemmy which uses the !. Like I said, the most straightforward way is just to copy the URL itself and figure out the shortcuts later.