Hi comrades, hope everyone is well.
We (the admins of lemmygrad) have noticed discussion surrounding lemmy.ml (the big instance) and as such I’m making this post (by myself) to explain some of the mechanics surrounding federation and how it works.
The general gist of federation is that anyone from any instance can communicate on any other instance. Instances have their own rules, like Lemmygrad is just one of many.
So if you make an account on Lemmygrad, you can interact on lemmy.ml. But lemmy.ml is a completely different instance with their own rules, their own communities, their own admin teams, etc.
Lemmygrad federates with most instances (I think) but instances can decide not to federate with particular ones. You just see lemmy.ml a lot because it’s the biggest and most active one.
To access federation, click on the All button on desktop:
The Local view will let you see all posts from your instance and the Subscribed view will show only communities you subscribed to.
You can subscribe to communities that are on other instances btw, and they will show up in your subscribed view!
How do you recognize whether something is from lemmy.ml or lemmygrad?
You will see it on the community it’s been posted to (underlined in red here). It says @lemmy.ml.
How do you know a user is from another instance? It will also say @lemmy.ml (or, again, any other instance we federate with) next to their name. If they changed their display name however, you will have to go into their profile page to see their actual instance.
I also wanted to explain reports a bit. When you report a comment or a post, it only goes to your instance’s administration (edit: this seems wrong; reports go to your instance and the reported content’s instance). Reports go to community mods as well as admins.
As admins of lemmygrad, we can delete content from other instances, but it will only act on this instance. People on lemmy will still be able to see the content and interact with it unless an admin from there deletes it.
For example, if you report something from !opensource@lemmy.ml with a lemmygrad account:
- Lemmygrad admins will see it
- Lemmy.ml admins will see it
- Mods of the opensource community will see it.
If we delete it however (lemmygrad admins), only users from lemmygrad won’t be able to see that post. Users that log in from lemmy.ml will still be able to see it and interact with it normally.
So generally we don’t delete stuff from other instances, unless it’s particularly gross shit, because it would just remove content from our instance but not from any others, which would just isolate us.
And if you wanted to report something on lemmy to the lemmy admins, make sure it abides by their rules (which you can only see if you go on lemmy.ml directly) so that you don’t waste your time making a report they cannot act on.
If you have any questions on federation feel free to ask them below.
Lemmy.ml admin here. Just a quick correction: we no longer advertise Lemmy.ml as the flagship instance, because as you alluded to, that’s where a lot of the problems come from. The idea of Lemmy.ml being the flagship is mostly from the days before federation was implemented, and Lemmy.ml is the instance run by the devs so it was what was displayed on the GitHub page and naturally became the largest one, because different instances couldn’t actually talk to each other. We don’t actually want to have any flagship or default instance on Lemmy now that instances federate.
May I ask what we should refer to Lemmy.ml as then? I get it is not the primary one, but I had always used the “flagship” as in as in the prototype/example one, the one the devs work on so other instances have something to look at and get an idea of what to do.
Just Lemmy.ml. It’s pretty standard in the fediverse to refer to instances by their domain, because that’s what the protocol actually uses to identify and authenticate them.
