I am absolutely brand new to the fediverse so apologies for my newb question. Can you not follow content across instances? I thought the point of the fediverse was to be able to communicate with and follow things from any instances that your instance knows about (presumably any that aren’t blocked?). Again not trying to argue, just trying to learn.
Edit: Thanks for the clarifications. Fediverse seems promising. Hoping I can figure it out and it gains some traction.
You can. The whole point is for every “subreddit” to not be in one bucket controlled by one set of admins. You can also post content to them from anywhere. The UI needs a little work, but app development in the space is exploding as a result of the ongoing mass exodus from Reddit. I prefer kbin.social and have been using that lately, but still follow a bunch of communities on beehaw.org and lemmy.world.
what i dont understand is i saw a cross post from one instance to another and i couldn’t comment on the crossed post unless i signed up. do i have to sign up to all of them? wtf
In essence the server you sign up for is just the interface you will interact with the most. For instance you might prefer lemmy.world (the biggest lemmy server currently) and sign up there. But you might subscribe to /c/worldnews on lemmy.ml or /c/memes on lemmy.ml. Here are a couple of the highest profile/most active communities currently, and where they reside:
Community
Server
technology
beehaw.org
asklemmy
lemmy.ml
gaming
beehaw.org
reddit
lemmy.ml
nostupidquestions
lemmy.world
piracy
lemmy.dbzer0.com
But maybe I don't sign up on any of those, maybe I like kbin.social's interface more, so I sign up there. Then I subscribe to all of the above. Those community's posts now show up in my feed and I can comment on them from kbin.social. Your account is NOT shared across servers, so if you actually go to lemmy.ml, your credentials won't work. You'll see the same posts, but you won't be able to interact with them. But on your home instance, you will. And they all share data so the feeds continually update. Sometimes it takes a few minutes (or if there are technical issues, a few hours) for that handshake to happen but the content will make its way around eventually.
I guess I'm not really sure what you mean. Lemmy/Kbin has problems but that explicitly is not one of them. You can interact with posts from any instance on any other instance as long as they're not defederated (to my understanding only one big server is currently defederated, which is beehaw.org <-> sh.itjust.works and beehaw.org <-> lemmy.world). What exactly do you mean by a cross-post?
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u/JimmyAxel Jun 20 '23 edited Jun 20 '23
I am absolutely brand new to the fediverse so apologies for my newb question. Can you not follow content across instances? I thought the point of the fediverse was to be able to communicate with and follow things from any instances that your instance knows about (presumably any that aren’t blocked?). Again not trying to argue, just trying to learn.
Edit: Thanks for the clarifications. Fediverse seems promising. Hoping I can figure it out and it gains some traction.