I’ve just created an account on Lemmy.world and am able to subscribe for communities in lemmy.ml. Can I use it there? Can I use same credentials for all lemmy instances? Does it make a difference where I create one?
Think of it like email. If you have an email account at
gmail.comyou can still send and receive mail from people atmit.eduor wherever.Here, the instance your account is on will fetch posts and comments from other instances on behalf of you and other subscribers.
I think that’s what the “federated” part means. Your account has “citizenship” on your instance/server, but had freedom to travel and correspond everywhere within the federation of Lemmy. Did I get that right?
That’s the best explanation I have been hearing about how this all works, what happens if an instance goes down or disappears? Would all your comments and posts on another instance disappear ? Or does it sort of take a snapshot of it and becomes part of that instance you commented in ?
Instances take snapshots of text and comments from federated posts, but not media links and embeds so that federation won’t take up too much storage. The posts from an instance that shut down will still be there but the post becomes “archived” as any new comments or edits cannot be federated.
You only use one account. The one you created on Lemmy.world.
You can use the search function to find communities in other instances, you can upvote and comment on them too! No need for more than one account!
Just make one on one instance, then use that instance to communicate to other Lemmies
What happens if that instances goes down? can you then login or re register on a other instances and keeping all your comments/communitys you are subbed to?
It is unlikely for larger instance to go down, but if it did go down, theoretically you should be able to migrate before the instance shutdown. Unfortunately, AFAIK Lemmy haven’t implemented account migration yet: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985
However, other fedi service like mastodon do have that feature, so it should work similarly. I imagine once it is implemented, you will be able to keep all your subscriptions (basically like exporting your communities, and automatically clicking “subscribe” on each one) and likely your account settings. But I don’t imagine your post/comment can migrate to your new account.
