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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Scrolling through the linked instances and noticed Lemmygrad was banned? Is it their politics or are they just annoying or smth.

    The lemmy.ml instance federates with lemmygrad.ml, the collection of Marxist communities. It blocks lemmygrad.com, which currently redirects to the forum of choice for President Donald J. Trump. The latter does not seem to be hosted using lemmy and I think could not be federated with in any case? But presumably this was once the domain of a similarly-minded lemmy instance.

    Some instances other than lemmy.ml do block lemmygrad.ml. Besides being a place for Marxist communities, the instance is also home to some very radical and very hostile users. I haven’t been around long enough to really know the situation for myself, but I have seen mentions of lemmygrad.ml communities engaging in brigading in the past.


  • It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just “Join Lemmy” and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren’t and it feels like it should be the other way around?

    User accounts can be independent of anyone else’s instance. You just have to host your own.

    But it’s always going to be much more convenient to register your account on someone else’s instance, than to set up your own. Even if instance setup was made to be as effortless as possible, and single-user instances were made to be as lightweight as possible, say you download and run a single binary onto your computer that runs a lemmy instance and everything is automatic from there, most people still wouldn’t want to do that.

    The idea that you should be able to log in to your account from any instance is…less practical than you might think.

    The technical reasons why are hard to boil down into an easy explanation. But the very short version is that everything comes with pros and cons. Doing it this way makes it a little less convenient for users, and a little harder to make a good UX for. Doing it another way could make it more convenient, at the cost of making it very easy for a bad actor to do things like post fake content under another user’s name, or could add inconvenience somewhere else, like making it so that users have to manage a private key instead of or in addition to their username and password.

    I do think there’s room for improvement, but I think the overall idea of logging in and interacting with content specifically via the instance you’re registered with is ultimately very unlikely to change.