We have received numerous reports from users about the closure of the c/android community. While we fully support the original community owners’ decision to move to another instance, it will eventually be necessary to open up the community on Lemmy.world. The beauty of the fediverse is that multiple communities on the same subject can exist in different instances. However, if you can no longer moderate a community on Lemmy for any reason, it is important to pass it on to individuals who are willing and able to do so.
To ensure the best interests of our instance members, it is necessary to establish boundaries. Holding onto a community name cannot be a permanent arrangement. It’s important to consider our users’ ongoing interest in the community if they wish it to continue. While we acknowledge the objective of consolidating communities, current community members ultimately decide whether they wish to join the new community at lemdro.id.
To ensure a smooth transition, we will keep the community locked for another week, providing ample time to inform the active user base about the move to the new instance at https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected].
So if the new community is still federated with lemmy.world, if they reopen this instance does that not make things overwrite each other or would they have to defederate themselves from lemmy.world?
Sorry if this is a dumb question. New to the fediverse and lemmy in general.
No - they’re entirely separate.
Basically the way it works is that you never really leave the instance you’re on. When you access a community hosted on that instance, you’re of course on that instance. But when you access a community that’s hosted on another instance, you’re actially accessing a mirror of that community that’s hosted on your own instance.
So for example, from your point of view, coming in through lemmy.world, the two entirely separate communities are [email protected] and [email protected]@lemmy.world. The first one is the lemmy.world community snd the second one is a local mirror of the entirely separate lemdro.id community.
Hope that makes sense …
Kind of, I still have a lot to learn.
So lemmy.ml and lemmy.world are two separate instances right? And then the communities on those instances are like subreddits for lack of better terms?
Think of it like email.
The email provider is the instance:
Google, Yahoo, outlook, etc
The community/user is your email address:
Android@gmail, Android@yahoo
Because they are different providers you can have the same name since it’s the only one on that provider.
@nosut @ThatGirlKylie I am on both lemmy.world and mastodon.social and it works like a charm
A subreddit can be uniquely identified like this
/r/games. Once that name is taken, no other sub can have it.A Lemmy community is identified like this: [email protected]. Notice it has a name part and a server part, both are necessary to uniquely identify the community. [email protected] is a different community with different mods and different posts/comments (unless someone crosspost, but then it’s still two different posts with mostly the same text inside). You can mostly access any community on any server from your account, mostly irrespective of what server your account is on.
But similarly named communities on different servers are different communities. They are analogous to /r/DnD vs /r/dndnext. Similar topic, different subs, same with those Lemmy communities.
Yeah:
Instances = Servers
Communities /c/ = Subreddits /r/
Basically, yes. And it’s not too much of a stretch to think of lemmy.world and lemmy.ml as two separate Reddits that share with each other, so anyone on either one can access stuff on both.
So two communities that both have the same name but are on different instances are actually two entirely separate places since they’re on two entirely separate “Reddits”. One is [email protected] and the other is [email protected].
Yes, essentially.
Tangentially related doubt -
Given two communities A@hostone and B@hosttwo, and a user U1 registered on the hostone instance and a user U2 registered on the hosttwo instance; imagine one day hostone goes down - server error, too many users, whatever.
Can U1 access B@hosttwo? Can U2 access B@hosttwo? I’m assuming that neither of the users can access communities on hostone on account of it being down.
Thanks in advance.
User U1 couldn’t access anything, since their account is at hostone and hostone is down. But they could log in with a different account on a different instance (or just lurk without logging in) and be fine.
User U2 would be almost entirely unaffected, since User U2 is on hosttwo, which is unaffected. B@hosttwo would be entirely untouched, and User U2 would even still be able to access A@hostone. Sort of.
All along, when User U2 accessed A@hostone, they were never actually accessing A@hostone directly - they were actually accessing a mirror that’s hosted on hosttwo - A@hostone@hosttwo. So the only effect of hostone bring down is that A@hostone@hosttwo wouldn’t get any new content from A@hostone (or from any of the other federated mirrors - A@hostone@hostthree or A@hostone@hostfour and so on). But all of the content that was already at A@hostone@hosttwo would still be there and could (presumably) still be accessed. New content could (presumably) even be added there, but since it wouldn’t be able to sync back up with hostone, it wouldn’t show up anywhere else - it would just be at A@hostone@hosttwo.
And a note on those (presumably)s - internally, the lemmy/kbin/whatever software would recognize that it was failing in its attempts to sync with hostone, and likely that it was failing to even contact hostone. I don’t know how the assorted pieces of software - kbin or lemmy or mastodon or whatever - handle that. If they ignored it and just kept trying to sync with hostone and failing, then User U2 might not ever even be aware of the fact that hostone is down, since even A@hostone@hosttwo would look the same - it just wouldn’t be syncing with hostone, so wouldn’t be getting any new content from there or from any of the other federated versions of A@hostone, and User U2 might eventually notice that.
It’s also possible though that the software could be set up to tell User U2 that hostone was offline, and it might even be set up so that it would refuse to accept new content at A@hostone@hosttwo until it could get back to syncing content with hostone. I don’t know why it would be done that way, but it could.
That’s brilliant, thanks for the in-depth answer.
Removed by mod