this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2023
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Can someone explain a little bit about how federation works? Can I log into other Lemmy servers using my lemmy.ca login? Also can I create communities that exist across multiple servers?
I would love to know too. Maybe a link to a Lemmy how-to ? I have a true fear of missing out I think. For example, if I follow /c/hockey on lemmy.ca, do I also get the posts from other instances ? Someone help us ! :)
This repo has some good Lemmy "how-to"s, including linking to this tutorial for finding and subscribing to communities.
I've been fiddling around with it a bit. I think the way it works is that you sign up to an instance, and log into a specific instance. You can search for communities on other instances - e.g. ifyou search for https://lemmy.ml/c/memes, which is the memes community on the lemmy.ml instance, you can subscribe to it, even from this instance.
The comments do go across. That's quite good.
So, if I go to lemmy.ca/c/memes do I see the same content as on lemmy.ml/c/memes ? That's the major issue I see but maybe I am mistaken and both "points" to the same content ?
No, but you can subscribe to both communities from your account on Lemmy.ca.
So it'd act like 2 separate communities on your feed.
Ah, then unless I go and search all instances for, say, /c/hockey, these will have different posts. This is a shame.
But thank you for taking the time to answer my questions :)
I believe the idea is that there will be one main established hockey community, and you wouldn't need to create another on another instance (unless you're unhappy with the "main" one). So if lemmy.ca hosts the hockey community, users from other instances would just use it directly. For example the main lemmy woodworking and hockey communities both appear to be hosted right here on lemmy.ca.
It's kinda like how there is the /r/gaming subreddit and /r/games, they post similar content but you cannot see posts and comments from one of those subreddits on the other.
Whenever you come across a community that you're following, like !technology@beehaw.org, that's also hosted on another instance, like !technology@lemmy.ml hosted on another instance, just follow that one too.
I think that's the case. But I'm new here too, so maybe there is some way to search across instances.
I always relate it to another federated service like email.
You create an account on a provider like Hotmail, Gmail, or yahoo. It doesn't really matter which one you choose because you can access emails from any other provider.
You cannot sign into hotmail.com using your Gmail account. If you go to Yahoo.com directly then you can't interact with content there because you're not signed in there. But if you are signed in at gmail.com and then follow accounts from yahoo.com, the all the emails from those yahoo accounts will show up in your Gmail page.
You can also have emails like funny@gmail.com, funny@hotmail.com, and funny@yahoo.com and they might all have similar content but they are different accounts.