It doesn’t make sense to use such a young platform that way. New communities and even new servers are popping up regularly, and I’d like to see what’s happening on the platform as a whole. I want a blacklist, not a whitelist. Until I can block users, communities, and whole servers from my feed, this place just isn’t worth the amount of effort it takes to scroll through all the wingnut political agitprop.

Agreed. Over the last couple of months, it’s become clear that Lemmy is shaping up to be Voat for the Left. Maybe I’ll come back once blocking functionality has been implemented, but until then, I’m just not interested in wading through the sea of political loony toons to sift out the interesting privacy and open-source content.

What do you need encryption for? You trust the government, don’t you?

The ACLU is a pale shadow of the organization it once was, and watching it fall has been one of my great sorrows.

Posting about stupid anti-privacy authoritarianism from the Australian government is almost cheating.

Agreed, I don’t like the idea of mods being able to edit posts or comments to make it look like a user said something they didn’t actually say.

I had a Note 4 for the longest time, and the stylus was handy for fine control when I wanted to draw something. You could also set the phone to show a notepad on the lock screen whenever you pulled the stylus out of its slot, which was convenient for quick note-taking. Other than that, I almost never used it, and I don’t miss it at all now.

People at sopuli.xyz are allowed to post to !technology@lemmy.ml.

Oh sure, I don’t mean I have any objection to their participation. I’m just trying to understand how Lemmy works, and I’m confused by the differing instance identifiers for this post, user, and community.

In fact I don’t see a !technology@sopuli.xyz community

Curiouser and curiouser! It does look like !suomi is on sopuli.xyz, though. The one on Lemmy was deleted.

Yep, that’s the post. OP appears to be registered @sopuli.xyz if you hover over their name on that post, and their profile here on @lemmy.ml indicates that they’re registered on @sopuli.xyz as well.

Also one of their communities, !suomi, is listed on @lemmy.ml, but appears as !suomi@sopuli.xyz.

It doesn’t look to me like a Lemmur issue, but obviously I’m no expert!

But even within Lemmur (which is quite good, btw), I would still have to manually go and switch between my accounts to see content from each instance. There’s not a way for me, as a single user, to simultaneously look at two instances which are not federated with each other. The instance where my account exists is acting as a “gatekeeper” to the rest of the Lemmy-verse.

I say this with full awareness that it isn’t a problem at the current scale. I’m just thinking about network coherence as the user base expands and the federative complexity grows. I’m eventually going to want a tool that combines multiple instances into a single feed, even if those instances don’t talk to each other for some reason.

Interesting. I don’t love the idea of my “home” instance dictating what I can choose to see, but I understand why the architecture is structured that way. It’s sounding increasingly as though if I want full visibility into the Lemmy-verse, the best way to use Lemmy is via a client on my own local machine, connecting directly to the instances I want to see.

Is that being contemplated? It sounds like I could create my own instance and federate with whoever I like, but is there a way to accomplish the same goal without maintaining my own instance?

So the instance where I create my account limits which other instances I can see? If my account is @user@alpha.com, and @alpha.com blocks @beta.com, I can’t see any communities from @beta.com, even if I choose to subscribe to them?

Now that’s interesting, only my posts in !lemmy@lemmy.ml are visible on lemmy.ca. My first post to !reddit@lemmy.ml and my post in !startrekmemes@lemmy.ml don’t show up at all. Do those other communities not sync to lemmy.ca? What’s going on there?

So what’s the role of the server in account creation/maintenance? Others could take the name “Flelk” on other servers and parade around pretending to be me, meaning readers have to check the domain name to confirm whether it really is me? If my “home” server deletes my account, does that erase all my votes, comments, and posts on just my “home” server, or on all servers?

(I know you folks are busy actually building this thing, so if there are better ways to get answers to these questions other than asking you admins directly, please feel free to point me in that direction.)

Because mods might conceivably be bad actors. This could lead to various forms of harassment.

Why would !main@startrek.com be synced in any way with !main@starwars.com

Interesting, I hadn’t contemplated the idea of topic-dedicated servers. So looking at multiple servers through lemmy.ml is functionally equivalent to using a local client to pull the data from each server separately. I don’t think that’s a bad idea, it’s just not what I’d assumed.

As I said in my initial post, clearly I have some things to learn! I’m not a programmer, just a superuser with an interest in finding an alternative to Reddit’s increasingly invasive and restrictive platform.

That said, I do still like the idea of giving subs the option to “merge” if so desired. It’s an interesting layer of complexity to add on top of what I’m realizing is already a fairly complex system.

You can add !canada@lemmy.ca as a subscription to your account on lemmy.ml and it will be treated more or less as if it was a (!) community on lemmy.ml.

Sure, but again I come back to the question of, what’s the point of being federated then? I may as well just be using a local client to present me with a set of RSS feeds from different websites or something.

What the OP is suggesting is more like distributed communities, a bit similar to matrix.org chat rooms.

And that’s how I’d assumed Lemmy was going to work until I saw this post. It seems intuitive to me that subs of the same name would at least have the option to “sync” across servers.

Makes sense not to do it by default, but I think the option to form a single coherent community across servers is crucial to avoiding platform-killing fragmentation. Otherwise what’s even the point of being “federated?” It’s just a bunch of separate servers.

Shit, is this not how Lemmy is intended to work already? I’d assumed this was part of it being “federated.” Clearly I have some things to learn.

Just for the record, I’m very much against this. I consider it a serious privacy problem if mods can see a list of subscribers.