What about adding some ability for instances to co-host a community? One single community, but the two instances share the load like a distributed server system? Or even at its simplest, one just acts as a backup in case the other goes down?
I don’t mean to be glib
No worries. I appreciate the time you have taken to explain things. I have watched a few videos and Googled around, but unfortunately most of the results I find are either way too vague (Lemmy is part of the Fediverse. What is that? We don’t know either!) or give the analogy of “It’s like email” and then proceed to basically explain the API gateway thing I was assuming.
I will dig into this some more now that I know what I’m looking for; thank you. I’m hopeful there will be some more/clearer/accurate resources for the Reddit refugees before the current frenzy dies down to help build up the network.
Thank you for taking the time to answer. I hope you might be willing to clarify a bit more for me. By “window”, I meant just… having access to a remote community via an API gateway, I guess.
I was under the impression that if I try to subscribe to a remote community hosted on lemmy.world from vlemmy.net, that is simply registering the URL of that community into some local directory in my instance, not duplicating the entire community contents into vlemmy.net. And then when I view a thread in that remote community, I am just retrieving the thread data from the host server at lemmy.world straight to my browser, not loading some local duplicate of the thread from vlemmy.net. Seems like it would get out of sync quickly if we are all reading separate local copies of the original.
So based on your answer, I am still misunderstanding something. What is the purpose of all the duplication then? Is it just for local caching purposes? Does this not needlessly drive up the amount of traffic because each instance is frantically trying to keep up to date with every other instance, rather than just letting each instance handle the requests for its own communities?
Each instance would have to handle the replication and storage of the entire lemmyverse.
Do instances fully replicate and locally store remote subscribed communities? My understanding is they are still solely hosted on the original instance; subscribing just opens a window to the community by making your instance aware it exists.
Doesn’t matter what account you have, you can see communities/subreddits across anyone of them.
I’m having trouble with this part. If I want to look up threads about the latest Pokemon movie, Reddit would let me just type “Pokemon Avengers of Middle Earth” into the search bar, and I would see hundreds of results from all different subreddits that I can comment on right away.
Lemmy only seems to search my local instance, unless I first
It’s a hassle. I would love if Lemmy included some kind of optional search mode that searches the directory instance, and then has a nice big button to subscribe to the results that are not federated (am I using that right?) with your current instance.
I understand there are growing pains, but I work in tech and I’m just barely stumbling along here. The “it’s like email” analogy starts to fall apart pretty quickly once you realize Gmail can only send messages to Outlook if you first go to Outlook and copy a special code. For every email address you want to send to. The average user is going to give up.
Am I misunderstanding how it all works? I’m hoping to learn more. Just figuring out how to comment on this remote thread from my instance took forever. I don’t even necessarily want to be subscribed here, but it seems to be required to make even a single comment. I am probably doing something wrong.
Trying to figure out Lemmy. It’s not easy…
Also, replying to users who keep requesting access to our blacked out sub.
You were into Warhammer at age 4? Man, I couldn’t even read.