Yes, Reddit is going through its own API pains right now, and of course it is anyway a centralised social network much like Facebook and Twitter. So the discussion around alternatives has been coming up again. Lemmy has been around for a while, its technology is good, and it federates via ActivityPub to the rest...
The thread you’re posting in right now is coming from kbin, but you are replying to it from your lemmy account. So I think you’re already doing the thing you described, maybe without even realizing it.
So maybe you can help me work through understanding the account part of it. Like, I’m on lemmy, we’re talking on kbin; super cool. The ‘data’ lives on kbin. But ‘we’ (royal we) ‘live’ on lemmy. What protects/ prevents some one from making a u/fomo_erotic on kbin? Anything? Say I liked the way kbin organizes the data better. Can I just use my fomo_erotic id to log into kbin? Would I have to migrate? If I’m concerned about other people in the fedi being ‘me’ should I get fomo on those ids?
I guess these are small details and if another fomo_erotic showed up, I wouldn’t really care, but I guess what Im wondering is how far can ‘we’ go in the fediverse? What analogy would you use for the ‘id’ part of the fediverse?
Your “name” in the fediverse is fomo_erotic@lemmy.ml. It’s just using shorthand for your name here. If someone else signed up on kbin as fomo_erotic@kbin.social they would have that as their username. You can’t log into one with the credentials on the other - they are totally separate. If you signed up on another Lemmy instance, like beehaw.org, you could be fomo_erotic@beehaw.org there, and that account would have no relation to your account on lemmy.ml. So don’t get too caught up in the idea that you are using Lemmy and I’m using kbin - it’s more about what home server you use.
I attached (probably? I don’t know how to use this well yet) a screenshot of what your account looks like on my end
Your ID is stuck on one server, even if you can post messages on other servers. One server must be your “home” server. Unfortunately, this means that if you ever want to start using kbin all the time time instead of just posting messages to it, you’ll have to register an account there. I don’t think lemmy or kbin offer a way of migrating your account right now, so you would have to just start a new account on kbin.
What protects/ prevents some one from making a u/fomo_erotic on kbin? Anything?
Nothing prevents that from happening. However, your name is not just u/fomo_erotic, it’s fomo_erotic@lemmy.ml. The “@lemmy.ml” part at the end is important, it’s part of your full username. If you hover over my name, you’ll see that it ends with @kbin.social.
This is the same as how email addresses work – someone can be john_doe@gmail.com, and someone else can register john_doe@outlook.com, and the first John Doe doesn’t really have any way of stopping that. John’s contacts need to know that he has a Gmail address, not an Outlook address.
Lemmy hides the @lemmy.ml part at the end unless you hover over the username, and I wish it always showed the full thing, because hiding it makes it easier to impersonate people. That isn’t really a big problem right now, though, since Lemmy is still too small to have a problem with impersonation accounts. But imagine if you got an email and it just said “from john_doe,” no @gmail.com after it. Hopefully Lemmy changes that soon.
If I’m concerned about other people in the fedi being ‘me’ should I get fomo on those ids?
I don’t think it’s worth worrying about that. Plus, it won’t even be possible to worry about it eventually. While there are only a few Lemmy-like sites right now, eventually, like email, there could be thousands.
So maybe you can help me work through understanding the account part of it. Like, I’m on lemmy, we’re talking on kbin; super cool. The ‘data’ lives on kbin. But ‘we’ (royal we) ‘live’ on lemmy. What protects/ prevents some one from making a u/fomo_erotic on kbin? Anything? Say I liked the way kbin organizes the data better. Can I just use my fomo_erotic id to log into kbin? Would I have to migrate? If I’m concerned about other people in the fedi being ‘me’ should I get fomo on those ids?
I guess these are small details and if another fomo_erotic showed up, I wouldn’t really care, but I guess what Im wondering is how far can ‘we’ go in the fediverse? What analogy would you use for the ‘id’ part of the fediverse?
Your “name” in the fediverse is fomo_erotic@lemmy.ml. It’s just using shorthand for your name here. If someone else signed up on kbin as fomo_erotic@kbin.social they would have that as their username. You can’t log into one with the credentials on the other - they are totally separate. If you signed up on another Lemmy instance, like beehaw.org, you could be fomo_erotic@beehaw.org there, and that account would have no relation to your account on lemmy.ml. So don’t get too caught up in the idea that you are using Lemmy and I’m using kbin - it’s more about what home server you use.
I attached (probably? I don’t know how to use this well yet) a screenshot of what your account looks like on my end
Hmm I dont see that. Do you see this:
Your ID is stuck on one server, even if you can post messages on other servers. One server must be your “home” server. Unfortunately, this means that if you ever want to start using kbin all the time time instead of just posting messages to it, you’ll have to register an account there. I don’t think lemmy or kbin offer a way of migrating your account right now, so you would have to just start a new account on kbin.
Nothing prevents that from happening. However, your name is not just u/fomo_erotic, it’s fomo_erotic@lemmy.ml. The “@lemmy.ml” part at the end is important, it’s part of your full username. If you hover over my name, you’ll see that it ends with @kbin.social.
This is the same as how email addresses work – someone can be john_doe@gmail.com, and someone else can register john_doe@outlook.com, and the first John Doe doesn’t really have any way of stopping that. John’s contacts need to know that he has a Gmail address, not an Outlook address.
Lemmy hides the @lemmy.ml part at the end unless you hover over the username, and I wish it always showed the full thing, because hiding it makes it easier to impersonate people. That isn’t really a big problem right now, though, since Lemmy is still too small to have a problem with impersonation accounts. But imagine if you got an email and it just said “from john_doe,” no @gmail.com after it. Hopefully Lemmy changes that soon.
I don’t think it’s worth worrying about that. Plus, it won’t even be possible to worry about it eventually. While there are only a few Lemmy-like sites right now, eventually, like email, there could be thousands.