sh.itjust.works Main Community

This post was made on that instance. Federation is why you see it and can comment on it. You have access to see all of their posts and comments and can interact unless your instance .world in this case gets defederated from their instance. You do not need any new logins to participate with their instance. It will show up in your feed on w.e app you prefer to use. (Same goes for lemm.ee)

Defederation is essentially a block made of an entire instance. Sometimes it is done to prevent future issues, and sometimes it is done because idiological differences. An example of the first is threads being built into the fedeverse. It has so many users that it would effectively nudge out all smaller instances and eventually start putting ads back in and w.e they want to make money and do whatever they choose to manipulate the users. So many instances have pre-set their instances to not allow federation with threads when it eventually connects. The second example was ideology, which the user mentioned .hexbear. They are a group of people who are often misrepresented but have no problems with commenting death to America over and over again. Some of them are trolls, some are not, but in the end many instances defederated from them because they didn't want to deal with all the issues and people bitching all the time. World is the largest instance by a good amount last I checked. (Probably to large ratio wise). You shouldn't have issues there. When someone posts a comment on dbzero, it'll show in your stuff.

Some other things instances vary on is, upvotes, downvotes, no votes, and perpetual scrolling. (Though many apps have that choice as well). Some people worry about mental impacts of perpetual scrolling so they limit it. Some instances don't show the votes, and some only show the upvotes as they believe it helps promote discussion as opposed to just downvoting something you don't like and moving on. This also makes situations where someone may not realize 184 people downvotes and 1 person upvoted and since they are new to a topic, may not be able to tell it may not be based on truth or agree with public opinion or what not.

The one thing people SHOULD realize. No matter what your instance shows you, upvotes, downvotes and by who ARE recorded and sent by Lemmy through federation as part of how it works. So when you upvotes a comment, there are people out there that know YOUR user name in specific upvotes that comment. They can see a list of every vote. This also goes for downvotes. Most every instance has turned this view off for users so people don't get upset at someone and follows them around nagging them and what not. That said. The data still exists and is transferred through federation otherwise it cannot keep track of up/down votes, because otherwise it would just go up or down every time you hit the button it has to say "Freddy.world" has already voted.

So now if you don't understand how scary that is yet. Just note that bad actors can spin up an instance, federate and know the username who up/downvoted say a post about Trump being a dictator. If you are not using a VPN at all times, your IP address is going to get caught up being tied to your account. So they have that account connected to your phone (and government will know the home address)

Have fun out there, but it's always nice to understand how things work. (Upvoted a nude, I'm sure someone can create a database and log all of it fairly easily.).