I’ve joined Lemmy.ml. Someone sent me a link to a video posted on Feddit.nl - I thought I could log in and upvote/comment using my Lemmy.ml credentials. Wrong!
Why is this? Sorry for my ignorance, I’m relatively new to the fediverse. But I thought that they were all federated so you can interact with all instances??!
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Your specific problem is solved, but just for people reading this thread who may be confused about some concepts:
Your instance of Lemmy or Mastodon, whichever it may be, is just one website that serves as a Reddit or Twitter clone respectively. There isn’t a lot of difference between one single instance of Lemmy or Mastodon on the one hand, and Reddit or Twitter on the other. Just like you need to register and log in on Reddit or Twitter if you want to interact there, you need to do the same on any instance of Lemmy or Mastodon you want to interact on.
So what is the concept of federation then? It doesn’t mean you can log into one website with the credentials of another website. All that federation means is that the website downloads some of its data (posts, comments, status updates, whatever) from other websites running the same or compatible software, instead of getting all of it from its own users (like Reddit and Twitter do).
Thank you that is useful to have that explanation here. I had no idea it works like that!
I’ve not seen this type of logging in issue within the Mastodon ‘world’ because no one’s ever ‘sent me a link from another instance and then I tried to log on from that link’ 😂. I just tried it on an inprivate browser window and of course it’s the same as what I found here with Lemmy - as you described. With Mastodon I’m on the .social instance and I can see and interact with posts from any other instance - but after your explanation I realise that’s because the content was alwasy served up from within the instance.
[I agree that with ActivityPub we certainly cannot expect to log in with the same handle *between *services (i.e. use your Mastodon handle to log in to Lemmy). Although that would be cool. Persistent IDs across the fediverse would be the dream imho (like Nostr does it).]
There is an open standard for logging into websites with other websites’ credentials, it is called OpenID and long predates ActivityPub (and is independent of it).
Ooooooooh I see! right… yes that works.
I wasn’t familiar with the idea of the instance ‘fetching’ a post. Thank you!
Happy to help!
Instances don’t have to be federated and instances federate and defederate from each other often enough. The goals of instances may not align, and to keep conflict low(er) it’s better if some instances cut ties.
TBH, this sounds like a technical issue between ml and nl or just a typo in the way you are posting.
While I thought it was basically an on/off switch for defederation, I suppose there could be a way to block updates from instances without fully defederating.
I am not going to get into the drama, but ml is defederated at a little higher frequency, but it’s not as high as some others. It’s because reasons, and is not relevant to this particular thread.
You’re looking for https://lemmyverse.link/
oh right. Well here’s the post I was talking about: https://lemmyverse.link/feddit.nl/post/31396342 😊 Thanks!
Thank you all for explaining.
The behaviour I was expecting was to click ‘login’ on the feddit.nl page, and that login page to recognise that I was logging in with the credentials used by lemmy.ml, and to log me into lemmy.ml instead, and then to be redirected to the ‘local’ version of the link on the lemmy.ml instance.
Rather than it just be a feddit.nl login page only, and be told ‘log in not recognised’. That’s where my confusion came from. I’m like “wait, I can’t log into Lemmy here? why?!”
Yes, that makes sense. I might create a post on !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca to make other new joiners aware of that issue
You may wish to use a script to change all Lemmy links to point to your home instance https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469273-lemmy-universal-link-switcher
