On the instance I’m using, my comments and posts have disappeared. It is ok?
I had a few helpful comments here that I saved, but it’s all gone.
Having got used to the stability in Mastodon I was surprised by such things in Lemmy as:
Unable to log into your account through the app after an update on the server.
Unable to log into your account through the app if your instance version is out of date.
Just because you’ve created a post or written a comment doesn’t mean other Lemmy users will see it.
I have to constantly check to see if my messages are visible on other instances.
You also need to have many sub-accounts on different instances in case some of the primary instances are unavailable.
As a developer, I am absolutely amazed that any of this (all the software you are using, all of it) even works a little. So: no.
I independently came up with “federation” (as in thought of it but not exactly this, and was building on others work) as the basis for a masters thesis in the early 2000s but left the program to get a job so never saw it through.
So, no, I am not annoyed. I am amazed, grateful, impressed, and humbled but I am not annoyed.
Great take. Everything in the software world is held together with twine. It’s a miracle that anything works. That’s the only kind of miracle or magic that I believe in. As someone on a mailing list once said about networking, “it’s two cans and some string.”