It’s the same as Reddit, except there’s multiple websites instead of one, and they’re all owned by different people with different rules— so if the admins are weird, you can just move to another one. The websites (mostly called “instances”) are all able to talk to eachother, so you can interact with people on different instances without making an account on that one. It’s pretty cool and designed so that a company can’t buy it!
Lemmy is pretty much Reddit, with one major difference—it has instances. Imagine you could take all of Reddit’s backend server code, copy and paste it, and host your own version of Reddit. Cool! Now you’re an admin of Reddit 2. If the CEO of Reddit 1 ever does something mind-numbingly stupid, you and your users will be unaffected*. Reddit 1 and Reddit 2 are akin to Lemmy instances. Each instance has their own users and communities (subreddits).
Lemmy instances all work with each other*. Think of it like email. If I’m a Gmail user, I can still email Yahoo addresses, because Gmail, Yahoo, and all other email providers use a shared set of rules. All Lemmy instances also follow a shared set of rules (called a protocol, not that you need to know that). That means you can post to other instances, subscribe to their communities, upvote, downvote, and do all the things you can do on your instance.
The Lemmy app you use has a lot of control over how this is all laid out, so if you’re finding it confusing, try different apps. I personally like Liftoff, which you can get in the Play Store, but other popular options are Jerboa, Thunder, Connect for Lemmy, wefwef, and Summit.
Instances can each have their own communities. It’s important to find out what instance you want to register with and associate with. Take into account reliability, politics, and legal concerns. Instances that don’t hold a standard are at risk of being defederated.
Federation is how instances share posts. You can see and interact with posts and communities from other instances that are federated with your instance.
Federation can be a two-way or one-way street. If you belong to instance A and it is federated with instance B and vice versa, B to A, then all posts and comments are visible to each other and all other federated instances.
If instance A is federated to instance B but B is not federated with instance A, then A can see B but not vice versa. A can interact on B posts but they will not be saved on B’s instance, only A’s.
I hope I didn’t get too complicated with the explanation. I just got familiarized a couple days ago myself.
Each instance is actually an independent site running a copy of the same source code. What’s different is that they are cross-linked, so if you are on one, you can interact with any others that are federated.
Note that federation isn’t universal. Some instances choose not to connect to others (due to things like getting problematic users from ones with less strict review and such). I had to make a new account on here since I had been using one on Beehaw, which is a relatively stricter and more limited community, and they had unlinked lemmy.world.
So it’s a bit more work to use, but you get the benefit that there is no single central authority who can dictate things. You can move to the same topic in another instance or start your own instance.
Same here.
Fuck /u/spez.
Ok, now that’s off my chest, let me see, how does this lemmy thing work?
It’s the same as Reddit, except there’s multiple websites instead of one, and they’re all owned by different people with different rules— so if the admins are weird, you can just move to another one. The websites (mostly called “instances”) are all able to talk to eachother, so you can interact with people on different instances without making an account on that one. It’s pretty cool and designed so that a company can’t buy it!
this could get you started.
Welcome to Lemmy!
Lemmy is pretty much Reddit, with one major difference—it has instances. Imagine you could take all of Reddit’s backend server code, copy and paste it, and host your own version of Reddit. Cool! Now you’re an admin of Reddit 2. If the CEO of Reddit 1 ever does something mind-numbingly stupid, you and your users will be unaffected*. Reddit 1 and Reddit 2 are akin to Lemmy instances. Each instance has their own users and communities (subreddits).
Lemmy instances all work with each other*. Think of it like email. If I’m a Gmail user, I can still email Yahoo addresses, because Gmail, Yahoo, and all other email providers use a shared set of rules. All Lemmy instances also follow a shared set of rules (called a protocol, not that you need to know that). That means you can post to other instances, subscribe to their communities, upvote, downvote, and do all the things you can do on your instance.
The Lemmy app you use has a lot of control over how this is all laid out, so if you’re finding it confusing, try different apps. I personally like Liftoff, which you can get in the Play Store, but other popular options are Jerboa, Thunder, Connect for Lemmy, wefwef, and Summit.
*Oversimplification.
Lemmy is all open source.
Instances can each have their own communities. It’s important to find out what instance you want to register with and associate with. Take into account reliability, politics, and legal concerns. Instances that don’t hold a standard are at risk of being defederated.
Federation is how instances share posts. You can see and interact with posts and communities from other instances that are federated with your instance.
Federation can be a two-way or one-way street. If you belong to instance A and it is federated with instance B and vice versa, B to A, then all posts and comments are visible to each other and all other federated instances.
If instance A is federated to instance B but B is not federated with instance A, then A can see B but not vice versa. A can interact on B posts but they will not be saved on B’s instance, only A’s.
I hope I didn’t get too complicated with the explanation. I just got familiarized a couple days ago myself.
As a user, does this federation actually make a difference or make things look different?
Each instance is actually an independent site running a copy of the same source code. What’s different is that they are cross-linked, so if you are on one, you can interact with any others that are federated.
Note that federation isn’t universal. Some instances choose not to connect to others (due to things like getting problematic users from ones with less strict review and such). I had to make a new account on here since I had been using one on Beehaw, which is a relatively stricter and more limited community, and they had unlinked lemmy.world.
So it’s a bit more work to use, but you get the benefit that there is no single central authority who can dictate things. You can move to the same topic in another instance or start your own instance.
I see… So how can I tell which instance I am in, and whether or not I’d need to make a new account in other instances?