You don’t need to join lemmy.world. Just a heads up.
…Unless they do a massive defederation like Beehaw.
There’s instances that are federated with both though. I’m on one of them.
You’ve just got to keep in mind that it’s not completely clean. Beehaw defederated from 2 of the largest instances making it useless for most users on the site.
Fine by me, what they did is actually a feature of the Fediverse. People fear what they don’t understand and based on comments at the time, there was a lot of misunderstanding.
Do you mean beehaw misunderstood or the defederated instances misunderstood?
For all new users: I’d recommend picking an instance that:
- Is geographically close to you first
- Has the same “moral compass” as you (ie if they allow NSFW content or are defederated from instances that has sensitive content)
- That isn’t hammered by too many new users
It’s not that hard to check out this info, usually after a day or two on Lemmy you’ll figure these things out.
I’ve seen this kind of advice for new users a lot… I think a lot of us new users (that have been around for a little while… since the reddit API changes) understand the idea. However, there is not really a user friendly place to go -from there-.
Googling “lemmy instances” for example, does not give you a lot of enlightening information. There seems, to a new user, to be a lot of homework involved in researching instances that may work well for their use cases.
That’s a big issue, because there are a lot of people who don’t want to necessarily do that homework and just want to start seeing memes or participating in communities for their hobbies. I fall into this camp which is why I am just chilling on lemmy.world.
The best thing for lemmy to diversify which instances users access the fediverse from, would be for someone to create some sort of instance selection tool, where new users can quickly and easily parse the information contained in your bullet points.
Great project idea. I hope someone takes it! For now there seems to https://lemmyverse.net/ available for the interested ones. (tho it’s not like instance “selector” you’ve mentioned)
There is this: https://join-lemmy.org/
https://join-lemmy.org/instances and https://lemmyverse.net/ are good starting points.
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
ljdawson should add this instead of lemmy.world
Lemmy being so confusing is partly why I was upset about Reddit taking a dump. I don’t understand the difference in all the Lemmy things or what to sign up for. I was excited about Sync because it seems to make it easier to understand and see everything. I just want something that will replicate a frontpage which is what Sync is trying to do. I don’t have the desire or time to learn the ins and outs of it all.
It bothers me that people find it out so supremely confusing and it’s definitely an issue that needs to be addressed because it’s definitely keeping people away. The fact of the matter is, you can go to any Lemmy instance and get that front page experience because the r/all equivalent of each instance shows threads from every other instance (minus defederated, etc but that’s beside the point).
Sync helps in that it is a familiar and polished look and feel for those who used third party Reddit apps, but outside of that it’s just another Lemmy app.
Probably the biggest factor in the confusion is fediverse terms being used to describe the fediverse, which is basically speaking nonsense if you don’t already understand it.
There’s this: Lemmy is a federated link aggregator where anyone can start an instance and communities within that instance and all the instances can communicate and share information. Doesn’t it sound amazing?
Then there’s this: Lemmy is like a version of Reddit where there’s a whole bunch of separate reddit dot coms. You can sign up for whichever one you like to be your home “reddit”. The reddits are all connected, so you can subscribe to subreddits on the other reddits while just logged into your home. You can also post to them, comment, and see the posts and comments from your home.
I’m sure there’s some analogy out there that really boils it down well much better than mine, so please share if you think of one.
So there will be duplicate of the same subs? For instance, I found two personalfinance in two different instances. I found it counter effective having multiple subs of the same name.
Yes. This was an issue for Reddit too, especially when it was young. Over time a lot of the subs consolidated or one became clearly more popular and the smaller withered. But off hand I can still think of r/doctorwho and r/gallifray which were serving the same community in the same way.
It’s actually not that complicated. Lemmy just works like email. You can use different email providers (lemmy calls them instances) like gmail.com or yahoo.com and they work together. What you call subreddits is called communities and they are managed by a instance. If one instance does something that you don’t like, you can use another. They all work independently but exchange data. If you have any questions see this. Hope this helps
What’s funny is that this is the same sentiment people had when email became popular. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg
Lemmy works the same way as email.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
My instance lemm.ee is sooo bad, totally don’t join our awesome club so I get longer load times. 🤫 How can we bare having not banning the evil porn and federating with all the other instances!
Also a cute lil instance at https://literature.cafe/ opened up too.
After what happened with lemmy.fmhy.ml I am a bit scared of joining “less popular” domains to be fair.
I recall the lemm.ee instance owner saying somewhere that .ee is the country code for Estonia and he is a citizen of said country himself.
Although IMO that whole freenom-Mali government contract expiration thing has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way regarding uncommonly encountered domains
Valid. I really like how the AT protocol does it. Their account portability is really something ActivityPub desperately needs. Even account transfers on Mastodon isn’t a proper solution.
Has this actually been tried though? As far as I know, while the AT Protocol has a form of federation built into it, the last time I checked BlueSky was the only actual implementation of it and its not possible to run your instance without building it up from scratch and designing your own implementation of the protocol(?).
You can also pick instances that are more lax and federate with everyone, then filter instances you don’t want to see, on sync. Huge feature
Is there some kind of tutorial or explanation for beginners who only came here because of sync and don’t understand anything that’s going on.
On one side this experience is really simple and easy, sync makes it very much like Reddit. But I see some people have @signs in their names showing their on different instances… Does that mean my comments aren’t seen by all people and what the heck is an instance and what an I doing?
I’ve seem this metaphor around and will try to replicate here. Lemmy (and kbin) instances are like email providers, you can have an email from Google, outlook, Proton, etc. and they all can send emails to each other. Lemmy instances are like this, if you have an account in an instance, you can see content and interact with all the other instances.
Some instances don’t talk to each other (defederate) for a myriad of reasons, but mostly because of political opinions and trolls. Here’s a link with a more in depth explanation of how defederation works, from when it happened with one of the big instances on lemmy: https://lemmy.world/post/149743
Okay thanks that made a lot of sense in that link.
How does this affect moderation of comments? If my comment propagates to all federated instances can it be deleted by anybody?
Also how does one start a community? Do you have to have your own instance in order to launch your own community?
