This question is especially for people who have joined in the last week. Have you used other fediverse platforms or is this your first time really using one? What do you think of it so far? Are you aware that you can comment on Lemmy posts with a Mastodon account?
I’m not sure I understand the last part correctly. As I understand it, if a community behaves in a way the users don’t like, we can just create a new community. The advantage of the federated nature is that it’s not as painful as finding for example a whole reddit or twitter alternative because of how modular the fediverse is, right?
Edit: come to think of it, I have a second question and you seem to have this whole thing figured out. I’ve seen people say that they are on lemma as well as kbin to see which they like better ot which one grows better I guess. But does it really matter since the whole thing is interconnected anyways?
Thanks :-)
Yes, somewhat. Communities are like subreddits. So yes, if a community is doing what people don’t like they can pick up and make a new community. A good example is on reddit r/gaming used to be more discussion and news focused but over time it became more popular and filled with memes. Some in the community didn’t like this so they made the r/games subreddit which is news and discussion focused.
On lemmy, that new community can be made on the same instance or on a different instance.
What I was getting at, was that in addition to this, if the communities on an instance dont like how an entire instance is being run, they can pick up shop and just move to a new instance. As a user you’d have to make a new account on a new instance, but you’d be able to subscribe to all the same communities on the instances you like.
To simplify: Instances are run by admins, communities by mods. On reddit your only option is to make a new subreddit and change your mods if you don’t like something, but you will always have u/spez as your admin. On lemmy, you can ditch your admins and set up shop with other admins.
To answer your kbin vs lemmy question: The only reason you would pick one over the other would mostly be due to their layout and customization. Additionally, instances can block other instances, so you might like kbins layout, but maybe they block an instance that has a community that you like. Conversely, kbin might have a cool community you want to subscribe to, but your specific lemmy instance is blocking it. So you can do what I said above, you pick up shop and you set up in an instance that doesn’t block the community you want to join. Alternatively, you can set up your own instance on your own server and then you can join anything you want, provided that you aren’t so toxic that other communities potentially block you lol.
I have general helpful additional links in the bottom of my sidebar over on my community https://lemmy.ml/c/ps5 if you want to see how you can do some of what I said above.
Thanks, this is very helpful. I’ll be sure to check out the link
The user interface is different: different looking website, different apps. The only thing in common is the content itself.
That makes sense. Thanks!
I’m having trouble with this part. If I want to look up threads about the latest Pokemon movie, Reddit would let me just type “Pokemon Avengers of Middle Earth” into the search bar, and I would see hundreds of results from all different subreddits that I can comment on right away.
Lemmy only seems to search my local instance, unless I first
It’s a hassle. I would love if Lemmy included some kind of optional search mode that searches the directory instance, and then has a nice big button to subscribe to the results that are not federated (am I using that right?) with your current instance.
I understand there are growing pains, but I work in tech and I’m just barely stumbling along here. The “it’s like email” analogy starts to fall apart pretty quickly once you realize Gmail can only send messages to Outlook if you first go to Outlook and copy a special code. For every email address you want to send to. The average user is going to give up.
Am I misunderstanding how it all works? I’m hoping to learn more. Just figuring out how to comment on this remote thread from my instance took forever. I don’t even necessarily want to be subscribed here, but it seems to be required to make even a single comment. I am probably doing something wrong.