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Any tips for a new user? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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I’m finally making the switch from Reddit. The Voyager app seems like a pretty seamless transition, but I’d love to hear any tips about using this platform, or what quirks distinguish it from Reddit as a whole.

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[–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

Every instance is like a different forum, and they can choose to “federate” with others to provide a somewhat seamless experience. You only have an account at one instance but others recognize that and vice versa. Each instance can have communities, similar to subreddits, focusing on different content. You can follow, comment, and post in communities hosted on other instances that federate with your instance. Each instance has its own rules and culture.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    How is that different than subreddits? Not tryna be argumentative about it it just sounds like Reddit and subreddits. I got banned on reddit but have grown to hate it and other than the constant US hate subs which I’ve slowly but surely come to block I like it here much more. Just wish there were more communities that weren’t political

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    To try to clarify for you:

    Imagine you could have your own entire reddit that you can install on a server and let other people join and use. On your reddit, they can create subreddits, make comments, make posts, and everything else you would expect.

    Now imagine other people do the same thing. Many other people. They make their own reddits on their own servers which have their own subreddits, users, posts, comments, etc. Imagine I am one of these other people, and I have my own version of reddit on my own server.

    Federation is where between you and I and everyone else, between all these peoples own personal reddits, posts and communities will show up from all of the reddits on everyones front page, and everyone can interact with them regardless of whose reddit they are actually on.

    You might make a post on your own reddit, in a subreddit there called "mySubreddit". Even though I am on my own server, I see this post you have made on the front page of my server, and I can comment on it, make posts on "mySubreddit", upvote and downvote, everything you would expect.

    This works both ways. I can make posts on the version of reddit running on your server, see its communities etc, and you can do the same on mine.

    Now replace the word "subreddit" with "community", the word "server" with "instance", and the word "reddit" with "lemmy", and this is how the platform works.

    This means you can have a large group of people like reddit does, interacting with one another, but without any one person or a business having to buy and manage entire server farms, moderate an enormous platform, or any of the other major logistical stuff.

    It means that no company owns it as well. Lemmy also can't "go down" like reddit, because reddit is not federated. If reddits server has an issue, no one can access reddit. If lemmy.ml goes down, you can still see lemm.ee, lemmy.world, lemmy.one, or any of the other lemmy instances, because they are different entire servers owned by entirely different people that are managed and configured separately from one another.

    Your account is on lemm.ee, which is an instance of lemmy on someones server. My account is on lemmy.ml, which is a different instance - someone elses server. And yet, we can hold this conversation because of federation. The community (subreddit) this conversation is taking place in is lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy, which is a community on my home server where my account is stored. Your account does not exist here, but you didnt have to create a lemmy.ml account to see this community, or the post, or my comments, or to reply to me, because federation allows your account to work on lemmy instances that are federated to your lemm.ee home server.

    This also keeps you from getting banned from the entire platform over ridiculous things. At most, you can be banned from an entire Lemmy instance. This is good because if an instance has a change of ownership, and the new owner is an asshole, you can't be locked out of the entire platform, you can always just create another account on a different lemmy instance without fear of being banned again (so long as you follow the respective rules on whatever instances you are communicating in). Furthermore, the mod logs are public data, and can be viewed from the sidebar of communities, so it is easy to see if a mod or admin is an asshole.

    I'm glad to take any follow up questions or provide further clarifications.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Okay that helps a lot I was always wondering what the instances were. How do you go about browsing different ones? Finding one that suits you? Is that possible?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    If you want to browse a different instance directly, you just type in that instances URL into your browsers search bar, though this is not how most people look at other instances.

    In the upper right, you will likely see a magnifying glass icon for search. When you click on it, you will see a page like this:

    The first box in the upper left that reads "All" (The one to the left of "Subscribed") let's you choose the type of result you want from your search. Using this box you can search for all, comments, posts, communities, users, or URL.

    The selector to the right with the choices Subscribed, Local, All, Moderator View (if you moderate communities) allows you to scope the source of your search results. Subscribed will only show results from communities you subscribe to, local will only show results from your home server (lemm.ee in your case), All will show you results from everything lemm.ee federates to (such as lemmy.ml, lemmy.one, and many more), and moderator view will show results from communities you moderate.

    If you set that first box to "Communities", set the selector to "all" and then search "asklemmy", it means you want to see communities from all federated instances that match your search. The result will also show how many users are subscribed to each.

    This is what I see when I do this. As you might notice, there is more than one ask lemmy community, because each instance can have their own! If the result is not on my home server, you can see that it adds the name of the instance it is on (for example the first result is the asklemmy on my homeserver, but then the second result is the asklemmy on lemmy.world, so it shows this.

    If you leave these settings the same, and enter in two spaces as your search term, it will return everything, and you can paginate through every federated community that you can go visit, subscribe to, and communicate through. Alternatively, you can click "Communities" at the top of the screen on your main page and change the selector there to see this.

    As to your question about finding an instance that suits you, there are a few pages like https://join-lemmy.org/instances which will let you browse instances. Each instance typically has a description explaining what the purpose of the instance is. Some are geared towards hobbies, others are for general use, some are for specific locations, some are for ideological beliefs, etc. On your main page on lemm.ee, at the top, you will see that same selector for "Subscribed, Local, All, Moderator View". When you browse "Local", you will only see posts from other users on your own instance and it's communities. This is really great because you can actually come to get to know other people pretty well on your home instance. It's the same as being able to see what is going on in your own town, and have a smaller community of people interested in the same general theme, but then also being able to interact with every town in the world by browsing "All" instead.

    Instance owners have the power to do a few things which are important to know. They can turn off new user account creation for their servers (because if they are paying for server space, it is a problem if suddenly you have 10,000 users on your instance creating content) so you can't necessarily create an account on any instance. If you hit join on one of them on that page though, it should let you know if they are open for new accounts when you go through the sign up process.

    Instance owners can also defederate other instances. This is a feature for cases where, let's say you have someone create a lemmy instance which is there just to make a group of mean people, who go to other instances to be mean. If every other lemmy instance were to defederate them, they become like a single standalone website without federation. Their comments and posts, votes, etc do not show up for anyone except them, and their content can no longer be searched for or seen by those who don't federate with them.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Reddit is like one big instance, subreddits are our communuties. However, federated instances can visit the subreddits (communities) of other instances. This leads to decentralization of power, and cool niche instances that don't all need to have everything.

    As for politics, most people here are going to be more political than Reddit, as coming here instead of staying on Reddit is an ideological choice, often times.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    subreddits are all part of reddit, there's a top part that can decide over all subreddits and make rules and ban people etc. Lemmy does not have a central point of authority. lemmy.world can only make rules and control lemmy.world, lemm.ee can only decide over lemm.ee. If you want your own rules, you can make your own instance and be as valid and part of lemmy as any other instance. The main point is: there is no level above this that controls all instances. Each instance is the top level of authority for that instance, and anyone can create an instance if they have the knowledge and resources.
    Another aspect is that technically you could also interact with mastodon, peertube, etc, but that isn't seamless and there's no consensus if it's even a good idea to pursue that, but it's technically possible.

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