I am a new user. To me it felt a bit like signing up with an ISP. There's a list you can choose from, rather than there just being a single reddit.
Once you sign up with an ISP, you can go anywhere on the Internet. Similarly, once you sign up with an instance, you can go anywhere in the fediverse.
Unlike an ISP, there are no costs or fees involved in signing up, though you are more than welcome to help fund the upkeep of an instance through donations. Unlike reddit, lemmy is not a profit-driven operation trying to serve you ads all the time.
In terms of choosing an instance, bigger is not necessarily better. Personally, I went with the medium-sized lemmy.ca as I am Canadian and it seemed to make sense, and have since learned that some of the bigger instances are struggling to keep up with surging demand as people seek alternatives to reddit.
Once you have an account, you can go into Communities, click on the All tab (which lets you see the whole fediverse), and start searching for and subscribing to whatever interests you. Communities are similar to subreddits, and there's a good chance you will even find one with the same name.
Other than Countries, size and content (I've seen general purpose, or NSFW) what are some other reasons to choose a certain instance? I don't want to make it a heavy point in the script but I do want to mention it.
I don’t think there is much concrete, but here are some things that it effects.
Performance. You view almost everything via your instance. So picking one running with capable hardware and ideally close to you (network wise) will give you a better experience.
Reliability. If your instance goes down you are basically offline. This can be hard to predict for the future.
Trust. Your identity is “owned” by the instance. So if they wanted they can impersonate you. This can also be very hard to gauge.
Longevity. If your instance shuts down it will be quite inconvenient and your identity will be lost, so you may want to try to predict which instances are likely to last.
Moderation. If they block too many other instances you won’t be able to see content that you want to see. If they block to little then you may be seeing content that you would rather not. Or the instance may be blocked by other instances if it becomes known for spamming.
Content is actually not really on my list since you can subscribe to any communities from any instance. It is true that the instance can provide some content discovery purpose via the local and known communities page but I would argue that separate service which track communities across all instance are better for this purpose.
it’s fine. it’s nice there’s more content here. although i hadn’t been here too long before the influx. i’m just getting a little tired of all the “should we make bots to copy reddit” “what communites should we make” “hey lets not do all the in joke stuff they do on reddit”. i’ve seen about a dozen variations of each of those posts so it’s a little old.
Nice analogy thanks. Sure, everyone has email, but most don't engage with it much and it doesn't really have communities.
Well, to think of it, mailing lists of old would be similar to communities.
It's like reddit but the reddit part works like email. You can get emails from yahoo.com on your gmail, just like you can interact with users and communities hosted on different instances.
The best explanation I’ve seen, for gamers, is tha reddit is like Xbox live. Lemmy is PlayStation and kbin is pc (or however). And kbin and lemmy have cross play enabled so you can play together.
This is what I used with my more technically friends and family. I think its really intuitive with the community/magazine url format <community>@<domain>.
Stress the fact that federation isnt a new or confusing concept. They already engage with federated services without realizing it. Stuff like email, dns, Usenet, etc are all “federated” they just haven’t been described that way because they existed before that term was used to describe it.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventures proposes a couple of interesting . One villain has a power called "The Lovers" he manifests a tiny ,almost microscopic, insect creature which is physically very very weak (or at least the weakest we have seen at that point), but has the ability of going crazy whenever the stand user feels any kind of pain, so he sends the stand inside an opponents ear to their brain and pain centre – whenever he feels any pain The Lovers inflicts that same pain but much worse on his opponent. It's also heavily implied that any pain caused by The Lovers that is above a certain level would be lethal.
Super weak power that is actually really strong if used intelligently.
One power I’ve always entertained is the ability to slow the passage of time linearly to the level of danger you’re in.
You can’t move much faster than the average human, and just because you can see something coming it doesn’t mean you can avoid it (though with time, your eyes will eventually train your muscles to reflex appropriately).
The ultimate killer ending of such a superhero would be an unwinnable situation (e.g. Comet coming to obliterate Earth) and all our hero will see is time slow down and down and down until the point where the catastrophe is about to occur, but (for them) never does.
I would lean hard into the ux being work in progress. Also as instances / communities mature I would expect the specifics on what federation means and the technology behind it will be less relevant to the average user.
Yep. I told a friend of mine "the federation just works, its the user interface and apps that need work".
Mastodon is in a really good place nowadays where you don't even notice you're browsing across multiple instances. Lemmy is pretty close, too, as long as people know to use relative links and the instance you're on is pretty well federated already so you don't get too many 404 from trying to open places your instance doesn't know about yet.
Yeah, as it gets more and more interconnected, all the links and UI start working more and more. Hopefully soon, lemmy will get the feature of just automatically converting community names in the !name@instan.ce format into working links, the way writing r/subreddit or u/user did on reddit.
A Friendica user told me in a comment that they already have that.
Nah, I won't return in a meaningful way. Come June 30, I'm fully deleting my 10+ y.o. account. I may make another burner one to be able to follow a few niche communities (mostly snark subreddits) that I'm certain won't be moving over. But I don't plan to contribute or even lurk in a meaningful way anymore.
I'm excited about the promise the Fediverse holds. It's refreshing to me. I've been longing for a better social web experience, something like I remember having 10-15 years ago, and I'm feeling hopeful that the communities developing here can give me some of that magical feeling back.
Only if Spez leaves and is replaced by a decent CEO who reverses EVERYTHING that Spez has effed up in the past few years. I'd return for some small niche communities I participate on that aren't present in the lemmy-verse (yet). But I'd stay here too. I am committed to Federated services now.
Don't Stop Me Now by Queen. No matter how bad I feel, it always makes me feel better, and it's lively enough that it inspires me to channel that energy into somehing more productive than just venting.
Bacon milkshake. Got to make sure the bacon is cooked proper to get some nice crumbles and it adds an amazing salty savory that really makes the milkshake flavor pop. Doesn’t work with all flavors
https://online-go.com is the place to play online for beginners. Its got apps for ios and android, and its web interface is quite nice. They also have some training stuff on there!
can’t really be worse than before given that there was barely content being posted to begin with. have been pleasantly surprised to see very little “le narwhal bacons when?” shit so far, but that’s me being a grouch and doesn’t really constitute etiquette
I dunno, we've had some trash get popular over the years, but I kinda enjoy the "absurd surrealism" meme culture we've got now where nobody bats an eye at hearing the phrase "shadow money wizard gang," which is in fact a real thing.
i suppose i’m burned out from doomscrolling threads flooded with those kind of call/response in-jokes (another user down the thread linked some more relevant examples), very glad it’s less egregious here atm
asklemmy
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.