With spez ascending the last few remaining levels of becoming an absolute wanker, it’s about time I got more active and I have been wondering how should I be using Lemmy efficiently? Like many I migrated from Reddit and I was primarly using Apollo to browse through my subscribed subreddits.
Over here on Lemmy.one, I have subscribed to communities and I scroll through my feed by sorting “All > Top Day” because sorting “All > Hot” means I end up seeing the same threads.
Then earlier today I discovered https://beehaw.org/communities where I found many communities I would love to subscribe to but then I got confused because I am also subscribed to more or less similar communities on lemmy.one.
I think I am sort of struggling to wrap my head around how lemmy really works and where I should be hanging out. It was easier on reddit in the sense that if I wanted to go LOTRmemes, there was only subreddit but here on Lemmy, there seem to be multiple instances of the same community :D
To top it off, it is proving hard to login to beehaw [probably the server is under stress] with the same details I use to login into Lemmy.one.
Not to forget there’s also Kbin which I haven’t even begun exploring. Phew.
ps - my apologies if I am sounding slightly incoherent as this is all new to me. If there is anyone out there who has this all figured out, I’d appreciate any help here.
This is going to blow your mind too but…you don’t HAVE to create accounts on all those servers. I’m reading your post right now from Kbin.
This is all very confusing for me, too. I have an account here (posting from kbin), and one on lemmy.world. I assumed it was a good idea to make an official presence in as many of the instances as possible. So, is the fediverse just a content aggregator for everyone who officially joins it? How do you decide to cut off one or more of the different sites/apps if you wanted? I have a lot of questions I can’t quite formulate. I have sort of an intuitive understanding, but I feel like a kid using the Internet for the first time in another way, too.
Which I really like.
Think like this. On reddit, you had old.reddit.com and www.reddit.com, here you have lemmy.world, kbin.social, and many more.
On reddit you have (I making the names up): /r/politics, /r/politicaldiscussion /r/truepolitics etc. All about the same, but slightly different. Here you may have politics@lemmy.ml politics@kbin.social and many more.
The rest goes behind the scene - fedeverse decentralized, run on many different servers, but you can simply ignore all that, and think about all of that as names and themes.
Kinda, but not exactly. Imagine there’s a sea with different ships. The ships have different crews, all with their own interests - some may like sleepy cats, others might like painting etc. And the sailors set their communities. Each community must take a room on that ship, and they can have whatever rules they want, unless they don’t break the general rules of the ship they’re on. Now, imagine the rooms have hardware that can create a hologram version of you, through which you can communicate with others - just like in Star Wars or Star Trek. By using that particular thing, any sailor can have a holographic version in any of the ships at will, and attend the discussions.
That fleet of ships is Lemmy as a whole. And every ship is a server.
Now on to something a bit more complicated: out there, there’s also a group of airplanes, and there’s also a group of UFOs, but fortunately controlled by humans. Their crews similarly have different interests, different hobbies, whatever. They also have this thing that allows their hologram into the room where your community gathers. They might however have their voice distorted, or there might be some latency, their image might be distorted a bit, but that’s okay. You generally get their message. That is because they use a different implementation of that thing, or they work differently since they’re not ships - they’re planes, or UFOs, serving different purposes, working differently. There is usually, however, no issue in ship-to-ship communication.
The other vehicles are the other platforms such as Mastodon, Kbin, Friendica, Pixelfed etc. - they all use a protocol (think of it as a language) called ActivityPub (that would be the thing allowing you to be on any ship through your hologram); these platforms usually work together in order to facilitate communication from one-another, but they add different features, they cather to different people, so issues may arise from time to time. That’s fine. The message should get through.
Let’s return to my previous example: Each ship has a captain. The captain can decide to cut all communications with all ships, allow communications with all ships from his end (mind that other captains can have the same power, but on their ships), or only allow communications with certain ships (which is generally what is done around this place).
When any captain decides to cut communications with any ship, the process is called defederation - it’s more of a red button.
Besides that, you can also block individual users yourself from contacting you, so you have some power as well. :D
Hope my example makes things more clear :D