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.
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)
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!
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.
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.
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
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
I used to see reports that you could "carry over" your account from one instance to another. Do you have any details on this, or whether this also works between different services (e.g. KBin and Lemmy)?
This works on Mastodon, but not on Lemmy/Kbin (yet). Migration between Lemmy and Kbin in general could be tough since they're completely different softwares and Lemmy lacks support for several Kbin functions (such as Boosts and Microblogging).
Account migration between Lemmy instances has been requested on GitHub but I don't know much beyond that. If you just want a profile redirect it might not be too complicated, but migrating full post and comment history is a different story.
Scripts have been created to transfer settings and subscriptions from one Lemmy account to another, however:
Being able to link/synchronize accounts a cross instances would be huge for continuing to use lemmy when your main instance is having trouble or goes down.
And I think if accounts were globally federated so that you could just log into any instance, it would take away the main complaint many people have when they claim lemmy is confusing.
Just think of it like different email providers. Ex. Gmail, Hotmail, Protonmail etc, they can still talk to each other just fine but are run by different groups with their own rules.
The reason why is to make sure a single entity doesn't hold all the power.
Reddit is only failing because the corporation holds all the power. If we replaced Reddit with another single site, the same thing would happen again. The site would sell out and it would be whored out to advertisers.
On Lemmy, if one site tries to go corporate, people will just move to another instance. The power is in our hands and no corporations can take it away.
As to why, basically anyone is allowed to run their own copy of lemmy and some people actually enjoy doing it. There is more nuance of course. For instance, the owner can block other people's instances for whatever reason so no one on their instance sees content from the other instance and people from the other instance can't comment or vote in their communities.
There are definitely pros and cons to this approach, but the cool thing about it is the whole thing is back in the hands of real people and not owned by a bunch of investors.
Lemmy is a bunch of servers that talk to each other instead of just one server that holds everything. A Lemmy "instance" is one of those communicating servers. You can join any of the ones that talk to each other and see the same content. You can sign up at any of the websites you see in people's usernames here (e.g. mine is lemmy.sdf.org), it's good to sign up for the slightly smaller ones to better balance the server load.
You can think of instances like communities, You can join different communities with different rules and all these communities are connected to each other. So no matter which instance you choose, you'll still be able to interact with people from the others.
Now the reason for the existence of different instances is the same reason why there are different communities in the world. Some people feel more comfortable in groups of people with similar tastes.And having multiple instances ensures that no instance "owns" the social network.
@[email protected] Account migration isn't possible yet. But you can sign up to as many instances as you like with the same username and email. Also you can post to any KBin or Lemmy instance as long as it's federated with your home instance.
However sometimes there's issues, like right now with me not being able to reply to you directly.
You can use a different one. Only one will be your main. My beehaw username is slightly different to my others. I never use my beehaw, but it's a great backup.
You can. Just search for any community from mastodon and then follow it and you can reply to anything that comes through your timeline. You can also follow users.
Sync is a mobile app, but you can sign in to lemmy by going to your instance's website (for you it would be lemmy.world). Remember, sync is only a way to view lemmy, it doesn't power lemmy
Sync actually helped me figure out that I can sign up for lemmy.this and still see stuff for lemmy.that. the organization is the tricky part it seems. I can look at the everything section and see it all but I would like to see an everything that includes my subscribed things (subreddits for lack of knowing the correct term) I'm sure that will come though as Sync gets more and more polished