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Holy shit this is about to be the top post for the instance, welcome, everyone who's new!!! be sure to check the Communities page for World.
What is an instance? Is everything not on one server? If not, then how is it all aggregated?
I recommend reading the starting guide: https://lemmy.world/post/37906
Thank you. The infographic in that link helped: https://imgur.com/a/uyoYySY
I just hope the search is better here than on Reddit.
Lol, I bet it's not. Google is the real Reddit/Lemmy search.
An instance is like Lemmy.world or Lemmy.ml, it's shared with federation so we can all see and comment on stuff from other instances.
I mean, on Reddit there’s just be subreddits which would be equivalent of communities. I just don’t get what instances are for then.
As far as I can tell, the instances are just different run versions of lemmy by different people, that can inter-mingle (normally). I'm not particularly into decentralization and am only just here because reddit can eat a fat one, so I don't know their arguments for it. The potential benefits I see are if one of the instance owners decides to fuck up absolutely everything for everyone, the damage can be pretty easily mitigated by defederating from that instance, basically exile. For example, on Lemmy you couldn't really have someone like Spez ruining for everyone, because there are other large servers you could just migrate to if you happened to be on that instance, while still keeping up with nearly all of the stuff that you were keeping up with before. Main downside I see is if one instance becomes super dominant, like multiple orders of magnitude more popular than whoever is in 2nd it would just be susceptible to the old problems again.
I'm still definitely not an expert, and some of what I wrote may be incorrect, but I think it's all accurate.
I read a bit about it here. It seems like a much better model than Reddit. It looks like each instance is controlled by the instance creator, who also supplies the hardware. But it is much more free and open. The only controllers I see are the ones hosting the instances, however it is easy to move from one instance to another, same for content.
I tried to log in to behaw and others with my lemmy.world user but the login just works for a very long time and nothing happens. I dont know.
I've read about it a few times, but I always seem to forget how to say it specifically when I need to.
You would need to register for Beehaw, and while I'm not entirely sure what the entirety of it is, I know they review people who are trying to sign up, it isn't just enter details, confirm email and go.
They probably have a free choice to review who can join, which blocks the federated part that allows a federated user to log in?
Try lemm.ee instance. Fastest in my experience. No defederated communities.
I too am here because Reddit can eat a fat one. However I dont know who is behind this, e.g. who I am sharing my data with and how that works...
wefwef.app makes the shift extremely easy.
I plan on using Lemmy exclusively for a period of time. Especially when Reddit lists on the stock exchange mid 2023. I then also will delete my very old Reddit account.
About defederation and mitigation, if one instance was fucked by the.. owner (who owns an instance? is it like, someone hosts the instance on their server?) then the subs/communities would have to be rebuilt again, the posts wouldn't migrate etc.
There is one guy running the lemmy.world instance i believe, I can't seem to get the correct information about it straight in my head so I'll just post a link to his profile to learn more about him, he makes a lot of posts relevant to the running of the server.
The fact the PC version of Lemmy is very similar to old.reddit made the switch a ton easier for me, jerboa was pretty good although it's a bit broken for .world currently, and the other app i tried (connect) is... alright, not a fan really, but it does work so it gets the temporary job. I used a bit of reddit, but nearly only on phone and that's gone so i guess im done with it. I keep opening it with muscle memory a few times a day and then realise im not meant to be doing that, hopefully that goes away.
The previous posts would remain, but new posts on that instance shouldn't show up for anyone else, although i did notice some beehaw posts on my subs list after they defederated (that one wasnt actually anyone being a dick or getting screwed over, they had concerns about a couple instances having open sign ups) so that might not entirely work, or i may have misunderstood it. I know and have seen that comments won't show up after the defederation though.
You might notice a few different instances have the same or similar communities, i expect they would just migrate over and because it's still Lemmy there should be basically no learning curve. Not great, but significantly better than if you had to start from scratch on a new website.
It seems that I can't log in to other instances with my lemmy.world user. I had hoped for that to be centralized, but I guess that beats the purpose.
At least I can just log into lemmy.world and access those instances and read/write/interact with them from that user.
Instances - servers with Lemmy software, controlled by instance creators. Instances can talk with each other. On lemmy.world you can see and comment on posts from sh.itjust.works f.e. Best analogy - eMail, different providers (instance holders) but you can talk with any of them :D
Nice!
But what is the point of instances then? Is it about control? Server load?
Lemmy.world is just 1 instance/server. Each instance/server is controlled by different people. Each instance/server can choose to(or not) group with other instances/servers for shared content all around, thats what people refer to as federated or federation.
Theres actually a handful of lesser known social media and video services that can run like this, including Mastadon and Peertube.
In terms of user usability, the it sure would be nice with one client or one aggregator so you could subscribe to everything.
I found WefWef yesterday, which is a total ripoff of Apollo. I kind of feel bad for the Apollo dev, for using WedWef, but the experience is just so much like Reddit on Apollo.
I don’t think Wefwef can aggregate across instances.
Does such a client or website exist?
Here you can see all the different instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances i believe lemmy.world is currently the biggest. Remember litterally ANYONE can start an instance so the content can be questionable on some instances.
Can you subscribe to communities across instances with the same user?
To the last bit you mention with anyone being able to make a community, then I guess that’s where mods would come in handy.
Coming here from reddit too, I like it so far. If you're taking suggestions, the "collapse" button in threads like this keeps changing position horizontally as I scroll down depending on the username length... could it be placed to the left of the username instead so it's easier to click each time?