this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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After 3 weeks of use, it still confounds me.
I think I've figured everything out, except how to link to posts across servers. That still drives me mad. Some of the apps (like Connect for Lemmy) are doing URL rewriting, but I can't assume that's happening for everyone.
It's pretty strange coming from Reddit. Each instance has its own communities but you can access all of them from the instance you signed up in? Like the equivalent of subreddits within subreddits. Or maybe I'm just unused to it.
I've been trying to think of a good metaphor, but I haven't landed on one yet. The best thing I've thought of is the old saying:
Federation (for lemmy) is the concept of the different instances sharing sublemmys, posts, and comments with each other. So you can be on any instance and interact or subscribe with things from another.
The strong caveat is: some instances turn off federation with others. For example, Beehaw has stronger moderation, and they had problems with users and spam from a specific other instance (lemmy.world was one, I think). So in that case, Beehaw turned off federation with lemmy.world. That means that if you were logged in to Beehaw, you would not see any new content from lemmy.world until they turned federation back on.
edit: I thought of one more thing. For communities that are run by their developers, like Minecraft, Lemmy is a great solution. They could host their own Lemmy instance (lemmy.minecraft) and lock down so that only their sublemmy - /c/Minecraft - is created. But when they federate, they get all the other content from other Lemmy instances.
As a user, you could sign up with lemmy.minecraft or lemm.ee, etc., and still see everything you want and sub to the /c/Minecraft.
As mods/admins, they only need to focus on their Minecraft thing. And they have complete control over that, because they can literally shut down the entire instance.
It's just different sites (instances) running the Lemmy software, that all work together and share their data to create "Lemmy" the overall platform.
The concept is simple enough but the implementation can be a bit weird and especially right now when everyone's trying out different mobile apps that are in different stages of development and have support for different features. Some of them make it a bit awkward to do things new users need to do like search and sub to communities, etc.
If there's anything in particular you're stuck on, feel free to ask!
I'm just confused about communities. Like if I wanted to follow a community about movies, is there a way to tell which community is the "main" one? Is there even such a thing as a "main" community on Lemmy? If not then how do people know where to be?? I love the federated concept but it also feels non user friendly, which I'm sure at least in part is because I'm confused.
So the idealistic idea is that there shouldn't be a "main" community, there should be multiple that are all slightly different in terms of their approach to the topic and you can choose which one(s) best align with what you want.
In reality, at least until the userbase is significantly larger, it actually does make sense to huddle a bit for now and split up topics as needed later. So in this case what I'd do is head to Lemmy Explorer and search for your topic ie https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=movies
This is quite a broad topic obviously so with a vague keyword search you're gonna turn up some irrelevant things but there should be some that fit what you need. Then you can change the sort order to whatever you care about most, subscribers, active users, posts etc to decide which is the one you're most interested in.
Personally I've just been subbing to all related communities on a topic, and crossposting my posts to see which one gets the most traction. The little "two squares" icon below the post info is crosspost, works pretty well. Ymmv with that tactic ๐
I'm thinking of it like pre-Reddit phpBB forums on multiple sites except I only have to create one login and everything funnels into one convenient place.