Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to become a member of the community, theres a reasonable amount of subs (or whatever the other word for em is) that fit my interests, enough linux content and shitposting for my liking, and the overall random posts made by people equally fed up with Leddit. (also i admit i used reddit a little cus there was this post on the fedora sub showing how to fix a sound issue i been having after a recent update)
so far it’s pretty ok and i’m quite hopeful for its future. the layout reminds me of reddit so it’s not particularly confusing to use… like someone else said, i hope the customisation improves (especially profile customisation, i can’t seem to upload an avatar). i’m a bit confused about the different servers though (what’s the difference between beehaw/lemmy/shitjustworks/etc? will i be able to access all of them if i signed up at beehaw?…) i’m not very tech savvy so perhaps somebody could eli5. i’m hopeful though!
As a fellow noob, take what I’ll say with a grain of salt, but my understanding of the servers is that think of them like this:
- Servers (i.e., Beehaw, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world etc) are “continents”
- Communities (i.e., AskLemmy) are “countries”
Every “country” is located in a “continent”. So AskLemmy “country” is located on the lemmy.ml “continent”. Users also have a home “continent”, that is where you sign up. So for example, you signed up for Beehaw, therefore you “live” in the Beehaw “continent”. I signed up here in lemmy.ml, so I live in the lemmy.ml “continent”.
Now if you sign up at Beehaw or in any other server, you can “travel” to the other “continents” (servers) and visit the “countries” (communities) that have their home base there and participate there too. So you, for example, can participate here in AskLemmy, which is located on the lemmy.ml “continent”. Sometimes your home “continent” issues a “travel ban” on particular “continents”, therefore you cannot visit that “continent” or the “countries” in them.
Now what the hell is kbin? Think of Kbin as another “planet”. They are fundamentally different from our “planet” (which is Lemmy), but residents from that “planet” can visit our planet and participate as well via a spaceship infrastructure known as ActivityPub.
Sorry if I used geography terms to illustrate my point. There’s a lot of nuance removed, but I think I got it nailed down based on my understanding. Take it with a grain of salt though.
Thank you, I appreciate the geography analogies. I understand it more now!
Yes, you’ll be able to communicate with almost all of the servers, a very select few are blocked for reasons that pre-date me. When you look at a username, you’ll see an extra @ after their name indicating where they’re posting from. The Communities (subreddits) that you subscribe to can be more or less anywhere.
