I plan on making two videos, one where I explain how Lemmy works and then how to post in a community. I’m going to do my own research but is there any points you want to give to a new user?
I am a new user. To me it felt a bit like signing up with an ISP. There’s a list you can choose from, rather than there just being a single reddit.
Once you sign up with an ISP, you can go anywhere on the Internet. Similarly, once you sign up with an instance, you can go anywhere in the fediverse.
Unlike an ISP, there are no costs or fees involved in signing up, though you are more than welcome to help fund the upkeep of an instance through donations. Unlike reddit, lemmy is not a profit-driven operation trying to serve you ads all the time.
In terms of choosing an instance, bigger is not necessarily better. Personally, I went with the medium-sized lemmy.ca as I am Canadian and it seemed to make sense, and have since learned that some of the bigger instances are struggling to keep up with surging demand as people seek alternatives to reddit.
Once you have an account, you can go into Communities, click on the All tab (which lets you see the whole fediverse), and start searching for and subscribing to whatever interests you. Communities are similar to subreddits, and there’s a good chance you will even find one with the same name.
Other than Countries, size and content (I’ve seen general purpose, or NSFW) what are some other reasons to choose a certain instance? I don’t want to make it a heavy point in the script but I do want to mention it.
I don’t think there is much concrete, but here are some things that it effects.
- Performance. You view almost everything via your instance. So picking one running with capable hardware and ideally close to you (network wise) will give you a better experience.
- Reliability. If your instance goes down you are basically offline. This can be hard to predict for the future.
- Trust. Your identity is “owned” by the instance. So if they wanted they can impersonate you. This can also be very hard to gauge.
- Longevity. If your instance shuts down it will be quite inconvenient and your identity will be lost, so you may want to try to predict which instances are likely to last.
Content is actually not really on my list since you can subscribe to any communities from any instance. It is true that the instance can provide some content discovery purpose via the local and known communities page but I would argue that separate service which track communities across all instance are better for this purpose.
