I don’t fully understand how lemmy works completely yet. But for example I made an account at Division by zero and subscribe here to post. Is it not just a more inconvenient version of making a reddit account and being able to post practically anywhere?
Also what’s the difference between making an account at one instant and just making one centralized account for the social media?
Well, you said it yourself, you’re able to comment using your Db0 account on Lemmy.world.
Which websites can you post to using your Reddit account besides Reddit?
But are they different websites? I’m a bit confused because I just saw a link to what looks like a lemmy instant but the url doesn’t start with a lemmy. So is it possible for someone to make a completely different website and for me to post with the same account I have now?
Say somebody makes a website with games like Kongregate or Newgrounds, could they let me post with this same account?
Yeah essentially.
The idea is not that the “Fediverse” - or well any specific app - is a single site broken up to run in multiple servers.
Rather it’s the inverse, it’s a lot of different little websites like lemmy.world, mastodon.social, etc etc, but you can also load any foreign thread / post / account via your own (as in, where your account is) site and then comment or vote on them. There’s a degree of interoperability - the federation - between all these various websites.
In the case of instances of the same app (say all the Lemmy servers) there’s also interoperability in the search, which importantly allows you to discover content on other servers and largely pretend it might as well be on your own.
wait I can use mastodon using this account? That’s crazy, I think I’m getting it now.
But how is that a benefit to the user? Instead of one large user base there’s a bunch of tiny ones scattered about fracturing the community and inhibiting growth.
Niche communities that existed on Reddit I doubt will ever exist here, at least anywhere near the user base as they had in Reddit before it went to shit.
On the contrary, a bunch of scattered communities create one large user base. The people you see in this thread all come from a bunch of different websites and services. You’ll see users from startrek.website discussing woodworking in communities hosted by lemmy.ca.
On top of this, someone could make an instance dedicated to that niche subject and similar topics, and you could subscribe with the account you already have somewhere else instead of having to periodically check that niche instance.
Right now the problem is finding those instances, and generally finding reliable instances that won’t suddenly go offline
One plus is that it takes more than one autocratic greedy wannabe tyrant to enshittify your entire experience by forcing ads upon you while taking away all the good but not ad-delivery-optimised tools.
It’s a lot like email really. If the 14 MB of storage hotmail once offered wasn’t enough for you, switching to the 1 GB of Gmail may have seemed appealing. If Google seems a bit too creepy for you, consider switching to proton or something.
If the admins of your current instance don’t like your cat memes, feel free to move to another one where cats and dogs are equally appreciated.
Also, third party apps! I really don’t like the default Reddit app.
The practical benefit is when things go wrong.
Imagine that you’d rather not deal with the Reddit admins, for whatever reason. You have two options: either you suck it up and deal with them, or throw away all Reddit content, communities and people, because of those admins.
Now imagine that you had some issue with the administration of your Lemmy instance. You still have both options above, plus a third one: migrate to another instance. You still have access to [mostly] the same content, communities and people as you did before; but you don’t need to deal with the admins of your older instance. You can eat the cake and have it too. That’s exactly what I did rather recently by the way.
Imagine that you’d rather not deal with the Reddit admins, for whatever reason. You have two options: either you suck it up and deal with them, or throw away all Reddit content, communities and people, because of those admins.
Unfortunately the fediverse, at least in the Lemmy/kbin sense, doesn’t solve that particular problem. This exact scenario can still happen because a community belongs to an instance, and that instance can still be maliciously or just ineptly managed. There are also added complications with federation, defederation, instance/community politics, and just dealing with “duplicate” communities in general.
For example, certain highly political instances host many communities that are not political, and have been known to silently ban people from the whole thing just because their politics were “wrong”. Sounds Reddity to me.
Even then, you can still move the community to another instance. You won’t get the same address, but provided that the community wants to leave, it will. (In fact I’m doing this right now, migrating !linguistics@lemmy.ml into !linguistics@mander.xyz )
That’s because the community is not just some address on the URL bar. It’s the users and the content that they share with each other. It’ll be where the users are.
You can still subscribe to the community on the boogered instance from your new instance. And if it’s bad, people are going to start to subscribe to another community on the same topic on another instance with you. And it can have the same name, you don’t even have to call it r/the_true_real_feet pics like you do when a community splinters on reddit
Now imagine that you had some issue with the administration of your Lemmy instance. You still have both options above, plus a third one: migrate to another instance.
In theory, yes.
In practice, I strongly disagree with a number of decisions by the admins of my instance, but I’d rather keep ownership of the comments I have posted and would like to be notified if anyone ever replies to them in the future. Since I care more about the latter than the former, I’m not planning on moving instances at the moment. Guess I could create another account elsewhere, but I’d still have to check out the account on the old instance every once in a while. Plus I’d like to have a unified posting history. It sucks, and the technology is not quite there yet, but I hope true migrations between instances become a thing sooner than later. As far as I have been told, true migrations aren’t yet a thing even on Mastodon.
I hope that content migration (what you called “true” migration) becomes a thing in the future.
That said, the burden of checking your old account once in a blue moon is by no means that big. And if someone replied to you months after you posted something, odds are that the person can wait a bit before you reply them. You can also link your old account in your new one’s profile and vice versa, for more pressing matters.
So while I get your point (and it is a fair point - the migration isn’t completely costless), it’s still an option that you wouldn’t see in Reddit.
The advantages of the fediverse are that there is no central ownership or structure of data. Your data is just your data, and your instance is just where you decide to host it.
You can sign up on one mastodon instance and start tooting and gather a following, if your mastodon instance starts enforcing rules that you don’t agree with (such as federating/defederating with meta) then your following belongs to you, not your mastodon instance and you can migrate your account.
Similarly the different services are just ways to present the same data as delivered by ActivityPub. I can access data posted to a Lemmy instance from Mastodon. I can follow pixelfed accounts from Mastodon. I can follow Mastodon users from Kbin, etc.
Right now big social media is like writing in the guest book and they let people look at it if you fill their requirements.
Federated social media is like sending an email to a public inbox that anyone can subscribe to as long as their instance maintains good standing with the sender.
