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?
It’s like reddit but the reddit part works like email. You can get emails from yahoo.com on your gmail, just like you can interact with users and communities hosted on different instances.
Stress the fact that federation isnt a new or confusing concept. They already engage with federated services without realizing it. Stuff like email, dns, Usenet, etc are all “federated” they just haven’t been described that way because they existed before that term was used to describe it.
I would lean hard into the ux being work in progress. Also as instances / communities mature I would expect the specifics on what federation means and the technology behind it will be less relevant to the average user.
Yep. I told a friend of mine “the federation just works, its the user interface and apps that need work”.
Mastodon is in a really good place nowadays where you don’t even notice you’re browsing across multiple instances. Lemmy is pretty close, too, as long as people know to use relative links and the instance you’re on is pretty well federated already so you don’t get too many 404 from trying to open places your instance doesn’t know about yet.
yep, lemmy.ca was like this when i first started browsing (the 404s) but the more everyone uses it, the better the site gets
Yeah, as it gets more and more interconnected, all the links and UI start working more and more. Hopefully soon, lemmy will get the feature of just automatically converting community names in the !name@instan.ce format into working links, the way writing r/subreddit or u/user did on reddit.
A Friendica user told me in a comment that they already have that.
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.
