Hello everyone! Long time redditor, first time poster to Lemmy.world. As I’m learning more about the Fediverse, I’m seeing there are several instances that seem to serve the same purpose. For example, Lemmy and Beehaw seem to be similar, yet they are still separate.
Are there any big differences or factors I should be looking for when browsing different instances? So far, it looks like the number of communities and rules are the biggest differences between instances.
Bonus question: are there any good sources for learning more about the Fediverse? I’ve found these links so far:
https://opensource.com/article/23/3/tour-the-fediverse - Gives a decent explanation of the Fediverse. https://fediverse.party/ - Provides a link to different Fediverse instances, not specific to Reddit replacements.
Beehaw.org places a high priority on censoring content that would offend folks like the LGBT crowd; they’ve been more-willing than most other lemmy instances to defederate from kbin or Lemmy instances that they consider sources of problem users. For some folks, that’s great, and for others, that’s not what they want.
It is currently a little hard to find the community rules for instances that give you at least a basic idea of what an instance is “about”. And not all instances are aiming for something, but for those that are, it’s nice to know about it. Sign up for pawb.social, and you’re on a furry-oriented instance, for example. For Lemmy instances, trying to join normally shows a page that talks a bit about the instance rules. For kbin instances, you can see a short writeup from the instance admins at /terms, like:
You can get there by clicking “Terms of Service” at the bottom of any page.
Lemmy is the software a lot of the Reddit style fediverse websites run on. Many of them include Lemmy in the name such as Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world, but others don’t include Lemmy in the name. Beehaw.org is another website that runs the Lemmy software, it just didn’t put Lemmy in its name. Beehaw does have an uncommon configuration since the down vote ability is disabled there, but it still is Lemmy at its core. Beehaw did defederate from some of the other big Lemmy servers because they were overwhelmed with trying to moderate that much content and those servers reportedly had open sign ups which led to a big influx of spammy bots, so Lemmy.world and beehaw.org are invisible to each other right now, but the admins of Beehaw have expressed a desire for more granular moderation tools in order not to have to defederate from such large servers as a whole in the future.
Kbin is a different software altogether so the kbin servers such as kbin.social and fedia.io have a different layout, terminology, and some different features than the Lemmy based servers, but Lemmy and Kbin both use the ActivityPub protocol to send and fetch data, so you can post between the two platforms as if they were on the same server. I am browsing this post and writing this reply from kbin.social.
They are all the same, but the only difference being the rules. lemmy.ml was one of the earliest instances, run by the developers themselves. beehaw.org is a community that promotes positivity, they’ve defederates from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world. lemmy.world is the largest instance. Some instances are hosted in different countries, which means different laws apply. Some instances are piracy friendly (lemmy.fmhy.ml and lemmy.dbzer0.com).
Then there are instances that are basically isolated. They’ve been defederated by many instances.
lemmygrad.ml - promotes Authoritarian Left politics
exploding-heads.com - many alt-right content gets posted there
All of the federated sites push and pull content using ActivityPub (the technology that connects them all together), but they all seem to differ in the way their website presents the data and how you interact with things.
For example there’s an upvote / downvote button on kbin.social for articles, but also a boost button. I’ve heard that some places only use the upvote and others the boost (or whatever they call it)
I found it easiest to just pick a place that looks decent and is chill and go from there 🦙🦙
I’ve read that upvote on kbin is basically “save” and boost is the functionality that would be upvote on lemmy or reddit.
Edit: Well look at that, seems I’m wrong and so many friendly people here to correct me without resorting to calling me names. Already this is much better than Reddit. :)
Upvote and downvote is just that (they recently fixed the reputation calculation). A boost is like a retweet. You crosspost the boosted content to your own microblog space. Kbin does both reddit-like discussion threads as well as twitter/mastodon like microblogging. In fact, kbin is fully interoperable with mastodon. By boosting something you retweet (retoot?) it to your mastodon/microblog.
It was changed recently, now upvote works similar to lemmy/reddit (but also adds things to your favourites)
Boost is more for the microblogging side of kbin, it’s like a retweet. (also adds more reputation points but that’s not really useful for anything right now)
Boost also enhances the visibility of a post, and it’ll probably have to continue to do so in future versions: not so much because of the internal workings of kbin, but because boosts are used to increase visibility across the fediverse. Having them not count towards visibility in kbin would be inconsistent when displaying information from the threadiverse at large. :)
That’s like asking if there’s a major difference between email and gmail
I’ve been seeing the analogy that the Fediverse is like email, but it feels like the Fediverse is more nuanced at a glance. If my question was translated for email, I think it would be something like “What are the major differences between Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo?” The answer being they all work similar and talk to each other fine, but they can have different features that make them somewhat unique.
