Would be helpful for most new users to understand how Lemmy works and how the different hosts interact with each other in a basic way.
Reddit is like going to Chucky Cheese for your birthday. It’s fun, but it feels a little forced and ultimately the point is for Chucky Cheese to sell you terrible pizza.
Lemmy is like being left alone during summer vacation with nothing to do and one of your friends hands out walkie-talkies and you all hang around the neighborhood and make a game of stalking the mail carrier and there’s no point but afterwards you get real pizza at Salvatore’s.
The real ELI5 👍
Adding to what the other guy said, you can think of Lemmy as a collection of servers. Right now you’re on lemmy.ml, but some people are on https://beehaw.org/ for example. Beehaw is also Lemmy, but it’s a different server with different users and communities.
Here’s what makes the Fediverse cool though. You don’t need to go there to interact with them. You can stay on lemmy.ml and access and comment on Beehaw. When you’re on the home page it defaults to “Local”, but if you click on “All” you can see posts from different servers. Same thing when you click on “Communities” at the top. It lets you browse communities on different servers by clicking “All”.
Let’s say you wanted to browse the gaming community on Beehaw. You can write “gaming” in the search field and find gaming@beehaw.org, or you can just type it into your search bar as https://lemmy.ml/c/gaming@beehaw.org
Now you can browse, comment, vote, and interact with that community. I posted this comment from https://kbin.social/ , which is NOT Lemmy, but since the Fediverse is connected we can basically interact with each other from different websites.
New mod here. What’s the best way to use mod tools? There doesn’t seem to be anything in Jerboa, so is it best to use the web browser?
@Senseibull
You can think of it like emails.A lemmy community is like an automated mailbox that sends everything they receive to all subscribers.
You can host a mailing list/community on gmail.
Then you can subscribe to the mailing list from outlook.
Then a user can send a post to the mailing list from yahoo.
The automated mailbox at gmail will receive the message from yahoo and send it to outlook and all other subscribers.
This is more of an ELI75 lol
Ha ha, no 75 year old is going to understand that either.
“What’s an email? Is that like a phone?”
Lmao 🤣
It’s Reddit but federated. A federated service is one that works like e-mail, i.e. there are multiple providers/servers/instances but all of them are connected so it doesn’t matter which one you choose. Additionally, Lemmy is federated to other services (e.g. Mastodon), forming what’s known as the Fediverse.
What’s the difference between the multiple lemmy instances and something else also ActivityPub based like kbin? Is lemmy.ml vs lemmy.world the same as comparing lemmy.world with kbin.social? I have accounts with both Lemmy and Kbin and confused a bit by what I’m seeing, and also Threads vs Magazines vs Microblogs haha. So much to learn about the fediverse!
Well, the software they run is different. The frontend looks different, etc. Lemmy can connect with kbin, as well as Mastodon, so it’s just one big network at the end of the day.
So one thing I don’t understand is, how do all the federated servers find each other? Is there one server that maintains the registrations to all other servers and each server can pull from there? What happens if that central server decides to delete another server from it’s list, doesn’t that put authority back into one server/persons hands? Or does each server maintain their own list of federated servers and if so you never know if you’re fully connected / how much time would that take each server owner?
No, there’s no central server. To my knowledge, servers federate either manually or by their users manually exploring other servers. But most servers at the moment are already federated with each other.
The best way i can describe it is with Runescape. Users can access different worlds(or “instances”) and every world runs the game. However unlike runescape every world is independently run and which world you form your account on determines which other worlds you can see and interact with.
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