I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
I’m still a little confused but it’s sinking in. The difference between an instance and a “sub”, as well as how to join or interact with other “subs” without having to join each individual instance, was the part that was toughest to adapt to. I love it, though. Lemmy is giving me the feeling Reddit did when I first joined it a long, long time ago on my first ever account. It feels organic.
If you could, maybe you can help me figure it out? I’m still very confused…
So I am just jumping into it myself (and straight into the deep end with running my own server, lol), so this may not be 100% accurate…
My current understanding is that an instance is where you make your account and log in to. The instance keeps track of all the stuff to show you, including things it gets from other instances.
A “sub” (I think called a “community” in Lemmy parlance) is basically a subreddit, but with the added benefit of being able to subscribe to it from any instance due to the whole “federation” thing. For example, this overall post is on lemmy.ml (in their “asklemmy” community), the comment you replied to is from a user on on the lemmy.world instance, you are a user on the latte.isnot.coffee instance, and I am on the lemmy.nrd.li instance. These instances are all sending messages to each other to keep all of our comments/votes/posts/etc in sync so this can all work (mostly) seamlessly.
Can I visit other instances and view/interact with their local posts from this instance? I’m getting the hang of communities but the instances are throwing me for a loop lol
When you subscribe to a a community you can see all posts to that community. You can think of it as the post getting sent to whichever instance created the community, which then distributes the post to any instances that have users subscribed to that community. AFAIK there is no way to view all posts from some other instance other than visiting that instance directly.
You should be able to see all of the posts from communities that someone on your instance has subscribed to by switching to “All” in the community selector at the top of your feed (Subscribed / Local / All).
For discovering communities right now I am just going to the top instances listed on https://join-lemmy.org/instances and seeing what communities are active and interesting. The flow to subscribe to them kinda sucks (you have to copy the community name “[email protected]” into the search on your instance, wait for it to do some sort of handshake, and eventually you can then click into and explore that specific community). Apparently there is also a community browser you can use.
Thank you!
The community browser you mentioned is super useful. Just copy links from there into your search bar to subscribe.
https://browse.feddit.de/
Well, it’s actually a bit simpler than that.
You can directly browse a community that technically lives on another instance without ever leaving your instance.
If you’re on the start page of your instance you can e.g. change between seeing Local, Subscribed or posts from all communities (across instances).
You can click around and browse from there without having to leave your instance :)
Thanks!
Yeah absolutely. An instance is kind of your home group. It’s not a “subreddit,” more just a sorting method for links. The “subreddits” are the boards inside the instances, and the instances work to determine their addresses.
On Reddit you might have /r/nfl, /r/actualnfl, /r/realnfl, for example, while here you would have [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].
(People better at explaining or who are further along the process of understanding please feel free to correct me and chime in!)
An instance is like your email provider. When you get “messages”, like “a new post was created”, or “your comment got upvoted”, it gets sent to your instance for you to read.
At the same time, instances are also email providers for communities/sublemmies, so when people post in a sub, the instance hosting that sub receives the “messages” from other instances in the Fediverse.
I actually think the double-split between communities/subs and instances is rather unfortunate overall.
I’m guessing, many people will end up subbing almost identical subs on different instances. In my opinion, it would have been better to use instances more as identity providers and let the communities be the first level distinction.
I actually don’t feel it’s organic at all, I have to make an effort to even find this post here on a different instance.
I hope that they can add the ability to create subs that exist in multiple instances. (i.e. [email protected] and [email protected] could both have the same posts and mods)
And as I just noticed, it’s really cumbersome to reply to you.
There’s a “show context” button in my inbox for your comment, but that links to lemmy.ml, where I’m not logged in (since I’m on feddit.de), so I can’t reply. Instead I have to use the reply dialog in my inbox.
Yeah, this needs to be fixed. There needs to be some way to link between instances and not get your browser stuck on a foreign instance.
I think this might help as a workaround for now. (browser only) https://lemmy.world/post/48816