So apologies if this is a stupid question as I’m new to Lemmy. Came from Reddit. I moved to lemmy.world and have noticed that lemmy.ml has been popping up as another featured instance. What differs from lemmy.world vs lemmy.ml? Is .ml more active?
Part of why I ask this is because I downloaded the lemmur client on my phone and it defaults to lemmy.ml. (Yes I’m aware that app is no longer being maintained)
Again apologies for the stupid question.
Well one of the other questions I had was, I’m seeing things in my feed like Android, catpics, therewasanattempt, and they all “look” like subreddits. They don’t look like different instances from what I can tell. So of course I’ve subscribed to them the same way I would on Reddit.
Is the concept of those the same as subreddits? Or are they just different instances? Or are they affiliated with lemmy.world? How does that even work? Hope that makes sense.
This infographic can explain better than I can:
That does answer my question actually! So they are “subreddits” in a sense but they’re called Communities. Cool!
And yeah I understood the concept of the fediverse pretty well before but I love the visualization here. Really well done. Will be sending this to my Reddit and Twitter friends to convince them to switch :)
Each Lemmy instance (or kbin 👋) is like its own Reddit, all connected together. So you’re seeing ‘subreddits’ from multiple instances right now.
Small correction. Kbin is not a Lemmy instance. It’s an entirely different backend on the ActivityPub protocol. It federates with “threaded” fediverse sites like Lemmy, and with microblogging sites like Mastodon. Users on kbin can create and interact with both kinds of posts and kbin magazines “Lemmy communities” can natively include both.
Edit: sorry @atypicaloddity I totally misread your comment. Ignore me!
I, uh, don’t think they were claiming that kbin was a Lemmy instance. To refactor the sentence slightly, it says “Each Lemmmy (or kbin) instance is like it’s own Reddit…” which acknowledges that kbin isn’t Lemmy.
Thank you, I think you’re right! I misread it for sure.
I’m pretty new here. I’d say the concept is the same in the sense that they are each their own community run by their own moderators. However, the all powerful Admins are those in control of the instance.
One interesting example is that Beehaw has started making “Bee themed” community icons which makes it easy to tell when you’re looking at one of the communities hosted on their instance.
Someone on Lemmy.world could have another community with the exact same name, you just have to pay attention to the end (and having themed icons also helps).
But it goes even a little farther than that. We can end up with Mastadon (twitter equivalent) users who are also able to comment in these communities. I don’t think its working in reverse yet (at least not for Lemmy.ml accounts).
Lemmy users can’t currently follow other users, only “groups” (Lemmy “communities”, Friendica “forums”, kbin “magazines”, Chirp “groups”, Guppe “groups”, and PeerTube “channels”), which means you can’t interact with other fediverse users outside of a group. Mastodon users can post to Lemmy communities (or these other group types), and comment on existing posts, and Lemmy users can interact freely with them within that context.
I haven’t heard anything about that changing, though the number of Lemmy users has expanded by several orders of magnitude these last two weeks, and so I imagine the number of contributors to the project will also increase and expand the roadmap somewhat.
On the flip side, kbin users CAN follow other users. Kbin has a feed like Lemmy, but also the “microblog” which is basically tweets. You can link the microblog to Mastodon servers and follow and interact with users from that platform as well. Mastodon, Lemmy and kbin are all different technologies that are allowed to interact with each other, and we as users get to pick the ones that best fit our needs. It really is an amazing concept
See, the cool thing is that by that logic, if hypothetically speaking the admins of Lemmy.world did anything shady or unfriendly to the user, we could just move to another friendly instance without making another bullshit account or moving to a different website, or god forbid a different app.
Not that I think they would, as it’s clear to me they can’t given there’s no actual company. But DAMN do I love options!
Could one move instances while retaining their own post / comment history? That’s the part that I’m unclear on (new reddit refugee here)
My understanding is no. You would need account migration. And at the moment kbin or lemmy does not support it?
Only Mastodon seem to support that.
https://joinfediverse.wiki/Moving_instances
For me this is still a big issue to solve. But hopefully will happen at some point.