& I’m doing pretty good! The wefwef app has done a great job of recreating the Apollo experience and has made it a lot easier to not want to go and download the Reddit app. The more active it gets here, the easier it’ll be. How are you guys doing so far? Have you found an App for Lemmy that you prefer the most yet?

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[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

People who say Lemmy is easy to use don't understand that it's difficult to get people with a centralized mindset to understand this whole fediverse thing. I'm going to try and explain a bit of what's going on in the background, not really the step by step that @gigachad@feddit.de went into.

The way it works is that an instance can have communities. Those communities can be subscribed to by any user on any instance (barring federation blacklists/whitelists, but that's a whole other rabbit hole).

Subscribing to a community that nobody on your instance has subscribed to yet will start the process of your instance pulling in all the information. Your instance will essentially have a local copy of that community that you can interact with. It will then periodically synchronize with the instance that hosts the community.

A brand new instance will not pull in anything from any instance. Users have to subscribe to start the process of pulling in communities. In theory (software bugs, network issues, servers being overloaded, etc all play havoc here), interacting with a community on another instance should feel relatively seamless. You post a comment, it gets synced to the home instance, then all other instances pull your comment from the community next time they sync.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask. Only been a Lemmy user for like 2 months, but been following the fediverse for a while now.