Hello, I'm here, as I'm sure, are you because of recent actions and plans created by Reddit's admin team to kill 3rd party apps in an effort to bring everything under the official app.
I'm not much of a mod, but I do want Eugene to have a viable alternative for those who are not happy with the direction that Reddit is headed.
A primer for how to think about Lemmy and the "federverse":
- Lemmy is like the world. (e.g. "Lemmy")
- Lemmy instances are like countries (e.g. lemmy.world, lemmy.ml)
- Lemmy communities are like cities (e.g. /c/eugene@lemmy.world, /c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml)
- Users are like citizens
In this world, citizens have a home country, but can visit, live, and interact using a visa without needing to be a citizen of the country that the city is in. Some countries have different rules for their users. Some countries don't recognize other countries, so their users can't see the other's content, but mostly they play along nicely.
The KEY TAKEAWAY is that users can be on the "lemmy.world" instance and be a part of communities on any instance without creating a user there.
The way to refer to communities on other instances in a way that you can interact is to use the URL format of https://{YOUR instance}/c/{communityname}@{COMMUNITY's instance} (e.g. https://lemmy.world/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml).
The federation model works well because communities will be spread out across different instances and so there's no ONE service/server that is responsible for ALL of the traffic going on in Lemmy.
I'm requesting that you spread the word about this place, if you feel like it's the right way to go and if anyone would like to help mod or take over entirely, please let me know.
Cheers @ewe