No Stupid Questions

Which, by the way, is also a great way to verify certain people. If a Lemmy account is registered on a server with a domain that is owned by a large broadcast company for example, it's easy to check whether the user of that account is who that person claims to be.

The municipality of Amsterdam set up their own Mastodon server registered to amsterdam.nl, so it's clear their Mastodon posts are genuinely from the municipality without any external verification schedule. If the mayor would want to post herself, she could simply get an account on that server and everybody knows it's genuinely her.

That's brilliant, thanks a lot 🙂

Thank you for this explanation! It helped a lot

You also have to keep in mind that openly federating forces instance admins to, on some level, moderate the content from other instances too. Lemmy.world was forced to block some instances because it was proving too hard to moderate the content from them. You should also consider this when choosing an instance.

hey you're the guy who didn't shit, how did that go!

There's also some feature differences between instances. Some instances disable downvotes, don't allow creating communities, or have stricter rules about communities that are allowed.

I chose my current instance because I wanted downvotes (I see them as critical for quality control) and also wanted to be federated with beehaw.

As an aside, LW made massive performance improvements the other day. They seem to be in a good position to keep growing, currently. There's certainly some benefits to being on the biggest instance, because of how the /all feed works. It's not actually all. It's "all communities someone on my instance subscribes to", so the bigger your instance, the more correct /all is.

But it's still pretty amazing to me: it's like using Twitter or Instagram to read and reply to Reddit!

It's probably amazing because everybody is used to social media platforms blocking access to and from other platforms. The point of these commercial platforms is to reel in as many users as possible and keep them in the ecosystem. No export possibilities, no federation or standard protocol.

It's like a large company inventing e-mail and not allowing people to e-mail to an e-mail address registered to another domain. Nobody would think that's logical, but most have grown accustomed to commercial social media locking every account in.

I find that to be a good manual for beginners, thanks for sharing :)

Yeah, lemmy and kbin have had issues syncing up for me and posts I made on a kbin instance not showing up despite waiting days.

So until that gets resolved or if, it's best to have a lemmy and kbin account.

yes, you can! you just have to search for "all" instead of "local" under Communities!

Some instances aren't connected for various reasons. What instance?

thats weird you should be able to unless defederated

Because Lemmy isn't a website. It's software that runs social content aggregation sites.

It's like what WordPress is for blogs and other unidirectional content serving websites.

The fun thing is, though, that any website running Lemmy can share content posted to it with any other website running Lemmy.

It's only confusing because corporate social media has taught us that "service = place".

Same reason there are multiple phone companies. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Google Fi, Cricket Wireless, Mint Mobile, etc.

They all allow you to communicate with your friends no matter what provider they use. But the companies are all slightly different. You might choose one due to better coverage, or customer support, or corporate ethics, or simply cause a friend recommended it.

Phones are redundant. So if Verizon fails, you can always sign up for another provider and still talk to your friends. Or if you have a bad experience, you’re not stuck using something you hate.

Plus, if one company ruled all of phones, it would be a bad thing. Monopolies aren’t good.

Lemmy isn’t the only thing out there with ‘multiple websites’ online. Email - there is more than just gmail, outlook, yahoo, proton, etc.

It’s not confusing to you that there are multiple email companies, that all work together, right? You don’t need a gmail account to send a message to a gmail user.

So don’t think it Lemmy like a website owned by one company. It’s not. Just like nobody owns “email”. Think of it like a protocol.

But I get it. Lemmy is an emerging technology. People are expecting it to be new Reddit. And it is on the front end. But it’s closer to new email.

Because that's the whole point of being decentralised. Nobody gets everything.

If there was just one "Lemmy", we'd be back to another monolithic Reddit again.

There really needs to be a fediverse primer that everyone can read before signing up. It would make all this stuff clear.