I plan on making two videos, one where I explain how Lemmy works and then how to post in a community. I’m going to do my own research but is there any points you want to give to a new user?
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It’s like reddit but the reddit part works like email. You can get emails from yahoo.com on your gmail, just like you can interact with users and communities hosted on different instances.
I am a new user. To me it felt a bit like signing up with an ISP. There’s a list you can choose from, rather than there just being a single reddit.
Once you sign up with an ISP, you can go anywhere on the Internet. Similarly, once you sign up with an instance, you can go anywhere in the fediverse.
Unlike an ISP, there are no costs or fees involved in signing up, though you are more than welcome to help fund the upkeep of an instance through donations. Unlike reddit, lemmy is not a profit-driven operation trying to serve you ads all the time.
In terms of choosing an instance, bigger is not necessarily better. Personally, I went with the medium-sized lemmy.ca as I am Canadian and it seemed to make sense, and have since learned that some of the bigger instances are struggling to keep up with surging demand as people seek alternatives to reddit.
Once you have an account, you can go into Communities, click on the All tab (which lets you see the whole fediverse), and start searching for and subscribing to whatever interests you. Communities are similar to subreddits, and there’s a good chance you will even find one with the same name.
Phone providers are also an good example. My phone on provider A can send and receive calls from providers A B and C.
Other than Countries, size and content (I’ve seen general purpose, or NSFW) what are some other reasons to choose a certain instance? I don’t want to make it a heavy point in the script but I do want to mention it.
I don’t think there is much concrete, but here are some things that it effects.
- Performance. You view almost everything via your instance. So picking one running with capable hardware and ideally close to you (network wise) will give you a better experience.
- Reliability. If your instance goes down you are basically offline. This can be hard to predict for the future.
- Trust. Your identity is “owned” by the instance. So if they wanted they can impersonate you. This can also be very hard to gauge.
- Longevity. If your instance shuts down it will be quite inconvenient and your identity will be lost, so you may want to try to predict which instances are likely to last.
Content is actually not really on my list since you can subscribe to any communities from any instance. It is true that the instance can provide some content discovery purpose via the local and known communities page but I would argue that separate service which track communities across all instance are better for this purpose.
Stress the fact that federation isnt a new or confusing concept. They already engage with federated services without realizing it. Stuff like email, dns, Usenet, etc are all “federated” they just haven’t been described that way because they existed before that term was used to describe it.
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Instead of visiting the Mall of America and shopping at only what the mall will offer, using outdated infrastructure-- you can instead visit a variety of towns (“instances”) which each host their own cute boutiques (“communities”) specializing in a particular sort of item (whatever the topic of the community is). The instances can have their own rules that apply to its communities, but communities can also make their own rules, like a shop can. Skip the crowds and barely functional Supermall experience and find a better place to engage in discussion and get information.
Would it be better to refer to servers as “websites”?
Users can make their own website or instance, there you can choose one to look through. It doesn’t matter where you choose to go since you can view all communities that are in the Lemmy network no matter what website they’re from.
Thank you guys for your input. I pretty much made the script and soon ill record and edit the video.
