this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
847 points (98.7% liked)
Lemmy.World Announcements
29100 readers
33 users here now
This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.
Follow us for server news 🐘
Outages 🔥
https://status.lemmy.world
For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.
Support e-mail
Any support requests are best sent to [email protected] e-mail.
Report contact
- DM https://lemmy.world/u/lwreport
- Email [email protected] (PGP Supported)
Donations 💗
If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.
If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us
Join the team
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm quite lost, and don't think I fully understand the distributed nature of the various Lemmy instances (if I'm even using those words properly).
I'll do it like Reddit 10 years ago... wander in, poke around, make a snarky comment or 4 and see where it goes.
I was a bit confused about the place at first too. Here's a comment I copy-pasted from a previous post of mine:
My friend gave me a great explanation:
Lemmy the platform is planet Earth
“Instances” like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth
When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country
If you register at lemmy.world, that means your home instance/ “home country” is lemmy.world, but you can “travel” to lemmy.ml, another instance / “country”, to check out and subscribe to their community
When you subscribe to a different instance that’s not your home instance, you can still participate in their content, and other people will be able to see which instance / “country” you’re from
Each instance can have its own version of the same “subreddit”, so you can have a c/Memes in your home instance that is different from a c/Memes in another instance. But you can subscribe to both separately
c/[community name] is the naming convention used here I think like r/[subreddit name] on Reddit. If talking about a community in a different instance, it's c/[community name]@[instance name] so like c/[email protected]
Donations will help with the cost of running lemmy.world only and not lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.
Someone please correct any of this if any of it is wrong, I’ll happily edit
Hope it helps even a little
If you don't mind me asking: what's the importance of choosing a "home country"? Like what consequences does it bring signing up for lemmy.world in comparison to lemmy.ml? As a new user (refugee), how do I know where I belong?
Other than that, and the questions underneath your comment, this makes a lot of sense and helps getting started here. I can see myself wasting hours in this place
Not OP but from what I understand, the instances (home countries) you sign up with don’t really matter on the whole. It’s just that those are different servers. When a server gets too big it can kinda bog down the system and can cause things to get buggy and slow. So it’s better if we all spread out to alleviate so much pressure on one server.
With the reddit migration there’s a lot of us coming in suddenly. So some servers Are having a difficult time keeping up. Luckily with Lemmy.world Ruud is hosting our server and he has a pretty strong background with hosting other federated servers on mastodon. He has already upgraded Lemmy.World to its own designated server with more bells and whistles.
Some servers do have limitations on what they want and expect out of their people, but our server doesn’t have anything like that which I like, I feel like our community (lemmings?) are quite chill.
With big companies like Amazon, they have a plethora of servers, some that are on big tankers out in the middle of the ocean. So with a federated community we are kinda socialist in the way that we have volunteers that are giving up their time an space in order to host our servers. It’s much easier for us to spread it out to host as many people as we can. Speaking of hosting our servers, I know Ruud has set up a patreon so that we can donate to help keep the servers running smoothly. That way it isn’t coming out of his pocket only
Thanks for your reply. This seems like a logical and solid solution to the centralization other social medias end up with, and all the problems this brings with it (looking at you u/spez). I am brand new here, so need to find my way around, but when (if?) I do I sure will send some dineros over Patreon in order to help with the costs