this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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I'm enjoying figuring out how the place works. For example, when I first signed up, I couldn't work out how Beehaw.org was part of Lemmy was part of the Fediverse, but I'm now subbed to almost as many communities on other servers as I am on Beehaw.
The learning curve has perhaps been more steep than on Reddit, but no more so than Twitter > Mastodon.
How I'm beginning to make sense of it is by thinking that each instance is a completely separate "reddit". The admins of each instance are as powerful as spez or any other reddit admin.
The community subdivision is then just that, a subdivision within a custom reddit rather than a "subreddit" under the centralized "main reddit website".
The federalization aspect of it is then completely alien, but understandable. At least to me!
I was trying to wrap my head around it yesterday, in the sense that there's a lemmy.ml/c/music AND a beehaw.org/c/music which are completely different communities with (mostly) different users and different posts, but I can sub to both and post on both. Now, on the one hand that may get a little confusing, but in reality it's no different to there being two different subreddits that both focus on music posting.
It definitely takes a moment to stop the reddit brain from thinking of everything being on one website. If we picked up the hotlink convention it would probably solve all that confusion:
That'd also make the email comparison clearer while providing solid examples of federation.
I have a feeling that as time goes by (and if Lemmy sees more migration) we'll end up with everyone choosing a de facto default server for each community. Which kind of defeats the purpose.
The real headfuck is that I could reply to your comment from Mastodon if I wanted.
(I've experimented with this, and it's kinda confusing over there, so I didn't)
Yeah that's really cool too! I tried to mess around with it but it was super confusing and I gave up. I should try figuring it out again!
I think my attitude is that it's nice that it can work, but that the style differences between Mastodon and Lemmy don't necessarily lend themselves to it being terribly worthwhile.
That said, there's likely a use-case whereby you can essentially use Mastodon like an RSS reader for other Fediverse software, so you can get a heads up on things you might be keeping an eye on.
Hah! I actually typed out that what I did figure out felt like subscribing to a "lemmy rss feed", but wasn't sure if that was just me being lost in the interface.
I guess that would be the best way to think of it. Then you can reply to comments as they come in? That part I'm not sure about but I think it works something like that.
oh yea for sure, especially since feduverse twitter alternatives have weird terminology for stuff and generally diff ui
In terms of UI, I noticed yesterday that there's one you can install for Lemmy that's based on the classic phpBB forum design, which made me realise that Reddit was never anything more than just a massive forum. And that's probably why I liked it so much.