I used to browse Reddit 90+% of the time from my phone through the RiF app, so after June 30th, here is what I did and what I recommend as a starter pack for others in the same situation:

Create account on lemmy.world, so the browser part is covered
Search for the information on which app provides the closest to the RiF (Apollo, etc.) experience
Instal Liftoff and be happy - it is just like RiF :-) (for Apollo and others, it could be different - find your own favorite!)
Dial back dramatically on using Reddit at all. I only load 4 subs in my phone's browser, because I did not find the Lemmy / Fediverse alternatives yet
Constantly look for the communities to replace the subreddits you are still visiting
OPTIONAL - once or twice a week, look at /r/pics and /r/videos and laugh at the creativity of the still ongoing protest :-)

So that is where I am right now, posting this via the web browser on the lemmy.world site, by pressing "create a post". Seems easy enough for now, but I find it a bit confusing that other people can post from Mastodon and other Lemmy instances... Do they see the same communities I do? Do I see all Lemmy communities if I use lemmy.world....? So many questions, but it's exciting to explore this brand new structure.

Even after reading the Fediverse and ActivityPub articles on Wikipedia my head is spinning, and I don't really understand how everything fits / works together, but here I am! An ex(-ish) Redditor after the APIcalypse, looking for cool new communities, and excited about the future that the Fediverse can bring!

(I'm willing to learn! Someone please link me a FAQ where I can find the answers to my questions :-) )

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[–] leraje 44 points 2 years ago (10 children)

Lemmy is a piece of software. Lemmy software is a link aggregator - same as reddit.

So you’re signed up to a server that's installed an instance (a copy) of the Lemmy software. Other servers also run the Lemmy software making them also instances of Lemmy. As well as you being able to talk to users in Communities (think subreddits) on the lemmy.world server, you can talk to users in Communities on other Lemmy instances. For example, lemmy.ml, feddit.de etc etc

KBin is also link aggregator software, just like Lemmy and Reddit. Same things apply there, same software on multiple servers, all able to talk with each other.

Mastodon software is a microblogging service - same as Twitter (and Threads). Just like instances of Lemmy, instances of Mastodon can talk to each other. So a user on mastodon.world can talk to (for example) a user on kolektiva.social which is also running the Mastodon software.

There’s also Pixelfed (Instagram), PeerTube (YouTube), Friendica (Facebook), Plume (WordPress) and a large variety of others.

Now, as well as all these different types of software (Lemmy, Mastodon, KBin, PixelFed etc) being able to talk to other instances of the same software on other servers, because they are all underpinned by a single method of passing information called ActivityPub, each type of software can also talk to each other - so you as a Lemmy user can also see posts and comments from a user on a server running an instance of Mastodon (or Plume, or PixedlFed, or...you get the idea). All these things are loosely joined together making a joined (federated) universe - the fediverse.

[–] BeezKnuts 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is how my poor grandmother must feel all the time. I'm slowly trying to understand it all. I've got most of lemmy figured out so far I think. But there's a lot more to this.

[–] leraje 2 points 2 years ago

Just abstract it in your mind - Lemmy is software. Microsoft Word is software. Mastodon is software. Photoshop is software.

You can install copies of all of these pieces of software on different machines. Now just imagine if all the various copies (instances) of MS Word installed on peoples PC's around the world were able to talk to each other. And so were all the copies of Photoshop. And then further imagine that all the copies of Word were also able to talk to all the copies of Photoshop.

That's all the fediverse is. Multiple copies of the same software able to talk to each other and also able to talk to multiple copies of different software.

Have a look here, put a tick in the 'ActivityPub' protocol tickbox and you'll see the software that can (theoretically) talk to each other.

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