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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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.
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.
This is what I used with my more technically friends and family. I think its really intuitive with the community/magazine url format <community>@<domain>.
The best explanation I’ve seen, for gamers, is tha reddit is like Xbox live. Lemmy is PlayStation and kbin is pc (or however). And kbin and lemmy have cross play enabled so you can play together.
Or you can sub Reddit for mastodon etc.
I would lean hard into the ux being work in progress. Also as instances / communities mature I would expect the specifics on what federation means and the technology behind it will be less relevant to the average user.
Yep. I told a friend of mine “the federation just works, its the user interface and apps that need work”.
Mastodon is in a really good place nowadays where you don’t even notice you’re browsing across multiple instances. Lemmy is pretty close, too, as long as people know to use relative links and the instance you’re on is pretty well federated already so you don’t get too many 404 from trying to open places your instance doesn’t know about yet.
Yeah, as it gets more and more interconnected, all the links and UI start working more and more. Hopefully soon, lemmy will get the feature of just automatically converting community names in the
!name@instan.ceformat into working links, the way writing r/subreddit or u/user did on reddit.A Friendica user told me in a comment that they already have that.
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.
I would look at what communities they host locally? Do they seem well run? Have they been around for awhile?
Since I signed up, I’ve noticed an explosion in new instances being added that have impressive user counts but host nothing at all. I suspect these are bot-driven instances and would steer well clear of them.
It’s really hard to get average users to take this into consideration or even care.
Take in consideration of the content, country and other factors.
Under “other factors” I’ll mention these points.
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.
I mean they do have their own domain, but each one is viewable from the other ones, so it seems like a bad comparison there. It kind of reminds me of RSS feeds.
Lemmy is like Reddit, except for that instead of one big Reddit server anyone can run their own “reddit” Lemmy server with its own “subbreddit” Lemmy communities (or “subs”). However, all of those Lemmy servers and communities have the ability to talk to one another. You pick a Lemmy server to login to and can then post and comment on any Lemmy servers that your server connects to.
Yeah I think a big key to getting a lot of people to understand is by relating elements of Reddit.
Honestly I would just tell someone it’s just like reddit. Then if they wanted they would learn from posts they see. That’s pretty much what I did. Used it exactly like reddit for a few days.
Like easy to see somebody complain it’s too complicated if you try to explain and never even browse. But saying it’s too complicated to use while using it and reading a post sounds ridiculous. Just start browsing.
I still want people to understand the general idea of Lemmy but in a way more simplified way. I plan on using graphics to explain more than words.
Thank you guys for your input. I pretty much made the script and soon ill record and edit the video.
Lemmy is like a state/province made up of several cities. You start by picking a city (“instance”) to live in (lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, etc.). You can visit and socialize in a pub (a “community” - like Lemmy.world’s c/mildlyinfuriating) located in your own city. Alternatively, you can drive over to socialize in a pub in a neighboring city (lemmy.ml’s c/memes). In the neighboring city’s pub, you might socialize with people that live in your own city and those from other neighborhoods. If a neighboring city decides they don’t like your city, they can tear up the roads between the two of you - this is called “defederation.” You can fly your drone over and still see and hear what’s going on in this neighboring city’s pubs, but you can’t socialize with them.
I’m sure this analogy breaks down in several ways, but it’s how I have thought of it and explained it.
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.
You know how in older games, the community runs the multiplayer servers because the original company was either shit or shut down the servers?
Reddit is like the original company. Lemmy is like the user ran servers. It’s basically the same thing as reddit, but we host it instead of them, which puts us in control over which “servers” we join, and we can choose which ones we like based on the rules.
I think the example of it working like email is the most intuitive for most people. We can all understand that @yahoo.com and @gmail.com interact with eachother despite being different service.
I would also make 1 or 2 recommendations of an instance you like because the overwhelming choice is too much for people. Imagine if you never heard of gmail or yahoo or outlook. Why choose those over @abcjoe.com? When @abcjoe.com end up sucking they’ll probably just think all email sucks.
I wrote this the other day:
Nice analogy thanks. Sure, everyone has email, but most don’t engage with it much and it doesn’t really have communities.
Well, to think of it, mailing lists of old would be similar to communities.Even though a lot of people use discord I think its better use examples like Reddit and Email since they are more well known and used.
I want to write something that sounds very simple because every post I heard of federation made it sound complicated which did stop me from trying Mastadon with the Twitter drama. But it’s really simple that even a idiot like me can quickly figure it out that it’s like talking to a next door neighbour only its a website like if Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc could choose to directly interact with each other.
For a different examples imagine Nintendo, Xbox, Sony and PC playing a cross platform on a social game.
