Works like email - Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.xxx, lemmy.whatever is just the email provider you choose. Just like picking gmail, outlook, yahoo, protonmail, etc. They can still all talk to each other, so the provider you pick doesn’t matter in that regard.

Instead of sending emails to people, I use this site to send shitposts. The underlying tech is very similar though

Very, very short explanation:

All of these are different servers which are federated, meaning people from each of the servers can interact with and view posts and users on other servers. Each server is run by independent admins. This way, if the admins of one server get greedy or turn into a-holes, you can easily switch over to a different server. Lemmy is a decentralised network so no one big corporate decision can fuck everyone over.

Is that you spez?

Got ya covered, I wrote this for folks just like you:

https://lemmy.world/post/583669

I’ll try to be brief here, but IDK… It’s a bit much to summarize without waving my hands around and saying “it’s magic”.

So, the first thing I want to explain is the idea behind federation. Federating (at least in technological terms) in the simplest way is a method to make someone’s login work somewhere else, like when you log into a website or a retailers webpage and you can either make an account with them, or “login using” then options for another site like Google or Facebook (or Twitter, or something… The list is long for what options might be there). If you make an account using your email, it’s unique to that site, but if you log in with, say, your Facebook or Google account, your access is federated. Basically the site pushes you to a Google login, you do so and approve it, and Google gives your browser a token (inside a cookie), the browser takes that token, validates it with Google, who sends key details to uniquely identify you as the person who signed in.

Your login isn’t with that site specifically, but it works for that site. You are a federated user.

Lemmy is federated among itself. While there’s a ton of “clones” (which are actually instances of Lemmy), they are all federated together, so your login to Lemmy.ml or whatever, works for getting you access to Lemmy.world, and Lemmy.ca and on and on and on.

Unless an instance is defederated, which is to remove access from non-local accounts, your login to whatever instance you signed up for, will work across all Lemmy “clones” as you say.

On top of that, there’s sync and sharing of communities among Lemmy instances, so if you want to browse a community from Lemmy.world on Lemmy.ml or something, and your .ml login is subscribed to it, then your local instance will retrieve a copy of the community from .world for you (and others in your local instance) to browse… Those communities are still on the source Lemmy instance, and when you post, your comment is replicated back to the original instance where the community lives and as long as your federated login is permitted to do so, the post will appear for other users across all federated Lemmy instances.

This is a basic tenant of decentralisation, so if one instance dies for any reason, it can be stood back up and all content can be re-replicated to it… All federated Lemmy instances can work together to make sure nothing is lost.

It’s confusing, I know but it is what it is.

TL;DR: your local Lemmy login permits you access to all federated Lemmy servers (you don’t need a login to each one you want to use), and your “home” server will facilitate any posts you make to other servers communities, and bring you the content from those servers.

Hey, welcome to the threadiverse! I’m also a newbie, whose only prior experience with this sort of site has been Reddit (as well as internet forums but they’re not quite the same type of thing), so here’s what I’ve figured out so far. (The “threadiverse” is the informal name for the realm of Reddit-like websites linked by federation.)

Apologies for another long post for you to read, but I’ll try to make this an easy read. (Feel free to tell me I suck in if you think I wrote this badly or if it was stuff you already knew.)

On Reddit, you have one site, which has a ton of subreddits, each of which is like a little forum and is independently moderated (within the limits of the larger site’s policies, of course). Lemmy and /kbin are, basically, like many little “reddits”, with a twist: they can talk to each other and so you can be a member of one “reddit” and post/comment on another. Also, subreddits are called “communities” on Lemmy and “magazines” on /kbin but they basically work the same way. You can subscribe to them and see posts from them and post to them, even if they’re on other “reddits”.

So, yes, you can have your account on lemmy.world, but also subscribe to (for example) /c/patientgamers at sh.itjust.works (which is sometimes written as !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works). Meanwhile, what if you’re also interested in the content at /c/patientgamers on lemmy.ml? Well, you can subscribe to that too! (Think of it like being subscribed to two slightly-differently-named subreddits.)

While there’s only one actual Reddit which has all the many many subreddits, in the threadiverse there are many “reddits”, each of which has some “subreddits”. There may be some duplication of more general topics, like memes, but you’ll also often find that more specialized “subreddits” are only on certain “reddits” – for example, my instance, mander.xyz, has a lot of nature and science related communities, not found on other instances. And each of those “reddits” has its own rules, and each of those “subreddits” has its own rules within the instance that hosts it. You’ll want to check each out to get a feel for the vibes in each place.

And now for the nitty gritty.

The way this all works is that you basically have two ways to see everything on the threadiverse: (1) on the site where the thing is, and (2) on your home instance. For example, you posted your message on lemmy.world. I can go to lemmy.world to read your post, but I can’t reply there, unless I have a lemmy.world account. So how am I commenting? I’m typing this reply to you on mander.xyz. That’s because I’m viewing your post on my home instance. I saw your post on the feed of another instance (acutally a /kbin instance, located at fedia.io), and I wanted to reply, so on that page, I got the link to your post ( https://lemmy.world/post/928037 ), copied it and pasted it into my own instance’s search bar, and pulled it up on my instance (Mander), and here I am, typing my reply.

Now, I did this only because my instance doesn’t already know about your post. I’m not subscribed to !reddit@lemmy.world, which is where you posted this. If I were subscribed, then your post would have appeared in my subscribed feed, on my instance, already. And I’d just view your post and type my reply just like it were a post on my own instance. I’m subscribed to !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works, so new posts there will show up on my subscribed feed.

The first thing I did when I wanted to join Lemmy was that I needed to pick an instance to join. But the second thing I did, almost concurrently, was that I started noticing all the different places that had content I wanted to see. I made a quick list of all those different communities/magazines. So once I joined, I just went and subscribed to all of them.

You can see what communities are on a given instance by clicking “communities” at the top of the page. (Or “Magazines” if you’re on a /kbin site.) So I basically just went through the communities lists of a bunch of instances, and checked out what people were posting about, and asked myself, “hey, do I wanna hang out here?”.

How do I subscribe? I go to the webpage for the community, like going to the subreddit, and I hit subscribe. What if it’s on another instance? I just take its URL, copy it, and paste it in my instance’s search bar. Wait a few seconds, then there’s a link to the community via my instance. Click subscribe. (Sometimes it’s a little buggy and have to go into a post to subscribe. Or it says “subscribe pending” after I click. But, really, I actually am subscribed, and I can tell because those posts start showing up on my subscribed feed.)

Where are my subscribed posts? I just go to my instance’s home page (mander.xyz for me, lemmy.world for you) and I can click “Subscribed”. Or “Local”, which shows posts on my instance. Or “All”, which is a feed of all the posts my instance knows about (local and remote). And I can sort them in different ways too.

The search box is surprisingly useful on fediverse platforms, I’ve found. On Lemmy and /kbin, I can copy the address of any community/magazine or post or comment and stick it in my instance’s search box. Wait a few seconds, and it’ll find it, and I click on it and do my thing. Sometimes I find posts that my instance didn’t know about at all before I pulled them up, so they’re “missing” comments that I can see on the post’s actual address, but I don’t need to see them all on my instance, I just need to pull up the one I want to reply to and post my reply. By the way, these links are that colorful little fediverse star you see beneath your posts. (On /kbin it’s in “more” -> “copy URL to fediverse”.) Everything has an address and every address is searchable, it seems.

So here’s basically how I’m using Lemmy now:

• load up mander.xyz (my homepage)
• check my notifications (which i’ll get when people reply to me)
• check my Subscribed feed, and optionally, the Local feed, or even the All feed (if I’m extra bored). anything my instance already knows about is something I can post on like it were local.
• if I want to check out extra stuff on other instances, I can easily just go to those instances and read stuff. If I want to comment/etc., I find a link from there, go back to my instance, paste it in the search box, and do my thing.

Hope this helps!

Okay, think of lemmy less like reddit, and more like a bunch of reddits that can all talk to each other. Each “instance” like lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, sopuli.xyz, is a mini reddit. They can (and likely will) have as many communities as they want, and may have duplicate communities.

As an example, there’s !sopuli.xyz/c/knives, and !lemmy.world/c/knives. Both are a community for knives and the people that like them, just like r/knives was. However, unlike reddit, two instances can have communities with the same short name of “knives”, because they’re different servers.

This is much like reddit having r/knives, r/knifeclub, r/pocketknives, and r/slipjoints. It’s actually exactly the same as that, where each community has its own mods, own rules, and requirements.

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Now, by default all of these mini reddits talk to each other. But, much like with r/the_donald, if one of these mini reddits goes crazy and starts causing trouble, it can be “banned” by other mini reddits by “defederation”,which just means that other instances decide to block the crazy one.

For individual communities, you can block those as a user.

There are instances that focus on political extremes, and they are often defederated long before we r/efugees left and came to one of them.

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As you may note, if you look at my user name, it is very simple for someone to find and access other instances from their “home” instance. This account is on sh.itjust.works.

On lemmy, you have three ways to view things. The first is “all”. This means that you scroll through and see everything posted that your home instance is connected to. This is usually a fun way to discover communities as long as you don’t mind seeing things you aren’t interested in along the way.

Depending on how you access lemmy, you can subscribe to communities with a simple click or tap on the community name. It can be a bit finicky via browser because links take you to the community on its home instance. The easiest way to fix that is to add @your home instance at the end of something. As an example, sopuli.xyz/c/knives@sh.itjust.works would take me to c/knives within my home instance, and allow me to subscribe remotely rather than having to sign up on the other instance.

In most of the apps, they take care of that for you, and you can subscribe with a tap on the c/ name in a post header, then the subscribe button (though it isn’t always in the same place in all apps). For someone brand new to lemmy, I recommend jerboa as the first app to try because it has the most fundamental functions in an easy to find way. Subscriptions and blocking are very easy to do.

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the other two ways to view lemmy are “subscibed”, and “local”. The first is going to show you only communities you’ve subscribed to. The second will show you everything from your home instance.

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To find interesting communities, there are multiple options. You can search in your app or browser (open the hamburger icon on the top right to find that function). This will pull up matches to your search term if a community matching that term has been viewed from your home instance before. Since most of the bigger instances are well linked, you’re going to have options most of the time.

There’s also https://lemmyverse.net which can help you find things fairly easy. There’s other options, but I don’t want to swamp you, and those are the two easiest.

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So, it isn’t as hard as it looks. The functionality is similar enough to reddit overall, and the learning curve isn’t any heavier than starting to use reddit was (I remember fucking up many a time back 13 or so years ago lol, catching bans because I didn’t understand things, etc).

What’s more, unlike reddit, most people here will help you without picking on you. There’s trolls here too, but less of them, and they tend to not do well.

The differences you’re seeing and thinking are a disadvantage compared to reddit really aren’t. With lemmy being decentralized and federated, what happened at reddit can’t destroy lemmy. The worst that can happen is individual instances closing or being assholes enough to need defederated. You may lose an account, but it’s trivial to find another instance. Seriously, because of the way reddit acted, I decided not to put al my eggs in one basket. I have accounts at all of the major instances, and some minor ones (though not under this name).

Individual instances have different signup requirements, but the first night I applied to one of the more restricted ones that require manual approval to activate the account for use, I was able to post and use the account within hours. Some instances take longer, but not more than a day or so, and it’s usually the smaller ones run by a small team.

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moderation is as broad as reddit is/was. Each instance has its own rules, which communities and users must abide by while using them. Each community can expand on those as needed.

Just like reddit, in other words.

Generally though, as long as you aren’t being abusive, trolling heavily, or espousing extremist actions, you aren’t going to run into much trouble. Even the most restrictive instances don’t boot you just for cursing or being emotional. You’ll almost always be warned and guided to the rules rather than banned for a first offense.

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Which instance you make your home instance is mostly unimportant. Since (currently) there’s only a small handful of instances that are defederated almost universally, you can access most of lemmy from any of the rest. You’d want to avoid lemmygrad and burggit.moe (the first is heavily political and in a bad way, the second allows what is called “loli” erotic art, which isn’t something most folks want to associate with).

Beehaw.org has defederated more than most, and has much tighter restrictions overall, so as a home instance, it has limitations. But it’s a very friendly instance with a curated community list, so it’s also a great place to get your feet wet if they approve your application to join.

There’s no real advantage or disadvantage to being on a smaller or larger instance for your home overall. The one you’re posting from is just fine tbh. I wouldn’t try switching or adding to that until you’ve gotten used to things a bit more.

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For real, lemmy is way easier that it looks coming from reddit. Reddit has the benefit of being more established, and centralized in that regard. But driving into reddit as a new user isn’t much easier at all.

Welcome to the fediverse, my r/efugee homie :). It’s nice here, and there’s so much fun to be had

I would suggest reading this FAQ that’s been put together.

https://lemmy.world/post/37906

Also, just subscribe to https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyworld to keep up to date on this instance.

Unlike Reddit, which is a monolith with many subreddits run by volunteer mods, Lemmy is federated. That is, volunteers run their own servers which then are joined to the fediverse and can populate their own communities onto other instances/servers. Each instance/server can run as many or as few communities as the owner decides. Once a server/instance is fully federated, you can subscribe to communities on other instances from your own. The easiest way to subscribe to communities on other instances is to just click on the “Communities” link at the top of this page, and select “All”.

Each instance/server can have its own policies as to what is acceptable. We have an instance that is specifically for NSFW content, https://lemmynsfw.com/. That makes it much easier to limit what your kids can or cannot see. Currently, we have an instance, beehaw, that is described as a walled garden with high-quality content. The volunteers are overwhelmed with all the redittors showing up and have decided to temporarily de-federate. That is, although you can see their communities and posts from elsewhere, they cannot see yours. We are hoping this will be temporary.

This is actually an excellent feature of Lemmy. It allows instance owners, hopefully with advice from their users, to disconnect certain kinds of content. To see which instances a particular instance is connected/disconnected to/from just add “/instances” to the end of the server name. For this instance, that would be:

https://lemmy.world/instances

Having multiple instances/servers can lead to duplicate communities being created on several servers/instances. Eventually, the smaller copies will probably drop away. Here is the current list of communities in the fediverse, sorted by popularity:

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

First please don’t ban me I’m new.

That would be a silly reason to ban you for dont worry your good. ^^

lemmy.world, lemmy.ml , lemmy.xxx, lemmy.whatever, etct… + hundreds of clones. Is each of these a Reddit by itself containing many subreddits inside it?

Sort of but it is all connected so if you view all you will be able to see all the lemmy.insertname that are connected kind of like /r/all but it includes other lemmy sites. (Think of it like crossplay between playstation and Xbox if that helps.)

Does that mean if someone in lemmy.xxx/c/jokes posted something interesting that I wont even see it because I’m signed up in lemmy.yyy/c/jokes ? It will still appear in (all) regardless but you can also search in (local) if you want that specific version of /c/jokes

That is quite a weakness of lemmy compared to reddit. Can I post on lemmy.yyy if I signed up for lemmy.xxx or do I have to sign up for each of them? No you can view and comment on other instances

Which one should I sign up for? Any is fine though Personally I chose Lemmy world and kbin social.

How can I see all lemmy posts in one place? I can’t believe no one has found a solution to this yet and just let hundreds of clones post repeated things. Also how is each moderated? Is lemmy.yyy moderated by sensitive snowflakes who ban anyone who cusses or offends anyone, while lemmy.xxx is ran by racist nazis? How does this work? Instances can block other instances aka defederating think of it as one country putting an embargo on another. For example we have defederated from a maga instance and a tankie instance.

I hope this helps you understand a bit better. https://mastodon.online/@binoctdechex/110538120775065728