This question is especially for people who have joined in the last week. Have you used other fediverse platforms or is this your first time really using one? What do you think of it so far? Are you aware that you can comment on Lemmy posts with a Mastodon account?
Yes it is the first time. I’m liking it. I’ve never tried Mastodon as I was never into Twitter and the two seemed similar.
I think that Reddit style forums are better suited for the fediverse anyway. Reminds me of the old internet of IRC/Usenet and eventually vBulletin/Xenforo days when I was growing up.
Twitter and by extension Mastadon I think suffers from smaller communities since the point of those apps is to blast your thoughts and opinions to as many people as possible while Reddit/Lemmy is more for conversation.
Lemmy is my first
I love the idea, I hope it grows in popularity
I wasn’t aware of that when I first signed up, but a few days in I learned that
This is my first venture into the fediverse. Confusing at first, but all the guides are helpful. I’m still unsure how to subscribe to communities I’m interested in
I think you just search the community name, if it is on your instance it will show up as community name otherwise it will show up as
<community name>@<instance name>likegaming@lemmy.ml.But in your instance or not, it will not make a difference for your experience, all you need to do is click subscribe, and it will show up in your feed.
I only see a subscribe button when I am browsing the list of communities, but if I search for a specific community I do not see any way to subscribe
Yes, it is. And I literally have no idea what I’m doing or what the fediverse is or how to best utilize it and I have a mastodon account but don’t use it because all of this fediverse/instance stuff stresses me out and I just want a cool community to feel like I’m a part of, not a bunch of stuff I don’t understand and I hope I can feel comfortable here with Lemmy. Oof.
Imagine there were multiple reddit websites. Reddit.com, reddit.org, reddit.social, etc. Doesn’t matter what account you have, you can see communities/subreddits across anyone of them.
That’s Lemmy.
When you make a lemmy account, it’s more like an email address. You are evolone@lemmy.ml, I am cosmicsploogedrizzle@lemmy.ml. Someone else is joeblow@beehaw.org. We can all chat and post and have a good time no matter what website/instance we post to.
That’s how users work on lemmy. Just like email. Communities on lemmy work the exact same way as users.
If all you’re interested in is that, then you can stop there and fully enjoy your time with lemmy as a reddit replacement.
The future potential and complexity comes from the next part:
The fediverse is someone said, "hey, you know how people on reddit can’t follow people on Twitter, or people on YouTube can’t subscribe to subreddits, or people on Instagram can’t leave YouTube comments? Well let’s make it so you can.
Now this isn’t perfectly implemented at the moment, and there are a lot of growing pains (it’s kinda like the wild wild West), but you can make a mastodon account (like Twitter), and follow the this lemmy community !asklemmy@lemmy.ml on it, and you’ll see all the posts and all the comments that you would otherwise see on lemmy, just in a twitter-like format.
It’s not perfect and compatibility across these decentealized apps is not perfectly impremented atm, but in the future you could theoretically have one giant interconnected web where everything from “Twitter” to “reddit” to “YouTube” to “Instagram” to whatever fediverse equivalent app are all interwoven. And if any instance of them gets a big enough head to pull something like reddit is pulling, or what Twitter has been pulling, the community can just make a new “email” on a different instance/website and continue as of nothing changed. No single website/instance can abuse their power, because another instance can be spun up any time.
