Welcome to Lemmy. Here is your free Lemming:
Go wild!
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
Welcome to Lemmy. Here is your free Lemming:
Go wild!
I would discourage telling everyone to go to Lemmy.World as not only could it overload the server, the centralisation problem starts all over again.
The vast majority of instances are federated to all the big ones anyway, so I would recommend looking around to see if there are any instances that better fit your wants before going straight Lemmy.World. You won't lose anything from it, and you'll be supporting the wider fediverse.
Spread out communities makes it easier to avoid a single admin deciding to go crazy. Like imagine if Reddit had been composed of different instances, so people were able to just pack up and leave the instance he was on and not lose all their communities by quitting the Spez reddit instance. So you make a good point. Maybe over time there will be topic based instances popping up like an instance for entertainment, and an instance for games. Which would be pretty cool over a swiss army knife do everything approach instance where everyone starts migrating communities too because it has the largest user base.
Hmm I feel like I've seen this before 🤔
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.
I thought I was getting the hang of this until I read your comment and learned about all these cool technologies in the fediverse. Thank you, I found this super helpful.
Do I need to setup accounts for these other ones like mastodon, pixelfed?
No problem :)
It really depends on your intention...if you intend to just interact with (for example) Mastodon users that appear occasionally in the Lemmy communities you're a part of then there's no need at all. Or if you want to communicate occasionally with a Mastodon (or any other type of software) user then you could use their Mastodon handle to do so - for example go to the Search box on your Lemmy instance and type in @Mastodon@mastodon.social (which is the 'official' Mastodon account on the mastodon.social server but it can be any handle) wait for a few seconds (or longer depending on the speed of the server) and the user account with the ability to private message them appears. There are currently some issues but it used to be possible to post directly to a Mastodon user's timeline from Lemmy. Mastodon users can post to Lemmy. It's worth remembering that Mastodon is a LOT more mature as a product than Lemmy, which is still in its infancy.
For now, at least, Id say if you're looking to spend a lot of time on each different software type then register an account at an instance of it. The integration will come, but the fediverse is young, Lemmy in particular is very young so it'll take time.
I really appreciate this comment. So many of us are still trying to learn exactly how this all works, so it’s very helpful for people like me. Here’s a cool wallpaper