Ask Lemmy

Something I haven't seen people talk about is the nature of the fediverse in terms of the philosophy of separate instances.

There are a lot of "general" instances that are kind of like mini-reddits. Lots of users sign up from all over, communities for a wide variety of interests. But there are also instances with a specific focus.

For example, I'm a member of midwest.social so when I look at the "local" feed, I only get communities relating to the US midwest. But of course, I can still subscribe and interact with other communities on federated insances.

Think of it like email. You can sign up for the big general purpose emails (google, outlook, icloud, etc). But you might want something different, perhaps privacy focused like Proton or Tuta. Or you can have an "instance" for your work where everyone gets an @company.com email. Or maybe you just want to spin up your own email with a vanity domain.

No matter which email server you use, you can still communicate with people on separate servers.

You don't have to stick with the first account you create. In fact, I'd recommend that you try a few instances before you settle on one.

Beyond separate instances, there are also alternatives to Lemmy that are very similar but do some things differently. Mbin, Kbin, and Piefed are examples. And again, thanks to federation standards and everything being built to be compatible, you can subscribe to a Lemmy community from Mbin and vice versa.

Well, you got THIS far, so you're doing a pretty good job understanding it so far.

Lemmy is made by communists for all of us. Don't be a dick, remember the human, but be careful about the communists, a few of them are in this to cause a war that they think they'll win.

Other than that, Lemmy and piefed are truly international, and you're going to encounter a lot of diverse, real cross culture perspectives. A LOT of people REALLY FUCKING HATE AMERICANS. Like, REAAALLLLLY hate us... If you aren't American, this is redundant, if you are American, don't let them get to you because there are good people out there too that understand that everywhere is a mix and the entire point of talking online is to learn to accept each other and try to live together better.

Other than that, there's a ton of nuance, a fuck ton of infighting, and you'll just have to learn all of this as you go. Don't be afraid to be different. Reddit was all about fitting in, this place is all about being true to yourself in an international space that isn't corporate. I think it could shift that way, at some point, but due to the nature of how instances work, you won't ever truly be banned unless you don't fit in with your instance, in which you should probably change, anyway. Yourself or your instance, that is.

I dunno. Go wild. See what feels good. Pour one out for Sir Patrick Stewart, complain about Russians to Russians, complain about Americans to Americans, complain at the Chinese to the Chinese, air your grievances about a semi united kingdom, hornypost, drink milk, talk about how you like holding your phone while you poop, learn about open source software from the .ml users (those are communists), the gay stuff from my instance (those are the gays... Actually, there's a LOT of gays on lemmy, not just us), try to remember which version of which community is which, or even start your own community and be a moderator of something neat just because you can.

Most mods on here are still used to the Reddit way, but are doing their best to not be. Everybody's got strong opinions, some even have strong opinions about not having strong opinions!

Poopoo peepee kaka doodoo fuckfuck speckin ze deutsch at yo mama yahear?

Me too. I don't know exactly how this works either. However I never had a Reddit account.

Add a zero to the upvote number, that makes it correspond to what you're used to on Reddit as far as vote count goes. So, ATM, you're at 1620 updoots, in equivalent popularity. This helps when you first start, but you'll get used to it pretty quickly.

Be free

It's way more chill over here. You might get into a heated debate every once in a while but even when you're in one it doesn't feel like it's the end of the world.

hello 👋