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It’s just a bunch of reddits all whispering in each others ears
Hey sh.itjust.works, tell feddit.uk to leave this comment and upvote
Sh.itjust.works: “Hey feddit.uk, starman2112@sh.itjust.works said to leave this comment and upvote”
Feddit.uk: “Hey lemmy.zip, starman2112@sh.itjust.works left this comment”
Lemmy.zip: “Hey Blaze, starman2112@sh.itjust.works left a comment”
And then all the federated instances get on the group chat and update the vote counter
Edit: I didn’t even realize I was commenting on feddit.uk lmao this game of telephone is wild
Good.
The barrier to entry is a feature! All those fools on FB and Reddit are there because they’re told there’s no friction. It’s the internet version of Wal-Mart. Anyone can find their way in.
I want to hang with people who are at least smart enough to tie their shoes sign up for a Costco membership. It’s a LOW barrier to entry, and that’s more than enough.
Seems like a sound though-process
The barrier to entry is a feature!
What? No it isn’t. Any individual instance is as simple to navigate as Reddit. The federation aspect is still in an early stage of development and implementation.
Twenty years ago, Reddit was in a similar state. It took a long time and a lot of effort to improve the system enough to be easily navigated and searchable (and then more time to mangle these features in the name of monetization).
But the idea that federated instances being difficult to traverse and filter against are intentional is utterly bogus.
I want to hang with people who are at least smart enough to tie their shoes
If you’re not navigating Lemmy via VIM, you are literally a baby who shits himself and needs someone to change his diaper.
Wow. You’re very much not understanding - I’m definitely not saying it’s intentional. It’s a take on the “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” notion.
I’m saying that signing up for Lemmy not being as one-size-fits-all intuitive as Web 2.0 social media is a net benefit because anyone who tries to sign up, gets confused SO easily, and then frustrated and gives up is not the kind of person we want taking up server space on a Lemmy instance.
I’m saying that signing up for Lemmy not being as one-size-fits-all intuitive as Web 2.0 social media is a net benefit
If you hate intuitive interfaces, you wouldn’t be on a Reddit clone to begin with.
I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about people who can’t manage the difference. I love Lemmy to death because it’s free of the mouth breathers.
Lemmy isn’t too hard, it’s just annoying at times. Like when your instance hasn’t downloaded the content of a given community and it just looks empty until you subscribe to it.
Wow, so that’s how it works. I signed up to a couple because they interested me and hoped in the future something would be posted, or I would, and then saw a heap of posts.
It wasn’t dark magic after all. Perhaps it was psionics?
If one user of your instance is subscribed to a community on another instance, then that community is visible on that instance as well.
I’m kinda in this boat right now too hahah
Any questions we could answer for you?
I would appreciate it if you could explain how I browse instances. I am using Voyager on iOS, not sure if that’s relevant, and I was trying to search for hexbear since people keep talking about it. Nothing comes up.
Then I tried searching for lemmy.ca, but it didn’t appear as something I could go through and browse, just a few of the communities there showing up in search results. What am I doing wrong? Or misunderstanding…
Heh, I read your comment using Voyager on Android. Yeah, makes it easier for me to check how things are done on your phone that we happen to have the same telephone client app.
Probably the easiest way to grasp these things is to browse Lemmy on a full-fledged computer. Voyager can do everything the interface made by Lemmy’s developers can do. (Plus, Voyager has a sensible way of reading your own private messages, while I have no idea how to return to them on the “official” web interface)
Since a phone has a cramped screen, all kinds of hocus-pocus needs to be done to fit the same features on the small screen. So, use it on a big screen of a computer and you’ll get things much better. So, here goes:Now, open a web browser, write “lemmy.world” on the address bar and then click “Login” in the upper right corner. Write “buttnugget” in the field “Email or Username” and your password in, well, wherever you feel it would fit well.
Now you’re logged in in the same instance you always use with Voyager.
Press “Local” here, and you will see content only on communities hosted on lemmy.world:
And then do some more browsing around Lemmy.world, just like you’d do with your phone.
Next, write some other instance’s address on your browser’s URL field. I’m using Sopuli, so that’s one option: Try writing sopuli.xyz as the address. You can try logging in again, bit it won’t work, because you don’t have a user account on sopuli.xyz.
So, go back to Sopuli’s main page and click “Local”. You’ll see only content hosted on sopuli.xyz. Having browsed those enough, click “Communities” on the upper part of the screen, here:
…and then make sure you have “Local” chosen. Choose any community you reasonably like and click on its name. On the upper right corner, press Subscribe, here:
Clicking that button gives you a dialogue asking “Enter the instance you would like to follow this community from”. Write the address of your own instance there, in your case lemmy.world. Sopuli will then tell .world that you’d like to subscribe to that community, and lemmy.world will handle the rest of the subscribing. So, even though you’re browsing a completely different instance, you can still also subscribe to communities there.
But alas… Some instances use a theme that has no “Subscribe” button. Which is weird. Try for example suppo.fi . Still, there’s something you can do: If you see anything interesting on any other instance, just copy the address from the URL bar, then go to your own instance (lemmy.world), click the search button here:
…and then paste the URL here and press [Search]:
You could also try feddit.org to see how the biggest German-speaking Lemmy instance looks like when you press “Local”. Or lemmy.pt to see something in Portuguese :))
But now, let’s get to answering the original question: I do not think Voyager has a feature for viewing the content of one single instance only, unless you create a user account there. And that’s a bit cumbersome. What you can do is open the web browser on your phone, then open some instance on its browser and either click the subscribe button if it exists on that instance’s theme, or copypaste the URL of the interesting thing to the search of lemmy.world, again using your phone’s browser. On lemmy.world you’ll need to click the hamburger menu on the upper right corner in order to find the login button:
Of course, if you want to subscribe to things with your own account, you need to be logged in :) Whatever you subscribe to with any browser will then immediately be visible on Voyager as well, as it’s just another interface for the same Lemmy.What you can, however, do on Voyager, is press “Posts” on the lower part of your screen (sometimes you need to press it several times):
And then click “All” here:
That will show you content regardless of what instance it was published on. But, as you remember from having browsed the various instances on your web browser, there’s a lot of content you cannot see in that view. But, what you can indeed do is open the interesting instances on your phone’s browser (or your computer’s browser), browse the communities there, and subscribe to whatever you find interesting. Remember, you’ll only need to do this once, because once you’ve found the communities you find interesting and subscribed to them, they’ll be visible on Voyager just fine :) If for whatever reason you want to have user accounts on several communities at once, Voyager does support that. Once you’ve created a user account on some instance, you can add it to Voyager.
And to close this short textlet:
You can see a short list of the biggest instances here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances .
And a full list of all 597 lemmy instances here: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list .I will read this tomorrow. Holy crap. Thanks so much for taking the time!
Human’s gotta do what human’s gotta do :)
Just finished reading it. Thanks so much!!
I followed reddit sync over to lemmy. I didn’t know how anything works but my experience has been roughly the same as it was with Reddit. I like the discussion here more though.
Exactly the same. And I still don’t know anything about this place after 2 years. At least here I bothered to create a profile unlike reddit where I was just browsing and never posting anything
My account was shut down without notice a few weeks ago. The server providing my account shut down. All comments, saved links and history was gone.
How do you explain this to a non-technical user while reassuring that this is a great system?
“you know how when a corner shop closes in town, you’re still able to go to a different store, but if safeway has driven all the other stores out of business and then shuts down you’ll fucking starve to death?”
A little pain in exchange for longtime gain?
Oh no, TIL that the Fediverse is “exercise” - no wonder most Westerners avoid us! 🤪
“Choose an instance that provides monthly reports, including finances, such as !home@lemmy.zip”
Hypothetical response:
“Sure, that’s an option, but no other social media I use requires a routinely read regarding whether I need to backup my saved items because it might shut down.”
Let me just be clear that I personally don’t have a problem with how lemmy runs, but I do think that difficulties and issues are heavily downplayed for potential users.
As someone said in another comment “you know how when a corner shop closes in town, you’re still able to go to a different store, but if safeway has driven all the other stores out of business and then shuts down you’ll fucking starve to death?”
Yep. It’s a good analogy. I’m not sure that this is the kind of argument which will get sceptics aboard, but I like it.
It’s crazy to me that whatever program you used to make that account on that server didn’t automatically force a backup location on the same device where the account is used. On Android, some folder. On desktop, some folder. And it’s crazy to me that we can’t just import all of our votes, comments, and posts in that backup to another account on the same device or another.
That is a terrible system. No answers from me. Just questions
Doing that requires content addressing. It’s what atproto is built around (bluesky’s protocol) but nobody’s made a proper forum variant of it yet
deleted by creator
Don’t be vain. Cast your shit into the void and let it go.
I actually saw an ad for Lemmy on reddit and here I am. Figuring out enough to make an account was worth it. They should do more ads… or maybe not. We don’t want too many of them coming here. Im still trying to cleanse my brain of the juice I drank.
Tbf you are dependent on all because most channels are dead/very slow.
It is complicated, and I like a little barrier to entry.
It’s like needing to know the password before being let into the treehouse.
“Fuck spez!”
“Yes, yes, come in, come in!!”
Yes me too, try PeerTube it is even more complicated.
Oh man it really is too. I spent the better part of a day trying to find a good instance to join to post and I couldn’t figure out the various keywords and stuff; every time I thought I found a fit it was basically the opposite of what I needed. Then I gave up and stopped even wanting to do it.
Yeah I join two neither are great. And unlike here you can’t see anything outside your instance. Guess I will keep posting to YouTube until they get their shit together.
All I want is keep scrolling new funny. Lemmy gives me that.
I have to say this is my experience too. I’m a boomer and whatever stumble upon here is purely coincidental.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Type a word for something you might be interested in, and if there’s a community it should come up there. The main problem is still that the fediverse doesn’t have enough people to support niche (or even kinda niche) interests yet
3 legged dung beetle jump racing isn’t niche!
But you are here all the same. We appreciate you!
Lemmy isn’t hard, it’s just different
It’s not even that different really.
It’s literally just reddit but a bunch of them
I still don’t fully understand what Fediverse and instance means.
The Fediverse is like a country, and an instance is like a town connected to the other towns in that country. You’re free to travel, visit, and interact with people in all the other towns that have their roads connected.
Each town has its own rules and culture, but they generally get along with all the other towns in the country. You can even choose to build your own town with your own rules and have a road connected to the rest.
On the other hand places like Facebook or Twitter are like huge, walled cities where you can only interact with people inside that city. They also claim the rights to all of your data to sell off.
I love great analogies.
Fediverse is like a country
I might even go one level up. The Fedeverse is like a network of connected countries like the EU.
Platforms like Reddit or Twitter are isolated countries like North Korea.
I’m glad I found my way out.
You’re right. Bringing it up to the country level instead of towns probably fits better.
Nice analogy, I might repost this to !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Fediverse = universe of federated instances.
Federation = many entities connected together and interoperating, etc
Instance: every individual Lemmy site with its own domain name runs an instance (a running copy of the software) on its server.
Those servers are talking to each other so users on one can talk to users on another server. That’s federation.
Cool, kinda makes sense. Still don’t understand what the federated / defederated stuff that was all the talk yesterday. But I got a slightly more nuanced understanding. Thanks homie
An instance is literally just someone’s computer with the software running. All your stuff lives on someone’s computer. Different computers can talk to one another to allow people who put their stuff on those computers to see each other’s stuff (federate) or they decide not to, like cutting off a computer with a lot of batshit insane people (defederate). They’re running the same software so the language is the same. Like your stuff lives on lemmy.today, I don’t know where and who owns that computer, while my stuff lives on sopuli.xyz, which is a computer that is owned by some random Finn, but those computers talk to one another, so we get to talk to one another.
You mean like a server? I hope it’s not just Joe blows laptop with a cracked screen and bulging battery.
So federated is basically “you’re allowed to post shit” within this list of other server?
If that’s it then thank you, it makes a lot more sense now.
A server isn’t necessarily all that meaningfully different from Joe’s laptop, it’s just that Joe’s laptop isn’t exactly practical for running big things. My website runs on a real server, but it doesn’t really act much different from a computer I have in my living room when I remotely log into it, I can access all the same files, run all the same software if I wanted to.
Federated is just jargon for “the posts and comments from here will display over there too because my computer knows yours exists and runs the same software and the software does the legwork of meshing all of that shit together with mine”
Yes, “instance” is the word used on Lemmy for what is usually called “server” elsewhere.
yeah, the ui is a total ass, but its fun
Dude it’s 2025 is that good ass or bad ass
Good ass. It’s not perfect but it respects your boundaries, tries its damnedest, down for any fetish/kink, there when you fall asleep and when you wake up.
The Reddit UI is so good though. I love browsing an album and accidentally sliding over to r/popular. Why can’t Lemmy ask me to confirm my email account every time I try to look at porn?
App UI peaked at RIF
hell yeah it did.
Which ui? The slrn style ncurses client that I don’t know if it exists or something else?
As long as you can clear the single minor technical barrier to entry you’re welcome here. It may be the lowest of hurdles, but Reddit threw all their hurdles away a while ago and just let anyone capable of moving forward on a flat surface in.
And bots. Don’t forget the bots
Most bots meet that criteria.
