this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I'm quite lost, and don't think I fully understand the distributed nature of the various Lemmy instances (if I'm even using those words properly).
I'll do it like Reddit 10 years ago... wander in, poke around, make a snarky comment or 4 and see where it goes.
I was a bit confused about the place at first too. Here's a comment I copy-pasted from a previous post of mine:
My friend gave me a great explanation:
Lemmy the platform is planet Earth
“Instances” like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth
When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country
If you register at lemmy.world, that means your home instance/ “home country” is lemmy.world, but you can “travel” to lemmy.ml, another instance / “country”, to check out and subscribe to their community
When you subscribe to a different instance that’s not your home instance, you can still participate in their content, and other people will be able to see which instance / “country” you’re from
Each instance can have its own version of the same “subreddit”, so you can have a c/Memes in your home instance that is different from a c/Memes in another instance. But you can subscribe to both separately
c/[community name] is the naming convention used here I think like r/[subreddit name] on Reddit. If talking about a community in a different instance, it's c/[community name]@[instance name] so like c/[email protected]
Donations will help with the cost of running lemmy.world only and not lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.
Someone please correct any of this if any of it is wrong, I’ll happily edit
Hope it helps even a little
Very helpful. I had a longer response typed out but lost it by clicking "next" instead of reply so I'll try to paraphrase. Is there a way to see a listing of instances and their size?
Not sure I get having communities spread across instances, seems like it would be rife for duplication and too spread apart but perhaps that's just the whole "fediverse" concept if I'm understanding that properly.
I created https://lemmy.world/c/paramore but I'm going to hold off on any other community creation until I understand things better and I'm confident I've found my home "country."
This is the only one I know of at the moment, though I'm still relatively new as well so there might be a better link for a list of instances and their sizes. Based on some posts I've read here, lemmy.ml has the most users, with lemmy.world at about half of lemmy.ml's and beehaw.org at about a third.
Also, yeah, I think we're on the same boat when it comes to why different communities are spread out. From what I've observed, "duplicate" communities in separate instances seem to all have their own "flavor" of that particular community. Taking the meme communities as an example, sh.itjust.works' memes have a bit of a French-Canadian flare to them, lemmygrad.ml's memes are made with a hammer and sickle, lemmy.world has more of that "general everyday memes" feel, etc.
On Reddit, it used to be r/memes -> r/memes, but here it seems like it's the opposite, like c/ -> c/memes. It's like having pizza in New York vs Italy -- they're both pizza but each country has its own twist to it.
I subbed to your community btw as I love me some Paramore myself. Hope to see everything work out easily for your community!
Thanks my dude! More helpful info.
As for the communities, makes me think like more back to message board driven web times, where yeah you could have a dozen Star Wars fan forums but each with their own flavor and eventually you'd find the one that's your own vibe. I did that and dove head first into a few specific places for retro video games (8/16 bit) and some other niche interests like a specific car model, etc.
There's an upside to it. I hope this approach gains traction, certainly has seen an injection of life from people jumping ship. But I imagine Reddit will keep plodding along in a week or two as there were a staggering amount of people who had a hard time even understanding why people would leave. Hope the blackout helps.