How would you explain to a new user how Lemmy works?

Maniac@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 25 points –

I plan on making two videos, one where I explain how Lemmy works and then how to post in a community. I'm going to do my own research but is there any points you want to give to a new user?

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Stress the fact that federation isnt a new or confusing concept. They already engage with federated services without realizing it. Stuff like email, dns, Usenet, etc are all “federated” they just haven’t been described that way because they existed before that term was used to describe it.

It's like reddit but the reddit part works like email. You can get emails from yahoo.com on your gmail, just like you can interact with users and communities hosted on different instances.

This is what I used with my more technically friends and family. I think its really intuitive with the community/magazine url format <community>@<domain>.

The best explanation I’ve seen, for gamers, is tha reddit is like Xbox live. Lemmy is PlayStation and kbin is pc (or however). And kbin and lemmy have cross play enabled so you can play together.

Or you can sub Reddit for mastodon etc.

I am a new user. To me it felt a bit like signing up with an ISP. There's a list you can choose from, rather than there just being a single reddit.

Once you sign up with an ISP, you can go anywhere on the Internet. Similarly, once you sign up with an instance, you can go anywhere in the fediverse.

Unlike an ISP, there are no costs or fees involved in signing up, though you are more than welcome to help fund the upkeep of an instance through donations. Unlike reddit, lemmy is not a profit-driven operation trying to serve you ads all the time.

In terms of choosing an instance, bigger is not necessarily better. Personally, I went with the medium-sized lemmy.ca as I am Canadian and it seemed to make sense, and have since learned that some of the bigger instances are struggling to keep up with surging demand as people seek alternatives to reddit.

Once you have an account, you can go into Communities, click on the All tab (which lets you see the whole fediverse), and start searching for and subscribing to whatever interests you. Communities are similar to subreddits, and there's a good chance you will even find one with the same name.

Phone providers are also an good example. My phone on provider A can send and receive calls from providers A B and C.

Other than Countries, size and content (I've seen general purpose, or NSFW) what are some other reasons to choose a certain instance? I don't want to make it a heavy point in the script but I do want to mention it.

I don't think there is much concrete, but here are some things that it effects.

  1. Performance. You view almost everything via your instance. So picking one running with capable hardware and ideally close to you (network wise) will give you a better experience.
  2. Reliability. If your instance goes down you are basically offline. This can be hard to predict for the future.
  3. Trust. Your identity is "owned" by the instance. So if they wanted they can impersonate you. This can also be very hard to gauge.
  4. Longevity. If your instance shuts down it will be quite inconvenient and your identity will be lost, so you may want to try to predict which instances are likely to last.

Content is actually not really on my list since you can subscribe to any communities from any instance. It is true that the instance can provide some content discovery purpose via the local and known communities page but I would argue that separate service which track communities across all instance are better for this purpose.

I would lean hard into the ux being work in progress. Also as instances / communities mature I would expect the specifics on what federation means and the technology behind it will be less relevant to the average user.

Yep. I told a friend of mine "the federation just works, its the user interface and apps that need work".

Mastodon is in a really good place nowadays where you don't even notice you're browsing across multiple instances. Lemmy is pretty close, too, as long as people know to use relative links and the instance you're on is pretty well federated already so you don't get too many 404 from trying to open places your instance doesn't know about yet.

yep, lemmy.ca was like this when i first started browsing (the 404s) but the more everyone uses it, the better the site gets

Yeah, as it gets more and more interconnected, all the links and UI start working more and more. Hopefully soon, lemmy will get the feature of just automatically converting community names in the !name@instan.ce format into working links, the way writing r/subreddit or u/user did on reddit.

A Friendica user told me in a comment that they already have that.

Would it be better to refer to servers as "websites"?

Users can make their own website or instance, there you can choose one to look through. It doesn’t matter where you choose to go since you can view all communities that are in the Lemmy network no matter what website they’re from.

I mean they do have their own domain, but each one is viewable from the other ones, so it seems like a bad comparison there. It kind of reminds me of RSS feeds.

Instead of visiting the Mall of America and shopping at only what the mall will offer, using outdated infrastructure-- you can instead visit a variety of towns ("instances") which each host their own cute boutiques ("communities") specializing in a particular sort of item (whatever the topic of the community is). The instances can have their own rules that apply to its communities, but communities can also make their own rules, like a shop can. Skip the crowds and barely functional Supermall experience and find a better place to engage in discussion and get information.

I think the example of it working like email is the most intuitive for most people. We can all understand that @yahoo.com and @gmail.com interact with eachother despite being different service.

I would also make 1 or 2 recommendations of an instance you like because the overwhelming choice is too much for people. Imagine if you never heard of gmail or yahoo or outlook. Why choose those over @abcjoe.com? When @abcjoe.com end up sucking they'll probably just think all email sucks.

I'd compare it to email. You can have a Gmail account but you can still email people on Yahoo Mail or Outlook.

This article is about mastadon instead of lemmy, but that doesnt really matter: https://ianbetteridge.com/2023/06/21/meta-and-mastodon-whats-really-on-peoples-minds/

I especially like this bit:

Mastodon is not a social network, which is where I think John and Dare start from. It’s a set of communities which may, or may not, choose to connect to each other. Those relationships are based on shared values and trust: my instance connects to yours because I trust you to moderate effectively, not allow spam, or whatever other ground rules we can agree on. Some communities choose to apply this loosely, and some more strictly (some communities, for example, won’t federate with others who don’t have the same expectations around moderation for everyone they federate with).

not a social network

Beehaw.org wants to be your friend federate

[Confirm] [Ignore] [Block]

You are now friends federated with Beehaw.org!

Just sign up for kbin and spend a couple of days on All.

I want to write something that sounds very simple because every post I heard of federation made it sound complicated which did stop me from trying Mastadon with the Twitter drama. But it's really simple that even a idiot like me can quickly figure it out that it's like talking to a next door neighbour only its a website like if Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc could choose to directly interact with each other.

For a different examples imagine Nintendo, Xbox, Sony and PC playing a cross platform on a social game.

Thank you guys for your input. I pretty much made the script and soon ill record and edit the video.