Lemmy is confusing and poorly limited. How does Lemmy work? Why are there so many Lemmy clones? Do I have to sign up for each of them? Does my post show on each of them?

DrNeurohax, 10 months ago

You didn't have to say you're new - the fact that you thought you could get banned for that post screams it! That's the good ole Reddit PTSD. Folks are more chill and friendly here. Also, maybe 5 people fully understand the system, so we're all learning.

One little bug that I think makes this whole situation more confusing is that not interacting with a thread for long enough (opening several tabs, walking away while ready comments, etc.), your browser could stop updating the state of the page. When you go to subscribe or comment or vote, you get hit with one of two errors. I had assumed that was part of this whole who-can-talk-to-who fediverse confusion. It's not. It's just a bug you can get around by refreshing the page.

As for combining posts, that's something in the works, but there's no karma and most people I've come across don't give two shits about the various bugged equivalents. If you're going to submit a post, check to see if it's already already being talked about on another instance. There's no etiquette for how to handle that yet, so I think it might make sense to just post a link to the federated post that that people in that subscribed magazine/community get directed to the larger discussion. Or maybe do this and say you want to talk about some specific aspect more.

And yes, there's lots under construction here, but nobody was prepared for this deluge. Seriously, from ~3,500 users between kbin and lemmy to ~2 million now. We know that the devs are hard at work, so it isn't like it's an abandoned project. But, I'll take this community over Reddit's any day.

datavoid, 10 months ago

Probably 2 million accounts, not 2 million users

atocci, 10 months ago

Account numbers are a bad metric due to bot account creation spam on bot instances. 116,000 active users, 2 million bots. Thankfully the bots have been mostly reduced to their own little defederated corner of lemmy at this point it seems.

DrNeurohax, 10 months ago

Very true, but I've been pretty active here for that period and I've been 3 spurts of bot comments. Nothing lasting more than a few minutes. Of course, trolls could be just spam-registering accounts to use later.

But, my point was about server load and challenges getting the service running and stable, so it doesn't matter much. Those accounts and spam posts stress the system as much, if not more then, regular users.

Another factor I'd be interested in numbers for is the number of users registering on multiple instances while figuring out how this all works. I know I have 4 or 5.

answersplease77, 10 months ago

Thank you. Yes it’s the future trust me. I’m loving every aspect of lemmy the more I’m learning about it. I already cannot go back to reddit power tripping mods and censorship. Now I understand how the fedverses are and 100% agree that’s how things should be. I think it’s the future of the internet. The internet has been infected with something called centlization and silicon vally greed. I watch more ads than videos when I use Twitch and Youtube. Twitter and Reddit coming up with more dictatorship laws and their only goals are IPO value and pleasing advertisers. People need to move away from these centrilized giants that stand for nothing but montization of user’s data and greed.

halfempty, 10 months ago

All the Lemmy and kbin instances can see anything posted on any other instance. It's all what they call "Federated" content. Best to pick an instance which is not too overloaded, but still has plenty of links to existing Federated content. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that if you or anyone else on your instance subscribe to a "Magazine" (like a subreddit), then your instance will have an established link to that Federated content.

DrNeurohax, 10 months ago

Correct. Also, in Lemmy "magazines" are "communities".

GlennMagusHarvey, 10 months ago

Hey, welcome to the threadiverse! I’m also a newbie, whose only prior experience with this sort of site has been Reddit (as well as internet forums but they’re not quite the same type of thing), so here’s what I’ve figured out so far. (The “threadiverse” is the informal name for the realm of Reddit-like websites linked by federation.)

Apologies for another long post for you to read, but I’ll try to make this an easy read. (Feel free to tell me I suck in if you think I wrote this badly or if it was stuff you already knew.)

On Reddit, you have one site, which has a ton of subreddits, each of which is like a little forum and is independently moderated (within the limits of the larger site’s policies, of course). Lemmy and /kbin are, basically, like many little “reddits”, with a twist: they can talk to each other and so you can be a member of one “reddit” and post/comment on another. Also, subreddits are called “communities” on Lemmy and “magazines” on /kbin but they basically work the same way. You can subscribe to them and see posts from them and post to them, even if they’re on other “reddits”.

So, yes, you can have your account on lemmy.world, but also subscribe to (for example) /c/patientgamers at sh.itjust.works (which is sometimes written as !patientgamers). Meanwhile, what if you’re also interested in the content at /c/patientgamers on lemmy.ml? Well, you can subscribe to that too! (Think of it like being subscribed to two slightly-differently-named subreddits.)

While there’s only one actual Reddit which has all the many many subreddits, in the threadiverse there are many “reddits”, each of which has some “subreddits”. There may be some duplication of more general topics, like memes, but you’ll also often find that more specialized “subreddits” are only on certain “reddits” – for example, my instance, mander.xyz, has a lot of nature and science related communities, not found on other instances. And each of those “reddits” has its own rules, and each of those “subreddits” has its own rules within the instance that hosts it. You’ll want to check each out to get a feel for the vibes in each place.

And now for the nitty gritty.

The way this all works is that you basically have two ways to see everything on the threadiverse: (1) on the site where the thing is, and (2) on your home instance. For example, you posted your message on lemmy.world. I can go to lemmy.world to read your post, but I can’t reply there, unless I have a lemmy.world account. So how am I commenting? I’m typing this reply to you on mander.xyz. That’s because I’m viewing your post on my home instance. I saw your post on the feed of another instance (acutally a /kbin instance, located at fedia.io), and I wanted to reply, so on that page, I got the link to your post ( lemmy.world/post/928037 ), copied it and pasted it into my own instance’s search bar, and pulled it up on my instance (Mander), and here I am, typing my reply.

Now, I did this only because my instance doesn’t already know about your post. I’m not subscribed to !reddit, which is where you posted this. If I were subscribed, then your post would have appeared in my subscribed feed, on my instance, already. And I’d just view your post and type my reply just like it were a post on my own instance. I’m subscribed to !patientgamers, so new posts there will show up on my subscribed feed.

The first thing I did when I wanted to join Lemmy was that I needed to pick an instance to join. But the second thing I did, almost concurrently, was that I started noticing all the different places that had content I wanted to see. I made a quick list of all those different communities/magazines. So once I joined, I just went and subscribed to all of them.

You can see what communities are on a given instance by clicking “communities” at the top of the page. (Or “Magazines” if you’re on a /kbin site.) So I basically just went through the communities lists of a bunch of instances, and checked out what people were posting about, and asked myself, “hey, do I wanna hang out here?”.

How do I subscribe? I go to the webpage for the community, like going to the subreddit, and I hit subscribe. What if it’s on another instance? I just take its URL, copy it, and paste it in my instance’s search bar. Wait a few seconds, then there’s a link to the community via my instance. Click subscribe. (Sometimes it’s a little buggy and have to go into a post to subscribe. Or it says “subscribe pending” after I click. But, really, I actually am subscribed, and I can tell because those posts start showing up on my subscribed feed.)

Where are my subscribed posts? I just go to my instance’s home page (mander.xyz for me, lemmy.world for you) and I can click “Subscribed”. Or “Local”, which shows posts on my instance. Or “All”, which is a feed of all the posts my instance knows about (local and remote). And I can sort them in different ways too.

The search box is surprisingly useful on fediverse platforms, I’ve found. On Lemmy and /kbin, I can copy the address of any community/magazine or post or comment and stick it in my instance’s search box. Wait a few seconds, and it’ll find it, and I click on it and do my thing. Sometimes I find posts that my instance didn’t know about at all before I pulled them up, so they’re “missing” comments that I can see on the post’s actual address, but I don’t need to see them all on my instance, I just need to pull up the one I want to reply to and post my reply. By the way, these links are that colorful little fediverse star you see beneath your posts. (On /kbin it’s in “more” -> “copy URL to fediverse”.) Everything has an address and every address is searchable, it seems.

So here’s basically how I’m using Lemmy now:

• load up mander.xyz (my homepage)
• check my notifications (which i’ll get when people reply to me)
• check my Subscribed feed, and optionally, the Local feed, or even the All feed (if I’m extra bored). anything my instance already knows about is something I can post on like it were local.
• if I want to check out extra stuff on other instances, I can easily just go to those instances and read stuff. If I want to comment/etc., I find a link from there, go back to my instance, paste it in the search box, and do my thing.

Hope this helps!

answersplease77, 10 months ago

Thank you! I learned more things I didn’t know from this comment. These tips really improve the user experience. Thanks

GlennMagusHarvey, 10 months ago

Glad I could help!

PleaseSandwich, 10 months ago

What I don't understand yet is kbin vs a Lemmy instance. I have an account on kbin, and I understand this post comes from a Lemmy instance. So kbin can view posts from Lemmy instances it's connected to. But my understanding is that I couldn't use a Lemmy client with my kbin login. I'm waiting for a beta invite for #Artemis but even when I have that, it sounds like it wouldn't support Lemmy right away. So do I need to also register on a Lemmy instance? And how would I juggle logins?

Virkkunen, 10 months ago

Think of it this way: your Gmail email can send and receive emails from a Hotmail email, but you cannot login in Hotmail with your Gmail account.

Otome-chan, 10 months ago

"instance" is just a fancy name for "website". if you have an account on kbin.social you can't login to your kbin.social account on lemmy.world. it's like email. your gmail account can email a yahoo address, but you can't login to your gmail account from yahoo.

Some mobile apps exist to let you login to lemmy sites, but those won't work with your kbin account.

subignition, 10 months ago

Hi, I'm participating from kbin.social.

Your account doesn't follow you across different websites, but rather you can see and interact with everything using your own instance as a window. (Except initial growing pains)

Because kbin.social and lemmy.world are federated, my local view of the thread is here

https://kbin.social/m/reddit@lemmy.world/t/124934/Lemmy-is-confusing-and-poorly-limited-How-does-Lemmy-work#comments

And on the other hand there's likely local pages for plenty of magazines (communities) on kbin from your perspective, too

Kichae, 10 months ago

You can build a website using WordPress. You can build a website using Joomla. You can build a website using Drupal. You can even use an RSS plugin to import posts from a Joomla blog into a totally different WordPress blog.

That is, in very simplified terms, what's going ok with kbin and Lemmy. You can build a content aggregator with Lemmy. You can build one with kbin. You can import content from one to another.

But they're different bits of software, and they have different 3rd party compatibilities.

jared, 10 months ago

since kbin is just lemmy + mastodon it's been my main, but I got a lemmy account to check out the apps.

BaroqueInMind, 10 months ago

Kbin combining Mastodon toots and also incorporating a nested-comment discussion like reddit/lemmy makes it superior.

That and lemmy developers are all tankies and openly support shitty political views about human rights violations. Not going to support that crap.

sadreality, 10 months ago

Kbin pleb here. Lemmy appears to be preferred.

I have dealt with tankies on Lemmy.ml

Weird love for daddy stalin and Mao... Obviosly China is helping people with education.... And Russia didn't invade Ukraine, but if it did Ukraine deserved it...

But other wise Lemmy instances don't seem to spill this trash over beyond rogue trolls.

My understanding is Lemmy.ml is devs pet project and they keep there.

I am seeing posts about alt right facist daily on here but I have yet to see anything beyond obscure links when I ask.

Either way, people can have their views and they can express them, rest of us can make up our own minds as long as they are not bad faith trolling or try to derail discussions.

So far, so good for me

DrNeurohax, 10 months ago

There were a bunch of initial shitlords that tried making roads into here a few weeks back, but they were quickly shouted down. A few defederations later and things have been smooth.

As for the Lemmy devs, there are some screenshots of nasty tankie comments floating around, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for now because they have been very involved with keeping things civil and came out publicly against their past statements. I think a bunch of us effectively argued with one of them that letting that shit in during the initial growth in general public instances was a platform-killer (lots of mentions of the "Tolerance of Intolerance Paradox" and the "nazi bar story"). A T_D popped up for an hour or two and was quickly pushed out. They can make their own little microcosm somewhere else.

I've seen a few douchebags pop up here and there, but not enough to worry me. Though, I hear the politics mags might have more trouble than the comment threads I frequent.

mochi, 10 months ago

Artemis is supposed to support kbin and Lemmy. If it doesn't support Lemmy right away, then it wouldn't help to register on a Lemmy instance, because Artemis still wouldn't support Lemmy.

You're right that you can't sign into a Lemmy instance with your kbin credentials. Each site is it's own site. If something is posted on lemmy.world, it sends a notice to kbin.social and kbin.social fetches the info and publishes it locally on kbin as well. Comments on the kbin post are sent back to lemmy.world. There's basically a copy of the post and comments on every server. Not every server will "know" about every other server though, so content could push across the entire federated network slowly sometimes.

dumples, 10 months ago

So federation is like medieval kingdoms. I am a citizen of Kbin so they know me and give me a token. Now I can use this Kbin token to get to any kingdom that let's me in lemmy.world or beehaw. They don't know me but they know that their buddy earnest at the kingdom of Kbin can vouch for me. So they let me in.

So won't need a login at these other places since I can use my Kbin token. So with a single login can work to talk to any who let's me.

If a site is defederated that means two kingdoms are fighting. So the lemmy.world token won't let you into beehaw because they are defederated.

dumples, 10 months ago

So federation is like medieval kingdoms. I am a citizen of Kbin so they know me and give me a token. Now I can use this Kbin token to get to any kingdom that let's me in lemmy.world or beehaw. They don't know me but they know that their buddy earnest at the kingdom of Kbin can vouch for me. So they let me in.

So won't need a login at these other places since I can use my Kbin token. So with a single login can work to talk to any who let's me.

If a site is defederated that means two kingdoms are fighting. So the lemmy.world token won't let you into beehaw because they are defederated.

DevCat, 10 months ago

I would suggest reading this FAQ that’s been put together.

lemmy.world/post/37906

Also, just subscribe to lemmy.world/c/lemmyworld to keep up to date on this instance.

Unlike Reddit, which is a monolith with many subreddits run by volunteer mods, Lemmy is federated. That is, volunteers run their own servers which then are joined to the fediverse and can populate their own communities onto other instances/servers. Each instance/server can run as many or as few communities as the owner decides. Once a server/instance is fully federated, you can subscribe to communities on other instances from your own. The easiest way to subscribe to communities on other instances is to just click on the “Communities” link at the top of this page, and select “All”.

Each instance/server can have its own policies as to what is acceptable. We have an instance that is specifically for NSFW content, lemmynsfw.com. That makes it much easier to limit what your kids can or cannot see. Currently, we have an instance, beehaw, that is described as a walled garden with high-quality content. The volunteers are overwhelmed with all the redittors showing up and have decided to temporarily de-federate. That is, although you can see their communities and posts from elsewhere, they cannot see yours. We are hoping this will be temporary.

This is actually an excellent feature of Lemmy. It allows instance owners, hopefully with advice from their users, to disconnect certain kinds of content. To see which instances a particular instance is connected/disconnected to/from just add “/instances” to the end of the server name. For this instance, that would be:

lemmy.world/instances

Having multiple instances/servers can lead to duplicate communities being created on several servers/instances. Eventually, the smaller copies will probably drop away. Here is the current list of communities in the fediverse, sorted by popularity:

lemmyverse.net/communities

ZenGrammy, 10 months ago

I hope this helps you understand a bit better. mastodon.online/@binoctdechex/110538120775065728

gamers_Mate, 10 months ago

First please don’t ban me I’m new.

That would be a silly reason to ban you for dont worry your good. ^^

lemmy.world, lemmy.ml , lemmy.xxx, lemmy.whatever, etct… + hundreds of clones. Is each of these a Reddit by itself containing many subreddits inside it?

Sort of but it is all connected so if you view all you will be able to see all the lemmy.insertname that are connected kind of like /r/all but it includes other lemmy sites. (Think of it like crossplay between playstation and Xbox if that helps.)

Does that mean if someone in lemmy.xxx/c/jokes posted something interesting that I wont even see it because I’m signed up in lemmy.yyy/c/jokes ? It will still appear in (all) regardless but you can also search in (local) if you want that specific version of /c/jokes

That is quite a weakness of lemmy compared to reddit. Can I post on lemmy.yyy if I signed up for lemmy.xxx or do I have to sign up for each of them? No you can view and comment on other instances

Which one should I sign up for? Any is fine though Personally I chose Lemmy world and kbin social.

How can I see all lemmy posts in one place? I can’t believe no one has found a solution to this yet and just let hundreds of clones post repeated things. Also how is each moderated? Is lemmy.yyy moderated by sensitive snowflakes who ban anyone who cusses or offends anyone, while lemmy.xxx is ran by racist nazis? How does this work? Instances can block other instances aka defederating think of it as one country putting an embargo on another. For example we have defederated from a maga instance and a tankie instance.

VulcanSphere, 10 months ago

Hello, commenting from kbin (social) here.

bobthened, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

It’s not a single website like Reddit or twitter. It’s a network of interconnected ”instances”. You can view and access and comment on any of the content from any one of them from from any other of them. So you only need one account. You can even subscribe to communities that are based on a difference instance from you.

For example I am commenting here from an account on feddit.uk but this post is on Lemmy.world

answersplease77, 10 months ago

Understood that far, but how can I see all the memes posted by all lemmy.nnn/c/memes in one place so that I see the top ones? where nnn is ml/world/xxx/etc. I really wish I just solve this one issue

muddybulldog, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

It sounds like you thinking of multi-reddit style. No such thing exists yet.

Just subscribe to all of them. You’re not limited to just one.

answersplease77, 10 months ago

The closest solution is go and subscribe to each lemmy.nnn/c/memes separately, then go home page and hit the Subscribed tab filter. However downside is it will also show posts from other subs I subscribed to. Still not bad

ebits21, 10 months ago

Yeah.

A great future feature might be multiple subscription lists you can keep separate.

Early days, could easily happen.

Candelestine, 10 months ago

Got ya covered, I wrote this for folks just like you:

lemmy.world/post/583669

mysoulishome, 10 months ago

To be fair I read all of that stuff too and it didn’t make sense until I signed up for an account and just started using it. When we moved from MySpace to Facebook and digg to Reddit it started off confusing as well.

answersplease77, 10 months ago

How can I see all the memes posted by all lemmy.nnn/c/memes in one place so that I see the top ones? where nnn is ml/world/xxx/etc. I really wish I just solve this one issue

Candelestine, 10 months ago

Yeah… this might be too complicated for you… It’s not for everyone in here, not yet anyway. Still too early, it’s basically an alpha. Very messy.

answersplease77, 10 months ago

So not possible? Or is it possible but messy?

Candelestine, 10 months ago

Alright, fine. Go to communities tab, flip the button to “all” and search for memes or whatever else you want. Scroll down and click on whichever ones seem ok. Go into their sidebars and hit “subscribe”. You will get “pending” in many cases, this just means it will take awhile to process. Otherwise it will subscribe you to them instantly.

FakeName, 10 months ago

That’s kind of you to point us in the right direction

Candelestine, 10 months ago

No worries. Welcome to the community.

mizu6079, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Very, very short explanation:

All of these are different servers which are federated, meaning people from each of the servers can interact with and view posts and users on other servers. Each server is run by independent admins. This way, if the admins of one server get greedy or turn into a-holes, you can easily switch over to a different server. Lemmy is a decentralised network so no one big corporate decision can fuck everyone over.

awderon, 10 months ago

Some more stuff you can do:

You can subscribe to a community on a different lemmy instance, this community will then be mirrored to your local instance for you to view. The comments will be distributed the same way.

eoddc5, 10 months ago

Is that you spez?

answersplease77, 10 months ago

yes off course, but help me please. How can I see all the memes posted by all lemmy.nnn/c/memes in one place so that I see the top ones? where nnn is ml/world/xxx/etc. I really wish there’s a solution to this thing

livus, 10 months ago

At the moment you just subscribe to any meme communities you like, across the federation, and you can see and comment in all of them. Sooner or later we're going to be able to group them like multireddits.

This is decentralised.

196 might be a good place for you to start, they are bringing the memes.

eoddc5, 10 months ago

It’s literally how lemmy works

You can sign up anywhere and see anywhere.

answersplease77, 10 months ago

How can I see all the memes posted by all lemmy.nnn/c/memes in one place so that I see the top ones? where nnn is ml/world/xxx/etc. I really wish I just solve this one issue.

andyMFK, 10 months ago

Sign up anywhere, subscribe to all the communities you want to see, and then filter your view so you see your subscribed feed.

Ignisnex, 10 months ago

Subscribe to the communities you like the look of, from any instances you want. You’ll get your own curated list of things you like. You can then see everything on your front page, or scroll through your subscriptions if you just want a specific meme community or something.