I’m really bought in to the Lemmy experience and I want others to share similar interests. However, I know they will have a massive amount of questions, and I want to be able to answer them in addition to my own curiosities. Here are a few questions that I have that I am still fuzzy on.
- I created an account on lemm.ee. Is lemm.ee a separate instance?
- When subscribing, are you subscribing to separate instances or different communities within a particular instance?
- What is the difference between lemm.ee and lemmy.ml?
- Is there any reason to make new accounts on different instances?
- When I’m looking at the “Local” feed, what am I looking at?
- What is the difference between the “Local” feed and the “All” feed?
Any additional information on these questions would be massively appreciated.
- Yes, Lemm.ee is a separate instance.
- You subscribe to communities that are made inside different instances.
- Their just different instances.
- I’ve got different accounts on different instances in the event one instance is having issues or is down.
- You’re looking at communities hosted on that particular instance.
6. Local feed is communities on your instance and all is communities on your instance combined with communities you’re subscribed in.- It’s all the communities your instance is federated with.
Edit: Corrected point 6 as pointed out by Communist.
Excellent answers to excellent questions. 🙇
Point 6 is actually incorrect, for all it’s all of the communities your instance is federated with.
Could you elaborate on “federated with”?
Subscribed to by a user on your instance
It basically means contents someone on your instance have interacted with. Either they subed to the community, commented on a post, upvoted a post, etc.
All of these actions requires your instance to ask for information about that post from its instance. And your instance will cache these information (because why not, your instance has already done the work to get the info), and serve it to people when they see “all”.
Basically you can see things outside of your instance, so there is more content than local.
How can I check what communities/instances my home instance is federated with?
Is there any instance that federated with everything so I can just scroll through and subscribe to the ones I want?
- I don’t think you can
- I don’t think that is possible, how can you federate with everything, when everyone can create a instance?
I think for a larger general purpose instance, in general they are quite well-fedorated, I think it could be a good approximation of what you want. But the mod can obviously stop federating with a certain instance, because their value do not align.
Thanks for the correction! I’ll correct this in the OC.
Very helpful thank
Really appreciate the timely response. Thank you!
No problem, by the way be sure to note the correction.
On reddit, you have reddit.com -> subreddits. on lemmy you have [all lemmys, including this one] -> the lemmy i have an account on -> communities.
Similar to how you can post on any subreddit if you have a reddit account, you can post on any lemmy community if you have an account on any lemmy server.
Think of it like old-school pre-reddit internet forums, if all of those forums were linked together, and as a whole they became a reddit-like thing.
This gives you an extra moderation step. Server/instance admins can ban an entire problematic server/instance, and you can have stricter or more lax rules depending on the server.
It’s a hybrid between old-school forums and modern reddit. lots of smaller, specialized or localized communities, which together as a whole become a reddit-like world. it’s the best of both worlds.
The other commenter is correct but to add to number 3: there is not much difference to them now, but a lot of instances usually have a particular “flavor” to them. Like one might be more geared towards people who are interested I’m programming, others are leftist instances, others are geared towards furries, or music interests… but that’s very broad and you don’t HAVE to choose an instance based on that. A lot of new instances have cropped up that are just “catch all” instances for the surge of reddit users. Look at the sidebar descriptions to see if there are any specifics to the instance and see what you vibe with.
In terms of functionality they work exactly the same
