Welcome! Always happy to see new faces showing up.

This place is significantly smaller than Reddit, and also significantly more spread out. It grows on you, but it’s important to look beyond the similarities between how lemmy.world and Reddit look. Under the hood, these are very different spaces.

“Lemmy” is actually a large network of independently operated Lemmy-based (or not… more on that later) websites. Each website has their own rules, and their own “communities” (AKA sublemmies, magazines, groups, etc.). You’re using one of, if not the, largest website in the network, and the one that is probably most Reddit-like (pre-IPO) in terms of rules and policies. It’s a general purpose content aggregator.

There are quite a few other medium-to-large general purpose content aggregator sites on the network. lemm.ee comes to mind, as does sh.itjust.works. And, of course, lemmy.ca, which is where I’m commenting from. Each of these websites has its own communities, and houses mirrors of remote communities that their users have subscribed to. Remote communities with local subscribers synchronize with the host website every so often (it can be quite frequently, but usually isn’t instantaneously). This makes the whole thing kind of like being on a web forum, but being able to follow topics from other web forums.

As you can imagine, this means there are some niche websites on the network. ttrpg.network is dedicated to table top gaming; startrek.website is focused on… I don’t know, some tv show or something; programming.dev hosts a bunch of communities focused on software engineering; lemmy.kde.social is focused on the KDE desktop environment for linux. These are often low-population sites, but they can see a lot of off-site engagement. Focused sites like that are great sites to use if your primary interest is the topic at hand; it really makes the Local feed super valuable.

If you remember that we’re not all using the same website, and that the different websites are, in fact, different websites, with their own rules, cultures, and norms, it helps grok the space a lot more. It also makes it easier to understand why there might be 8 different politics communities, and that c/politics on lemmy.world might be very different, both in terms of who is posting there, and also what they’re interested in discussing, from c/politics on lemmy.ca, or on aussie.zone.

Now, one thing that’s not obvious from lemmy.world (or any Lemmy-based website, really), is that not every website you have access to here is actually running Lemmy. kbin.earth and rimworld.gallery both run mbin, which is a different content aggregation webserver. community.nodebb.org runs nodebb, a web forum server.

People have access to Lemmy communities from an even wider range of website types. Users from Mastodon-based websites, Friendica-based websites, Hubzilla-based websites, and probably quite a few more.

We’re all on different websites. Some of those websites are significantly more different than others. That shapes this space in ways we haven’t even begun to truly explore yet. And it adds a little jank.

But the jank is worth it, as far as I’m concerned.