Hello. I am from Korea. I heard of Lemmy while I was browsing the Korean community DCinside. I thought lemmy.world was “the” Lemmy community. But it turns out each community is hosted by different people, which are divided into smaller communities?
Lemmy is not well known in South Korea. To be honest I don’t really know how this federated system works. But I do hope people can take a look at communities not funded by corporate.
I think to Koreans, evading government censorship is more important than corporate tracking, algorithms, etc. because Korean law makes it easy to get sued for defamation from a comment, NSFW content is banned, North Korean websites are blocked… things like that. You can get away from corporate tracking but you still need to follow the law 😮💨
So without a need to move to decentralized platform I think it will be difficult to make Lemmy well known.
I do have a question though, how I can trust Lemmy communities? For example if I were using Reddit, I can just trust one entity (the owners of Reddit) that they keep my data somewhat safe. But since Lemmy is hosted by many different people, I would have to trust many people at the same time!
Everything you do on lemmy is public. What data do you think you trusting the different servers with?
At the moment I can only think of my email address. I guess Lemmy does require less personal info (at signup)
But I could be asking, is this website actually using Lemmy code? Or is it just a random forum website that look like Lemmy? Can I verify if a site that I am visiting is part of the Fediverse?
Not every server asks for a email address, they only use it so you can log in, to prevent automatic spam accounts and for password reset. I went around that problem by setting up my own instance where I never had to put in my email address. For the distributed nature of Lemmy the email address is not necessary. So it is also not shared with any other server. Therefor this specific data you only need to trust the one admin who runs the server where you have your account on with.
Yes you can verify if a site is part of the fediverse by using it to post into a community on a different server. If your post or comment shows up there, then it is part of the fediverse.
Ah okay, that solves my question. While it’s true that I’m basically visiting totally different websites for each instance, admins only know what is happening on their server.
After reading some other sources about Lemmy I guess it’s more about freedom and data resilience, than avoiding tracking and unwanted data collection
Anyways I’m glad someone gave me a detailed explanation upon my first visit - I am grateful!