Do I understand correctly that Lemmy.ca is part of a larger Lemmy platform? I’m new to the Fediverse so I’m doing my best to understand.
No worries! It is ok to be confused, it can be very bewildering when you first come in.
In the end though, remember you don’t need to understand the way everything works beyond this simple metaphor, the fediverse is like email, you have an email account at a specific place.
An email account [email protected] can email [email protected] just fine even though accounts from two seperate places are interacting.
The reason people call it the “fediverse” is it twist on the word “federated” or “federation” . It is meant to evoke many different communities willingly deciding to connect so that their users can interact, post, and like eachother’s stuff even though those users have accounts at different locations.
The fediverse logo is meant to evoke that
The specific thing that makes this possible is a standard of agreed upon formats and protocols called ActivityPub.
Lemmy.ca runs the lemmy reddit-like software which allows lemmy.ca to “federate” with other communities running not just lemmy software, but any other kind of software that also adheres to the ActivityPub standard. That could be another reddit-like like mbin, piefed or it could be actually liking a post from a user on mastodon (a twitter-like) from your reddit-like lemmy user interface.
Federation isn’t just about technically making everything happen behind the scenes though, federation also happens according to shared core values between communities. Communities may defederate from one another if there becomes a difference that cannot be bridged. Additionally while different communities routinely share info about block lists to prevent spam attacks and such, every community has its own moderation team that moderates according to its own policies. Which I actually think is very important and very beautiful.
There is no central control agent on the fediverse, which hopefully will allow it to flourish without falling under the control of any one overpowering entity!
One final note, in your lemmy feed you can choose between “subscribed” “local” and “all”, this is actually a great simple way to think about the fediverse. Your “subscribed” feed is posts from all of the subreddits you follow. Your “local” feed is posts from all the subreddits at the same location/community as you (where your account is @). Finally, and this is my favorite, your “all” feed is a feed of all of the subreddits that people from your community (where your account is @) follow from ALL over the fediverse! It is a wonderful way to discover new stuff!
Thanks for this clear info! I really like the idea of the Fediverse but it will take some getting used to on my end practically.
You will be surprised how easy and seamless it all is. Just browse the content if you like.
PieFed has tools that help a ton by bringing together communities from different instances under one roof - like [email protected] and [email protected] and [email protected] (and no this is nowhere close to being a comprehensive listing - there’s also [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected], although I would advise avoiding the latter two for reasons perhaps best not discussed here, and still several more besides), but with some effort you can piece together your own choices as to which communities you want to subscribe to and from then on see in your Subscribed feed. Perhaps even if you don’t want to specifically make an account on PieFed (e.g. if you prefer a particular Lemmy app that doesn’t support it yet), you can still see the collection of communities underneath the single header of simply “Technology” (which also includes others by different names, e.g. [email protected]) and then using the “communities” link on lemmy.ca, subscribe to them with your account there.
Another thought is that you may find it helpful to browse by Local or All to help you discover where new content can come from. Also, people here will share links to communities and webpages dedicated specifically to that purpose.
Welcome to the Fediverse btw!:-)
Browse your “local” feed and treat it just like reddit if you want, no pressure to take in more than you want!
My recommendion is not think to hard about federation, inter-instance interactions and so on…
Best to just contribute/read communities that interest you and you’ll figure things out as you go along.
Hello,
Welcome to Lemmy!
You are correct, lemmy.ca is part of the larger Lemmy platform. Other Lemmy servers are for example
- https://feddit.uk/
- https://feddit.org/ - German speaking
- https://jlai.lu/ - French speaking
Thank you! Is there a ranking of servers based on subscriber count?
Just to clarify, all the Lemmy servers you can join are interconnected as if they are just one big platform with the same content, so the experience is pretty much the same regardless of the server you join. The server you choose is just your door into the Lemmyverse.
Each server may have slightly different policies, but ultimately the goal is that you don’t have to think about it (other than knowing which server you are a part of so you can log in). However, it’s smart of you to consider how big a server is as some of the small servers might be more likely to shut down due to lack of maintainers or funding. That’s the main downside to the not-for-profit, decentralized nature of Lemmy/Fediverse—but so worth it in my opinion.
I use Fediverse Explorer - click Active Users a couple times to sort decreasing. So the largest is Lemmy.World, bigger than the next five combined, and after that one they really drop off fast, with the rest being more alike in having merely hundreds or few thousands of active participants, rather than >18 thousand.
These “instances” (servers) make up the Fediverse, along with other federated platforms such as Mastodon (X/Twitter replacement), Friendica (Facebook replacement), Pixelfed (Instagram replacement iirc?), etc. Lemmy is software meant to replace Reddit, and then there’s a few unique ones that are related but have much fewer users: Mbin, which offers connection to both Mastodon and Lemmy software at once, and PieFed that is an entirely new thing, somewhat like Lemmy but not aiming to replace Reddit as the latter does and instead offer entirely new features (like democratization of moderation where users can control their own experiences, rather than have to depend upon a moderation team to tell them what they can or cannot have - I think it’s highly worthwhile going through it’s sign-up wizard just to see what it’s all about, even if you for sure plan to stay on your current instance, so that you’ll see it first-hand what is coming! other great features include categories of communities, basically multi-reddits, and hashtag support, neither of which Lemmy has). Both Mbin and PieFed though have fewer than 1k users total across all of their instances (shown in those links above), which is expected to change as they begin to be supported by apps - e.g someone is testing PieFed in a fork of Thunder right now.
But fwiw, Lemmy.ca looks to me like a fantastic instance, especially if you are located in Canada (for lower ping and increased relevance/interest to you), and it is the #6 top-ranked instance. So unless you prefered PieFed or Mbin software rather than Lemmy, it would make a great home. My only beef with it is that it federates with Lemmy.ml (for reasons not worth going into here:-), but this is exceedingly common among all of the top 20 instances (and most others as well), and you could spend a lot of time searching for “better” than Lemmy.ca without finding it.
One mantra for using Lemmy: block early, and block often - the people who were too toxic even for Reddit came here, and we have lost many people who expected the platform to curate their experience for them, yet we simply are not given the tools to do so: you need to do such things on your own. As you do, pay attention to which users submit content, what communities you are reading it in, and as you get more experienced, what instances are involved. They are NOT the same at all - they have entirely different sets of rules about what is allowed where.
But there are great discussions to be had here:-). Especially as Reddit gets more enshittified every day. You will probably like it here:-).
This isn’t comprehensive, but is a pretty good indicator of the largest servers.
Note that you don’t need to be using that instance to be able to read their content or post there.
MAU stands for “monthly active users”, so users who voted, posted or commented last month
Lemmy itself is also part of the larger “Threadiverse” ecosystem: the part of the fediverse that deals with threaded content in a forum-like structure (like Reddit basically). Lemmy is one software interacting with this, but there are also other alternatives like Piefed and Mbin. Since they all use the ActivityPub protocol they are interoperable - which software you chose doesn’t matter. The common analogy people tend to use is email providers: Hotmail and Gmail and Proton are all different, but you can register to any of of them and talk to people from all the others.
The instance you choose does matter, as each one will have its own moderation policy and defederation list. Defederation is a tool instance admins can use to shut off communication with another instance - for example blocking dedicated NSFW instances or instances that have different philosophies on content and moderation.
For the most part the biggest instances are all federated, so it’s not something you need to worry too much about for now. Down the line, it’s a good idea to shop around for an instance that suits your personal preferences.
I have my Voyager app set to show the full names of users, so it shows up like username@instance. You can really see the scope of how many instances their are.
goes beyond even that. both piefed and mbin show the same feeds as well so you will this comment is from piefed but my other account is on the mbin instance catsweat.
Correct! You sign up here but it lets you post on any site that runs Lemmy (or a software that support’s Lemmy’s protocol like mbin and PieFed) and is connected to here.
If you are coming from Reddit, the communities are like subreddits except that they might be here or they might be hosted elsewhere, but you interact with them without leaving the site you signed up with (lemmy.ca in your case). The way you do it is instead of going to https://lemmy.world/c/news (the News community on lemmy.world, you go to https://lemmy.ca/c/[email protected]. Community mentions (the equivalent to r/something) are in this form: [email protected]. Remember you are subject to the rules of the community you post to in addition to the server (just like a Reddit user would have agreed to Reddit’s terms and follow subreddit rules).
It is otherwise pretty seamless, the main thing is you have three feed groups: Subscribed, Local and All.
Subscribed works like you’d expect: you go to communities you like and subscribe to them, then that feed shows only posts from those communities.
Local shows only posts from communities hosted where you signed up. On Lemmy.ca that means Canadian city and Province communities, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], and a bunch of others. You will still see posts and comments that people from outside lemmy.ca publish to these communities.
All shows you that plus stuff from every other community from servers we are connected to, which tend to be bigger and more populated. Sometimes a big news story from [email protected] makes it to near the top of All. You can block annoying users, communities or entire servers to clean up any of the feeds above.
Thanks for joining Lemmy, hope you have a good time.
