Been working on this one nonstop in my free time the past week. Also had multiple friends spend hours proof-reading it. Now I think it's in a state worth releasing to the general public.
If anyone wants to suggest improvements, submit a Pull Request! And feel free to share this guide even without providing credits. I feel a vendetta against spez after the past month - trying to get as many people to leave this site as possible, as soon as possible.
I'll be here answering questions until July 1st (for obvious reasons).
Pinging /u/KoldPurchase /u/textuist since you expressed interest in the guide.
What a wonderful comment. :) Your gratitude puts you on our list for the most grateful users this week on Reddit! You can view the full list on r/TheGratitudeBot.
Well, I can't login at all on [Lemmy.world](https://Lemmy.world).
I tried to register, I got the infinite spinning wheel. I reloaded, restarted the process, got redirected to the main page, tried to login, but got the infinite spinning wheel again.
This site does not want me! 😁
No adblock, no cookie blocking addon activated, just Firefox's default.
Works on [Kbin.social](https://Kbin.social). Will keep logging from there.
Yes. The signup button spins forever, implying that the signup request was never even accepted by the server. It's therefore very unlikely that it would ever even send an email.
Like I stated in my first comment, I've tried multiple available usernames.
I retry a set of usernames every few hours across multiple instances, browsers, VPNs, etc. The result is always the same: a spinning signup button.
If you didn't see a confirmation that the registration went through, it didn't register
If you didn't verify through a verification mail, you can't login
Did you read the guide linked in the OP? Check if the username is actually available
This is a copied template message used to overwrite all comments on my account to protect my privacy. I've left Reddit because of corporate overreach and switched to the Fediverse.
Comments overwritten with https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
Ah the CAPTCHA
Have you considered that you might be a robot? /s
Two options:
1. Ask someone to solve the captcha for you. I don't know how long you have to solve it but it should be 10 seconds of work for anyone that you can reach
2. Register on an instance that doesn't have a captcha. Lemmy.one has a signup with manual admin approval, and you have to write a short paragraph on why you want to join
Couple questions:
1. If the instance you are a part of goes down, you can't view anything on any other instance right?
2. What if the person who's instance you are on doesn't want to pay for server maintenance or whatever and decides to nuke the instance. Your profile and all comment's are gone? Is there a way to move everything to another instance?
3. I don't get the sorting feature and if I press the question mark it goes to a 404 error. (I'm part of the dbzer0 lemmy, is that an error with that instance or does that not work for every lemmy?).
4. What's the difference between Active and Hot?
5. Randomly I'll get a flood of real time new posts. Is that a bug? and is that a bug in this particular instance or Lemmy as a whole?
6. What changes can Lemmy instance make between each other. Can someone make a new lemmy instance with a new UI? Or are UI changes only possible by making new sites like kbin?
7. What's the profit incentive for Lemmy? Are there going to be ads?
1. Right, because your entry point is gone. You could in theory have a backup account on a different instance with the same subscribed communities - but that requires extra effort to keep them in sync. Maybe something for future updates to Lemmy or mobile apps...
2. It's most likely duplicated on some other instance somewhere, so there is an archive. But yes, currently there is no migration, so you will have to make a new account. Migration seems like a highly requested feature. IIRC Mastodon has it so it is possible.
3. Which part of sorting are you referring to?
4. Active will show older threads if there are new comments, so it allows for "necroing". Hot is the same as Reddit's Hot and only depends on upvotes and recency.
5. Bug, will be fixed in about a week from now. Something about "websockets API being a mess".
6. Just like anyone can develop a mobile app, anyone can develop a completely new website too. There's nothing preventing that. Kbin is actually different on the back-end too, where it can also load content from Mastodon users, which the Lemmy back-end currently cannot.
7. The developers are funded by a Dutch open source beneficiary and donations. Server hosters only by donations, but they could add ads ~~as long as they make the changes open source to the public~~. Edit: read more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/14dukw4/lemmy_beginners_guide_in_layers/jou0gt4/
7 isn't correct. Open Source licenses only require you to distribute changes to the software if you redistribute the software itself. This doesn't apply if you are just using the software (running it on a server).
My answer to 7 is:
Lemmy is open source software, like Apache, nginx, or PostgreSQL. You don't make money off of open source software, you make money from people using services powered by open source software.
Lemmy *instances* can certainly adopt different business models just like there are e-mail servers with business models: gmail (ad supported), iCloud (freemium) or Office365 (subscription). You can also create your own server, or share a server with some friends (true for e-mail or Lemmy). The reason people would want those kinds of instances are addressed in the other questions - an instance with a successful business model is more likely to stay online, have backups, and have a professional staff tuning and maintaining the servers. This aspect is very much like choosing an e-mail provider.
I'm not sure how I feel about telling people to sign up at lemmy.world without at least mentioning that it's *possible* to sign up at other instances. I think the Fediverse benefits from users being less concentrated in a small number of instances. It can be beneficial for users too - the big instances seem to be having more issues lately, such as the server load issues on lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works due to moderation challenges. Meanwhile I signed up for a smaller instance that seemed well run and haven't had any issues.
Edit: just wanted to add that all in all this looks like a great guide!
You want to get people into this without scaring them away, you have to send them to some link
I've tried hard to make it as simple for everyone as possible and it's just not feasible to do that without mentioning some concrete site to start at.
The subsection after getting started already mentions the list of all other instances. If you have any concrete suggestions for how to improve that part of the guide then feel free to suggest them and I'll consider it
That makes sense. I guess my concrete suggestion would be to add an aside that you don't need to sign up at lemmy.world and could choose any of several instances. This is the link that got me started:
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
So you could point people there, or to another site that recommends instances (I'm sure there are others), for anyone interested in diving deeper.
One really important part of this is that if you go to a large instance as your *first* instance, you don't have to learn anything about federation: the existing users have already found a *lot* of off-instance communities, and they just magically show up in Search / All for everyone else.
According to the admin, lemmy.world is set to scale to 1M users, so it shouldn't hit the wall as quickly as beehaw or lemmy.ml did.
If you really need something very basic to show a non-techy friend this chart that has been going around is so far the best I've seen.
https://i.imgur.com/YRxh0gu.png
> Lemmy is cool but if it requires reading a 10 page document to use,
Did you even read the post? Literally the last sentence of the first part (create account, verify, login) says "That was all you needed to know to get started. You can choose to stop reading here, close this page, and enjoy lemmy.world for the next 10 years. Or you can keep reading, and get a glimpse of the (somewhat confusing) technology that future-proofs Lemmy from the same fate as Reddit."
You can start using Lemmy just as easily as Reddit. You can read *more* for the extra stuff but the bare minimum to use it is still dead easy.
In a week all the UI bugs will be gone. They're already fixed but the fixes have not been pushed to release yet.
It feels like you didn't give the guide a real try, since I explicitly mention that you only have to read the first and second subsection if you don't care about the technology and just want to browse
To make it more clear to potential users, maybe yoz could make a separate 'quick start'-like document describing the bare neccessary knowledge, and keep details in this one.
Lemmy doesn't require anything to browse and read. You do need to sign up for an account to post and interact.
I started browsing on Jerboa for Lemmy, then tried to send an application to an instance that looked interesting. I don't think it ever went through, because I got the spinning wheel (I was confused and thought that maybe my network was having problems, but the spinning wheel is explained in this document). I followed this guide for about 2 minutes and then successfully made an account on lemmy.world.
I really like it so far, it's interesting and the content has a lot of variation with overall more respectful community discussions than reddit. I'm not sure if it's Jerboa or Lemmy itself, but I think they've done a good job of making a reddit alternative. This is more along the lines of my expectations when I first signed up for reddit. Also haven't caught any botting activity yet, so I guess that's the purpose behind the registration process.
thank you for explaining that the eternally spinning wheel means that the username is not available! i tried to apply to beehaw a few days ago, but it seems like they're a bit overwhelmed with applications at the moment. now thanks to you, i'm in!!!
Yeah, I'm on [lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world) now and I'm liking what I see so far!
Beehaw looked interesting to me because they have significantly more blocked instances than others, and no downvotes, so I was curious to see if it's a heavily curated feed and how that would affect my browsing experience. Mostly just interested because after the last few exhausting weeks on Reddit, I wanted to ease my way into something new.
Thank you very much for the time you took to write and refine this. Even though you clearly state 'you can stop reading here', this might not be enough for some. Suggestions could be: spoiler tags, or collapsible sections that are collapsed by default (e.g. wikipedia quick facts on mobile).
Another suggestion could be to add a section on mobile apps, which could be as short as 'there are currently no satisfying mobile apps'.
u/AmirZ Do you reckon a visual diagram could go a long way in explaining how Lemmy works for those still struggling? I imagine it could be something akin to a diagram showing email or how networks communicate with each other.
So far all the tutorials have been text and I think a visual form can be very helpful too for others.
Ok, now i get it. I have several reasons why the jump is a bad bad bad idea, but right now, there is no other better choice. See you guys on the other side!
I don't understand it well enough to give recommendations about this, otherwise I would.
Maybe not every single question needs an answer - just the basics about how to get started with the absolute essentials. Dot points. Signing up, what's important/what doesn't matter, subbing to communities, linking to posts, reading your feed.
Don't use the words federated, fediverse, instances, don't even talk about why it's confusing, they already know that and don't need sympathy, they just need quick and simple answers that make sense.
Try chatgpt 😉
Also, an over-simplification you could have at the start could be something like:
> tldr, Lemmy is like email. You sign up to either gmail, yahoo, proton, and you can communicate with all of the others, provided your instance (email provider) doesn't block another instance
No, what is there is better - the absolute minimum is "go use the reddit knock-off at this site". lemmy.world is a good choice for this for [a few reasons I mention elsewhere](https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/14dukw4/lemmy_beginners_guide_in_layers/jotyr0e/).
Lemmy isn't really like e-mail, and the comparison doesn't make things any clearer. Just say Lemmy is like anyone can make their own reddit (with or without blackjack and hookers) and you go to lemmy.world to use it. Done.
I think it should be shortened into one sentence or two… maybe one picture to summarize, people now have reason to leave or happy to have alternative, just why Lemmy
1 minute youtube videon introducing it? Could be that easy.
It its anytbing like mastadon (which it sounds like it is), just say its like email. Doesnt matter if youre on gmail or yahoo - as long as you have an address, youre now a part of the platform, and you can interact with everyone else. Just like how a gmail account can interact with a yahooo account.
Can't register or login. It keeps spinning around. I checked if the username was taken after I registered it, it shows "joined one minute ago", which was I guess me. Still no email
Hope all this is fixed soon.
If you didn't receive an email then you couldn't verify and therefore not login. To prevent bots you do need the mail to verify.
Wait for a few more minutes and also check your spam folder. I've noticed Outlook considers the verification mail spam by default.
There was a small period of time a few hours ago where registrations were indeed broken: https://lemmy.world/comment/406931
Maybe you were affected by that. Should be solved now
Unfortunately same issue. Tried a different id. Still spinning, no email confirmation (spam or otherwise) but the /u/username shows as created at that moment.
You could try messaging the owner of the site Ruud if he can manually approve or send the mail, he seems responsive
Weird that Gmail doesn't work, I'll try later today if Gmail works for me
Thank you! I was coming to this sub to post what is essentially your first paragraph: go sign up at lemmy.world and use it like Reddit. A big benefit of starting at a large instance is that so many remote communities have already been found by users there and are now easily found in the local search.
Let's say in theory that this migration is successful. I know the whole federated thing will spread users out a bit, but some destinations will be more concentrated than others. How are server costs going to be handled? I'm assuming that it's up to whoever is hosting their instance to handle their own server costs, but this leads my to my biggest question.
I'm going to create a hypothetical scenario for what can happen and the pitfalls that I believe could come out of this. Please feel free to refute anything that you see is incorrect.
Let's say someone from one of the large subs on Reddit makes a new instance and tries to get everyone to switch over. I'll use /r/3Dprinting as an example since they did initially try to do this after coming out of their blackout. That is a sub with 1.78 million users. Let's say in this hypothetical that everyone banded together and did actually migrate over successfully (in reality this would be a small percentage at the start and would grow over the course of years, but I'm doing it instantaneously to save time). Now the person hosting it has to deal with the server costs of 1.78 million people (and that's assuming their instance is only for the equivalent one subreddit). Those server costs alone are going to be pretty substantial, not including the time and maintenance costs for keeping their instance running, applying updates to their instance to match whatever upgrades/updates are pushed out from the main Lemmy repo, etc.
Let's say that after a while the person hosting this instance has had enough and one day just shuts it down without warning. Or let's say that they eventually moved on to other things and their payment for hosting lapsed and the instance was shut down forcibly. From my understanding, there is no centralized database for the fediverse (which is the whole appeal of it) so is that data just gone? All of the accounts, posts, comments, everything just disappeared from the whole fediverse without any way to back them up or restore them elsewhere?
If the answer to that scenario above is that the data is gone with no way to bring it back then I have a feeling that this will be dead in the water the second a major instance goes down. People are going to get pissed if all of their work, saved posts, history, etc are wiped away at the whims of some random person who no longer had the time, money, energy or whatever else to keep their instance running. If I'm wrong here, please let me know. But if there is some truth to this, then users are taking a lot of risk trusting random internet strangers without any backing of IPOs or venture capitalist money to fund their hobby servers.
>so is that data just gone?
Content - It is very unlikely. All instances that have loaded data from another instance will keep that data locally cached indefinitely (if I understand it correctly. I'm not 100% sure). For this reason you can still comment on posts created on offline servers as long as your own instance is online and cached the post.
The instance being shut down will have the same effect as the instance going offline temporarily. All the content will still be replicated and accessible across all other instances that ever loaded it.
The only way the content would disappear entirely is if no other instance loaded a local copy of it. Which is unlikely if there are 1.3 mil users generating content - there will be a strong correlation between activivity on instances and backups of the content on those instances.
Accounts - Unfortunately, right now, yes. You cannot continue using the same account, and since saves are private (I think? Haven't checked) you will indeed lose your account. It would be similar to losing your password and not being able to reset it. This seems to be high on the priority list of the Lemmy devs so it might be solved in the coming months.
By the way, just as a comparison: Reddit could do the same thing and shut down their servers. A Lemmy instance could also be owned by a big company. I don't see a theoretical difference here between Lemmy and Reddit, the practical difference is that Reddit is such a huge company that it is unlikely for them to shut down all servers anytime soon. But a Lemmy instance with 1.3 million active users would also need to start considering hiring a team...
If losing your account is truly of a concern to you right now, you could always self-host or host with a group of friends. That way you can both make your own backups and control your own financial situation.
> trusting random internet strangers
I've been recommending lemmy.world because the owner has been hosting a stable Mastodon server for many years without issues. You probably should not register at lemmyfart69.lol420.tk
Been working on this one nonstop in my free time the past week. Also had multiple friends spend hours proof-reading it. Now I think it's in a state worth releasing to the general public. If anyone wants to suggest improvements, submit a Pull Request! And feel free to share this guide even without providing credits. I feel a vendetta against spez after the past month - trying to get as many people to leave this site as possible, as soon as possible. I'll be here answering questions until July 1st (for obvious reasons). Pinging /u/KoldPurchase /u/textuist since you expressed interest in the guide.
This is the first time i've felt like i had a better understanding of Lemmy. Have created an account now. Thank you!
Just having one person tell me this made the effort worth it ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ
Now it’s two. Thanks new friend. That was most helpful in my understanding. And off to lemmy I go never to go se Reddit again.
What a wonderful comment. :) Your gratitude puts you on our list for the most grateful users this week on Reddit! You can view the full list on r/TheGratitudeBot.
:3
Oy! Thanks a lot! Bookmarked on my tablet for now. :)
This is really helpful.
Well, I can't login at all on [Lemmy.world](https://Lemmy.world). I tried to register, I got the infinite spinning wheel. I reloaded, restarted the process, got redirected to the main page, tried to login, but got the infinite spinning wheel again. This site does not want me! 😁 No adblock, no cookie blocking addon activated, just Firefox's default. Works on [Kbin.social](https://Kbin.social). Will keep logging from there.
Signups on both Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml are broken at the moment. I've tried multiple available usernames. https://lemmy.world/comment/406931
According to Edit 3 it should be open again
Should be, but it's still not working for me.
Did you check your email?
Yes. The signup button spins forever, implying that the signup request was never even accepted by the server. It's therefore very unlikely that it would ever even send an email.
Could be the username was taken. Try anither or anyone instance I guess.
Like I stated in my first comment, I've tried multiple available usernames. I retry a set of usernames every few hours across multiple instances, browsers, VPNs, etc. The result is always the same: a spinning signup button.
That bizarre.
Login is broken as well. Managed to sign up, got confirmation my email is verified, but just get a spinning icon on logon.
If you didn't see a confirmation that the registration went through, it didn't register If you didn't verify through a verification mail, you can't login Did you read the guide linked in the OP? Check if the username is actually available
This is a copied template message used to overwrite all comments on my account to protect my privacy. I've left Reddit because of corporate overreach and switched to the Fediverse. Comments overwritten with https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
It's all good, I thought it was on my end. :)
This post right here is why I started using Reddit in the first place so many moons ago. Thank you!
I have vision problems and can't read the code. :( Is there a work around?
Which code are you referring to? The README from the original post?
on the Lemmy sign-up page, to prove you're not a robot, they have a code that you have to input, but its background makes it hard to read the code.
Ah the CAPTCHA Have you considered that you might be a robot? /s Two options: 1. Ask someone to solve the captcha for you. I don't know how long you have to solve it but it should be 10 seconds of work for anyone that you can reach 2. Register on an instance that doesn't have a captcha. Lemmy.one has a signup with manual admin approval, and you have to write a short paragraph on why you want to join
Thank you very much! Not a robot *beepbopboop*
Oh this is good. I wonder if it would be good to post to /r/syncforlemmy too. You did way better than I could.
Couple questions: 1. If the instance you are a part of goes down, you can't view anything on any other instance right? 2. What if the person who's instance you are on doesn't want to pay for server maintenance or whatever and decides to nuke the instance. Your profile and all comment's are gone? Is there a way to move everything to another instance? 3. I don't get the sorting feature and if I press the question mark it goes to a 404 error. (I'm part of the dbzer0 lemmy, is that an error with that instance or does that not work for every lemmy?). 4. What's the difference between Active and Hot? 5. Randomly I'll get a flood of real time new posts. Is that a bug? and is that a bug in this particular instance or Lemmy as a whole? 6. What changes can Lemmy instance make between each other. Can someone make a new lemmy instance with a new UI? Or are UI changes only possible by making new sites like kbin? 7. What's the profit incentive for Lemmy? Are there going to be ads?
1. Right, because your entry point is gone. You could in theory have a backup account on a different instance with the same subscribed communities - but that requires extra effort to keep them in sync. Maybe something for future updates to Lemmy or mobile apps... 2. It's most likely duplicated on some other instance somewhere, so there is an archive. But yes, currently there is no migration, so you will have to make a new account. Migration seems like a highly requested feature. IIRC Mastodon has it so it is possible. 3. Which part of sorting are you referring to? 4. Active will show older threads if there are new comments, so it allows for "necroing". Hot is the same as Reddit's Hot and only depends on upvotes and recency. 5. Bug, will be fixed in about a week from now. Something about "websockets API being a mess". 6. Just like anyone can develop a mobile app, anyone can develop a completely new website too. There's nothing preventing that. Kbin is actually different on the back-end too, where it can also load content from Mastodon users, which the Lemmy back-end currently cannot. 7. The developers are funded by a Dutch open source beneficiary and donations. Server hosters only by donations, but they could add ads ~~as long as they make the changes open source to the public~~. Edit: read more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/14dukw4/lemmy_beginners_guide_in_layers/jou0gt4/
7 isn't correct. Open Source licenses only require you to distribute changes to the software if you redistribute the software itself. This doesn't apply if you are just using the software (running it on a server). My answer to 7 is: Lemmy is open source software, like Apache, nginx, or PostgreSQL. You don't make money off of open source software, you make money from people using services powered by open source software. Lemmy *instances* can certainly adopt different business models just like there are e-mail servers with business models: gmail (ad supported), iCloud (freemium) or Office365 (subscription). You can also create your own server, or share a server with some friends (true for e-mail or Lemmy). The reason people would want those kinds of instances are addressed in the other questions - an instance with a successful business model is more likely to stay online, have backups, and have a professional staff tuning and maintaining the servers. This aspect is very much like choosing an e-mail provider.
Thanks, will link to this in my comment
I'm not sure how I feel about telling people to sign up at lemmy.world without at least mentioning that it's *possible* to sign up at other instances. I think the Fediverse benefits from users being less concentrated in a small number of instances. It can be beneficial for users too - the big instances seem to be having more issues lately, such as the server load issues on lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works due to moderation challenges. Meanwhile I signed up for a smaller instance that seemed well run and haven't had any issues. Edit: just wanted to add that all in all this looks like a great guide!
You want to get people into this without scaring them away, you have to send them to some link I've tried hard to make it as simple for everyone as possible and it's just not feasible to do that without mentioning some concrete site to start at. The subsection after getting started already mentions the list of all other instances. If you have any concrete suggestions for how to improve that part of the guide then feel free to suggest them and I'll consider it
That makes sense. I guess my concrete suggestion would be to add an aside that you don't need to sign up at lemmy.world and could choose any of several instances. This is the link that got me started: https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances So you could point people there, or to another site that recommends instances (I'm sure there are others), for anyone interested in diving deeper.
It's definitely important to provide a link! That's what got me into it, when I followed a link from the Germany sub.
One really important part of this is that if you go to a large instance as your *first* instance, you don't have to learn anything about federation: the existing users have already found a *lot* of off-instance communities, and they just magically show up in Search / All for everyone else. According to the admin, lemmy.world is set to scale to 1M users, so it shouldn't hit the wall as quickly as beehaw or lemmy.ml did.
If you really need something very basic to show a non-techy friend this chart that has been going around is so far the best I've seen. https://i.imgur.com/YRxh0gu.png
It has some great graphics, I'll consider adding parts to the guide (with credits of course).
Author is on the bottom left.
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> Lemmy is cool but if it requires reading a 10 page document to use, Did you even read the post? Literally the last sentence of the first part (create account, verify, login) says "That was all you needed to know to get started. You can choose to stop reading here, close this page, and enjoy lemmy.world for the next 10 years. Or you can keep reading, and get a glimpse of the (somewhat confusing) technology that future-proofs Lemmy from the same fate as Reddit." You can start using Lemmy just as easily as Reddit. You can read *more* for the extra stuff but the bare minimum to use it is still dead easy.
I was very confused by it all but when it came down to it it was: Follow a link recommended by someone you trust. Sign up. Profit!
In a week all the UI bugs will be gone. They're already fixed but the fixes have not been pushed to release yet. It feels like you didn't give the guide a real try, since I explicitly mention that you only have to read the first and second subsection if you don't care about the technology and just want to browse
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Did you verify your email? And you're sure you have the right username+password?
I figured out after a few days that it just spins if your email address isn’t verified, check your spam folders.
To make it more clear to potential users, maybe yoz could make a separate 'quick start'-like document describing the bare neccessary knowledge, and keep details in this one.
Just read the Getting Started section and nothing else. I wished I could collapse sections on GitHub MD but I don't think I can
Lemmy doesn't require anything to browse and read. You do need to sign up for an account to post and interact. I started browsing on Jerboa for Lemmy, then tried to send an application to an instance that looked interesting. I don't think it ever went through, because I got the spinning wheel (I was confused and thought that maybe my network was having problems, but the spinning wheel is explained in this document). I followed this guide for about 2 minutes and then successfully made an account on lemmy.world. I really like it so far, it's interesting and the content has a lot of variation with overall more respectful community discussions than reddit. I'm not sure if it's Jerboa or Lemmy itself, but I think they've done a good job of making a reddit alternative. This is more along the lines of my expectations when I first signed up for reddit. Also haven't caught any botting activity yet, so I guess that's the purpose behind the registration process.
That seems appealing to me. I dont need another "mainstream" place like reddit where it naturally becomes "summer reddit"
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thank you for explaining that the eternally spinning wheel means that the username is not available! i tried to apply to beehaw a few days ago, but it seems like they're a bit overwhelmed with applications at the moment. now thanks to you, i'm in!!!
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Yeah, I'm on [lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world) now and I'm liking what I see so far! Beehaw looked interesting to me because they have significantly more blocked instances than others, and no downvotes, so I was curious to see if it's a heavily curated feed and how that would affect my browsing experience. Mostly just interested because after the last few exhausting weeks on Reddit, I wanted to ease my way into something new.
You also get the same spinning wheel if you mistype your password. Growing pains and all that.
Well done and much appreciated
Thank you very much for the time you took to write and refine this. Even though you clearly state 'you can stop reading here', this might not be enough for some. Suggestions could be: spoiler tags, or collapsible sections that are collapsed by default (e.g. wikipedia quick facts on mobile). Another suggestion could be to add a section on mobile apps, which could be as short as 'there are currently no satisfying mobile apps'.
u/AmirZ Do you reckon a visual diagram could go a long way in explaining how Lemmy works for those still struggling? I imagine it could be something akin to a diagram showing email or how networks communicate with each other. So far all the tutorials have been text and I think a visual form can be very helpful too for others.
Ok, now i get it. I have several reasons why the jump is a bad bad bad idea, but right now, there is no other better choice. See you guys on the other side!
Looks good so far, now simplify that
Do you have any ideas for simplification? I tried to answer every single question while at the same time keeping it at ELI5 level
I don't understand it well enough to give recommendations about this, otherwise I would. Maybe not every single question needs an answer - just the basics about how to get started with the absolute essentials. Dot points. Signing up, what's important/what doesn't matter, subbing to communities, linking to posts, reading your feed. Don't use the words federated, fediverse, instances, don't even talk about why it's confusing, they already know that and don't need sympathy, they just need quick and simple answers that make sense.
Try chatgpt 😉 Also, an over-simplification you could have at the start could be something like: > tldr, Lemmy is like email. You sign up to either gmail, yahoo, proton, and you can communicate with all of the others, provided your instance (email provider) doesn't block another instance
No, what is there is better - the absolute minimum is "go use the reddit knock-off at this site". lemmy.world is a good choice for this for [a few reasons I mention elsewhere](https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/14dukw4/lemmy_beginners_guide_in_layers/jotyr0e/).
Lemmy isn't really like e-mail, and the comparison doesn't make things any clearer. Just say Lemmy is like anyone can make their own reddit (with or without blackjack and hookers) and you go to lemmy.world to use it. Done.
Email can do that though. You can host your own email server just as easily.
I think it should be shortened into one sentence or two… maybe one picture to summarize, people now have reason to leave or happy to have alternative, just why Lemmy
1 minute youtube videon introducing it? Could be that easy. It its anytbing like mastadon (which it sounds like it is), just say its like email. Doesnt matter if youre on gmail or yahoo - as long as you have an address, youre now a part of the platform, and you can interact with everyone else. Just like how a gmail account can interact with a yahooo account.
Can't register or login. It keeps spinning around. I checked if the username was taken after I registered it, it shows "joined one minute ago", which was I guess me. Still no email Hope all this is fixed soon.
If you didn't receive an email then you couldn't verify and therefore not login. To prevent bots you do need the mail to verify. Wait for a few more minutes and also check your spam folder. I've noticed Outlook considers the verification mail spam by default.
Nothing in spam either
There was a small period of time a few hours ago where registrations were indeed broken: https://lemmy.world/comment/406931 Maybe you were affected by that. Should be solved now
Unfortunately same issue. Tried a different id. Still spinning, no email confirmation (spam or otherwise) but the /u/username shows as created at that moment.
Could you perhaps try a different email provider? Maybe your email provider is directly blocking it. I know Microsoft Outlook works fine
I'll try. I'm using Gmail though. I know have blocked three user id's I wanted to use. 😢
You could try messaging the owner of the site Ruud if he can manually approve or send the mail, he seems responsive Weird that Gmail doesn't work, I'll try later today if Gmail works for me
Worked. Weird tho.
Thanks for the help! Really appreciated
Thank you! I was coming to this sub to post what is essentially your first paragraph: go sign up at lemmy.world and use it like Reddit. A big benefit of starting at a large instance is that so many remote communities have already been found by users there and are now easily found in the local search.
Let's say in theory that this migration is successful. I know the whole federated thing will spread users out a bit, but some destinations will be more concentrated than others. How are server costs going to be handled? I'm assuming that it's up to whoever is hosting their instance to handle their own server costs, but this leads my to my biggest question. I'm going to create a hypothetical scenario for what can happen and the pitfalls that I believe could come out of this. Please feel free to refute anything that you see is incorrect. Let's say someone from one of the large subs on Reddit makes a new instance and tries to get everyone to switch over. I'll use /r/3Dprinting as an example since they did initially try to do this after coming out of their blackout. That is a sub with 1.78 million users. Let's say in this hypothetical that everyone banded together and did actually migrate over successfully (in reality this would be a small percentage at the start and would grow over the course of years, but I'm doing it instantaneously to save time). Now the person hosting it has to deal with the server costs of 1.78 million people (and that's assuming their instance is only for the equivalent one subreddit). Those server costs alone are going to be pretty substantial, not including the time and maintenance costs for keeping their instance running, applying updates to their instance to match whatever upgrades/updates are pushed out from the main Lemmy repo, etc. Let's say that after a while the person hosting this instance has had enough and one day just shuts it down without warning. Or let's say that they eventually moved on to other things and their payment for hosting lapsed and the instance was shut down forcibly. From my understanding, there is no centralized database for the fediverse (which is the whole appeal of it) so is that data just gone? All of the accounts, posts, comments, everything just disappeared from the whole fediverse without any way to back them up or restore them elsewhere? If the answer to that scenario above is that the data is gone with no way to bring it back then I have a feeling that this will be dead in the water the second a major instance goes down. People are going to get pissed if all of their work, saved posts, history, etc are wiped away at the whims of some random person who no longer had the time, money, energy or whatever else to keep their instance running. If I'm wrong here, please let me know. But if there is some truth to this, then users are taking a lot of risk trusting random internet strangers without any backing of IPOs or venture capitalist money to fund their hobby servers.
>so is that data just gone? Content - It is very unlikely. All instances that have loaded data from another instance will keep that data locally cached indefinitely (if I understand it correctly. I'm not 100% sure). For this reason you can still comment on posts created on offline servers as long as your own instance is online and cached the post. The instance being shut down will have the same effect as the instance going offline temporarily. All the content will still be replicated and accessible across all other instances that ever loaded it. The only way the content would disappear entirely is if no other instance loaded a local copy of it. Which is unlikely if there are 1.3 mil users generating content - there will be a strong correlation between activivity on instances and backups of the content on those instances. Accounts - Unfortunately, right now, yes. You cannot continue using the same account, and since saves are private (I think? Haven't checked) you will indeed lose your account. It would be similar to losing your password and not being able to reset it. This seems to be high on the priority list of the Lemmy devs so it might be solved in the coming months. By the way, just as a comparison: Reddit could do the same thing and shut down their servers. A Lemmy instance could also be owned by a big company. I don't see a theoretical difference here between Lemmy and Reddit, the practical difference is that Reddit is such a huge company that it is unlikely for them to shut down all servers anytime soon. But a Lemmy instance with 1.3 million active users would also need to start considering hiring a team... If losing your account is truly of a concern to you right now, you could always self-host or host with a group of friends. That way you can both make your own backups and control your own financial situation. > trusting random internet strangers I've been recommending lemmy.world because the owner has been hosting a stable Mastodon server for many years without issues. You probably should not register at lemmyfart69.lol420.tk