Hi 🙋,
you might be in search for an reddit alternative and don’t get the Lemmy thing, yet.
Lemme help you out, shortly.
- Lemmy lets you build
communities just like you are used to.
- You need an account to participate. I doesn’t matter on which server you register.
- https://feddit.org/ → German/English community
- https://feddit.uk/ → UK centric
- List of other servers
- Lemmy servers (instances) host communities and can be interconnected.
@user@example.com can follow local or remote communities
[!community1@example.com](/c/community1@example.com)[!community2@niceplace.com](/c/community2@niceplace.com)- identified almost as easy as an e-Mail address.
- Following a community is called
subscribing, you’ll find a subscribe button when browsing communities.
- Subscribing will keep you noted on new posts.
- Mobile clients can make the experience more fluffy
- Voyager
- Arctic (iOS)
- List of other clients
Our community is called !BuyFromEU@feddit.org but there are several likeminded communities out there. Make sure to watch out for them, e.g. by browsing an instance's local communities. Also if you want to stick around we posted about What to expect (from this community) and Where to start (buying european).
Feel free to link this post, when onboarding people to this community.
And why is that? I just signed-up. :)
Pretty much what the other person said. There isn't really a difference which server you're on, lemmy.world is fine. But we go on Lemmy because we want a robust network that isn't prone to central failure like reddit is - if theoretically everyone were on lemmy.world, then the situation really is no different than reddit. Someone could just buy the server/admins and do whatever they want, or the lemmy.world admins could just be evil in the first place.
For you not to be on lemmy.world is no disadvantage, just make sure whatever server you go to isn't a walled garden and stopped talking to ("defederated") lemmy.world, currently the only larger one that does that is beehaw.org.
Unfortunately (talking about federated services in general) there is a small bit of complexity that comes with spreading around the service across multiple servers. Lemmy tries to hide as much of it as possible from the end user, but it's impossible to hide the effects completely. It's kinda like democracy - it only really works well if every voter is informed, but even if they aren't, it's still better than an autocracy.
Not OP but I think they just meant it's pretty overloaded - it's one of the most well-known instances. "Too many" users can cause problems for the people hosting the instance, so I think there's been a movement to spread it around so all the eggs aren't in the same basket.