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Comment on Six months after the initial reddit surge (graphs)

Wav_function@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

I’m here because of the API stuff, I was a reddit sync user so when sync made their Lemmy app I joined.

Honestly Lemmy feels much more confusing than Reddit used to, I don’t fully understand the federation stuff and different worlds or whatever, I imagine there’s a lot of people confused about it like me.

I’m happy to stay and contribute but I think I need to figure out how to use this on my desktop because I only check Lemmy because of the sync android app.

Any tips on how to get started migrating my experience to desktop? Like I literally don’t know what URL I would go to.

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reattach@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The most intuitive analogy to federation to me is email. You may have an account with one provider (gmail.com in the example of email, or lemmy.world in the example of Lemmy) but you can send emails to other providers (email example) or post messages to other instances (Lemmy).

Just like with email providers, a Lemmy instance may decide not to allow communication with another instance - this is “defederation.” Instances that allow communication are “federated.”

Just like email, you don’t normally need to worry much about whether you are on the same instance as a particular community or user - it just works.

This is a simplification, but for me is a good working model.

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- Wav_function@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thanks
  
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shrugal@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The url for you would simply be lemmy.world. Just login with your account from the app and start scrolling, no need to migrate anything.

Federation in principle is actually really simple. Basically there are multiple servers (aka instances) run by different people and with their own urls, and they just send each other messages to stay in sync. E g. if you post something on LW, that server also sends it to all the others (all they are federated with), so they can show it to their users too. That’s it, that’s the magic.

The result is that all instances have the same content, and users can message each other no matter what instance they are on. So it doesn’t really matter which one you sign up on, and no content is lost if one of them goes down.

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- Wav_function@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thanks
  
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Hjalamanger@feddit.nu ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You could just go to lemmy.world. That’s your home instance, it works kinda like an email provider. And if you (for example) use gmail you can access your mail at the Gmail website and the same is true for Lemmy.

But just like you could download an email client you can get yourself an Lemy client and use that*. That client will make API requests to your home instance to get the posts it presents to you. Your home instance in turn will communicate with other instances in order to show their posts to you.**

clients/websites you could try

Here is one list and here is another. Also note that some clients are actually webapps.

* you probably know this considering you use the Lemmy client sync

** Disclaimer: the last part about how Lemmy works is just how I think it works based on what I have read. I could be completely wrong.

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clients/websites you could try