There's instances that are federated with both though. I'm on one of them.

Fine by me, what they did is actually a feature of the Fediverse. People fear what they don't understand and based on comments at the time, there was a lot of misunderstanding.

It is what it is The fedi drama makes it kinda interesting lmao

This is why I have an account on Beehaw, and one on Lemmy.world

Hello fellow lemm.ee user 👋

After what happened with lemmy.fmhy.ml I am a bit scared of joining "less popular" domains to be fair.

too late, going to register on lemm.ee now!

It bothers me that people find it out so supremely confusing and it's definitely an issue that needs to be addressed because it's definitely keeping people away. The fact of the matter is, you can go to any Lemmy instance and get that front page experience because the r/all equivalent of each instance shows threads from every other instance (minus defederated, etc but that's beside the point).

Sync helps in that it is a familiar and polished look and feel for those who used third party Reddit apps, but outside of that it's just another Lemmy app.

Probably the biggest factor in the confusion is fediverse terms being used to describe the fediverse, which is basically speaking nonsense if you don't already understand it.

There's this: Lemmy is a federated link aggregator where anyone can start an instance and communities within that instance and all the instances can communicate and share information. Doesn't it sound amazing?

Then there's this: Lemmy is like a version of Reddit where there's a whole bunch of separate reddit dot coms. You can sign up for whichever one you like to be your home "reddit". The reddits are all connected, so you can subscribe to subreddits on the other reddits while just logged into your home. You can also post to them, comment, and see the posts and comments from your home.

I'm sure there's some analogy out there that really boils it down well much better than mine, so please share if you think of one.

It's actually not that complicated. Lemmy just works like email. You can use different email providers (lemmy calls them instances) like gmail.com or yahoo.com and they work together. What you call subreddits is called communities and they are managed by a instance. If one instance does something that you don't like, you can use another. They all work independently but exchange data. If you have any questions see this. Hope this helps

Is there some kind of tutorial or explanation for beginners who only came here because of sync and don't understand anything that's going on.

On one side this experience is really simple and easy, sync makes it very much like Reddit. But I see some people have @signs in their names showing their on different instances... Does that mean my comments aren't seen by all people and what the heck is an instance and what an I doing?

Lemmy.WTF Which of course means “What The Fediverse?!”.

That's the beauty of lemmy, there's always options

Not our lifeblood!

Back up now though

Looks like it's back. You can log in for science 🤣

Considering this myself, how much work is there in it?

Just think of it like different email providers. Ex. Gmail, Hotmail, Protonmail etc, they can still talk to each other just fine but are run by different groups with their own rules.

The reason why is to make sure a single entity doesn't hold all the power.

Reddit is only failing because the corporation holds all the power. If we replaced Reddit with another single site, the same thing would happen again. The site would sell out and it would be whored out to advertisers.

On Lemmy, if one site tries to go corporate, people will just move to another instance. The power is in our hands and no corporations can take it away.

As to why, basically anyone is allowed to run their own copy of lemmy and some people actually enjoy doing it. There is more nuance of course. For instance, the owner can block other people's instances for whatever reason so no one on their instance sees content from the other instance and people from the other instance can't comment or vote in their communities.

There are definitely pros and cons to this approach, but the cool thing about it is the whole thing is back in the hands of real people and not owned by a bunch of investors.

Lemmy is a bunch of servers that talk to each other instead of just one server that holds everything. A Lemmy "instance" is one of those communicating servers. You can join any of the ones that talk to each other and see the same content. You can sign up at any of the websites you see in people's usernames here (e.g. mine is lemmy.sdf.org), it's good to sign up for the slightly smaller ones to better balance the server load.

You can think of instances like communities, You can join different communities with different rules and all these communities are connected to each other. So no matter which instance you choose, you'll still be able to interact with people from the others.

Now the reason for the existence of different instances is the same reason why there are different communities in the world. Some people feel more comfortable in groups of people with similar tastes.And having multiple instances ensures that no instance "owns" the social network.

But you can sign up to as many instances as you like with the same username and email.

But, like anywhere else, I would strongly suggest to use different passwords.

Sync is a mobile app, but you can sign in to lemmy by going to your instance's website (for you it would be lemmy.world). Remember, sync is only a way to view lemmy, it doesn't power lemmy

You can. Just search for any community from mastodon and then follow it and you can reply to anything that comes through your timeline. You can also follow users.