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Disappointed ex-Reddit user after the APIcalypse - starter pack (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by Sati1984@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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I used to browse Reddit 90+% of the time from my phone through the RiF app, so after June 30th, here is what I did and what I recommend as a starter pack for others in the same situation:

Create account on lemmy.world, so the browser part is covered
Search for the information on which app provides the closest to the RiF (Apollo, etc.) experience
Instal Liftoff and be happy - it is just like RiF :-) (for Apollo and others, it could be different - find your own favorite!)
Dial back dramatically on using Reddit at all. I only load 4 subs in my phone's browser, because I did not find the Lemmy / Fediverse alternatives yet
Constantly look for the communities to replace the subreddits you are still visiting
OPTIONAL - once or twice a week, look at /r/pics and /r/videos and laugh at the creativity of the still ongoing protest :-)

So that is where I am right now, posting this via the web browser on the lemmy.world site, by pressing "create a post". Seems easy enough for now, but I find it a bit confusing that other people can post from Mastodon and other Lemmy instances... Do they see the same communities I do? Do I see all Lemmy communities if I use lemmy.world....? So many questions, but it's exciting to explore this brand new structure.

Even after reading the Fediverse and ActivityPub articles on Wikipedia my head is spinning, and I don't really understand how everything fits / works together, but here I am! An ex(-ish) Redditor after the APIcalypse, looking for cool new communities, and excited about the future that the Fediverse can bring!

(I'm willing to learn! Someone please link me a FAQ where I can find the answers to my questions :-) )

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[-] rustyfish@lemmy.world 92 points 1 year ago

Welcome to Lemmy. Here is your free Lemming:

Go wild!

[-] Sati1984@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

LOL, thanks!

[-] TechGoat@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

We are Lemmyins now. Lemmy In! Lemmy In! ...That was a good shitpost, IMO.

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[-] EyesEyesBaby@lemmy.world 49 points 1 year ago

For apollo: use https://wefwef.app, it’s nearly identical.

[-] quinten@lemmy.world 50 points 1 year ago

The speed at which all apps are updated is insane! Not only wefwef.app but also Memmy. The community really wants this project to succeed.

[-] aquarisces@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

Definitely rooting for it!

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[-] HorseFD@lemm.ee 18 points 1 year ago

Plus Memmy is out on the App Store! Doesn’t help OP of course.

[-] Suru@mander.xyz 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm not sure if I'm just technologically challenged, but I can't seem to find a way to log into wefwef from a smaller instance. Does it only support the big four?

//edit: Turns out you can only pop in as a guest from the bigger instances. You can log in to any instance, and I'm just dumb.

[-] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 5 points 1 year ago

For Sync, try Thunder, it's similar. Sync will eventually come out, but Thunder is FOSS.

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[-] leraje@lemmy.world 44 points 1 year ago

Lemmy is a piece of software. Lemmy software is a link aggregator - same as reddit.

So you’re signed up to a server that's installed an instance (a copy) of the Lemmy software. Other servers also run the Lemmy software making them also instances of Lemmy. As well as you being able to talk to users in Communities (think subreddits) on the lemmy.world server, you can talk to users in Communities on other Lemmy instances. For example, lemmy.ml, feddit.de etc etc

KBin is also link aggregator software, just like Lemmy and Reddit. Same things apply there, same software on multiple servers, all able to talk with each other.

Mastodon software is a microblogging service - same as Twitter (and Threads). Just like instances of Lemmy, instances of Mastodon can talk to each other. So a user on mastodon.world can talk to (for example) a user on kolektiva.social which is also running the Mastodon software.

There’s also Pixelfed (Instagram), PeerTube (YouTube), Friendica (Facebook), Plume (WordPress) and a large variety of others.

Now, as well as all these different types of software (Lemmy, Mastodon, KBin, PixelFed etc) being able to talk to other instances of the same software on other servers, because they are all underpinned by a single method of passing information called ActivityPub, each type of software can also talk to each other - so you as a Lemmy user can also see posts and comments from a user on a server running an instance of Mastodon (or Plume, or PixedlFed, or...you get the idea). All these things are loosely joined together making a joined (federated) universe - the fediverse.

[-] Tygr@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

I thought I was getting the hang of this until I read your comment and learned about all these cool technologies in the fediverse. Thank you, I found this super helpful.

Do I need to setup accounts for these other ones like mastodon, pixelfed?

[-] leraje@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

No problem :)

It really depends on your intention...if you intend to just interact with (for example) Mastodon users that appear occasionally in the Lemmy communities you're a part of then there's no need at all. Or if you want to communicate occasionally with a Mastodon (or any other type of software) user then you could use their Mastodon handle to do so - for example go to the Search box on your Lemmy instance and type in @Mastodon@mastodon.social (which is the 'official' Mastodon account on the mastodon.social server but it can be any handle) wait for a few seconds (or longer depending on the speed of the server) and the user account with the ability to private message them appears. There are currently some issues but it used to be possible to post directly to a Mastodon user's timeline from Lemmy. Mastodon users can post to Lemmy. It's worth remembering that Mastodon is a LOT more mature as a product than Lemmy, which is still in its infancy.

For now, at least, Id say if you're looking to spend a lot of time on each different software type then register an account at an instance of it. The integration will come, but the fediverse is young, Lemmy in particular is very young so it'll take time.

[-] Tygr@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Thank you for this explanation! Lemmy really needs an award function to allow me to give people awards for going above and beyond.

[-] leraje@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

No need :) if you're not already, make a donation to the instance you're on instead.

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[-] IlliteratiDomine@infosec.pub 6 points 1 year ago

Technically, no, but you may want to. All of these services are federated and interact with one another. Mastodon users can interact with pixelfed posts and lemmy communities and anything else in the Fediverse. In reality, though, these services, and their clients, are built for specific types of content. If you're spending much time at all on those other Federated communities, the "round peg, square hole" nature of using a Reddit-like app to use a Twitter-like service (as an example) may start to chafe.

[-] Amanduh@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

I've seen numerous posts trying to explain what is going on here but this is the one that made sense to me. Thanks.

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[-] Th4tGuyII@kbin.social 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I would discourage telling everyone to go to Lemmy.World as not only could it overload the server, the centralisation problem starts all over again.

The vast majority of instances are federated to all the big ones anyway, so I would recommend looking around to see if there are any instances that better fit your wants before going straight Lemmy.World. You won't lose anything from it, and you'll be supporting the wider fediverse.

[-] ImaginaryFox@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago

Spread out communities makes it easier to avoid a single admin deciding to go crazy. Like imagine if Reddit had been composed of different instances, so people were able to just pack up and leave the instance he was on and not lose all their communities by quitting the Spez reddit instance. So you make a good point. Maybe over time there will be topic based instances popping up like an instance for entertainment, and an instance for games. Which would be pretty cool over a swiss army knife do everything approach instance where everyone starts migrating communities too because it has the largest user base.

[-] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 11 points 1 year ago

This already is a thing, see StarTrek.website, Lemmy.film and LemmyNSFW.com for just a few examples.

The admin paranoia is tough because it goes both ways. Yes, big instances mean huge losses if they get abandoned, defederated or the admin loses his mind. At the same time, smaller instances are often run by regular people who can't or aren't interested in running an instance long term, or don't have the ability to have 99%+ uptime.

At the moment momentum is important to reach critical mass of users and it's just not feasible to tell most Reddit refugees "Okay so go to look up the handful of instances closest to your geographical location. Research their uptime, the reliability of their admins, their funding, their rules and whether they're defederated from any major instances. Just pick the one that best suits your needs! Oh, also remember to use !community@instance.something (don't forget the exclamation point!) when searching for communities because many small instances haven't connected yet to everyone. This also means these subs will appear empty at first because old content doesn't get propagated but don't worry about it. Oh and also sorting topics by Hot is bugged on small instances currently."

[-] InisSieferI@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

We're kind of starting to get that, we just need to encourage people to spread out from lemmy.world and make communities in these other instances. We've got lemmy.film that's TV and film focused, pathfinder.social and another ttrpg instance, star trek has an instance, the solar punk instance, there's a couple tech, privacy, and hacker instances. I'd also like to see more local area communities in instances like midwest.social instead of all on lemmy.world, too.

[-] tchotchony@mander.xyz 23 points 1 year ago

Optional extra point to add on to #5: if the community that needs to replace a subreddit isn't here yet, MAKE IT. And advertise it, so it can get popular. Be the change you want to see!

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[-] BetaRebooter@feddit.uk 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Newbie here and apologies if these are FAQs but just want one line answers

What's an instance?

What's a community?

What are federations?

Whats the difference between all these?

What's mastodon?

What's Kbin?

What's ActivityPub?

Just jargon I'm trying to get my head around, I'm still confused on signing up to different communities?! I guess and yeah.. a bit lost I suppose. If there are FAQs to all this please direct me to them, thanks!

[-] tj@fedia.io 18 points 1 year ago

What’s an instance?

An instance is a server running the Lemmy software (or some other federation software such as Mastodon, Kbin, Pixelfed, and others). Instances can talk together (similarly to how you can send email from gmail.com to outlook.com), so you can sign up on one instance and subscribe and comment to communities on other instances

What’s a community?

A community is to Lemmy what a subreddit is to Reddit. on

What are federations?

Federation is the machanism allowing different instances (servers) to talk together. Federation is automatic, so two instances becomes federated, when you as a user on one instance subscribe to a community on a different instance

Whats the difference between all these?

Many instances are general but have somewhat different values and rules for what you can post or not. "lemmy.world" is a good choice for a general instance. There are also topic specific instances, such as "mander.xyz" that is science focused.

What’s mastodon?

Mastodon is like twitter but is part of the federated universe (the "fediverse").

What’s Kbin?

Kbin - like Lemmy - is like Reddit. The impelemntation is different and focuses on different fetures. Some (myself included) like Kbin more than Lemmy - others the other way around.

What’s ActivityPub?

ActivityPub is the common technical protocol that allows all of the software in the Fediverse to talk together. Both Mastodon, Kbin and Lemmy (and others) are build "on top" of the ActivityPub protocol.

Hope this helps

[-] TechGoat@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I'm just not sure about how much I like that on kbin, upvotes and downvotes are publicly viewable. I don't mind publicly viewable comments of course... but your votes? Eesh.

Sorry about the reddit link. It's old.reddit though: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/14gyay8/on_kbin_upvotes_downvotes_are_public/

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[-] 3xa8yte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'll give it a try, though I'm new here too:

What's an instance? -> A server on which you can register your account

What's a community? -> same as a subreddit

What are federations? -> Information exchange between servers

What's mastodon? -> Twitter alternative. As lemmy is to reddit

What's Kbin? -> Similar to lemmy, but kbin can interact better with Mastodon

What's ActivityPub? -> the protocol used within the fediverse

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[+] gelberhut@feddit.de 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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[-] Sati1984@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

This part is especially helpful:

"You should always stay on lemmy.world. To join the "music" community from lemmy.ml, you click the search icon in the top right corner on lemmy.world (not the "Communities" link) and search for !music@lemmy.ml including the exclamation mark (!) at the start. You should see the community pop up in the list after clicking Search. In general, the search term is "![community-name]@[instance-name]"."

A few times I was looking for communities using the search bar, and got confused that I found more than one community for the same thing (e. g. music) and they seemed to be on different Lemmy instances. I did not know if I can even subscribe to them or not, if they are even visible for me with my lemmy.world account or not, etc. Now I understand that part a bit better. Thanks again! :-)

[-] tias@discuss.tchncs.de 19 points 1 year ago

I think it is dangerous to tell everyone to go to lemmy.world. That buildup of lots of people on a single server goes against the intended use and risks introducing similar problems as Reddit has, when a single instance gets too much power. We regrettably have that problem with email servers today, where a few bad powerful actors (Gmail, Yahoo etc) with a business incentive control who is allowed to send mail or not.

It would be much healthier if they encouraged everyone to find a Lemmy instance that is either geographically close or has a local community that with common values and interests. We need to spread people out to promote democracy.

[-] DasRubberDuck@feddit.de 10 points 1 year ago

I was about to post the same. Joining the biggest instance is a bad Idea. I remember when joining Mastodon, there was a quiz that helped me find a fitting instance. Maybe there is a way to have something similar for lemmy instances? Maybe it already exists and I don't know about it? The concept of a decentralized social network seems to be hard to grasp for people.

[-] d00phy@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It’s kind of a double-edged sword, though. Sure the better advice would be to join a smaller instance, or spin up your own. Most people can’t spin up their own instance. As for smaller instances, who’s to say that smaller instance ris still going to be here 1, 2, 5 years from now? The 2 largest are more likely to stick around. Not saying you’re wrong, just that there are lots of unknowns.

Personally, I don’t think Lemmy folks should be working to get people to leave Reddit. Most people I see on Lemmy love the fact that it’s a small community like Reddit used to be. Why work to destroy that? If people want to leave Reddit, Lemmy will be here, and they’re probably going to add to the community. To me the barrier to entry of understanding how lemmy/Fediverse works is kind of helping to keep the community from growing to Reddit sizes with all the annoyances that entails.

[-] Coelacanth@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

While you're not wrong per se, having a massive instance like .world has enabled some much needed stress testing of the Lemmy backend in a way that really hasn't been possible before, which will help the Devs find optimizations and improvements that will facilitate future growth overall on all instances. The recent memory leak that was discovered is a great example of it.

Really testing the limits of scalability is important for the overall future of Lemmy. Doing it on a server whose admin already runs a large mastodon server and has proven to be trustworthy and reliable is not a bad thing so long as donations can keep up with server costs.

Finally, gathering on .world makes it easy for Reddit refugees to transition, which is actually valuable in reaching critical mass on Lemmy, though maybe that first big wave of people has passed already.

[-] HeartyBeast@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

I think they were saying ‘if you are an existing happy lemmy.world user and you want to join a community on another instance, do that through Lemmy.world

It’s reasonable generic advice. I’m subscribed and commenting from kbin.social

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[-] Sati1984@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I did not realize that lemmy.world is but a single instance - it's all starting to come together in my head :-)

The FAQ linked earlier in the thread suggested making an account on lemmy.world, that same thing was what I meant in my post as well. And I see the comments about it being beneficial to "stress test" the Lemmy backend, so... should I edit my original post?

[-] Coelacanth@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

One advantage lemmy.world has which led to many people recommending it early on is that Ruud is an experienced Fediverse admin (here is a summary of all his servers: https://lemmy.world/post/6441). This meant it was easy to suggest to early Reddit refugees since he's proven competent and reliable so it soothed fears of instances having poor uptime or getting abandoned and helped ease the transition.

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[-] Sati1984@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Thanks! This seems to be exactly what I was looking for :-)

[-] Amir@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

Hmm I feel like I've seen this before 🤔

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[-] Atiran@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

Lemmy has definitely been able to replace Reddit for me. And although I don’t fully understand the fediverse either, I am super intrigued by the concept. I hope this style is the future of social interaction on the internet.

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[-] Sev@feddit.uk 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Essentially, lemmy.world is an email provider right? Like Gmail.

And communities [or subs!] are forums. While these forum posts are made by people who are on the lemmy.world instance, every other provider [instance] can see them, provided the instance owner has not decided to block other providers [defederated].

As long as you are browsing ALL instead of Local [local only shows subs on your own instance], it's effectively reddit.

It may be worthwhile to make an account on an instance which features your country for Lemmy performance purposes, plus the local communities [subs, remember] may be very relevant for you, albeit probably very small in terms of users.

Signing up for lemmy.world is like signing up for shit, monopolised, slow internet in America? It has lots of customers, but that new upstart fibre company [small, fast instance] will let you see the same pages as shitty, slow Comcast.

(I'm not knocking Lemmy.world, just using it for this analogy)

That's what I make of the fed so far, pretty cool.

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[-] Amir@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

I highly recommend trying the Summit for Lemmy app. It doesn't have an Inbox or Profile pages yet, but browsing is much smoother than all alternatives

[-] Decide@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

Can confirm. Instantly better than any other app I've installed for Lemmy. Also, Liftoff requires you to login to each individual instance to upvote anything from that instance for some reason. Summit is great, is what I'm saying.

[-] th4@feddit.it 7 points 1 year ago

Also, Liftoff requires you to login to each individual instance to upvote anything from that instance for some reason.

Uh, I just upvoted you and this post from feddit.it using Liftoff

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[-] Jon-H558@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

I explain the fediverse a bit like all those "local" newspaper websites (that have names like Chathamgazette.org or GainsvilleAdvertiser.com or ChanningtownTimes.net), that in actual fact share 90% of the content on articles (usually all articles written as adverts but that is not part of the analogy here). They have 10% local content that others could access then the pages are made up of material they all share.

[-] menemen@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Welcome. The confusion will fade away after a few more days of using lemmy. :)

[-] Saneless@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I haven't found anything like Joey, but I like liftoff a lot

Connect is OK but I don't like comment threads having the color line extended the whole way down. I also don't like connects font size options. Too big or too small.

I also don't care for Connect's comment option bar between comments. Too spread out

Font size options are a big miss on most reddit apps

[-] InisSieferI@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I still need an app that does the RIF thing of hiding the little links under a post (time it was posted, by whom, also links to share share, save, hide, comments, etc.) on the main feed until I click on it. It saved a lot of screen real estate.

But until an app does that, I've been switching between Liftoff, Connect, Jerboa, wefwef, and the kbin.social PWA. They all seem to sort posts in different ways so it's actually provided a different experience each time lol.

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[-] fossilesque@mander.xyz 5 points 1 year ago

www.fedi.tips it's tailored to Mastodon but similar rules apply. It's written for non technical users.

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