Q: What is Lemmy?
A: Lemmy is a self-hosted FOSS Reddit alternative that is a part of the "Fediverse". Lemmy gives us the freedom & full control over our community, unlike Reddit.
Q: What is the Fediverse?
A: Think of email - no matter which email provider you use, you are still able to seamlessly communicate with others who don't share the same provider. The Fediverse (or “Fedi”) is basically the same concept, but for social media. The Fediverse is a collection of thousands of independent social media servers that communicate with each other seamlessly. This means that the millions of users on these servers can interact with each other as if they were on a single social network.
Q: What is the point of this Lemmy instance?
A: This Lemmy instance was created to provide a home for those migrating from Reddit, it's a general lemmy instance that welcomes (almost) everything including piracy and NSFW.
Q: How do I join?
A:
- Register an account on https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/signup
- Login, and then join communities!
You may create an account on any of the instances we federate with, and interact with our instance and communities. The list of the servers we currently federate with: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/instances
Q: I'm new to this and I'm still very confused about all this where can I learn more?
A: You can find a collection of beginner's guides here.
Q: How do I make a community on FMHY's instance?
A: Just click create communiity and follow the basic setup.
Q: Why is my feed empty? How do I see other communities from other instances?
A: Communities will only show in ‘All’ of you instance if someone in that instance has searched and subscribed to it. Try to visit other instances and search their interesting communities on your own instance so there is a better federation among all instances.
Subscribing to as many communities as you can would help grow your instance much better.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment and we’ll do our best to answer as soon as possible.
I've found that each explanation I read kind of helped me understand; it took the totality of all them before it finally clicked. So I'm going to copy and paste my explanation that I shared with someone else, in hopes that it helps to further understanding. Some people grasp concepts differently, so I offered a new explanation.
Let’s pretend there are three different websites: reddit.com, feddit.com, and seddit.com. Each one has its own subreddits:
reddit.com/r/funny
feddit.com/r/funny
seddit.com/r/funny
These three websites can browse ALL of the other sites’ subreddits. On reddit.com you can browse and comment reddit.com/r/funny, feddit.com/r/funny, and seddit.com/r/funny, even though these three subreddits are entirely different from each other and not linked in any way. These subreddits are known as communities. Now it doesn’t matter whether you sign up on reddit, feddit, or seddit, since they can all browse ALL of the communities.
Now to expand on that just a tad: reddit, feddit, and seddit will still have their own rules, permissions, and such since they’re independent of each other. These distinguishing factors are (as far as I know) the only reason to choose one over another. Maybe server speed and some other factors.
The usernames reflect where you signed up. If I signed up on feddit, my username would be guitarded@feddit.com
Hope that helps. I’ve found that once you understand lemmy, the explanations are more complicated than the actual setup itself.
Thanks a lot, this really helped.
Nice write up.