Lemmy.ca's Main Community

Welcome :)

If anyone is curious, the post sorting calculations are also public (the code is open source). As a summary:

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

• Active uses the post votes, and latest comment time (limited to two days).
• Hot uses the post votes, and the post published time.
• Scaled is similar to Hot, but gives a boost to smaller / less active communities.

No more hidden algorithms was a big one for me. I personally use 'Scaled', and sometimes flip to the other ones to take a peek

So, there are a couple of issues with 'streamlining', the big one being that Lemmy isn't a single service, controlled by a single entity. It's a website engine, that lets anyone create a reddit-like content aggregator service. There are a thousand "Lemmys" out there, each one owned and operated independently from each other. Most of them are just engaged in an implicit content free-trade agreement.

So, how do you streamline that?

The apps are also made by whoever wants to make them. And none of them are made by the development team behind the Lemmy software.

How do you streamline that?

And, importantly, do you want to? Because stream-lining means centralizing ownership of it all, which leads us right back to the kind of situation that every major social platform is currently experiencing: taking away control from the user.

The tech isn't the barrier. It's the communication. People keep saying "join Lemmy!" as if it's a place you can go to, and not 1000 different places.

So, Lemmy is software that lets you build an off-the-shelf content aggregation website, similar to how Wordpress lets you build an off-the-shelf blog. There are dozens of moderate to large websites running Lemmy, and hundreds of small or tiny ones running it.

Each one of these websites can, if the users and admins enable it, subscribe to communities hosted on other Lemmy-based websites, which lets them comment on posts in those communities, or even make their own posts to them.

Because this intercommunication allows users to treat remotely-hosted communities as if they are local to the user's website, it's common for people to think of the network of Lemmy-based websites as a signular entity. In this model, each of the independent websites running Lemmy gets called an "instance".

The same terminology is used for Mastodon-based websites, and other websites that allow for similar auto-syndication of content that creates a simulacrum of a centralized content environment. So, a "Lemmy instance" is a "website running Lemmy that is participating in active content syndication", a "Mastodon instance" is "a website running Mastodon that is participating in active content syndication", etc. You can replace "Mastodon" or "Lemmy" with "mbin", "Friendica", "PieFed", "Misskey", "Hubzilla", "PeerTube", "PixelFed", "BookWyrm", "FunkWhale", "nodeBB", or any number of other website engines that are participating in this type of ecosystem.

Welcome!

I'd recommend looking through these two guides / infographics as they are a good introduction

What is the fediverse

How does Lemmy work, in detail

If you consider the network of email providers, then "gmail" could be considered one "instance" of the network. You can use it as a self-contained service, but the strength comes from being a part of the wider network.

So you can use lemmy.ca as if it was an isolated Canadian version of reddit, but the strength comes from being able to access communities from all over