No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
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Instance == server == each individual lemmy (Beehaw is its own instance, so is lemmy.ca, etc)
Basically, reddit was a bunch of communities on one server (the reddit servers)
Each lemmy instance has its own collection of communities, and each lemmy is connected together, so users from any individual lemmy can read and interact with communities and users from other lemmys (this is federation)
All of these lemmy instances federating makes up the greater lemmy network as a whole
Thank you for this.
How does one go about finding communities from other instances and connect with them?
Use your instance's search feature. You can search
- Name of community:
No Stupid Questions - By using !community@instance syntax:
[[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) - URL of the community:
https://lemmy.world/c/nostupidquestions
First option won't work if your instance hasn't federated the community yet. The last option is best in my opinion.
Some small addition to the last option:
If you want to browse a community from a specific instance on your home instance you have to add the 'home' instance.
For example your home instance (where you did register your account) is Lemmy.ml and the community you want to interact with is on Lemmy.world you would use:
Https://Lemmy.ml/c/[email protected]
In order to be able to post, reply etc
Doesn’t this then make, a bunch of communities with same names like ‘iOS’. Then it feels fractured across a bunch of groups of same enthusiasts. Or what do I misunderstand about this or it’s benefits? I’m legitimately curious.
Yes, it is fractured, and that is by intention. The point is that no one single person can control the entirety of the Lemmyverse. Suppose a spez comes along and tries to ruin things. Then, at worst, he can only destroy 1 instance. Even if he destroys the biggest instance, then it's a big loss, but it's not the end of the entire platform. Lemmyverse lives on.
As for how the fracturing affects the user - not much. As mentioned in other comments, each instance can communicate seamlessly between each other. I can post to other instances, and other instances can post to mine. All information is shared.
One caveat, though, is that the Lemmyverse is still very much in its early growth stages. So you'll find a bunch of communities spread out over a bunch of instances that do virtually the same thing. It'll look like the community is fractured. But over time, users are probably just going to settle on a single community, we just don't know which one yet. Think of it like subreddits on Reddit. There's basically always 3 subreddits about the same topic, but there's always the one major subreddit, which is usually the one that you're looking for. We haven't reached that point yet - we're still waiting to see which is going to be the "major" community for most topics.
Yes, but technically no. The full name includes the instance, for example [email protected].
Similarly, you had multiple subreddits dedicated to a single topic, with slight variations in their name.
I recommend to subscribe to anything which seems interesting (including duplicates), then unsubscribing from annoying stuff.
great explanation
Overall great explanation, accurate and short.
The one thing I dislike is the usage of 'lemmy', which you seem to use as a synonym for 'instance'. That is both inconsistent (you already established terms for that; 'instance' and 'server'), and inaccurate.
Lemmy is the whole, the network of federated and defederated instances.
Hello this is my first comment on Lemmy, so consider me an expert.
The idea of ‘federated’ websites is that you can use your login from one server to interact with another server. An analogy is email: you can have a gmail account that can send a message to a yahoo account via shared and open source protocols (e.g. SMTP).
One question I do have though; if I create my account on Lemmy.world and then for whatever reason that instance disappears; does my account disappear or is it recoverable on another instance?
Your account would disappear and unrecoverable from other instance, but your comment history can still be found in other federated servers, so it's not a complete loss. For example, should lemmy.world disappear someday, a copy of your comment history is still preserved in my server at https://c.calciumlabs.com/u/[email protected]
What is an instance?
An instance is a deployment of Lemmy. sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, ani.social are all instances.
what is a federation?
Federation is the ability for these instances to communicate with each other. I can make post in this community ([[email protected]](/c/[email protected])) using my account (@[email protected]), while you are reading it on another instance (sh.itjust.works).
It's like how you can send email from gmail.com to yahoo.com or outlook.com.
what is a server?
In simpler ways, the same as instance, but technically it also means the computer/hardware that Lemmy is running on.
can someone please describe in simple terms how this all runs and how we as users navigate it?
-
Make an account in any server you like.
join-lemmy.orghas a long list of them. -
Subscribe to communities that you like. There's a search feature above or you can search in
lemmyverse.net. -
Use it as you normally would use Reddit.
Well said!
An instance/server is like an email provider but for your ~~Reddit~~ Lemmy account.
Here's a reddit analogy:
An instance is an independent reddit, filled with communities that are an instance's subreddits. Federation is an interconnection with all the different instances. You, as a user, can interact (post, comment, etc) on all different instances, and subscribe to different communities on different instances.
An instance is like an independent version of Reddit
Each Reddit (instance) has its own set of subreddits (called communities)
Whichever instance you're on, you can access communities in almost any other instance
So in sum... Just sign up to an instance, subscribe to communities that interest you, and don't overthink it!
Imagine instances as treehouses - then servers would be the trees they're built on.
You enter a treehouse and sit down - that's your home instance. You can talk to others in your treehouse, you can share stuff, but not between treehouses. You can leave and enter another treehouse (make another account), but what if there was a better way to talk?
That's where federation comes in. Two treehouses can choose to set up a telephone line with two cans and a string (federate). Then the users in one can use it to talk to another without actually being present (having an account) in that treehouse.
Hey! Could you maybe edit the title, to be more descriptive of what you are asking? Something like: "could someone explain lemmy to me in simple terms?".
Lemmy is an open source software that anyone can run on their own computers. People can't run their own reddit because its source code is closed. When a person runs lemmy on their server (computer), it has its own domain name (like google.com). Each domain name is a different instance, like lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. These different instances can talk to each other and exchange posts and comments. This is called federation. This means you can create an account on lemmy.world and post comments and posts on sh.itjust.works. There are over 1000 instances. They can all talk to each other unless they choose not to. When an instance decides to block another instance, it is called defederation. Each instance is its own seperate thing and instances talk to each other in the background. Your account data is only stored on the instance you signed up on.
Federation is a bunch of websites that agreed to share their content between themselves. They use an agreed upon protocol for threads, posts (or whatever you call it) and other websites can fetch these posts. These websites are called "instances". That also works for users who can comment, upvote or whatever on any post and their comments and upvotes will go to all other websites that are in the federation.
For anology, you probably know how tweets are usually posted as screenshots on reddit. Imagine you could have that tweet just show up in reddit as a regular post. That can be done if Twitter and Reddit would agree to federate with each other and use one protocol.