In essence, what woud you say lemmy is? A way to have all your old forum subscriptions in one place in the form of communies?
Or is there something else I’m missing?
A link aggregator.
Although it can feel like “A link aggregator for people reluctant to click on external links”
Feel like? It is this, for the most part lol
For the fediverse
Is that really an accurate description though? Do people primarily use it to find links, or to have discussions? I think more the latter.
I am of the same persuasion… “link aggregator”, I would think, should be a place to “aggregate” links. In lemmy you have 4 fields: URL, Image, Title and Body. Never seen someone say lemmy is an image aggregator, for example. Body is for discussion (as in forums) and seems to be where the meat of the matter really is.
distributed forum.
Some boards in one server, some boards in another server, glued by
miraclesomeone’s hardwork.It probably depends on which client you use but it is kind of a forum tool like reddit (striking similarities).
As someone who has specific needs in terms of ui and also designs UIs, I can try showing the differences.
Lemmy and reddit have communities (or subreddits, forums if you will) - the content is rather long form. I don’t know of any limit. You have forum like headlines and body texts. You can put in images, videos, links but the vast majority of posts is text.
Mastodon and Twitter are more short form (character limit) and they work more with threads, like answering yourself or others and so on. You can do this on the redditlikes but you cant do it the other way round. They’re also called microblogging platforms as you‘re limited in the length of your „blog“.
Then there is Instagram and pixelfed (havent tried the latter yet) which are focused on pictures and videos, less on text. I believe you can post as long a text as you like but without a striking image, nobody will read it.
And last (maybe least) is facebook: a wild mix of all of the above. I don’t think there‘s a character limit, you can post text, video, audio, whatever. Most importantly imo is that you join groups as these open you up to other people than your friends. There you again find a wild mix of post types. Facebook is notorious for the low quality content that some people post, like childish pictures of badly animated birds which are supposed to convey some kind of message. Those are signs that the less tech literate and sometimes less culturally knowledgeable are on the platform (imho).
Just to finish this off: mastodon, lemmy and pixelfed are part of the fediverse. This means they are federated and are not (and can never) be controlled by a single entity. Also, they don’t use an algorithm. They do not check what you like and throw stuff at you it thinks you like. These algorithms are like heroin to a lot of people but for some reason they‘re not outlawed yet.
Have a good one.
Thanks. I’m figuring this all out as I go… never ben very much a social media user up until now because of the federated promise. Hope it delivers.
@Ninguem It is a kind of forum, but not quite as structured. The special thing for me is that it is part of the Fediverse. For me, it is a platform that offers a topic-centred access to the Fediverse. It follows a different logic than microblogging services like Mastodon, which are account-centred and in which the content has to be structured by the individual users via lists, hashtags, antennas and the like.
It is possible to interact with Lemmy content from Mastodon etc. and also to create posts in Lemmy communities (I’m replying here from #Friendica)). But with Lemmy account (which I also have) the content is of course even better structured. But it is not quite as structured as in a classic forum.It’s like Reddit, as an link aggregator (Wikipedia said “social news aggregation […] website”), but federated (in the Fediverse), as in it is not centralized and built upon many instances of Lemmy, not just one centralized website like Reddit.
It’s like a multi Reddit where anyone can spin up a Reddit (Reddit is a Lemmy clone ofc.).
💀
Fundamentally it’s Reddit but distributed.
Maybe I should have been on Reddit first to really understand it.
@Lmaydev I love the federation part of it, though. Shouldn’t lemmy be more like stack exchange, then?
In its use it’s practically exactly the same as Reddit. I would say it’s format is taken pretty much as is from Reddit.
The difference is the instances. Now instead of just reddit.com we have a series of websites each with their own admins.
This adds a new dimension to it’s ecosystem and lots of new drama. But to most users makes very little difference.
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Silicon.
