this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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What's an instance?
Great question. An instance is just the name of the site through which you're accessing the Lemmyverse. So you're on the lemmy.world instance, while I'm on aussie.zone.
You can think of Lemmy a little like email. You could be on Gmail while I'm on Outlook, but both of us can communicate with each other just fine, even though our email providers are completely different.
Thanks for that explanation. That was my first post and this place is confusing and full of random exclamation marks lol.
So are instances automatically assigned based on region? Or did I choose this instance? Can I switch, or would I notice a difference?
It’s just like with email, you choose which provider you go with. You must have gone to lemmy.world when you first came to Lemmy, so that’s your current provider.
Right now, you can easily just go and sign up with another instance if you like. There are a heap of them, and if you google you can find out more about different ones. Some are general, like Lemmy.world, some have a geographical focus, like aussie.zone. Others are based more on shared interests, like ttrpg.network.
On Lemmy, the equivalent of Reddit’s "subreddits" are called "communities". And each instance has its own communities. Right now we’re commenting on [email protected], which you might also see referred to as /c/[email protected]. Those both mean the same thing. But there’s also a [email protected], and those two are completely separate communities with their own mods and their own rules. And even though your account is on lemmy.world, you could go into that other community and post or comment.
Each instance has its own admins as well, and those admins have powers similar to that of admins on Reddit. They can ban users, remove communities on their own instance, etc. Most often the thing you’ll see talked about in terms of admin powers is "defederation". That’s where the admins of one instance prevent users from another instance from interacting with them. Different admins might have different policies for why they would or would not defederate another instance, and you may want to ensure the instance you use has a defederation policy that you’re comfortable with—and one where your own instance hasn’t been defederated by other instances that you want to interact with.
Right now, to move to another instance you just have to create a new account. Your old comments and posts etc. will be left behind. But there has been some talk about being able to migrate your account from one instance to another, and it’s theoretically possible. Mastodon is a fediverse equivalent to Twitter (in the same way that Lemmy is a fediverse Reddit) and I believe account migration is possible on Mastodon. For the most part though, no, you won’t really notice the difference between different instances.
What's a fediverse?
It's just a general term for all the different federated services. Lemmy is federated Reddit. Kbin is another reddit-like federated service. Mastodon is federated Twitter. There are also federated versions of things like YouTube and Instagram. They all use a technology called "ActivityPub", which means you can sorta see Lemmy posts from Mastodon and vice versa. It's mostly not useful, but it does mean if you mention a Mastodon account in Lemmy, they'll get a notification and be able to reply without being on Lemmy. Kbin and Lemmy can interact with each other much more seamlessly because of how similar they are.
Collectively, they're all called the "fediverse". You might also occasionally see the term "threadiverse" (or some other spelling of that), to refer to all the federated services specifically designed to be similar to Reddit. Mainly Lemmy and Kbin.
Realistically though, none of this is stuff you should need to know. It's all still under development and a little wonky, but as much as possible the goal should be for it to all be transparent to users. It should just work.