It's the collection of various softwares/sites/platforms that are all able to interact due to operating on the same underlying technology.
Lemmy is part of the Fediverse. Mastodon is also and users there can follow and post in Lemmy communities despite being a totally different thing. Kbin is another Reddit-like, it and Lemmy coexist pretty seamlessly.
And there are so so many more. Fediverse alternatives to FB, Insta, YT, Linktree, etc etc etc.
You'll also hear "Threadiverse" which is what people have taken to calling that part of the Fediverse that focuses on forum thread type discussions (ie Lemmy and Kbin mainly).
Thanks for the explanation. How connected are the platforms? As a new Lemmy user, if I search for a particular community to join, am I seeing the same content that someone from Mastodon would? Or is it more that Lemmy is capable of reading Mastodon content but we're not sharing the same content by default?
I'm finding it a little hard to find the words to even ask this question haha, I'm still a little confused. This all looks nice so far though!
No worries at all! Gotta get you settled in somehow 😄
I’m not sure what you know about Mastodon but it’s a microblogging thing (think Twitter).
So, Mastodon users can search for Lemmy communities, which appear to them just like a regular Mastodon user account. They can post to the community by tagging that account. If they follow the community they’ll then see new posts and comments show up in their feed like regular “toots” (tweets). As you can imagine if they follow a busy community that gets spammy fast, but it does work.
From the Lemmy side, we can’t follow Mastodon accounts yet afaik. But we can reply to posts and comments coming from Mastodon users, which from our side are formatted just like regular posts and comments in our communities.
Hmm I better add something Futurama-ey so I don’t get in trouble.
Amazing thanks! I had made the assumption that everything in the Fediverse is just a fork of Reddit style platforms or something, all competing yet somehow connected, but I guess they can all offer significantly different experiences (I must have glossed over your reference to FB, insta etc).
So, if I want, I’m about to discover alternatives to not just Reddit but a bunch of platforms?
Not to be a Debra downer but until we have a way of accurately IDing bots / auto-generated accounts these numbers should have a massive asterisk on them, it's interesting but not an indicator of quality
Rest in peace RIF. I was honestly heartbroken. I know how sad that must sound, but goddamn, I used it daily for 6 years. It made my office hours and daily commute on the subway so much better.
I've been full-time on a Lemmy for nearly a month already and haven't really missed the other place at all. But damn, seeing that goodbye message on RIF yesterday filled me with emotions that were weird and deeply confusing.
Yeah man I used RIF as my only reddit access for 12 years. So when reddit was going hard with avatars, rewards and ads, I was immune to it. I think that’s partially why 3rd parties were cut out. I did the revanced reddit app, but it still feels gross.
I’ve used BaconReader for the last 11 years, and at this point it’s even hard to think about removing it from my phone. I know it doesn’t do anything anymore, but it’s probably been the most consistent app on every one of my devices since starting with it. Just feels weird to think about uninstalling it.
I had to move the Connect app to the spot RiF used to be in because I didn’t realise until it was gone that muscle memory would take me there pretty much every time I was scrolling my phone. I’ll miss it a lot, but I have hope that in time a better alternative/Lemmy will take over. They don’t deserve to succeed at this point.
To all my Apollo refugees that are struggling with the interface. wefwef.app is basically a clone of Apollo for this site. The name is shity but it works great!
Decade long RiF user here and Connect functions and looks quite similarly. Only 24hrs in and I was more of a lurker so I have no clue about how it handles power user features.
RiF was my most used app for the last 10 years. It's weird not being part of my life anymore but hey Lemmy seems pretty cool actually reminds me of Reddit in the old days.
Thanks - will gave a look. Didn’t know about Apple testflight until today so used that to start testing Liftoff. Also playing around with wefwef. But it is kinda fun testing all these new apps.
There’s also slide, but it’s very bare bones at the moment. Think you can only really log in and view posts and comments. A lot of copy over from the reddit app which hasn’t been updated yet.
lemmy.world
Newest