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So confused! Lol (lemm.ee)

submitted 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/newtolemmy

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I know this will take some time to get used to, but I am using the Voyager app. I am confused on what local communities in comparison to the federate communities.

I’m also not sure why there are so many different apps for Lemmy because now I feel like I should be checking them all out, but Voyager is very similar to Apollo for Reddit so I feel most comfortable here.

What is an instance?

And how long will I be able to share photos? Since my account is one day old I can’t upload any pictures.

I’ll have more questions, but I can’t think of them right now, thanks in advance!

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Reddit is a single website, made up of a collection of (link and post sharing) subreddits, each with its own moderators, policies and content preferences, but with one overall admin team who work for one overall boss, u/spez, with one overall aim - to make money from user generated content.

The creators of lemmy felt that the profit motive was actively harmful for this type of website, and decided to remove the single, powerful, profit-motivated owner model, so...

Lemmy is a collection of websites all running the same open source software, that globally shares (federates) all the user generated content, each website (instance) has a (local) collection of (link and post sharing) communities, each with their own moderators, policies and content preferences, but each lemmy website has their own admin or admin team, who are generally just the tech folk who decided set up the website (instance) and run it, so instead of one overall agenda that reddit has, you have many overall agendas.

Of course this sets up the possibility that different instances disagree with each other (what should count as nsfw, what's acceptable speech, what's acceptable moderation, which type of politics is unacceptable), and instances disagreeing definitely happens, but that's kind of by-design to prevent one set of admins from controlling all of lemmy. Some of them defederate (stop sharing with) some of the others.

As far as I can tell, the money to run the computers on which the instances run is usually crowd sourced from (a minority of) the users themselves. Small instances are just run in people's spare computers at home, I think. Anyone can download the software and make a new instance, again by design.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago