Kichae

Tell me you played with strafe in 1993 and I'll never belueve another word out of your mouth.

Go on. Play like it's 1993 all over again.

"Why should I adhere to or obey the rules of the place I'm posting to? I didn't even bother to read them!" - A real genius

Welcome! Always happy to see new faces showing up.

This place is significantly smaller than Reddit, and also significantly more spread out. It grows on you, but it's important to look beyond the similarities between how lemmy.world and Reddit look. Under the hood, these are very different spaces.

"Lemmy" is actually a large network of independently operated Lemmy-based (or not... more on that later) websites. Each website has their own rules, and their own "communities" (AKA sublemmies, magazines, groups, etc.). You're using one of, if not the, largest website in the network, and the one that is probably most Reddit-like (pre-IPO) in terms of rules and policies. It's a general purpose content aggregator.

There are quite a few other medium-to-large general purpose content aggregator sites on the network. lemm.ee comes to mind, as does sh.itjust.works. And, of course, lemmy.ca, which is where I'm commenting from. Each of these websites has its own communities, and houses mirrors of remote communities that their users have subscribed to. Remote communities with local subscribers synchronize with the host website every so often (it can be quite frequently, but usually isn't instantaneously). This makes the whole thing kind of like being on a web forum, but being able to follow topics from other web forums.

As you can imagine, this means there are some niche websites on the network. ttrpg.network is dedicated to table top gaming; startrek.website is focused on... I don't know, some tv show or something; programming.dev hosts a bunch of communities focused on software engineering; lemmy.kde.social is focused on the KDE desktop environment for linux. These are often low-population sites, but they can see a lot of off-site engagement. Focused sites like that are great sites to use if your primary interest is the topic at hand; it really makes the Local feed super valuable.

If you remember that we're not all using the same website, and that the different websites are, in fact, different websites, with their own rules, cultures, and norms, it helps grok the space a lot more. It also makes it easier to understand why there might be 8 different politics communities, and that c/politics on lemmy.world might be very different, both in terms of who is posting there, and also what they're interested in discussing, from c/politics on lemmy.ca, or on aussie.zone.

Now, one thing that's not obvious from lemmy.world (or any Lemmy-based website, really), is that not every website you have access to here is actually running Lemmy. kbin.earth and rimworld.gallery both run mbin, which is a different content aggregation webserver. community.nodebb.org runs nodebb, a web forum server.

People have access to Lemmy communities from an even wider range of website types. Users from Mastodon-based websites, Friendica-based websites, Hubzilla-based websites, and probably quite a few more.

We're all on different websites. Some of those websites are significantly more different than others. That shapes this space in ways we haven't even begun to truly explore yet. And it adds a little jank.

But the jank is worth it, as far as I'm concerned.

Well, you see, I deserve free software for my hobbies, or even my business. You deserve to suck shit and die in a gutter. /s

Yeah. I switched to free weights last week in prep for not being able to access any of the machines at the fitness centre.

At least the running lanes at the track usually stay empty. I needed to work on my cardio more, anyway.

If you just gave them the box, they would ignore it just to spite you.

No one is off-put by the realization. Just the attitude the post represents.

Ni, but the UX is shit, and the value proposution is so poorly thought out that you can't really sell people on it who aren't already ready to buy in.

Everyone makes the same mistake: Diminish the home instance, paper over the heterogeneous nature of things, and try to make it look like centeralized social media. It breaks the user experience.

My analigy:

You have a Reddit account. You recently bought a Honda Civic, and know there's a web forum for civic owners over there, called hondacivicforum. You would like to participate in it.

You can just subscribe to the forum topics you care about from your Reddit account. No need to create a new account.

Also, you have family on Facebook that posts updates and photos and whatnot. You can follow them, too, and reply to their posta without needing a Facebook account.

You use Reddit. You can interact with content outaide of Reddit from Reddit.

Tada.

There's no reason you couldn't do this with a network of Lemmy, mbin, NodeBB, or even Friendica wrbsites

Presumably for the same reason you're on a federated forum-like platform: to have your posts syndicated to other websites for easier discovery, and to comment on posts from other websites without needing abother account?