Similar to Reddit:

• Navigate to a website (for example, “lemmy.world”) and register an account.
• Search for communities to follow based on your specific interests.
• Check back later and watch posts appear in your home feed from the communities you follow.
• Bonus points for posting and commenting!

Different from Reddit:

• It’s not a single website. You’re on “lemmy.world”, I’m on “fedia.io”. Each site houses its own users and content, but cross-site communication happens almost seamlessly. (For example, even though I’m logged into a different site, I can easily read and comment on your post.)
• It’s not a single software. You’re looking at Lemmy, I’m looking at Mbin, and other people might be looking at Piefed or something else. Moreover, I understand there are also custom UIs and apps to create even more options. This doesn’t matter too much, but over time you might explore the different options and form a preference for the way some software works.
• Under the hood, all of this happens thanks to a protocol called “ActivityPub”, which allows all of these servers and software to communicate with each other. You don’t need to care about this.
• A good analogy for all this is email… If you have a gmail account and your friend has a protonmail account, your accounts and data will be stored on different servers, and your email inboxes will look different and have different features. BUT, because all email services use a shared communication protocol, you can still email your friend! This works exactly like that.

Bottom Line…

It can take a while to wrap your mind around this stuff, but the bottom line is that this is essentially infinite-reddit.

Don’t like the moderators of a certain community? Make a new community on whatever server you want!

Don’t like the admins of a certain server? Fire up a whole new server!

Don’t like the way Lemmy works or looks? Use an alternative GUI or give a server running Mbin or Piefed a try!

This is part of the “fediverse”, and it represents a new form of social media that puts the community in control, instead of corporations or billionaires.

That’s a fairly big question.

Lemmy works a lot like Reddit in terms of form factor. “subreddits” are “communities.”

A major difference is the federated nature of the platform. Reddit is one website. Lemmy, and in fact the entire Fediverse, are many individual websites. You joined lemmy.world. I joined sh.itjust.works. These two websites share data via a protocol called ActivityPub. From the user standpoint, don’t worry about it too much, you can think of it a bit like email in that gmail.com and icloud.com speak the same email protocol so they can send messages to each other.

A username will be formatted as @bluedeepeye@lemmy.world and a community name as !asklemmy@lemmy.world

On Reddit, there was only one namespace. If a subreddit name is taken…well shit. So if you wanted r/example but someone else has it, you’d have to do r/actualexample or r/realexample or r/examplemasterrace. On the Fediverse, each instance has its own namespace, so you’ll find several Ask Lemmy’s, like 40 Linux communities, etc. The pot community is even called trees.

Oh, and that ActivityPub protocol? It allows some kinda crazy shenanigans. Lemmy, mBin and Piefed all three share Reddit’s form factor. Mastodon is similar to Twitter. Pixelfed is like Instagram. Peertube is like Youtube. Loops is like Tiktok. All use ActivityPub, so you can do goofy shit like comment on a Peertube video from a Mastodon account. Imagine tweeting a tiktok. Not…reposting a link to a tiktok video on twitter…tweeting a tiktok. It’s bizarrely interoperable like that.

On the technical side, you post a bunch of actions to your local server (posts, comments, votes) and others who are interested pull copies of them to their server where they can respond or not.

On the social side, you subscribe to communities both locally and on other servers. Moderation is public, unlike reddit. And even if you’re banned from a community or even a whole server, as long as it’s not your home server (where your account is) you can just keep going without content from that server.

On the flip side, there’s no real block function, the “block” is actually a mute. They keep posting but your server just doesn’t show it to you. And if someone’s enough of a shitkicker to get banned from their home instance, nothing stops them from joining another. Most veteran fedizens have three of four accounts already (in my case, to cover server downtime). And servers can outright ban whole other servers, including all their communities and users; this is called defederation.

To go back to the technical, all these blocks and bans and defederations come back to the same thing: someone saying “I’m not interested in the actions of this user / community / server, don’t pull copies of it for me.”

On this platform, you can say

• spez is a fascist
• Israel’s main export is crimes against humanity And you might get banned, but only from servers you shouldn’t care about anyway.

Works largely the same as reddit, just smaller and more distributed.

The go-to analogy is e-mail. You pick a particular e-mail provider, say gmail.com or yahoo.com, and create your account there, but that doesn’t stop you from sending messages to anyone with any other provider, or them sending messages to you. In the fediverse/lemmyverse/whatever, same thing, you create an account on whatever server/instance you feel like, and use that to see posts and messages from any other server/instance in the network.

Occasionally, you might hear the term “federation” which is the process of different servers/instances syncing their content with each other. It’s not foolproof, and sometimes doesn’t work properly. But generally, you won’t have to care about the nuts and bolts of the protocol.

It works like Reddit

I want to add an additional point or two; unlike Reddit, people generally don’t care about karma (total up votes aren’t really counted and some instances don’t even do downvotes, etc) so even if we were mainstream you won’t see much karma farming. People post genuinely, although it might just be a dudes memes on their phone, etc.

Another is regarding the culture, as you may still get banned from specific instances. For instance, there are tankies (authoritarian communists) in places we mostly defederated from that ban you if you criticize the Chinese government or even North Korea (!). World, a typical go to for Redditors, tends to be center left but had their own controversial moments. Personally I don’t mind their defederation choices except I have to use another instance to access pro-piracy stuff (which div0 folks have the best of).

Multiple servers connect to each other, federate their actions. A simple example is that my account is from lemmy.dbzer0.com, but my upvotes and comments show up on a community hosted on lemmy.world.

It’s not just this server though, you can interact with every server that can federate. This could be different applications like PieFed and Mastodon.

Unlike Reddit where you would subscribe to stuff you like, the advisable MO on here is to scroll the front page and block stuff you don’t like (because there’s less content overall). Your block list dictates your experience. Some apps also let you block by contained words.

You mainly seem concerned with moderation, so I’ll try to focus on just what’s relevant to you

In short, things are more “split up” here, in that there’s a lot of smaller moderation teams, and lots of instances with different admins. Reddit has site-wide moderation which applies to all of Reddit, but here a single “final say” team to speak for all instances doesn’t exist, and can never exist

So, if you have a problem with admins of a particular instance (ie, lemmy.world ), there’s nothing stopping you from making a new account on another instance (such as the one I’m on, thelemmy.club , if approved) and going back to the same content you were looking at before. lemmy.world wouldn’t be able to lock you out of an account hosted on thelemmy.club , as these are completely independent servers which can just access and interact with the content on the other

If you have a problem with any specific community’s moderation, for popular topics there are often duplicates hosted on different servers with different moderation teams. I think I’m already subscribed to 3-4 different communities just for “technology” because people kept making the same topic on different instances

So mainly it’s important to look for an instance with rules and admins that align with you and then you’ll be fine (currently, you have lemmy.world’s tos to follow)

(edit reason: tiny wording adjustments for clarity)

reddit has become too oppressive these days to new users and old users who have either inactive accounts or multiple accounts where one of them couldve have subreddit banned temp or otherwise, which compromised your whole horde of it.

lemmy is quite smaller so dont expect large communities you would find on reddit to be on here, also because people are scattered to other platforms like piefed and others you might not see contibutions right away.

you arnt likely to see any right wing shilling here, which is a huge plus.

Imagine if anyone could make their own subreddit and own it. The mods are the admins. Instead of maga it’s overun with tankies. Bout sums it.

best way to use it to me is to peruse all and block communities that you have no interest in and users that are annoying. if you played an mmo ever think of it how the in game chat is and how much better it is once you pared it down.

A couple of major differences from Reddit are:

1. Karma does not matter.
2. Since not all instances recognise each other, what you see will vary wildly depending on your home instance.

Also there is some self-sorting based on preferences and politics. Your instance (lemmy.world), for example, tolerates transphobes and zionists, and so attracts transphobes and zionists. (It may also gets blocked by other instances who don’t like this, so you won’t be able to see content there even if you personally are fine. This is one of the problems with lemmy.)

it’s the same as reddit.