It’s just different sites (instances) running the Lemmy software, that all work together and share their data to create “Lemmy” the overall platform.
The concept is simple enough but the implementation can be a bit weird and especially right now when everyone’s trying out different mobile apps that are in different stages of development and have support for different features. Some of them make it a bit awkward to do things new users need to do like search and sub to communities, etc.
If there’s anything in particular you’re stuck on, feel free to ask!
I’m just confused about communities. Like if I wanted to follow a community about movies, is there a way to tell which community is the “main” one? Is there even such a thing as a “main” community on Lemmy? If not then how do people know where to be?? I love the federated concept but it also feels non user friendly, which I’m sure at least in part is because I’m confused.
So the idealistic idea is that there shouldn’t be a “main” community, there should be multiple that are all slightly different in terms of their approach to the topic and you can choose which one(s) best align with what you want.
In reality, at least until the userbase is significantly larger, it actually does make sense to huddle a bit for now and split up topics as needed later. So in this case what I’d do is head to Lemmy Explorer and search for your topic ie https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=movies
This is quite a broad topic obviously so with a vague keyword search you’re gonna turn up some irrelevant things but there should be some that fit what you need. Then you can change the sort order to whatever you care about most, subscribers, active users, posts etc to decide which is the one you’re most interested in.
Personally I’ve just been subbing to all related communities on a topic, and crossposting my posts to see which one gets the most traction. The little “two squares” icon below the post info is crosspost, works pretty well. Ymmv with that tactic 🙂
It’s just different sites (instances) running the Lemmy software, that all work together and share their data to create “Lemmy” the overall platform.
The concept is simple enough but the implementation can be a bit weird and especially right now when everyone’s trying out different mobile apps that are in different stages of development and have support for different features. Some of them make it a bit awkward to do things new users need to do like search and sub to communities, etc.
If there’s anything in particular you’re stuck on, feel free to ask!
I’m just confused about communities. Like if I wanted to follow a community about movies, is there a way to tell which community is the “main” one? Is there even such a thing as a “main” community on Lemmy? If not then how do people know where to be?? I love the federated concept but it also feels non user friendly, which I’m sure at least in part is because I’m confused.
So the idealistic idea is that there shouldn’t be a “main” community, there should be multiple that are all slightly different in terms of their approach to the topic and you can choose which one(s) best align with what you want.
In reality, at least until the userbase is significantly larger, it actually does make sense to huddle a bit for now and split up topics as needed later. So in this case what I’d do is head to Lemmy Explorer and search for your topic ie https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=movies
This is quite a broad topic obviously so with a vague keyword search you’re gonna turn up some irrelevant things but there should be some that fit what you need. Then you can change the sort order to whatever you care about most, subscribers, active users, posts etc to decide which is the one you’re most interested in.
Personally I’ve just been subbing to all related communities on a topic, and crossposting my posts to see which one gets the most traction. The little “two squares” icon below the post info is crosspost, works pretty well. Ymmv with that tactic 🙂