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.
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.
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.