This question is especially for people who have joined in the last week. Have you used other fediverse platforms or is this your first time really using one? What do you think of it so far? Are you aware that you can comment on Lemmy posts with a Mastodon account?
Imagine there were multiple reddit websites. Reddit.com, reddit.org, reddit.social, etc. Doesn’t matter what account you have, you can see communities/subreddits across anyone of them.
That’s Lemmy.
When you make a lemmy account, it’s more like an email address. You are evolone@lemmy.ml, I am cosmicsploogedrizzle@lemmy.ml. Someone else is joeblow@beehaw.org. We can all chat and post and have a good time no matter what website/instance we post to.
That’s how users work on lemmy. Just like email. Communities on lemmy work the exact same way as users.
If all you’re interested in is that, then you can stop there and fully enjoy your time with lemmy as a reddit replacement.
The future potential and complexity comes from the next part:
The fediverse is someone said, "hey, you know how people on reddit can’t follow people on Twitter, or people on YouTube can’t subscribe to subreddits, or people on Instagram can’t leave YouTube comments? Well let’s make it so you can.
Now this isn’t perfectly implemented at the moment, and there are a lot of growing pains (it’s kinda like the wild wild West), but you can make a mastodon account (like Twitter), and follow the this lemmy community !asklemmy@lemmy.ml on it, and you’ll see all the posts and all the comments that you would otherwise see on lemmy, just in a twitter-like format.
It’s not perfect and compatibility across these decentealized apps is not perfectly impremented atm, but in the future you could theoretically have one giant interconnected web where everything from “Twitter” to “reddit” to “YouTube” to “Instagram” to whatever fediverse equivalent app are all interwoven. And if any instance of them gets a big enough head to pull something like reddit is pulling, or what Twitter has been pulling, the community can just make a new “email” on a different instance/website and continue as of nothing changed. No single website/instance can abuse their power, because another instance can be spun up any time.
I’m about 24 hours into Lemmy and beyond bamboozled so thank you intensely for your ELI5 response: really helped. My key concern is who pays to keep all the lights on?
Of course! Whoever runs the server bears the cost. How they pay for it is up to them and the community. Maybe you run your own instance and pay out if pocket. You’d be your own admin and can do whatever you want. Or you join lemmy.ml and maybe donate or sub to patreon, or you don’t pay anything. Maybe in the future some instances might make private deals to pin ads at the top in exchange for payment. It’s up to the server hoster. Right now it’s the wild wild West. If a server gets filled with ads and you don’t like it, you pick up shop and join a different server.
What lemmy/the fediverse really needs is an account migration tool, so that if you want to set up shop elsewhere, you can export all your subscriptions and settings, etc and import it into a new profile on a new instance. That will come with time
Holy shit, thank you for this explanation! This was the simplest way I have ever seen it explained and was super helpful. Very appreciated!