I'm clearly not understanding this platform as well as I thought, I should probably watch a video or something!
The memes and boobs are great, but I'd love to get more reliable news and local information, seems like every Canadian one dies or is unpopular (fair enough given the limited user base which is still kind of nice)
And the news + politics seems to crash, but that's because I'm still using .World ...I think?
The way it works is that there’s not one lemmy site, there’s many different sites, or “instances” that people can host on their own servers—lemmy.world and lemm.ee are two of these. The catch is that they are “federated”, meaning that a user in one instance can see, vote on, comment on, etc posts from another instance. That’s why you can be on lemmy.world and see posts from !memes@lemme.ml. So if lemmy.world goes down it’s as simply as typing in another instance to your address bar :^)
However, all the communities hosted on lemmy.world will be inaccessible while it is down. If you really only care to look at one of those at a particular moment, lemmy might as well be down for you.
They'll still be accessible, since instances store local copies of data from servers that they're federated. Your interactions with those communities will be invisible to anyone outside your own instance until the instance hosting the community comes back up, though.
It's more like email than a regular platform. Each insurance is a Lemmy "provider" but from any instance you can reach every other instance. It even used the @server for user names and communities like email. It also means you have a technology@lemmy.world, technology@lemmy.ml, ...
think of all of this like email, you get data from other providers and interact with people and posts using an "email address". im oversimplifying it, but that's how i started to wrap my head around all of this
Only reason I use lemmy.world is for community discoverability. Until subscriber counts are federated, it only shows the amount of subs on your instance, and on average the most subs are on lemmy.world. I have a backup alt for when lemmy.world is down
Since when is Jerboa the "official Lemmy app"? It's not even the only FOSS app and I'm not aware of any connection between the Jerboa and Lemmy developers, let alone the various admins of the lemmy communities that Jerboa accesses. Use a different app if Jerboa isn't working for you
Edit: I was wrong, just looked at github and it looks like there is an affiliation between lemmy developers and Jerboa. But it's still not the official app of any of the instances, so it's not like Reddit where the devs and admins are the same entity
I went back to reddit out of boredom a couple of days ago while lemmy.world was doing it's thing. It dawned on me how shitty things have gotten there over the years. It's more active, sure but the comments sections are full of hot garbage 99% of the time unless you're in a small community. And the sheer quantity of comments basically guarantees you won't be seen or responded to unless you appeal to lowest common denominator bs.
The engagement you get here is much higher quality. It isn't nearly impossible to have a real conversation and get deep about any given topic. I miss my hobby subs and go back every now and then for those but I'm otherwise all in on lemmy