Please use the feddit.uk London Community
Hey everyone, when I created this community I searched for, but couldn't find any London communities on Lemmy. I think this was a temporary issue as Lemmy was dealing with a large number of new users. Now that things have settled down, I'd encourage you to use the already active https://feddit.uk/c/london rather than this community so we can build a decent community for London based Lemmy users.
The whole network of communities is super confusing. I thought Piefed was a community, so what is Lemmy? And what are all the other communities.
The point is, this seems to be unclear, a chat community forum should be easy to understand, clear layout, simple to use.
Piefed is software, like Lemmy. They're designed to be little Reddits that people can spin up and host.
Piefed contains within it instances. You're using piefed.social right now, which is the flagship Piefed instance hosted by the dev of Piefed.
There is however also, piefed.zip, piefed.world, piefed.ca, piefed.blahaj.zone etc. they all interconnect.
Thank you. Appreciate that.
Do you feel like it works?
For me A. It’s confusing as fuck, to start up. Shouldn’t good design be simple, clear, obvious, and not need to be explained.
Take Reddit for example. It’s just one big site, with subs within it. That’s about it. Then there is a voting system on top, I’m not a fan of that, but basically that’s it. So why do they need to reinvent the wheel here. Why is Lemmy separate to Piefed? Why not just one site and boxes of communities within that?
Yes.
I mean, by "good design" you're effectively asking an explanation of federation in a single sentence. I don't know how to do that.
That's a long story, but to cut it short: It was at least partially created due to Lemmy not having many features people desired, and a slow development cycle. Piefed has flairs, hashtags, scheduled posting, feeds, private communities, community migration (still in development in terms of total migration), events, polls.
Because federation is important for long-term health and security.
The people running communities are mostly hobbyists. They don't have any funding. They rely on donations. You can't scale up under a centralised structure without hitting a brick wall under this scenario. Federation also prevents the entire project going sour, or being bought out. Because Piefed and Lemmy are open-source, they can't be bought out and the platform degraded by corporate interests. Activity is spread across the fediverse. An instance that goes ba for any profit reasons can be defederated by the others and effectively cut-off from the network.
Federation also has some good benefits too. It allows different instances with different themes to exist. You can have a Canadian instance (piefed.ca), an LGBT instance (piefed.blahaj.zone), a German instance etc. They can all have different quirks and styles unique to them to distinguish them for those that use them, and allows more community variety unlike reddit where the first-mover to the name wins forever.
Ok fair enough, I’m starting to wrap my head around it.
The open source code allowed the project to get started, and you’ve expanded from there. Then multiple countries can feed in. Ok, it’s just at first it’s a bit confusing, if you’ve never heard of these places, fedaverse, lemmy , Piefed, then the different .domain names,
But anyway, I’ll dig in and it’s nice to not be on Reddit, that’s for sure.