I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
Yeah absolutely. An instance is kind of your home group. It’s not a “subreddit,” more just a sorting method for links. The “subreddits” are the boards inside the instances, and the instances work to determine their addresses.
On Reddit you might have /r/nfl, /r/actualnfl, /r/realnfl, for example, while here you would have nfl@lemmy.world, nfl@other.instance, nfl@another.instance.
(People better at explaining or who are further along the process of understanding please feel free to correct me and chime in!)
An instance is like your email provider. When you get “messages”, like “a new post was created”, or “your comment got upvoted”, it gets sent to your instance for you to read.
At the same time, instances are also email providers for communities/sublemmies, so when people post in a sub, the instance hosting that sub receives the “messages” from other instances in the Fediverse.