Wait…you can browse instances without making an account??? Whoops, lol, I guess I was a little too eager to get Boost for Lemmy working with an account of my own immediately following Boost for Reddit getting nuked.
Is there a good way to browse instances? (Particularly through Boost?)
Also, what are the instances… literally? Like, I’ve never seen social media have groups like this (tied to the account, and separate from the communities, that is)
Yep, you can browse instances just by visiting their sites! It’s how I signed up to the couple I use, not sure how Boost handles it, I just use my mobile web browser (Hexbear has emojis you can use if you use the web version, so I just use that). I am sorry about not knowing Boost specifically, my fiancé uses Voyager.
As for what instances literally are, they are their own websites and servers, but they can talk to each other, think email. Gmail can talk to protonmail, etc
Yep! There’s also a bunch of inter-instance drama too, but by and large it’s a much better experience than Reddit, and if all else fails you can find an instance you really like and just browse locally, avoiding most of that drama. A big source of that drama is generally along political lines, Lemmy generally has 3 camps: Marxists, Anarchists, and Liberals, and each instance is more or less friendly with each of those, or hostile to them, so picking an instance that generally aligns with your views will dramatically smooth out your experience.
Wait…you can browse instances without making an account??? Whoops, lol, I guess I was a little too eager to get Boost for Lemmy working with an account of my own immediately following Boost for Reddit getting nuked.
Is there a good way to browse instances? (Particularly through Boost?)
Also, what are the instances… literally? Like, I’ve never seen social media have groups like this (tied to the account, and separate from the communities, that is)
Yep, you can browse instances just by visiting their sites! It’s how I signed up to the couple I use, not sure how Boost handles it, I just use my mobile web browser (Hexbear has emojis you can use if you use the web version, so I just use that). I am sorry about not knowing Boost specifically, my fiancé uses Voyager.
As for what instances literally are, they are their own websites and servers, but they can talk to each other, think email. Gmail can talk to protonmail, etc
So, Lemmy is a bunch of separate social media networks that seamlessly* connect to each other? That’s… really cool
Yep! There’s also a bunch of inter-instance drama too, but by and large it’s a much better experience than Reddit, and if all else fails you can find an instance you really like and just browse locally, avoiding most of that drama. A big source of that drama is generally along political lines, Lemmy generally has 3 camps: Marxists, Anarchists, and Liberals, and each instance is more or less friendly with each of those, or hostile to them, so picking an instance that generally aligns with your views will dramatically smooth out your experience.
I recommend sorting this server browser by “most active” and checking each out locally.
Thank you for the info!
No worries!