I don’t fully understand how lemmy works completely yet. But for example I made an account at Division by zero and subscribe here to post. Is it not just a more inconvenient version of making a reddit account and being able to post practically anywhere?
Also what’s the difference between making an account at one instant and just making one centralized account for the social media?
How is that different than just making different smaller subreddits? I did notice some instances have themes, like tech or electronics. So is it that if one instance enshitifies there would be many other instances with tech related communities?
All subreddits are run by Reddit; if Reddit decides to overrun it with ads, require you to use their app, make content impossible to enjoy, or incorporate some awful AI bullshit, nobody can really do anything about it.
Over here, you are in charge of your own user experience. You’re reading this content from dbzer0; I’m using an entirely different application called kbin. We have completely different user experiences, and some users might be banned on my server but not on yours (or vice versa).
Others might get different user experiences through apps or front-ends such as Old Lemmy or more experimental stuff. It’s basically going to be a lot more difficult to enshittify as everybody is chosing their own experience.
As for the communities, they are indeed at the mercy of whoever runs a particular server. If the lemmy.world admins go a bit crazy, users might for example respond by jumping ship to the !fediverse community on a different server.
Side note: when linking to a community you have to do !community@instance. If you do [email protected], it links to kbin.social’s fediverse community for everyone. If you just write !fediverse, that links to [email protected] for me, [email protected] for you and other kbin.social users, [email protected] for lemmy.world users, etc.
Oops, yes - there’s a bug in Kbin where links to local communities don’t work properly. I kind of assumed it would appear correctly when viewed from other instances, turns out that’s not the case. :)
That’s pretty much it, yes.
There’s no central control.
In a practical sense this creates a better experience because if an instance does something like… allow too many bots, or include ads, everyone can just block them
Pretty much. By splitting the platform into smaller chunks (instances) you reduce the effect any one instance has on the rest of the platform. The price for this is convenience however over time people will find solutions for this.
Not subs, but the entire platform is Reddit can enshitify. More adds, no api, pushing nfts/crypto, etc.
I’m not sure how active you are on Reddit or if you saw what happened this previous summer, but that is exactly what we thought until the API fiasco. Then Reddit showed us exactly how little control/voice we ultimately have over our communities and the site as they called us (mods) “landed gentry” then began forcibly removing mods from their communities despite having a mandate to keep their subs private or otherwise.
On a day-to-day basis, it works fine. But that was a wake up call for a lot of people. They can pull any rug they want at any time out from under us. We have no rights on the site. We have no say. But if I want to stand up an instance today, I am my own admin and my community/structure can be exactly what we thought we had on Reddit (but clearly didn’t).
Edit: also Reddit doesn’t care about accessibility and claims it’s been a “concern for a long time” as they dedicate resources to dumb one off projects like their clubhouse rip-off that lasted months and NFT “snoovatars” (can’t believe they pushed that with an straight face).