Hello everyone! Long time redditor, first time poster to Lemmy.world. As I’m learning more about the Fediverse, I’m seeing there are several instances that seem to serve the same purpose. For example, Lemmy and Beehaw seem to be similar, yet they are still separate.
Are there any big differences or factors I should be looking for when browsing different instances? So far, it looks like the number of communities and rules are the biggest differences between instances.
Bonus question: are there any good sources for learning more about the Fediverse? I’ve found these links so far:
https://opensource.com/article/23/3/tour-the-fediverse - Gives a decent explanation of the Fediverse. https://fediverse.party/ - Provides a link to different Fediverse instances, not specific to Reddit replacements.
All of the federated sites push and pull content using ActivityPub (the technology that connects them all together), but they all seem to differ in the way their website presents the data and how you interact with things.
For example there’s an upvote / downvote button on kbin.social for articles, but also a boost button. I’ve heard that some places only use the upvote and others the boost (or whatever they call it)
I found it easiest to just pick a place that looks decent and is chill and go from there 🦙🦙
I’ve read that upvote on kbin is basically “save” and boost is the functionality that would be upvote on lemmy or reddit.
Edit: Well look at that, seems I’m wrong and so many friendly people here to correct me without resorting to calling me names. Already this is much better than Reddit. :)
It was changed recently, now upvote works similar to lemmy/reddit (but also adds things to your favourites)
Boost is more for the microblogging side of kbin, it’s like a retweet. (also adds more reputation points but that’s not really useful for anything right now)
Boost also enhances the visibility of a post, and it’ll probably have to continue to do so in future versions: not so much because of the internal workings of kbin, but because boosts are used to increase visibility across the fediverse. Having them not count towards visibility in kbin would be inconsistent when displaying information from the threadiverse at large. :)
Upvote and downvote is just that (they recently fixed the reputation calculation). A boost is like a retweet. You crosspost the boosted content to your own microblog space. Kbin does both reddit-like discussion threads as well as twitter/mastodon like microblogging. In fact, kbin is fully interoperable with mastodon. By boosting something you retweet (retoot?) it to your mastodon/microblog.
Well, that was how things worked 48 hours ago or something like that. Things are changing quickly. :-)