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  • Okay. I've learned a little bit, enough to ask questions. Where should I go to post my questions/thread about waves hand all this? At this point, my questions are very ELI5, with answers (hopefully) in the form of tiny, manageable bites, not walls of text. So far, I know I signed up for and can post on a Community, Star Trek specifically, LLAP. And, that the Fediverse is not a new name for the United Federation of Planets. And ... yeah, that's about it.

    • This is as good a place as any. We're all learning as we go.

      • Thanks. I just hit the wrong button and lost my reply to you. Shaka, when the walls fell. Giving it another go.

        I'm deciphering an image whose original post I've lost in a sea of Lemmy links I've been reading and bookmarking. Image link is below. So, Lemmy is an umbrella for instances (servers), which in turn can host (I'm not sure if host is the right term) other instances? Is Star Trek an instance like a mini-reddit, or an, I don't know what to call them, an instance like a subreddit within the mini-reddit?

        The image I mentioned:

        https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0006c2db-13c6-406e-97e7-6e274fddf355.png

        • Yeah, so the terminology can get weird, and the Reddit comparison is tricky Because you have to imagine multiple Reddits (the platform, not subreddits) for it to really work.

          Servers and Instances are used pretty interchangeably - each one is privately operated, and you pick the one you want to sign up on - startrek.website is one of these instances.

          Each instance can host its own "Communities" - there are like subreddits. We're hosting three right now, /c/startrek, /c/daystrominstitute, and /c/risa.

          The neat-but-complicated part is that each instance can communicate with other instances, so if you want to subscribe to a community on a server other than the one you signed up for, you can (within reasons, as there are mechanisms for instances to isolate themselves or block other instances from communication if they choose to do so).

          So yeah, you can look at startrek.website as a mini-reddit with three Trek-related subreddits...but you can also use it as a springboard to subscribe to other subreddits on other mini-reddits.

        • If you've been on the Internet a long time, good analogies seem to be like email servers or (back in the day) Usenet servers. There can be lots of servers, and you get an account on one, but then you can post and read between all the servers. Like being on gmail but emailing people and reading emails from their accounts at other places. Or back in the day, like being on your ISP or university's Usenet server, but reading posts from other servers and posting things people on other servers can read.

    • If it's Lemmy in general you need help with rather than this instance, try !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml (direct link)

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