RiF was reddit for me. And it pisses me off because if Spez had been reasonable, I would have happily signed up for Reddit Gold to have continued API access.
Other than occasionally checking in on the Ex-Mormon subreddit (to follow up on an institution I dislike even more), I am done with reddit forever.
It stopped loading for me but then I logged off and it would load up again. Logged back on and it worked still but kept giving me errors. Either way it's deleted and gone now.
It's the same as Reddit, except there's multiple websites instead of one, and they're all owned by different people with different rules— so if the admins are weird, you can just move to another one. The websites (mostly called "instances") are all able to talk to eachother, so you can interact with people on different instances without making an account on that one. It's pretty cool and designed so that a company can't buy it!
Lemmy is pretty much Reddit, with one major difference—it has instances. Imagine you could take all of Reddit's backend server code, copy and paste it, and host your own version of Reddit. Cool! Now you're an admin of Reddit 2. If the CEO of Reddit 1 ever does something mind-numbingly stupid, you and your users will be unaffected*. Reddit 1 and Reddit 2 are akin to Lemmy instances. Each instance has their own users and communities (subreddits).
Lemmy instances all work with each other*. Think of it like email. If I'm a Gmail user, I can still email Yahoo addresses, because Gmail, Yahoo, and all other email providers use a shared set of rules. All Lemmy instances also follow a shared set of rules (called a protocol, not that you need to know that). That means you can post to other instances, subscribe to their communities, upvote, downvote, and do all the things you can do on your instance.
The Lemmy app you use has a lot of control over how this is all laid out, so if you're finding it confusing, try different apps. I personally like Liftoff, which you can get in the Play Store, but other popular options are Jerboa, Thunder, Connect for Lemmy, wefwef, and Summit.
Instances can each have their own communities. It's important to find out what instance you want to register with and associate with. Take into account reliability, politics, and legal concerns. Instances that don't hold a standard are at risk of being defederated.
Federation is how instances share posts. You can see and interact with posts and communities from other instances that are federated with your instance.
Federation can be a two-way or one-way street. If you belong to instance A and it is federated with instance B and vice versa, B to A, then all posts and comments are visible to each other and all other federated instances.
If instance A is federated to instance B but B is not federated with instance A, then A can see B but not vice versa. A can interact on B posts but they will not be saved on B's instance, only A's.
I hope I didn't get too complicated with the explanation. I just got familiarized a couple days ago myself.
Connect for Lemmy is a nice app, as a RIF user I find it quite minimalistic and comparable.
Oh, my first comment here. And I didn't even look at Reddit today. This may just work out fine!