Hello, not sure where I should ask questions like this so I guess I’ll start here?

I’m new to lemmy, and as there’s not much info about this place outside of super tech savvy spaces I’d like to ask some basic stuff, hope you all don’t mind:

1: is lemmy good for macro blogging? Like how you’d use something like Tumblr or the like.

2: when you create a community for yourself and post in it, does it reach other people or is it only if they actively search for it? Is it common here to create a community just for yourself to post blogs and the like? Can you even do that?

3: how does the federation thing work exactly? I’m from an instance that has downvotes disabled, so what happens when someone tries to downvote me?

4: is lemmy safe from AI scrapping or nah? Is this platform good for artists compared to something like mastodon, twitter, or bluesky?

5: is there search engine crawling on lemmy? Are all posts on here possible to show up in search engines or nah? How do things work on that front?

6: how’s development? Is lemmy going to continue to build and improve or are things gonna stay as they are for the foreseeable future?

7: how privacy friendly and secure is lemmy really? I’m guessing a lot better then reddit, but just curious.

8: are there normal people or communities here? From what I’m seeing all of lemmy seems primarily focused on politics and tech, am not seeing much beyond that.

I’m sorry if these questions have been answered before, again am new here and not a super duper tech savvy person.

  • AdaA
    6·
    2 days ago

    1: is lemmy good for macro blogging? Like how you’d use something like Tumblr or the like.

    No. You’re looking for Mastodon/Sharkey/Misskey/Friendica or kbin for that! Lemmy is more the federated equivalent of a site like reddit.

    2: when you create a community for yourself and post in it, does it reach other people or is it only if they actively search for it? Is it common here to create a community just for yourself to post blogs and the like? Can you even do that?

    There is no such thing as a community for yourself. Every community is either visible to everyone, or you can lock it down to just people on the same instance as you. But you can’t ever make it just for you. You can make it so that no one else can post to it, but you can’t stop them reading it.

    3: how does the federation thing work exactly? I’m from an instance that has downvotes disabled, so what happens when someone tries to downvote me?

    Basically, the instance just ignores downvotes that it receives. Other instances don’t. So that means that the timeline you see will be different to the timeline someone on a different instance sees, because their timeline will factor in downvotes and yours won’t.

    4: is lemmy safe from AI scrapping or nah?

    Nothing that is publicly visible or searchable is safe from AI scraping.

    Is this platform good for artists compared to something like mastodon, twitter, or bluesky?

    Different things.

    Lemmy is “reddit like”. Mastodon and Bluesky are “twitter like”. On lemmy, you subscribe to and follow communities. On mastodon, you subscribe to and follow users.

    So it really depends on what you’re looking for.

    5: is there search engine crawling on lemmy? Are all posts on here possible to show up in search engines or nah? How do things work on that front?

    Yep, it can and is crawled. If you don’t want that, lemmy isn’t going to be great, as it’s impossible to avoid.

    You do have more control over that on mastodon, as you can lock posts down to be more private, but even then, it’s imperfect.

    6: how’s development? Is lemmy going to continue to build and improve or are things gonna stay as they are for the foreseeable future?

    Active and ongoing, with a couple of competing alternatives that are also actively developed

    7: how privacy friendly and secure is lemmy really? I’m guessing a lot better then reddit, but just curious.

    Admins have full access to the database, and in theory, can pull out pretty much anything. Which is just the same as reddit. Your best bet for privacy is anonymity

    8: are there normal people or communities here? From what I’m seeing all of lemmy seems primarily focused on politics and tech, am not seeing much beyond that.

    Lots of meme communities too! It’s a size thing. Not as many lemmy users as there are reddit users, and the ones that are here tend to be more tech oriented.

    Lots of queer communities our instance!

    • 𝐷𝑒𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑜𝐸𝑠𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑜OPEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Hi, thanks for the answers! That was very helpful. Mind if I ask just a few more follow up questions?

      So I know about mastodon, but it’s not great for macro blogging or organising stuff on a larger or upper-medium scale, and all the other stuff has barely any info on it and also seem completely baren and even dead, is the fediverse beyond mastodon still not ready for normal peeps just yet or? I also see another person here mentioned kbin and projects that supposedly are competing with lemmy, what’s that if I may ask?

      Oof, here I thought one of the advantages of the fediverse was that it’s less data hungry seeing as all the linux folk are on it lmao. That sucks, sorta makes it pointless on that front to leave twitter and reddit then if they’re all the same in how they handle user data. So then what about account deletion? What’s respected and not when a fedi or lemmy account gets deleted?