r/LinuxHardware is now officially on the Fediverse! Will you join us? :)

Hey everyone! Hope you're all doing well.

While we're a bit late to the party, the r/LinuxHardware team has decided to create an official presence on the Fediverse. If you're unfamiliar with the term, it's basically an interconnected series of open-source and self-hostable websites that fulfill different niches of social media, but are able to communicate with each other using the ActivityPub network. Imagine it like email, but with social media.

We now have a presense on Lemmy and Kbin, which are both reddit-like alternatives on the fediverse, though Kbin also has some additional features that make it easy to interact with micro-blogging websites, such as Mastodon.

If you create an account on Kbin, you'll be able to see and interact with all the communities on Lemmy, and if you create an account on Lemmy, you'll be able to see everything on Kbin!

We wanted to support the growth of this decentralized network, as it's quite clear that as time goes on, these centralized, profit-at-all-cost websites like reddit, twitter, facebook, and youtube will continue to not only have a worse user experience, but also will further contribute to a worsening global society due to their inherently divisive algorithim, which has already directly caused genocides to occur in the world (sorry for the downer, but it has to be said).

To make the experience of transitioning to the Fediverse a little easier, I found some helpful little tools for you guys. To be clear, you don't need these, you can just register an account on any of the instances and pretend you're using one big website, and you'll be totally fine!

1. The Lemmyverse explorer - This website lets you easily search for communities across all lemmy instances. If you set your home instance there, it also makes it very easy to subscribe to them

2. The Fediverser Network - This website allows you to log-in with your reddit account to help you find the lemmy versions of the reddit communities you're subscribed to!

3. The Instance Assistant Addon for Lemmy & Kbin - This addon (available for Firefox, Chrome, and Edge) allows you to view a new instance from your home instance, to make it easy to subscribe to and comment on.

And with those, you're rockin' and rollin'! I hope to see you over there! ^^

#FAQ:

Q: Sup.

A: Sup.

Q: How do I choose which instance to sign up to?

A: Lemmy has a nice little sign-up process that'll recommend ones based on your interests (a lot of instances are themed). Kbin is a general instance, so you can safely sign up for that and not worry.

Q: Do I have to create an account on every instance?

A: No! One account works everywhere!

Q: Can I use a Lemmy or Kbin account to talk to people on Mastodon, or leave comments on Peertube videos?

A: Yes! You can subscribe to Peertube channels with your Lemmy or Kbin account, and whenever a new video is released, it'll show up in your feed. Kbin is nicer to use with Mastodon, but you can comment with Lemmy as well, but it's a little clunkly.

Q: Is this another Voat?

A: Thankfully no. While a lot of these alternative sites tend to gather up a lot of extreme and unpleasant people, the Fediverse is fairly immune to this, as it's possible to defederate from those types of instances, so you'll never see those communities or posts.