I used to browse Reddit 90+% of the time from my phone through the RiF app, so after June 30th, here is what I did and what I recommend as a starter pack for others in the same situation:
- Create account on lemmy.world, so the browser part is covered
- Search for the information on which app provides the closest to the RiF (Apollo, etc.) experience
- Instal Liftoff and be happy - it is just like RiF :-) (for Apollo and others, it could be different - find your own favorite!)
- Dial back dramatically on using Reddit at all. I only load 4 subs in my phone’s browser, because I did not find the Lemmy / Fediverse alternatives yet
- Constantly look for the communities to replace the subreddits you are still visiting
- OPTIONAL - once or twice a week, look at /r/pics and /r/videos and laugh at the creativity of the still ongoing protest :-)
So that is where I am right now, posting this via the web browser on the lemmy.world site, by pressing “create a post”. Seems easy enough for now, but I find it a bit confusing that other people can post from Mastodon and other Lemmy instances… Do they see the same communities I do? Do I see all Lemmy communities if I use lemmy.world…? So many questions, but it’s exciting to explore this brand new structure.
Even after reading the Fediverse and ActivityPub articles on Wikipedia my head is spinning, and I don’t really understand how everything fits / works together, but here I am! An ex(-ish) Redditor after the APIcalypse, looking for cool new communities, and excited about the future that the Fediverse can bring!
(I’m willing to learn! Someone please link me a FAQ where I can find the answers to my questions :-) )
This is how my poor grandmother must feel all the time. I’m slowly trying to understand it all. I’ve got most of lemmy figured out so far I think. But there’s a lot more to this.
Just abstract it in your mind - Lemmy is software. Microsoft Word is software. Mastodon is software. Photoshop is software.
You can install copies of all of these pieces of software on different machines. Now just imagine if all the various copies (instances) of MS Word installed on peoples PC’s around the world were able to talk to each other. And so were all the copies of Photoshop. And then further imagine that all the copies of Word were also able to talk to all the copies of Photoshop.
That’s all the fediverse is. Multiple copies of the same software able to talk to each other and also able to talk to multiple copies of different software.
Have a look here, put a tick in the ‘ActivityPub’ protocol tickbox and you’ll see the software that can (theoretically) talk to each other.