I wrote this simile explanation of Lemmy intended for millennials / Gen Z who might be familiar with discord. While I could have left it out completely I included a bit of explanation about Lemmy instances in order to highlight why it's different from Reddit or other centralized Reddit-like platforms.
Everything written here is copyleft/public domain.
The audio was generated with Elevenlabs AI TTS with a paid account and I'm fairly confident that I can also give it the Public domain / copyleft license.
Audio: https://voca.ro/1cZOHPZo8shQ
Transcript:
"So, you're probably familiar with discord right?
On discord you've got one user account and that lets you participate in countless discord servers, each of them with their own channels, moderation style and possibly even dedicated to a particular community or topic.
Lemmy is very similar. With one account you can participate in countless of Lemmy servers, each of them with their own Lemmy communities, which are basically equivalent to a subreddit.
Now, this is basically what you need to know in order to start using Lemmy, but there's a couple of differences that are worth pointing out if you want to know how it works under the hood.
One big difference is that Lemmy servers are actually servers, as in an actual computer. These Lemmy servers basically know how to talk to each other so that it's easy to use them with a single account.
Unlike reddit or even discord, these servers aren't owned by a big centralized corporation. Instead, they're run by anyone who wants to create an online space for their communities. It is harder to run a Lemmy server than a discord server because it requires actual computing resources, that's true, but it also means that there's no for-profit business that controls the Lemmy network or all the Lemmy communities.
Joining Lemmy and giving it a try is quite easy. Because there's no owner of the Lemmy network, in order to sign up you just need to sign up on one of the hundreds of Lemmy servers available. This first server will become what's known as your "home instance" and with that account you can interact with countless other Lemmy servers and each of their subreddits slash communities.
If you want to give it a try, just vist join-lemmy.org and choose a server to become your home instance. And that's it!"