I'm so confused, I ended up here after experimenting with an image generator, which somehow lead me to...a character chatbot sort of thing?

I don't understand any of this, I'm not sure how to navigate the site. Or how to even find the chatbot/image generator again on the perchance site without the direct bookmarks.

What are you talking about?

I dunno, this site is confusing, it's nothing like any forum or such I've been to before.

It works more or less like Reddit. If you want to talk about Perchance, you should go to its community: !perchance@lemmy.world

You've stumbled upon a server called Lemmy.world. It connects to the Fediverse, a network of a bunch of servers like it, which together form a Reddit-like social network. The difference is it's distributed and there's no single entity in control, like with Reddit. For instance, I'm on a different server (discuss.tchns.de) and can talk to you!

I don't think there's a direct connection between Perchance and the Fediverse, but maybe someone can prove me wrong? Otherwise perhaps you meant to go to the Perchance community as a different user suggested?

In any case, have some memes:

!memes@lemmy.world

!science_memes@mander.xyz

That was more or less the plan but then I figured since I had a stupid question or take, might as well fish it here first.
How come no one ever mentions lemmy.world? I been on the internet since every, the dial up was a sweet lullaby for me, newsground was the go top place. But this, bam, out of rightfield.

Are communities basically same as reddit subs?

There is a Perchance community on, IIRC, the db0 instance. Perhaps that is why you have been led here.

I was in dire need of good memes. You're a refreshing breeze of solace T_T
How do I tell which server I am on, and should I aim for particular servers near me?

I clicked on something, related to the perchance@lemmy.world I think, and that made me more confused and wonder if the two were somehow related.

The server you're on is of little importance. You're on Lemmy.world, I'm on sh.itjust.works, and we can discuss as if we were on the same server. To discover Lemmy lemmy.world is a good server; maybe when you'll understand more you'll want to move but not necessarily.

Are communities basically same as reddit subs?

Yes.

How come no one ever mentions lemmy.world?

The big social media companies fear Lemmy and the Fediverse in general. As far as I know discussing Lemmy on Reddit often leads to your post being (auto)deleted.

Are communities basically same as reddit subs?

Yes. You can link to them with an exclamation mark like !selfhosted@lemmy.world or !trippinthroughtime@lemmy.ca

So, your full username includes the server (also called an instance), in your case it's Eisenworth@lemmy.world which means lemmy.world is where you've created an account. You can freely make accounts at other instances if you like also.

You might notice that it looks like an email address, that's on purpose - email is the usual example of a federated service that people are familiar with: if you have a Gmail account you can still send and receive messages from people with a Yahoo account, or protonmail, or AOL, or whatever.
In fact it's possible to run an email server yourself, and that can also be done with software like lemmy also.
Lemmy is one particular piece of software a server can be running that can connect to this network, there's a few others like Piefed and Mbin that all work together, but whichever one a server runs, the users can see the same communities and posts and comments. (Exceptions exist when server admins block certain things for various reasons)

Which instance to choose mostly doesn't make much difference, but there are some that host communities for specific countries or languages, some that are politically extreme far right or extreme far left (to the point of being authoritarian communists - notably the developers of the Lemmy software run such an instance, lemmy.ml), but any instance's politics only go as far as communities hosted there and users from there. I feel this one (.world) is a decent balance. Note that you can still see communities and users from other instances, except as noted below.

Another consideration when choosing an instance are which other instances it blocks ("defederates"). For example there's one called Beehaw which is probably a nice little community, but they have cut themselves off from most of the big instances, so if you log in there you won't see posts from here.

Reddit molted in 2023 and some of us came here. This has been a place for a bit longer than that.

So you signed up because you thought this was all a forum around an LLM provider?

In brief... your username is listed as Eisenworth @ lemmy.world

everything after the @ is the server they're on. If you don't see that, they're also on the same server as you (so my name shouldn't also include @lemmy.world the way Funkycarrot's includes @discuss.tchncs.de

Much like reddit, people can just make communities on whatever topic, and they are largely open to anyone with an account on their server, or on any of the many servers connected to it. Someone on Perchance must have a community on lemmy.world that they are directing people to for discussion. I don't think there's any connection beyond that.

If that's a community name, the way to make a link that works for everyone would be
!perchance@lemmy.world

Edit: Yep, that is a community for discussing Perchance. You can just stick with that, or see what else is around. We're still a lot smaller than reddit, and kind of fragmented by design, but there's still a lot of cool people discussing all sorts of things to be found around.

To add on, someone can make a new community ("subreddit") on an instance ("server") (lemmy world, db0, etc) and name it whatever they want, including the same exact name as a community on another instance. So there may be more than one c/perchance. And to make it more confusing, instance eowners choose if they want to federate (connect) nto other instances. This allows different instances to see and comment on each other's posts, but instance owners can also choose to defederate from instances they disagree with at a core level. Lemmy. World is the one most reddit expats chose in 2023. It doesn't really matter which you're on, but you may eventually want to join an community hosted on a non-federated instance. You'll either need a new account elsewhere and start over or just use a dedicated account there. There's no karma here, so not a whole lot to lose with a fresh start, aside form rebuilding your subs

Server is actually fairly important. I'm not at dni status with .word but I would much more recommend sh.itjust.works, lemmy.blahaj.zone, or if you're a l'il anarchist maybe lemmy.dbzer0.com. It doesn't matter most of the time in that you can still access most parts from most other parts, but when shit does get weird and political and servers start blocking each other it helps to already be on a homeserver that shares your values.

Mostly I just signed up because I was curious. The LLM thing is just the rabbit hole that lead me here.