I’m one of the people who has very recently tried Lemmy and decided to drop Reddit. Initially because I will no longer be able to use SyncForReddit, but now also because I just like the vibe a lot more here than Reddit.
I’m not a massively technical person, but I understood the broad concept of federation - different instances/servers that sync to form a big conversation/forum of sorts.
I heard a lot of people joining and saying positive things about lemmy.world, so I signed up there…and that’s it.
But, am I using it right? Is the idea to sign up in one place and use it to participate across the LemmyVerse/FediVerse? Or should I be seeking out lots of niche instances of interest?
I hear lemmy.world is the biggest instance. What if most people end up here, does that defeat the purpose? Is this inevitable?
You need a critical mass of users, so a quiet instance with few posts is not attractive. If I search for Xbox, there are lots of empty places or places with 3 posts. If there’s one big one (often ends up being in lemmy.world) that’s where I’m subscribing.
How are you using Lemmy, are you participating in a bunch of instances or just one?
I subscribe to communities on multiple instances. My main activity is on our niche instance. If people are happy signing up at lemmy.world and limiting themselves to the communities available there, I see nothing wrong with that.
That being said, I think if you search lemmy.world for wetshaving, as an example, our instance does show up in the results because there is federated cross-over (for lack of a better term).
I generally scroll through either local or everything sorted by “New Comments”. That’s why I’m replying to this two month old post, because someone else did, so it rose to the top. Feels like a combination of Reddit and a classic forum where you’d have posts that would get bumped by activity.
2 months old?! Oops.
It only really matters for the “local” feed which instance you choose. I don’t really see much point to that one honestly, except if you’re on something like startrek.website where “local” is “show me all star trek stuff”, or something similar.
And yes, it is important to spread out the user base across multiple servers and not all end up on lemmy.world.
So I’d say find some smaller instance, maybe with a community actually physically local to you, and make that your main one. Or don’t and stay on lemmy.world, I’m not your dad.
Perpetual plug to my userscript which changes all links to point to your home instance to make this even easier :)
I signed up on a smaller instance and only follow a couple of communities there, so I had to go out and search for things I was interested in. I pretty much just subscribed to anything that sounded remotely interesting, figuring I could leave later.
i mostly found stuff with https://browse.feddit.de/ and https://lemmyverse.net/, as well as just going to the bigger instances and looking at the local lists for anything interesting. So I’m following communities across several of the larger severs - lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, kbin.social, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ca, sopuli.xyz - and a few smaller ones that sounded interesting or relevant. Also fedidb.org is a nice tool to see info about the fediverse in general, including stats on Lemmy and Kbin servers.
The idea is you can subscribe and interact with any instances, no matter what instance you came from
Sure, most will jump the bandwagon into lemmy.world… at least for the near future. I can say that with confidence because when you search “how to join Lemmy”, most guide will point you to Lemmy.world instead of… lets say… coughLemmynsfwcough
Over time, some will eventually move to other instance (mostly just the account, because they want ‘cool username’ for themselves). Sooner or later, things will balance themselves out.
Maybe you can even start by deploying your own instance, for no other reason than claiming your own ‘cool username’.
I’d argue one of the most pressing concerns right now is the lack of migration tools
Currently you can’t just create an account on instance X and move to Y. You need to create a new account. Eventually if we get the functionality to migrate from one place to another, people will be able to spread out across the fediverse and the risk of a single big server going belly up reduced.
From a technical standpoint if one instance gets defederated from other instances, all the users on that instance are stuffed. Their content won’t appear in the wider fediverse (so less engagement)
I’d like to see some sort of export/import functionality as well. Instances will come and go, and it would suck for people on those to just lose their stuff with out having a way to back up/restore it.
We’re all figuring this out as we go! Since the great Reddit migration, we’ve already seen our first big drama with the Beehaw defederation. Some Beehaw users disagreed and left for other instances while users of other instances liked the move and joined Beehaw. The Lemmy fediverse is what WE make it for better or for worse.
i don’t blame them for not welcoming redditors. they weren’t on reddit for a reason, and now there’s an influx of redditors making a lot of changes.
Sure, but I don’t think beehaw’s philosophy suits the fediverse very well. They want to create a safer space where discussion and disagreement is encouraged, but more closely policed. Which makes sense for a closed system - not one where “unpoliced” users can interact with your community. Otherwise you end up playing server whack-a-mole… exactly like beehaw has done.
I don’t think beehaw doesn’t fit the fediverse, I do believe it doesn’t fit every user.
As I understand it, they want to be a safe place for a very specific audience, that is, people afraid to be harassed for who they are, that could also include people with extreme social anxiety, that’s why it’s so heavily policed and they defederate from a lot of other instances.
It’s like having a heavily moderated subreddit, you wouldn’t say it doesn’t fit reddit just because they don’t accept contribution from everyone.
The purpose of the fediverse is to have things spread out so one or few nodes dying doesn’t affect the entire system, it’s also about avoiding corporate control, the same principles on which the internet was founded.
I don’t think it means having to trust everyone or accepting everyone into your local group.
The purpose of the fediverse is to have things that are spread out and can talk to each other, right?
My point was only beehaw trying to cultivate a safe space that is closely policed isn’t easily compatible with that baked-in interaction with other spaces which they can’t police. Unless they play server whack-a-mole.
And then once large instances are cut off because they contain too many users to police when they interact on beehaw.org - what’s the point in being part of the fediverse? Why not just be any other type of link aggregating forum?
It would make a little more sense if you could defederate unilaterally (i.e. non beehaw members cannot post on beehaw, but beehaw members can go interact on other instances). But as far as I understand that’s not how it works.
(i.e. non beehaw members cannot post on beehaw, but beehaw members can go interact on other instances). But as far as I understand that’s not how it works.
It depends, you believe that’s not how it works because you’re thinking of both sides defederating each other, but defederation is one-side.
For example, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world but lemmy.world didn’t defederate from beehaw, so lemmy.world people cannot participate on beehaw but beehaw can participate on lemmy.world.
It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, since lemmy.world people can still participate in beehaw discussions but only lemmy.world people would see those comment, I think also other instances that are not defederated can but I’m not sure about this.
You sure about that? I’m pretty certain that unilateral defederation is not possible yet.
I don’t know about kbin but it’s certainly possible on lemmy:
