When introducing members to kbin/lemmy don't mention the fediverse!
I introduced kbin to someone today who asked what the fediverse was. I answered for them of course, but it made me realize that the concept is still technobabble for most people. The average joe probably doesn't care or notice that server A is really talking to server B. Just have them find out on their own and if a mass migration does need to happen from A to B, just make a standard announcement.
this is not that simple. If a user joins an instance that has only a few users they will get disappointed because it will look empty and non-active. They need to understand that they can still join communities from another instances where they can find more users and activity and they can still interact with them
On top of intentionally connecting specific external communities to the instance you are using, communities from other instances will show up as search results. For example, I am a big Star Trek fan, so I go to the search and enter "star trek", which shows me both a local community here on kbin.social and reveals there's a dedicated instance at startrek.website which has more content.
Over time, I'm expecting that niche topics will (for better or worse) gravitate to specific instances, but that content will then be duplicated throughout the whole Fediverse. There's a lot of duplication right now because things are new and not totally connected, not to mention technical challenges for scaling up, but that will improve over time.
it already works, partially. You can go to search and try pasting "asklemmy@lemmy.ml" . You need only the community name, if you paste the whole URL it is not working. Then, if you click on the community name's, you are transferred to https://kbin.social/m/asklemmy@lemmy.ml which is essentially the content from that community, but "inside" your current instance. The problem now is that this content is stuck in 2 days ago, when the issue with cloudflare started. When fixed, content will start being updated
Is that content being updated, though? Or was that community simply imported before syncing was off, and is now stale?
This is why some knowledge about how things work is important. Accessing https://kbin.social/m/asklemmy@lemmy.ml does not access the remote community. It accesses a local mirror of the remote community, which is updated when the remote group forwards content along.
If k-soc isn't accepting those content updates, it's not actually engaging with remote users and new content, and it's not se ding along local content addressed to the remote group.
I think the question is when cloudflare is no longer needed, will interaction with the content be "live" vs only when instances send/receive data. It's a reasonable question, no need to be impatient. A lot of people are learning right now.