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?
What if most people end up here, does that defeat the purpose? Is this inevitable?
It is likely that most users will end up on a few big instances. That's not inherently bad, but it can be an issue if those instances have poor moderation.
You'll be able to see content from any instance that isn't defederated from your instance. The main thing this means right now is that you can't see new stuff posted to beehaw. Beehaw defederated lemmy.world and shitjustworks because of high moderation load due to open signups on those instances leading to a lot of troll users coming from them. They may refederate later when moderation tools for the platform improve or if those instances get more of a handle on the trolls, or they may not.
Since there are some big established communities on beehaw, you might benefit from having an account on an instance that is not defederated from them. Or you might not, if those specific communities don't interest you.
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?
A quiet instance is fine (great, even), as long as it's federated with the busier instances that have the content you want to see. The best place on the fediverse is
An instance with moderation/rules that you feel comfortable with
Which is federated with all the instances that have communities you want to see
In terms of which communities I join, most communities aren't that active yet, so I'm joining all the ones that look remotely interesting. If the volume gets to be too much as the userbase grows, I'll drop the ones that aren't as fun/interesting.
One thing to note is that when you search from within your instance, the "subscriber" account for communities on other instances doesn't necessarily reflect the total population of subscribers, you'd need to click through to that instance to see the real number I think.
Also, since the total userbase is small relative to reddit, folks are going to be pooling more in general communities rather than specific ones. So for example, you might actually find more xbox related content in the general "gaming" community at Beehaw (20k subscribers) or the one at lemmy.ml (11k subscribers).
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.
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.
since I missed part of the announcements, did they defederated completely? Aka removed themselves from the federated network. I thought they had started just blocklisting instances. I guess I'm wrong (?)
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'.
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.
When I first started looking around here, I had no particular reason to pick one instance, so I didn't. I initially registered with three (kbin.social, lemmy.world and lemmy.one). I was sort of planning to try them out and compare them before settling on one, but I ended up just rotating through them as the mood hit me, and I still use all three. And in fact, I'm planning on adding a couple more.
The thing I like about using multiple instances is that I can change my experience quickly and easily.
Mostly I go back and forth between kbin.social and lemmy.world, and they're notably different. In the first place, they use different software, so the interfaces are quite different. The kbin software is a bit more feature rich but also a bit harder to get around in while the lemmy software is a bit simpler in both respects. And the instances are notably different, since .world is federated with virtually everyone while kbin.social has defederated from a number of instances, and most notably all of the botfarms.
So kbin.social has less content of generally higher quality, so it feels more serious and sedate, while lemmy.world has more content but a lot of it is botspam, so it feels more hectic and noisy. And I just go to whichever one appeals to me more at the moment.
And I'm actually looking for a couple more. I'd like to find one that's deliberately reserved and sort of scholarly - high standards and serious discussion - and one that's overtly goofy snd lighthearted.
And I have no doubt that if they don't exist, they will.
Idk how to switch between them. I tried signing into kbin with my Lemmy stuff and it just went nope. Maybe I messed up the password lol but I don't think so
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.
A lot of the fediverse reminds me of usenet and usenet was destroyed by spam. (Not by september(s).)
For my own purposes as a flesh n blood user I agree with you. However when I consider spam and its modern descendants, idk. Would it then be the case that any spam (etc) instance could just transport all its "user" data to a new instance?
Currently you can't just create an account on instance X and move to Y. You need to create a new account.
I don't see how that's a problem. It's entirely painless to create a new account or to switch between accounts. I do it all the time.
I guess if a particular instance folds, I'll lose the stuff I posted there, but I don't see how that's a problem either. I've written countless thousands of forum posts over almost thirty years, and the vast majority of them are undoubtedly gone. What difference does it make? I didn't write them in some vain bid for some sort of immortality - I wrote them because there were specific things I wanted to say at specific moments, and because I enjoy writing. So they've already served their purpose.
There are different ways of relating to online content.
In some contexts I am more motivated to make contributions when I have reason to believe they will be persistent for years. I post on forums that have been around for 20+ years, where I search for things and come up with posts from that whole time. So when I write on there I kind of do it with care because I am thinking of people in the future who will find my stuff.
OTOH there is also a place for ephemeral communications. That is the whole draw of snapchat for example. The promise this will be deleted soon. Whether that is true or not is another thing.... But people do want it sometimes.
Instances can defederate. For instance, lemmy.world was defederated from beehaw because of a bot influx. So if you liked what was on beehaw you’d need another account there.
But generally you only need one account in one instance to see most everything.
Right now, until such time as they feel like they have the mod team/tools to handle the influx, you won't be able to see any new posts or comments from Beehaw or its users.
There are old pre-defederation threads from maybe a week or so ago that you could even comment in, but no one on Beehaw's side would be able to read it until they refederate because your instances aren't passing that information between each other.
If you both comment on a post from a neutral instance, both of you can see and interact with every other user, but you shouldn't be able to see each other.
Since lemmy.world didn't defederate from beehaw you can still see posts and comments. But if you go to make a comment on a post from beehaw people on that instance won't be able to see or respond, only people from your instance or other federated instances. Hopefully that explanation helped, it's hard for me to explain some things through text.
[An interconnected diagram with six cloud-shaped bubbles with text and images of the reddit mascot snoo in them are shown. There are lines going between them connecting all of the bubbles to one another in the approximate shape of the fediverse pentagram logo. The top left bubble says "r/aww" and has two images of the reddit mascot. The upper middle bubble has the text "r/gaming" and "r/Music" with one image of the mascot. The top right bubble says "r/funny" with one mascot, the lower left says "r/Pics" and "r/science" with one mascot, the lower right says "r/art" and "r/ask science" with two mascots, and the bottom centre bubble has the words "r/space" and r/videos" with one reddit mascot. The Lemmy logo, a black and white cartoon mouse head, sits in the bottom left corner of the image. Below the web of connected bubbles, there are three small cartoon drawings of people standing next to each other, with the text "Lemmy devs" beside them, and a large purple speech bubble above them that reads as follows]
We donated Lemmy to the world, we can't control what people do with it.
^I'm a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^
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.
Maybe just the "Local" tab not being very useful. Although if you can find a server that fits your interests that may not be the case. I just picked one that seemed well run.
Just a heads up, LJ the Dev of Sync for Reddit is doing Sync for Lemmy. I've been a Sync user for years now and am excited to see his version of Lemmy.
I’m trying out using my lemmy instance as a personal blog, more or less.
I have one community with pretty locked down settings and super SFW policy. Over time I will post things that might be of interest or that I want to show off. I selectively subscribe to some other communities on larger instances to get some visibility and be part of the conversation. But really Im using lemmy to drive traffic to my custom domain and as a way to SEO.
I have another personal use account on another instance I don’t own but that I align with philosophically. That’s where I keep my main collection of communities Im interested in.
I'm on kbin.social. When I browse the tag "All", I can see all Lemmy communities that federate with kbin.social and all kbin magazines that federate with kbin.social (including those belonging to kbin.social). It's very seamlessly, and at some point you don't realise you're commenting in a post from a different server. But you can also browse those communities and/or magazines you're subscribed to, in a similar fashion to Reddit.
I personally host my own instance, from which I interact with communities on many other instances.
This ensures my Lemmy account can't just be decimated because my admin decided to stop maintaining their instance and I avoid defederation that can block content I'm interested in (including the infighting among larger instances.)
Out of curiosity, what's the disk usage from hosting your own instance like? My concern with self hosting is it'll quickly run out of control. I don't want to dedicate hundreds of gigabytes to a lemmy instance.
So theoretically you should be able to make one account and view a majority of content. This is barring of course any instances or communities defederated from your home instance.
There’s merit in making a community for your interest on your home instance even if you’re subscribed to it on a different instance, for reasons like outages and a diversity of content. Lemmy being bigger than other instances just means there’s more content available here, but if you like the layout of kbin or Mastodon or what have you better you can still see it all.
Plus, just because two instances are federated doesn’t mean the users actually see all the information exchanged. You have to actually opt into it which is cool- ie if an instances particular community is problematic you can just block it and sub to the rest.
Edit: got so wrapped up in my TED talk I forgot to mention- I’m currently trying out Lemmy, sh.itjust.works, and kbin.social until I can settle on one (hopefully kbin gets an app soon lol.)
tl;dr: don't make a community on your own instance unless you intend for it to be a divergent population or discussion from one that already exists.
There’s merit in making a community for your interest on your home instance even if you’re subscribed to it on a different instance, for reasons like outages and a diversity of content.
I'm going to disagree with you on this point. Communities of (nominally) identical purpose probably shouldn't exist in an ideal fediverse. Because these communities are not linked it fractures the user base and/or requires a great deal more work on the human side to manage. Example: 3 communities about Akron, Ohio. If you want to know what's happening in Akron, you have to subscribe to, and manage, three distinct community feeds. Participants won't all be subscribed, so people with interest in the dog park on one community won't get input from people who have dogs on other communities. If I want to put up a flyer for my band which is giving away free beer for coming to our show at the city festival, I have to put it up on all three communities separately and then monitor all three threads for activity.
Alternatively, the ability to create alternate communities of the same focus is not a necessarily a bug. If I'm on an instance which hates beer and dogs, I would want to create an Akron community where I don't have to hear about those drunkards parading their precious fur babies around town like the own the place. I can say all the negative things I want to about beer or dogs while discussing important festival events like the goldfish-bowl-pingpong-ball vendor who always has the most vibrantly colored fish stacked in their prize bags.
While this is a made up example, there are two reddit subs for the game Elite Dangerous and it's the best for the two player bases because they have split along the lines of PVP/Seal Clubbing and Co-op/world generation and, generally, fucking hate one another. That's a good reason to have split instances here on the fediverse.
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 think the whole design of most of these the platforms missed out a better paradigm. It's super restrictive and terrible for global discovery to have content communities and account communities be one thing. To me the design only really creates a good experience if you don't need the fediverse and what's outside your instance's walls. Instances that people browse should ideally act more like a subreddit vs an entire reddit. People should add different servers from people or groups that run a community that you want to see posts from. Your main feed app would aggregate the diverse set of communities that make up a persons interests. the current system forces you to pick which restrictive box you describe yourself as, and then makes discover-ability and interactivity of everything outside of that bubble a terrible chore. I think maybe one day Nostr might be able to do something like that with its relay technology. Right now the relays focus more on being like a customized redundancy, but I think that community relays could work similarly. Nostr is weird because in ways it's simpler but also not packaged so that it feels that way. It feels more complicated, but it's early days.
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.
I looked at a few instances a week or two ago and decided on fmhy as they seemed, by name, prepped for Reddit users. I then subscribed to a lot of communities often on other instances or kbin. I've found that my local feed is not what I want, lots of piracy & porn, and my subscribed feed has a lot of repetition as a lot of communities are cross posting stuff. Also uploading media seems broken.
I've created an account on a smaller instance with a local feed that is fairly quiet, inoffensive and a little more niche, which makes for a pleasant homepage. Switching to the 'All' feed gives a nice overview of the lemmy & kbin world.
I think I'm gonna avoid the subscribe button for a while and watch, post, comment & vote instead. The entirety of lemmy & kbin is about the size of a medium subreddit at the moment. I think the 'All' feed with some sorting options alongside the search and alert system may be a better way to navigate the current landscape than subscribing to 1234 communities with liberal use of copy & paste.
Alright so I have a question and can’t figure out a better place to post it than this comment thread.
Kbin is neat and I’ve enjoyed it a reasonable amount for the past week or so. But 80% of my feed is either news and discussion about how bad Reddit is (I know, guys!), memes about about Reddit, and depressing climate change articles that make me panic about things I can’t change. How do I filter stuff like this out of my feed on Fediverse communities?
In a way, it's just like reddit. Subscribe to magazines and then switch your feed to Subscribed. It takes a bit to get a full, diverse feed, but then you'll be filtering by the things you like. Alternately, you can go to the magazines page and block the ones you don't want to see.
Reddit is a hot topic of discussion right now for completely obvious reasons. That will probably die down in the next couple weeks but I think there's going to be another influx of refugees on the 1st when the 3rd party apps go dark.
I've made accounts on a handful of the bigger ones, just to have them. If one is inaccessible for any reason, it seems like a good idea to be able to log into other instances.
As for where I'll spend most of my time, it'll probably be in whichever is the most open and least likely to defederate others.