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’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 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).
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
That. Really sucks. Idk it’s all so fragmented, how do you know what is where and why?
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’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)
