this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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General Discussion
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Welcome to Lemmy.World General!
This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.
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If everyone already here just stays here, I'd be happy. We've already hit a nice place.
Lemmy is not a business, so it doesn't necessarily need a constant influx of new users. Sustainability is based on user experience, not endless growth.
Edit: actually last sentence kind of dumb. Sustainability based on keeping the servers running and user experience.
I think being able to register on other instances and interact across is virtually the whole point of Lemmy.
It reduces server costs because content is spread out. If something happens (like the custom emoji XSS exploit or vlemmy.net's disappearance), it doesn't take out the entire network. It's good against anti-censorship. It's good against powertripping mods/admins, but on the other hand also can be modded with a heavy hand to help curate a specific culture (see beehaw.org in contrast to lemmy.world)
So all around good. Disadvantages are some fracturing of content and lack of tools to sync and properly moderate between instances.
I don't fully understand the instances, other than it provides the whole idea behind this, being multiple servers, no one master that can run and change and whatnot. But if I join one of these other servers (I'm on world), do I have access to the same things or does it change? My reason for staying on world in spite of some of the hiccups is my subs are here and it's where I've been active.
From my understanding, you can subscribe to & view other communities regardless of the instance they're hosted in.
I've only been using Lemmy for a couple days, since Boost finally shit the bed. My only gripe so far is that there are multiple communities with both the same name and purpose but on different instances.
And that's good. No more "subreddits" monopoly. If a mod or mod team goes against the will of their users they can just move on another instance without needing to use another name (and it's easier to find afterward). As a user, you just need to subscribe to these redundant communities (or not if you don't care about federation but if not why are you on Lemmy) and it will appear in your front-page as if it was one and only community.
I agree conceptually, for sure. I don't want a monopoly on any community or topic/subject matter. I'm enjoying the old school forums vibe I'm getting from the federated nature of Lemmy.
I'm having trouble putting it into words, and I'm sure this has been repeatedly explained better elsewhere, but I'll try my best...
The initial encounter with Lemmy is challenging for new/potential users. So many options for instances and little in the way that explains how to find the best fit, why there are so many, what the differences are, and why you don't necessarily have to join the biggest ones. I ended up with lemmy.ml but probably would have started out with lemmy.world had I seen it because it has a bigger number.
Once you get through that barrier and want to start building your subs, it isn't obvious to a new user that there even are multiple variations of the same community. Everything I searched for was only on my instance and I was unimpressed by the amount of activity and options. My default feed was just a flood of old memes and other posts from 20 hours ago.
This is a particular issue to those who are migrating from reddit looking for comparable replacements. Let's just say I wanted World News. On my instance it was essentially dead. I thought that was just it. A bunch of dead or floundering communities.
Casual users would stop there and possibly move on from Lemmy after that. As a slightly less casual user I figured it out. But it still bugs me.
Which, honestly I don't think it should. I don't need Lemmy to be the next reddit- and I don't want it to be. I do want interesting people posting interesting content and having engaging discussions, and not all of those people are savvy enough to figure out how and where to sign up.
Right now it feels like the early early days of when I joined reddit 14 years ago, mixed with present-day vibes. I'm extremely excited to be here and hope it grows organically into a net-positive place for entertainment, education, and information. When we finally get the reddit monkey off our back we'll start to see Lemmy's community personality become its own thing.
Cheers and sorry for the wall of probably incomprehensible text
So? Just sub to both/all and you get content from every one in your feed. It's no different than the two/three subreddits that existed for every community on reddit.
Sure it takes a bit longer to search for all of the comms you want to see but in the end you have more places to go and naturally one is going to probably rise and be the biggest one.
If that happens then you just stick with that one, if it goes to shit people will just migrate to the next biggest one that isn't run by morons.
I'm signed up through lemmy.ml and subscribed to communities on several other instances, including Kbin.
Federation means your account credentials are accepted as "good enough" by other servers standards.
So you make an account on lemmy.world, and lemm.ee/sh.itjust.works/lemmy.ml/etc. All look at your account and go "yeah, that's cool. You're allowed to subscribe to our instance and it's communities, post content, and engage."
Literally the ONLY limitation is that you can create communities on your home instance, nowhere else. Outside of that, it's free reign on every server that's federated with yours. Post, like/dislike, comment, do whatever.
Without multiple instances, Lemmy would effectively be more like reddit (one entity controlling the whole thing). If that instance goes down, or it decides you can't talk about topic X, or it does anything that affects you as a user -- you have no option but to love it or leave it.
With multiple instances, if one becomes trouble, you just move to another. You can read and post to other instances from any other federated instance, so you get some freedom in that regard, and you're not really tied to any one entity (you're always beholden to the rules of your home instance, but you can also freely instance hop).
The best reddit analogy is probably using subreddits: imagine if one subreddit actually ran the whole site. R/spez one day decided to change the rules on yoiu, and you disagreed-- what option do you have? Well, in that setup, you simply start interacting on other subreddits. Lemmy kind of works this way, but there the subreddits are instances which control your login info, and there are communities within those instances that everyone elsewhere on the site can access.
The related technical advantage is still that no one instance runs the whole federation. Lemmy.world is big (likely because a lot od ex-redditors thought it was the one to switch to), but it doesn't control the rest of the federation. If it got shut down, for example, users on it would need a new instance, but the federation itself would be exactly as it was.
It's kind of like grass-roots networking, if that makes sense to you. One could also argue it's a bit like like bittorrent for forums.