I moved off lemmy.world after looking for a large-ish server in the same country as me, and the difference in load times has been really quite impressive.
A kindred soul. I never got why r/fatpeoplehate was lumped in with the rest of those awful subreddits… the worst part about the subreddit was its name.
I agree, I actually ended up gaining the weight back, but when I was working on losing it- I loved that sub for its motivation. I’m actually about to re-embark on that very same goal again now.
/r/fatpeoplehate- to reiterate, did help me. It didn’t make me hate myself, it didn’t inspire the eating disorder I came to be under, or are under now- it made clear to me that I had things to deal with. A healthy person does not lose over a hundred pounds of weight, and then gain it back in a fairly short period of time. For all of it’s failures, flaws, and imperfections- that sub may have very well saved my life by bringing to my attention; I have an eating disorder.
That’s a good thing. Keep the fediverae alive without overemcumbering servers. That’s what’s so strong about it, we can keep growing without too much costs.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Less reliance on a single instance means, the single instance is less likely to fuck over their members (via advertising or data sharing)
Less likely of a situation where one instance can create a sort of monopoly of Lemmy communities and take them private via defederation, leading everyone to join that singular Lemmy instance to see the content.
I think I meant more so like does it matter because we can still all see the same content regardless where we sign up right? From my basic understanding of this fediverse or whatever the hell it’s called lol
Well I mean when you have connectivity issues and authentication issues making you unable to log in, I more than get it. It’s all well and good though as I hope Lemmy takes off. Growing pains is all!
I kind of think that’s how it’s supposed to go in my made-up-right-this-second knowledge of the evolution of open source Federated social media sites. Pick the largest/most active/most variety to get your feet wet and make any weird mistakes you need to make in a crowd where you’re one of many and sheer speed of posting means you’ll be forgotten in like, hours. Then you get comfortable and see if this is a forever-fit or just a okay-right-now fit.
I mean, I hard-bond to my first and pretty much settle immediately for life unless something is seriously awry, but even I made a backup in another one that I mirrored all my favorite communities in and I am seriously getting one more in a smaller, more specialized server. Yes, I do get the point of Federated, you do not need to explain, but here’s the thing: intellectually I know that actually, the population of the Fediverse is orders of magnitude smaller than reddit or pretty much any other social media site, but feelings do not agree: Reddit was like a large, slightly hostile country with a lot of states you avoided always but especially between dusk and dawn; the scope of Fediverse is like being on a very small planet in an expanding universe you can watch growing in real time and it never stops. It’s great, but there’s something very unsettling realizing you’re eight servers from home surrounded by kpop or wake up to find you posted in three communities in servers you don’t recognize at two AM and if you can get a reputation for that kind of thing.
My ADHD is living the dream, let’s go, but I can see how it would throw people a little.
Have you figured out how to save your subbed communities to make migrating to another instance more fluid? I’ve only been here a couple days and want to do the same
made a backup in another one that I mirrored all my favorite communities in and I am seriously getting one more in a smaller, more specialized server. Yes, I do get the point of Federated, you do not need to explain
I have a second account on a much smaller server as well. and when I was going through the other day subbing to different things that I was already subbed to here I realized that even though everything gets federated out to everything it’s more a pull to the server than a push to all servers. There was a few communities that I subbed to that I had been subbed to on this account since the beginning and I was apparently one of the first on my other instances to go there because the communities were barren. When opened on this account they were full of life. so following the communities you want to early on a small server seems pretty important to me so you continue to have access to everything in the event your main fails for whatever reason.
I’m not surprised. Lemmy.world seemed to be the default, but you’re now seeing subs from Reddit coming over with their own instances and others realizing it might be better to make their own instances with blackjack and hookers.
That’s the intended effect. With the current population on Lemmy/Kbin, most instances are still generalist in nature. People will naturally gravitate to the instance with admins who are best aligned with their personal needs, and I expect badly managed instances to simply turn into Voat and die out, as well as more topic specific instances like MTGzone or startrek website to pop up.
This instance took a “wait and see” stance to Meta. It lost a lot of subreddit modteams when it did, who are now pushing their userbases to the comms they’ve made in other lemmys by putting up links and sticky posts in their old subreddits.
I have several subreddits where our teams argued internally about it, we were mostly in support of coming here until the instance was soft on Meta.
I mean, not my subs since I’m a communist. Being on the platform doesn’t mean liking it. You have to be where people are though if you want to do anything to help spread your ideology or fight libs. It’s a matter of treating reddit as a theatre of operations for us, much like our presence on twitter remains so. But yeah you’re right about the majority of moderators.
People thought they had a mutually beneficial relationship with reddit (and they did): they provided content and moderation, reddit provided a platform, administration, etc.
Reddit has never been perfect but pretending it was as bad as Zuck’s creations is being dishonest. Sure, no corporation has your needs as their top priority. However, I remember a time when reddit used to do things like talk about warrant canaries and other privacy minded things. Facebook has always been a bit… questionable. And then it got worse.
They’re just not, though. Meta and Reddit are not the same. Reddit and my employer, where we make thing that people choose to buy, are not the same.
People can have preferences on different platforms and products, and they can have different amounts of confidence in different companies on how capable and trustworthy they are.
I signed up for TTRPG network, not realizing I also can access Lemmy through it! To be honest I don’t know a lot about how the fediverse works at all but so far I like what I’m seeing. Reminds me of reddit circa 2009. In fact, I think this is going to replace my use of Reddit altogether, as it definitely serves the purpose of providing endless content to scroll to.
This is very cool because a lot of online forums were completely gutted when Facebook took over, and seeing communities adopt the fediverse is awesome.
Treat it like email, except emails are public(posts) and your instance can block sending and reciving emails from another instance. You are not required to create a new email with that instance to interact with a post unless that server has blocked your instance.
E.g someome with gmail is free to message people using yahoo, outlook, proton, but may block some domains (e.g spam domains)
First, when leaving Reddit, people are going to gravitate towards one of the larger instances. That’s what I personally did. I don’t think I’d say I fully understand Lemmy and the Fediverse now, but I’ve been here long enough to now know more about how the instances thing works.
So second, as the userbase grows and people stay for longer, they learn how this place works. And third, if they dislike moderation or direction or server performance or what have you, they have enough experience to start from another instance or frequent it more and this less.
I expect we’ll see other communities start to grow now, while the larger ones stay relatively constant.
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