People need to realize you can use alternatives
tbf people just wanna sign up and click on funny links, not browse through 100 rando instances to find the one that lines up with their exact interests and wait for approval and worry about uptime and whether their instance will still exist in a year
I feel that, while lemmy is still a work in progress, it is already pretty adequate for solving this need. If you want to subscribe to other instances you can do it from within your insance by going up to communities and searching. You can also click the all tab and see a bunch of instances from around lemmy that your instance is federated with.
I think mastadon struggled with this because the twitter model is to follow people and depending how far removed the servers are this can be trickier. Compared to lemmy where people interested in a single subject will likely target and find the subject theyre interested in and bring themselves together naturally.
Furthermore I think some people are splitting up and dividing into sub instances and tiny subjects a little prematurely. Reddit didnt get super esoteric with it’s subs until it got big and the larger subs either declined or got too noisy to talk about certain things. Like for example how beehaw has an operatingsystems instance instead of a linux, ubuntu, macos, windows, fedora, archinux, opensuse, openbsd, etc. Right now there arent enough of us that we dont need to subdivide.
I’ve seen people literally signing up here just to make like 50 empty communities and not post or comment on anything at all. Definitely a lot of folks just trying to stake some territory that they think will be valuable in the future.
Im sure some of it is staking out territory, but I think a good chunk of it is just that modern reddit mindset. The mindset is that of course you cant have good gaming discussion on gaming you need to have truegaming, and games, and linux_gaming, and patientgamers, and etc. The thing is you can and things are small enough on all instances even lemmy.ml and beehaw that you can talk about it in one place.
The reason reddit had so many is that it would rapidly homogenise into giant echo chambers with minimal community. Minority perspectives were supressed or drowned out by lurker voting.
New subs were being made to recapture giant subs’ original intentions, or specialise, yo put minority perspectives of the Hot page and curate a community as a result.
Lemmy isn’t big enough to homogenise like that, at least not yet.
I’m personally kind of hoping that the existence of smaller instances and multiple same-niche communities on Lemmy provides a way to avoid that phenomenon. Like, it’ll probably happen to communities on the Big Instances, I imagine, but on the more limited ones… maybe not?
Good thing this is pretty pointless, since I can have the same community name in another instance.
I’m pretty confident we’ll eventually see some form of voluntary synchronization between identical communities added to either the codebase or a popular client app. “Owning” an individual instance’s community will be worthless.
(Wish I had the !remindme bot right now)
I like how Beehaw is doing it. Slowly introducing new servers as there is demand for it.
I also like the beehaw has a mission for community in mind, supported by having an application process; and their having prepared umbrella communities that will prevent echo chambers.
Beehaw is definitely getting hammered too though; it’s probably the second- or third-largest instance atm.
Beehaw is most definitely an echo chamber.
@lemillionsocks @Menachem for mastodon users you don’t need another account to interact with other instances, you can simply reply to posts to comment or follow from your instances, like me
Let me see if I underatand this correctly:
If I create an account on a random, small instance. And then go to the “all communities” feed. I can automatically see all communities that are in my instance. In addition to that, I can see all communities of other Lemmy instances, that are “federated”. But I cannot see other communities from other nstances, unless I go on there, find the communitis and manually subscribe to them (I believe there are other ways to get them to show up, like using the search etc.?)
So, as a normal user. Who’s just looking for a replacement for /r/all, wouldn’t joining the largest lemmy instance that is fedarated to many others (Just by how many users it has, because it’s the users who link instances by their actions?) make perfect sense?
The all communities tab should be showing you communities from every instance you are federated with. It’s true that they won’t show up in your feed until someone on your instance connects to the instance it’s on at least once, but you don’t need to be on a massive server to be connected to all the major communities right from the start.
This. There’s no need to join the biggest instance, as long as you’re not among an instance’s first users you won’t notice much difference.
Idk I kind of think it having a bit more complexity might help ward off enshitification
Very true. It would be sad to build up a persona on a smaller instance to then have it go dark and take your user with it. Other than losing your collection of “upvotes,” you can just recreate a new user with the same display name on another instance and keep going. 👍
Holy crap, you can do Slack style emoticons? Huzzah! 🎉
worry about uptime and whether their instance will still exist in a year
that’s the biggest thing for me, it’s hard to sign up on smaller ones without worrying about its long-term viability
I joined sopuli.xyz because they have a cute fuzzy animal in a hat as their logo.
hi from other fediverse server
https://lemmy.film - for movies, tv, film production, artistic stuff, moving images, etc. etc.
Just started a small server, have a fair amount of extra compute.
How easy is it to migrate yourself from one to another?
so true for our server
Haha I’m special
If it helps, I joined kbin cause I like the UI more :P
Doesn’t help that much, since we’ve apparently lit kbin.social’s server on fire.
I’m hoping the maintainer gets the installation instructions polished up tomorrow and we can set up a bunch of other kbin instances.
Same, though I also like that I can interact with Mastodon/Calckey posts from here as well.
I joined an instance based on my region but otherwise I can’t say this is surprising. Everyone wants to be at the most popular spot, very few people actively seek out quieter places.
You can sub to whatever communities you want though, regardless of instance. So it doesn’t actually matter which one you join.
Nuhuh, beehaws active user count and seemingly inclusive nature drew me in
Beehaw.org unite!
I definitely didnt pick sh.it just.works for the funny name, naaaaaaaaah
lemmy.world unite!
I don’t really get the difference. And can I visit different servers from the one I’m on? I don’t see a way to on Jerboa
Jerboa now doesn’t have community search, but you can visit your instance website and subscribe. If it hasn’t needed community, go to community search and put full community name prepended with !, like ! Lemmy@lemmy.ml. then wait for like 10s and do the search again, your instance will fetch it and add to its community list.
I seem to be able to search for communities, because I found gaming lol. I’m wondering about instances, though
I don’t know much about the Android mobile app, but now I’m curious to dig up one of my old phones and try it just to see. I’ve been mostly in a browser either oh my iPhone of MacBook, which is very odd for me as I primarily reddit via the native mobile app.
On jebora on the bottom next to the home button is the community list view and you can search it to find instances. In addition to that from the home page if you click the little filter icon(that one with the three lines creating a triangle shape down) you can select all and it will show you links federated with your instance as well.
I don’t seem to be able to find instances on the community search, nor do communities show up when I type “!community@instance” could this be a bug?
there are bugs with it currently, when you do the search click on Next Page and it should show up then, might take 10 seconds or so
or you can manually craft the URL like
Here’s what I see when I try to type in a community not followed by anyone on my server. There’s no next or anything. The three dots in the upper right corner don’t do anything
Just tried switching to my account on a different server and found that community as it was followed by someone else in that server. Odd that I can’t just find it on this one.
What if you click on this?
Actually wait this one isn’t working for me either from your instance, but memes did
Might be an issue with your instance? It works on mine, maybe they just need to update? Actually it seems like both our instances are running on v0.17.3
Maybe. At least I’m in enough instances now that I can start getting into the groove of things and see what’s up with the site
Might be
When I search I’m able to see instances I haven’t joined yet
And join
But it’s all still a new app so who knows
Regarding the search the !instance search there seems to be a bug even on browser where if you for example search !fdroid@lemmy.ml it has to be set to search all.
