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.
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.
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! 🎉
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.
I created my own server…
This is the way. If you don’t like the moderators, don’t play on their servers. It’s that simple.
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You could always create an account for your username on multiple popular servers if you wanted to. Can’t stop it on small servers but having multiple accounts in the Fediverse is not a crime.
Nah, I can’t see any reason to make more than one account.
agreed
yeah
yeah
Why would you need more than one?
Just if you wanted more than one. Just like u/kadu said about email. It’s like if you had your email on Google, Yahoo, and Hotmail. I know a lot of people have an alt on platforms like Discord too.
I know, look at the usernames of the replies
I hate Discord with a passion. Can’t wait for https://github.com/vector-im/element-call to be done so I can leave that behind.
same
It can be useful in case whatever instance you’re using defederate or is defederated by another instance you want to participate in. It’s also useful in case your instance goes the way of the dodo and shut down.
Look at the usernames in the replies to this comment
New feddit.de user reporting in
Ze Germans seem to have their own monopolistic instance
Created mine on feddit.de to get the german equivalent of Catastrophe as a username. And also because I live in Germany
German “Catastrophe” is “Katastrophe”. “Katzastrophe” is “Katze”+“Katastrophe”, which in english would be “cat” + “catastrophe”… oh.
Ich sehe was du dort tatest.
To potential new users, also consider https://discuss.tchncs.de/ as Feddit gets hit really hard currently
Lemmy.world gang
.world rise up!
.world reporting in
As someone who intentionally joined a different instance, the biggest issue is the “federation” doesn’t allow cross-authentication. Clicking a link to another instance moves me to that instance where I’m not logged in. Authentication should really be cross-instance.
I agree with you
This is something I also find strange. If I click a link to an instance, I want to view their content and not visit their homepage, where I am not logged in and cannot do anything.
I think this occurs because people haven’t gotten used to linking to communities on other instances properly.
They usually post the direct link like beehaw.org/c/technology . Instead they should start using the federated link which is more instance agnostic like this: /c/technology@beehaw.org . This link will load the community from your instance.
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FWIW, on a browser the /c/technology link you posted isn’t a hyperlink, so I can’t actually interact with it. It doesn’t work in mlem either.
Yeah. A shorter-term solution might be a browser plugin that recognizes links like that and converts it to a hyperlink to that community on whatever instance you tell it. I’m not a programmer but that does seem like a relatively simple plugin for somebody that actually knows what they’re doing.
assuming the servers are properly federated you should be getting a link that is still on your server. i mean, you got to this lemmy.ml link alright at least
wait, i think i get what you mean, like if you get an external link while not browsing on your instance? you should just be able to paste that link into the search function to find your instance’s version of the post
Yeah, I can manually search and find communities, but hyperlinks move you to the other instance (on a webpage; browsing within an app like mlem seems to work)
links that you find while browsing on reddthat.com will send you to other instances? that’s super odd, I’m not getting that behavior with midwest.social or lemmy.ml, using mobile or desktop firefox. just pasting the links into the search to find your instance’s version of the post is a bit of a janky workaround but it should work. you might try posting in https://reddthat.com/c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml
If I click the link you provided, my browser takes me to Lenny.ml. There I am not logged in and my credentials from feddit.de are not working. So I cannot post there.
I think it only works if the link points to a community on another instance. Like !memes@lemmy.ml . Maybe this is the intended behavior.
The downside is, you can not visit an instance and view the local communities and their post and interact with them. This makes it a lot more attractive to join the instance where the communities are you want to frequent.
Edit: the link to the community does not work either for me. But I am kind of sure, that there are links that work as intended and make you just view the community from your own insurance…
You can subscribe to those communities on your instance, and then interact with them.
From my instance, I’ve been crossing to other instances fine to post, upvote, etc.
Can you elaborate on your experience a bit more? I can’t say I have had any issues as you’ve described. If something doesn’t look right, or isn’t working the way you expect, it might actually be a bug.
Problem is that a) new users don’t know that they can join communities across servers, and b) it is intuitive use start with the servers that a lot of people like.
Instance browsing and onboarding is probably the biggest challenge to Lemmy’s growth. The current experience either scares new people away, or encourages them to congregate on a limited set of instances.
How’s it work if I get banned from one instance? Yet I can still comment in that instance I got banned from? No clue how that works
If you get banned from your home instance, you’re banned everywhere.
If you get banned on a different instance, you can no longer post/comment/vote in communities there but otherwise you’re fine.
Just joining in, and what will happen if the instance you created your account on decides to stop running. Does your account just dissapear?
Yes. But it is easy as hell to set up on another instance or even throw up your own.
If the registration process just picked a random instance for you, maybe something nearby, and assured new users that they can visit communities and interact with users across instances, very few would pick the biggest instance.
That isn’t guaranteed, though. The other day I wanted to create a new community and was browsing instances on join-lemmy.org/instances for an instance that was compatible rulewise. The one I picked evidently wasn’t a good pick (burggit.moe). Trying to advertise my new community, I found out it was defederated from beehaw (and likely others) and got insulted as a pedophilia sympathizer …
Randomly assigning new users to instances would make a substantial fraction of people very unhappy.
I applied to 3 instances when I decided to join and lemmy.ml was the only one that responded so there’s that.
And I thought I had choose the wrong one…
I’m in lemmy.world. they have an associated mastodon as well.
hi from other fediverse server
I joined mander.xyz because it has a lot of science oriented communities and that’s why I’m here. Super happy to have found it.
proudly hailing from NOT lemmy.ml 🤗
The dude on the left is too happy about it to be a lemmy.ml admin.
I signed up for another one, but they haven’t approved me yet!
I definitely didnt pick sh.itjust.works for the funny name, naaaaaaaaah
you are marked as ‘robot account’ on leemy.sdf.org
at a guess, I think its because I’m using Jerboa for Lemmy but I don’t know for sure, I haven’t done anything to become one.
It’s a toggle in your user settings.
Do you often drink oil? 🤖
