Why is that tankie?

That post criticizes “any western leader” talking about human rights and shows photos of bombing gaza below it, if I interpret it correctly. It certainly is whataboutism, but I don’t see how it is directly used to justify anything else, even though that might be thought behind it and be more clear after reading more posts of that person. Though I’d rather use the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, since that’s a more direct human rights violation than supplying Israel with money, weapons and defense support.

hm, maybe lemmy needs the feature to disable response notifications for specific posts or threads. Though that’s the less problematic scenario. The biggest issue in federated networks is when somebody is determined to stalk and pester you, though I haven’t heard of that happening here so far. But you could comment under each and every post of another user, since you can see all posts. And there is no way to stop that if they are persistent as they can just create a new account on a new instance anytime they get blocked or banned.

4. […] certain communities that were supportive of Lemmy suddenly got locked behind a NSFW curtain […]

You got that wrong. That was a measure taken by these communities to demonetize reddit. Reddit doesn’t put ads on NSFW subs. Any profile that posts on an NSFW sub also gets their profile switched to NSFW afaik. Moderators got banned for these NSFW tags.

r/PixelDungeon is the only sub that I’m aware of that completely moved to lemmy. Withe the main mod and developer of the most popular fork moving to lemmy. The sub is still open, but it has a “bookmark” called “Lemmy” and a “link” called “Lemmy Community” that directly links to the lemmy community. The sub is still open and automod responded to any new post that the sub moved to lemmy … at least for a year or so, it doesn’t post that any more.

And there are some obvious down sides. To my knowledge lemmy has not implemented flairs or post tags, which get used excessively by some communities to categories and sort their content. !pixeldungeon@lemmy.world fell back to putting text tags into titles like “[DEV]” and “[OC]” and then use the search for this. But that is merely a work around. The sidebar links to these searches, but since instance-relative links are not a thing they are fixed links to lemmy.world.

The search itself is still inconvenient, because you can just “search this community”. You always have to explicitly select a community to search it and have to enter the search term before selecting the community. Edit: that’s of course only true for the front-end (lemmy-ui) I use, dunno if all have that issue

I doubt regular end users will ever get warm with distributed federative networks. A lot of people already seem struggle with email. All tend to flock to a few big instances. For lemmy you also need some basic awareness of these systems. You can’t find everything and to expect that will always go wrong since you only search what your instance knows and never for everything. There are great projects like lemmyverse, but you need to know about them. People who don’t know about them will either just not find the communities they are looking for or they’ll start duplicate communities. The problem of not finding something is smaller on big instances but also more fatal, because their duplicate communities will displace the ones that were started on smaller instances but did not federate well yet.

And everything, the development and hosting, is solely carried on the shoulders of a few volunteers. That will always result in instances popping up and disappearing over time, with development speed varying depending on interest and free time the developers have.

The biggest selling point is not to replace reddit but to be connected with the rest of the activitypub fediverse. That you can see peertube channels as communities here. That mastodon users can comment on lemmy posts eggcetera

Yes, some of the bigger communities there are !pcgaming@lemmy.ca, !til@lemmy.ca, !wowthislemmyexists@lemmy.ca, !lemmyconnect@lemmy.ca, !bicycles@lemmy.ca, !trippinthroughtime@lemmy.ca, !traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@lemmy.ca, !plex@lemmy.ca and !shittyfoodporn@lemmy.ca. And none of these are Canada-specific. I guess I have to follow !fediverselore@lemmy.ca now 😀

Canadians are Americans too.

No … my alts always have different names. But they are for things I don’t want others to know.

Doesn’t blahaj.zone itself throw errors all the time?

I subscribed 10 on lemmy.ml and 8 on lemmy.world.

lemmy.world is definitely the biggest instance with it’s 126k users, but lemmy.ml with 46k, lemmynsfw with 35k, hexbear with 24k and sh.itjust.works with 22k aren’t small either

Yes, lemmy.world is the biggest, but the next four biggest instances combined have just as many users.

I didn’t mean communities with the same name on different instances, but active communities with related topics.

A bit of a stretch would be music genres linking to each other, open source games linking each other etc.

But more specifically closely related communities !ich_iel@feddit.de and !hessisch_iel@feddit.de (dialect variation of the former) or !me_irl@lemmy.ml, !ich_iel@feddit.de, !ik_ihe@feddit.nl, !eu_nvr@lemmy.eco.br and other translations linking each other. Or !minetest@lemmy.ml and !mineclone2@lemmy.world (game/mod of the former) linking each other.

Example screenshot with sidebar of r/meirl, which isn’t r/me_irl:

Yep, such links like between fuck cars and yimby are what I meant.

Though a link with Bang-Syntax might be easier, otherwise that results in a bit of instance hopping and switching to browser in some mobile apps.

People will, very quickly, want to be able to subscribe to channels.

Mastodon can do that. On mastodon channels are groups that boost posts, which means they can be followed. Mastodon handles lemmy similarly.

Even then, I can’t just watch the video and write a comment at the same time, in any sane way.

Yes, but that’s even hard on youtube, because you have to scroll down. It’s easy to do though, despite quite hidden. If you aren’t logged in and press comment or subscribe peertube asks you for you fediverse handle and redirects you to your fediverse instance (on mastodon: corresponding post for comment; follow popup with the group/user for subscribe). In that regard it works a lot better than lemmy.

In fact, if I happen to click a link to watch a video, there’s nowhere to go to in order to watch the video from my non-PeerTube account.

Which gets us back to this, because mastodon embeds the video into the post (the webinterface at least). Clicking on comment does exactly this, but it’s definitely not intuitive and it’s still the player from that peertube instance. I don’t know if it works with anything other than mastodon. It certainly doesn’t work with lemmy right now.

Here a screenshot of it, because I can’t give a link. Mastodon will immediately redirect you to peertube if you aren’t logged in.

It seems it has a similar struggle mastodon has. The best way to find interesting posts there are boost from your bubble and hashtags. Peertube has tags too, but it doesn’t seem it can follow/subscribe to them like mastodon can.