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.
I’m using Lemmy.world, but I still need to get away from the traditional mental model of usernames. It bothers me a bit knowing someone could use my username on another server and interact with the servers I do… But then again, nothing prevents someone from creating my Gmail on Yahoo. So it’s just a matter of getting used to things.
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
same
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.
yeah
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
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.
It’s the ui that should rewrite links to the local instance
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.
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.
proudly hailing from NOT lemmy.ml 🤗
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.
I applied to 3 instances when I decided to join and lemmy.ml was the only one that responded so there’s that.
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.
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
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 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.
stupid beehaw 3:<
Beehaw kind of seems like a problem child. Like, the first thing I saw about them is that they were de-federating.
It’s also that lemmy.ml is the instance I’ve seen posted everywhere when it’s brought up, so naturally people would just sign up there instead of finding somewhere else.
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 checking in
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.
Lemmy.world gang
.world rise up!
.world reporting in
First I created account there and then landed on my current instance, because lemmy.ml’s admin views looks sketchy for me. Been living in ex-ussr for all my life I just cant accept all that communists and marxists and the fact that lemmy.ml has /c/Communism on it.
I know that’s silly but that’s why I’m not there anymore.
Profit motive ruined Reddit so you’ve come to a place created by communist then get upset that the people who made and operate it are communists. Yeah that’s more than a little silly.
There’s a difference between being a communist and blindly supporting authoritarian dictatorships wearing communist masks.
I’ve not really looked into it too deeply because every single mile-long screed about this “controversy” starts off by clutching pearls about communists. Can you link me to where this is happening without paragraphs of dissembling preamble?
This is the lead dev on Russia’s invasion, total support here and other comments:
A few months later, they’ve apparently flipped on the issue entirely and now support US aid:
I’m not very concerned with the “communist” or tankie part fwiw. And while I do have strong opinions on Russia’s invasion, I’m far more concerned with the 180 shift in position displayed here, and I have yet to find an explanation. I don’t think he wants to talk about it, but a quick “I changed my mind because xyz” could alleviate my concerns. Clear communication is important if you’re gonna have such strong opinions imo.
I’m not trying to villainize him or cancel lemmy, he seems like a decent person and we’ve even had a brief interaction here… But I hope you can see why I’m cautious about things. The whiplash is my main issue, not which side he picks.
And I’m not here to stir the pot, it’s just that you specifically asked and I had already personally looked into things.
Mods: I won’t be spamming this, just wanted to put it out there once.
However… if the platform prospers and attracts enough other devs, none of this even remotely matters, and that’s why I’m still here, I want to believe this can be set aside.
It’s not silly at all. I also made an account there before realizing the admins are tankies. It honestly sketches me out about Lemmy in general considering they’re the two lead (and currently only?) devs. Casts a big shadow over all of Lemmy when the devs are posting Xinjiang genocide denialism and their instance is at the top of the recommendations on join-lemmy.org. With lemmy.grad pretty high up there too.
At least with the way Lemmy is designed it doesn’t seem like even the main devs can have much of an impact.
They even write themselves that if they made changes to the Lemmy codebase that some instance admins didn’t like, then those admins can decide not to upgrade their instance. The code is also open sourced so anyone with some tech know-how can fork the codebase and remove whatever they don’t like.
Yeah that’s what Lemmy started out as. The thing is with all the Reddit refugees flooding in it is diluting out the tankies. Besides, lemmygrad.ml is blocked by many instances. As for the values of the devs the great thing is that Lemmy is FOSS so if they go rouge someone will just make a fork of Lemmy.
Is it possible to move instances once I’m registered or do I have to create totally new account on other instance?
You’d need to sign up for a totally new account. There is talk of adding a migration feature but obviously that’ll require a bit of patience, they’ve got a long list of feature requests!
Unfortunately an account transfer feature is pretty complicated to develop so it might still be a while. Devs need to make sure it doesn’t cause issues with federation when content changes home instances and domains, and transferring live user content over while retaining points, interactions by other accounts, and while having the same timestamp but now being hosted on a different instance, while ensuring there is only one canonical location/URL of the content on the fediverse, is not easy.
Oh no ;_;
Any recommended communities? (or ones to avoid)
I’m currently on lemmy.world. You can create communities and people are chill over here.
Everything from beehaw.org is nice. Even stuff on lemmy.ml is okay as long you don’t bring up politics. Stay away from news or politics subs on this instance. And I hope we will get bigger communities on other servers than lemmy.ml or beehaw.org.
All I know is that you should avoid lemmy.ml. In their /c/WorldNews community, an admin gave a four day ban to a user for posting an Axios article about the Chinese succession plan for the reason of “Orientalism”. Those guys are tankie shills. In my experience, lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.one seem solid. Obviously I personally went with lemmy.ca. But you should check out the admin profiles before you join any instance. That will tell you most of what you need to know. That and the modlogs (found at the bottom of the page) that will tell you what posts have been taken down and what people have been banned by mods on various communities.
Who are they shilling for?
China and Russia. Thus censoring legitimate western media articles about China. There’s also a lot of anti-NATO bullshit. Here’s the Axios article they banned a user for posting.
legitimate western media articles
anti-NATO bullshit
Out of idle curiosity, do you self-identify as a leftist?
I generally align with the left most of the time, but I hate making one label the basis for your entire political opinion. I am very against censorship. My greatest pet issues have to do with censorship and democratic principles. In terms of American politics, I will never vote Republican. If I feel a Democrat has let me down in a big way, I would consider voting third party, but 99% of the time I would vote Democratic. Centrist Democrats piss me off more than leftist ones. My foreign policy stances are probably the least in line with the further left. I am generally pro-NATO with the understanding that NATO isn’t perfect. I just worry way more about a world with China/Russia at the helm given their propensity for censoring opinions that oppose their majority parties.
I am generally pro-NATO with the understanding that NATO isn’t perfect.
I’m terminally-online enough that I am used to the paths of most arguments that have appeared on this website about politics, but – and I say this to be transparent – this one baffles me and I don’t know how to respond to it. I’ve seen people say it but, well, it gets hard to explain within rule 1.
Maybe if we agree that “NATO is an extension of US foreign policy” we can sidestep the issue for now.
I just worry way more about a world with China/Russia at the helm given their propensity for censoring opinions that oppose their majority parties.
This one I am much more used to. Remembering that NATO is a military organization and not, you know, “who controls the internet,” I’d like to just present you with a simple pair of questions:
-
How many of the past thirty years has the US been at war?
-
How many of the past thirty years has China been at war?
Beyond that, for all the fearmongering people do, China is remarkably less interested in unilaterally dictating relations than you might think, so explaining things in terms of “which country is the master of the unipolar world order” is not justified. Unipolarity has only been the state of things for a little over 30 years (and only obvious for a little over 40) and was unheard of before that. There is no reason to suppose that the future can only be unipolar, especially if the country that ushered in unipolarity and viciously guards it with world-historic levels of violence (the US) is no longer the strongest force.
China has shown every indication of seeking bilateral development and cooperation. An example in severe microcosm is the US banning China from the International Space Station and China responding by making its own space station which the US isn’t banned from, nor most other countries (though I think it is still a finite list and not totally open, owing in part to being a new program). Stories like “debt traps” from China are grotesque projection, as China doesn’t do things like forced restructuring or asset seizure, unlike the IMF.
I truly think this sort of “US is the least of the available evils” ideology has a hard time existing except in a subcultural bubble where it meets no challenge at all, because it is an astoundingly flimsy position.
-
I signed up for another one, but they haven’t approved me yet!
Lemmy world was the only one that let me sign up lol
Same
I definitely didnt pick sh.itjust.works for the funny name, naaaaaaaaah
I picked it because all the other instances asked a bunch of questions and then you had to wait for approval.
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? 🤖
I tried to make an account on lemmy.ml and it looks like their servers are (understandably) overloaded
I ended up choosing lemmy.world instead
My understanding is I’m not missing out on anything by chosing a less-popular instance. Did I get that right?
yes!
lemmy.world in particular doesn’t block any instances
see for comparison:
Oof, I can see why some of those instances are blocked, though. Since I’m on Beehaw, I checked their block list and…wow. Scrolled through each one for a few minutes and now I’m hoping I’m not on some kind FBI list for it. A few highlights from my research expedition:
- A meme featuring various characters (MLP, Vaporeon, Peter Griffin, etc) unironically mourning Ted Kaczynski
- NSFL gore
- People calling for the execution of cops who stopped rioters on Jan 6
- SO. MUCH. LOLICON.
- “Hahaha look at this WOKE LIB 🤣🤣🤣”
- QANON. QANON EVERYWHERE.
I was only on each one for a minute or so. I don’t think I’m missing out on anything except maybe being put on some kind of list.
Even if you wouldn’t like it, the cool thing here is you can decide for yourself. If… you feel the need to do so.
same, I’m on Sopuli and their Blocklist is pretty short but has the worst ones.
they are really, really bad and some are straight up illegal in some countries.
Mostly far-right ones, straight up terrorism (seriously there are people with RAF and other terrorist organization’s logos on their profile pics there), nsfl gore videos (like people dying and being tortured type of stuff), and nsfw ones full of underage anime girls in suggestive poses…
lemmygrad is probably the worst one out of all of them, just because of it’s size (tankie terrorist group)
I haven’t blocked anything on my instance yet since I haven’t encountered that but maybe I should copy sopuli’s blocklist.
same, I’m on Sopuli and their Blocklist is pretty short but has the worst ones.
they are really, really bad and some are straight up illegal in some countries.
Mostly far-right ones, straight up terrorism (seriously there are people with RAF and other terrorist organization’s logos on their profile pics there), nsfl gore videos (like people dying and being tortured type of stuff), and nsfw ones full of underage anime girls in suggestive poses…
lemmygrad is probably the worst one out of all of them, just because of it’s size (tankie terrorist group)
Ah yes. There’s far-right terrorism, NSFL gore, CSAM, but it’s the commies that are “the worst one out of all of them.”
Lemmy grad is my favorite.
I’ve just finally caved in and visited lemmygrad for the first time and oh, boy! I’ve heard the sound of my grey matter atrophy
