Welcome! if you're new to the fediverse, I have a quick intro stickied in this sub. The main difference is looking for communities across different instances, not just on lemmy.world.
I’ve already started seeing a lot of redundant communities being made here that have already existed on other Lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml is at risk of centralization and overload, so now is a great time to raise awareness of other instances....
You can also grab the URL to any community or post on another instance, return to your own instance, and paste the URL into the search bar. If you're the first person to ever search for that server it might not find anything at first, but it'll fetch the data and probably work in a couple minutes.
I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?...
I like the concept
But it feels very much like its been designed by nerdy developers and has had little to no-input on user friendly design.
The federated idea can work but it needs to be more seemless than this.
Communities with the same name should be merged when viewing it from any instance, so you can see all the posts from these communities, they can be moderated seperatley and for advanced users you should be able to select which communities make up the merged community.
By default you should see all of the merged communities in a central place and be able to subscribe to them easily, at the moment its handled different per instance but you have to seek out these communities to subscribe or follow them.
I strongly believe there should be a centralised log-in system, so you can log into any instance with an account from another instance, this means if your instance goes down your account is centralised and is safe.
I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:
The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I’m aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that’s less than ideal)
The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I’m aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it’s vital to the success of Lemmy.
Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it...
Regarding your last paragraph, I agree. I’m subscribed to gaming in lemmy.ml and beehaw so see the same content twice regularly. Duplicate communities raise other concerns for me though:
Which one is the defacto community to join? Using the Gaming community as an example, maybe one leans more to images and the other has more meaty discussion threads just by way of who has joined those communities - nothing to do with the rules. But if you subscribe to both, the majority of the content may be duplicate posts instead? It’s not clear from the community title alone.
Is the potential squandered as communities are potentially splintered? Maybe people just stick to one community without joining the other. It’ll take time for a certain community to establish itself as the main community with the highest quality posts, but due to the volume of users on the main instances maybe there won’t be a main community? Or maybe people won’t even be aware of multiple communities for the same topic as the names are different, e.g. football Vs soccer.
I like it ~ I joined mastodon but I think it was way too slow to load images - probably joined some dodgy overloaded server (though I like the Reddit format and community better rather than Twitter)
It’s giving me Reddit 15 years ago vibes - smaller tech-savvy and agile community - my Reddit use was on and off through the years; but I like the idea that each community in the Extended Lemmiverse can all have their own vibes and cultures and implementations of the platform and we can all chat and follow topics together 🕊️
I’ve only been here a short while; but maybe one thing I’d love is not to see reposts in the /all section ; I know the communities are small and growing and can cross post for more stuff , but I’m sure there could be a way for the system to know that the title and url are the same - so only show one , or auto-merge the comments and prioritise posting your comment to your local community instance’s post Edit - I might try install an instance on my website and try to make a merge function ~
Interesting - I'm using Jerboa and it looks correct to me. Could it be an issue with viewing communities cross instance? Either way, I'm not sure why, but I just rechecked and the community name should be correct.
A lot of these aren't exactly "niche", but afaik none of them exist on lemmy yet
Edit: for some reason, a bunch of these that actually do exist weren't showing up in search unless I specifically searched for "!community". I've gone back through and added links to them here.
Personally I think not having karma limits is nice currently! I understand why they were used but grinding karma as a lurker on reddit was frustrating.
Here admin has even more power, except it is limited to their own instance. So it is more on the user to be prepared. You don’t want to be too attached to your data on a single instance. The instance might be abandoned, down, gone; the admin might go crazy. And the solution isn’t to have the admin be more reasonable. The solution is to hedge your bets on multiple instances and multiple communities.
It's a very good thing to avoid what happened on Reddit that a big istance is moderated by people that don't think democratically and rule against other people's will deleting posts and banning everyone they don't like.
With federation, you can choose the instances and communities you like the most, the ones with better moderation and so the kindest one will probably prevail :)
Hello! We've reached 15k members (afaik we're still the largest community on lemmy). It's a lot for only a couple people, though there is admin support....
I'm interested! I keep finding myself here. I am admin for a small instance (wayfarershaven.eu) and am working on building up some communities. I'm enjoying Lemmy and the fediverse and want to help build that up as much as I can.
I don't have Reddit mod experience but I do work in support and believe in FOSS. At the end of the day, we're here to share knowledge, learn from each other, and have a good time.
Just a random thought experiment. Let's say I have my account on a lemmy instance: userA@mylemmy.com. One day I decide to stop paying for the domain and move to userA@mynewlemmy.com, and someone else gains it and also starts up a lemmy instance....
The new domain owner — if they set up an ActivityPub server instance (e.g. a Lemmy) and got a list of the old user's post URLs — might be able to delete or edit the old user's posts stored on other instances. That is a vulnerability, albeit a small one.
If the old user was still listed as a moderator of communities hosted on other instances, the new domain owner might be able to take over that moderator role.
One way to fix this would be for instances to issue a public-key cryptographic identity to each user, and distribute users' public keys to other instances. Then activities purporting to be from that user would need to be signed by that user's private key.
Users' private keys would stay local to their home instance, so users don't have to do any key management themselves.
This would mean that if an instance goes away (and its key material is destroyed) then nobody can ever act as any of those users again. A new user created with the same username and domain would be a distinct user for all other instances too.
What I think could make Lemmy superior to Reddit is the ability to create themed-instances that are all linked together which feels like the entire point. I've noticed that a lot of instances are trying to be a catch-all Reddit replacement by imitating specific subs which is understandable given the circumstances but seems like...
You can subscribe and post on different instances. But, I don't think all pertinent communities should be on one CENTRALIZED instance since that defeats the point of the Fediverse.
I don’t agree. If I like LOTR and giraffes I don’t want to create an account on both “instance groups”. I want to do like today and create a single account, then subscribe to the communities I am interested in wherever they are.
To me it sounds like you are sort of mixing up community location and community discovery. This is sort of the case right now because instances have a list of local communities but I think that it is best that they are separated. For example on Reddit I don’t generally find new communities by scanning the entire list of communities. I usually find them when someone mentions a related community in a comment of a community that I am already in. Or when I stumble across a community when searching the web. When you discover and subscribe to communities this way it doesn’t really matter where they are hosted or if they are grouped. You can organically discover things that interest you over time (although I agree that it can be a bit slow to start).
This question is especially for people who have joined in the last week. Have you used other fediverse platforms or is this your first time really using one? What do you think of it so far? Are you aware that you can comment on Lemmy posts with a Mastodon account?
Imagine there were multiple reddit websites. Reddit.com, reddit.org, reddit.social, etc. Doesn’t matter what account you have, you can see communities/subreddits across anyone of them.
That’s Lemmy.
When you make a lemmy account, it’s more like an email address. You are evolone@lemmy.ml, I am cosmicsploogedrizzle@lemmy.ml. Someone else is joeblow@beehaw.org. We can all chat and post and have a good time no matter what website/instance we post to.
That’s how users work on lemmy. Just like email. Communities on lemmy work the exact same way as users.
If all you’re interested in is that, then you can stop there and fully enjoy your time with lemmy as a reddit replacement.
The future potential and complexity comes from the next part:
The fediverse is someone said, "hey, you know how people on reddit can’t follow people on Twitter, or people on YouTube can’t subscribe to subreddits, or people on Instagram can’t leave YouTube comments? Well let’s make it so you can.
Now this isn’t perfectly implemented at the moment, and there are a lot of growing pains (it’s kinda like the wild wild West), but you can make a mastodon account (like Twitter), and follow the this lemmy community !asklemmy on it, and you’ll see all the posts and all the comments that you would otherwise see on lemmy, just in a twitter-like format.
It’s not perfect and compatibility across these decentealized apps is not perfectly impremented atm, but in the future you could theoretically have one giant interconnected web where everything from “Twitter” to “reddit” to “YouTube” to “Instagram” to whatever fediverse equivalent app are all interwoven. And if any instance of them gets a big enough head to pull something like reddit is pulling, or what Twitter has been pulling, the community can just make a new “email” on a different instance/website and continue as of nothing changed. No single website/instance can abuse their power, because another instance can be spun up any time.
Honestly is not a big deal. Some specific instance might start behaving like aholes because of corporate greed or anything else.
All they can do is take their specific communities down. The affected communities can always move to other instance (that is easier than changing to a different system all together).
Changing platforms will always be harder than just switch instance because you instance changed the rules on you.
I'm already happy with the amount of content here and actually a bit lost with all the variety of content, instances, new communities, links. No great need to look back. But if you need to find equivalent communities, lookie here: https://sub.rehab/
I am exploring Lemmy right now and what I see is very worrying to me, but I also don’t understand wth is going on with some instances here. I don’t know if it’s smart to post this, but here we go....
Today I was made aware that beehaw.org blocked my entire instance. I would be ok if I simply could not write a post/comment in beehaw, that would be reasonable....
hello! this is just a thing i’d like to personally note. it speaks for myself, and where it does not expresses sentiments we’ve already placed somewhere else. this is not a moderator document or anything, and it will not be stickied....
18+ /r/interestingasfuck forced open, lowers its standard of what qualifies as "interesting", gets flooded with adult content [NSFW within two clicks] (www.reddit.com)
I think the title speaks for itself.
What is your favourite Lemmy community, which is not on lemmy.ml?
I’ve already started seeing a lot of redundant communities being made here that have already existed on other Lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml is at risk of centralization and overload, so now is a great time to raise awareness of other instances....
For everyone new to Lemmy, how are you finding the experience?
I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?...
How has ur lemmy experience been so far?
Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it...
[META] 2.8k subscribers - welcome! Updates, Rules and Navigating the Fediverse
WELCOME!...
What niche reddit community do you want to see find a place on the fediverse?
Personally i'm looking forward to seeing twobestfriendsplay, arkhamasylum, whowouldwin, and respectthreads, on here.
What kinds of things from reddit would you like to see Lemmy avoid as the user base grows?
Personally I think not having karma limits is nice currently! I understand why they were used but grinding karma as a lurker on reddit was frustrating.
How do we deal with similar communities on different Lemmy instances?
Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc....
Do you want to moderate asklemmy?
Hello! We've reached 15k members (afaik we're still the largest community on lemmy). It's a lot for only a couple people, though there is admin support....
Can you steal a user's identity if you gain their old domain name?
Just a random thought experiment. Let's say I have my account on a lemmy instance: userA@mylemmy.com. One day I decide to stop paying for the domain and move to userA@mynewlemmy.com, and someone else gains it and also starts up a lemmy instance....
Are we using Lemmy correctly?
What I think could make Lemmy superior to Reddit is the ability to create themed-instances that are all linked together which feels like the entire point. I've noticed that a lot of instances are trying to be a catch-all Reddit replacement by imitating specific subs which is understandable given the circumstances but seems like...
Is Lemmy your first time on the Fediverse?
This question is especially for people who have joined in the last week. Have you used other fediverse platforms or is this your first time really using one? What do you think of it so far? Are you aware that you can comment on Lemmy posts with a Mastodon account?
How long until we have corporate instances in the Fediverse?
Not willing to give them ideas so fast....
What do you think about sublemmies that add content by reposting from Reddit?
Is it a good (probably temporary) way to get content in Lemmy?
How does moderation work for 'false' instance communities following defederation
I hope this is a clear enough description of what I'm asking....
[META] Important Post - Rules, Formatting, FAQ, & Cross-Posting Tip
Rules...
What's with the schism between lemmygrad and beehaw?
I am exploring Lemmy right now and what I see is very worrying to me, but I also don’t understand wth is going on with some instances here. I don’t know if it’s smart to post this, but here we go....
Is there a way to migrate your lemmy account to another instance?
Today I was made aware that beehaw.org blocked my entire instance. I would be ok if I simply could not write a post/comment in beehaw, that would be reasonable....
please be measured in what you expect of us: a non-binding appeal from one of the people running the site
hello! this is just a thing i’d like to personally note. it speaks for myself, and where it does not expresses sentiments we’ve already placed somewhere else. this is not a moderator document or anything, and it will not be stickied....