Seems to me the fear of overloading one instance over another will not happen after all.
But I do hope the Threadiverse can hit 500,000 consistent active users by the end of summer.
Give me that hopium guys! 💉
I wonder how many people created an alt and just wound up using it more than their original.
I like alts so I can watch the new feeds
Hi! :) new user here after 10 years on r*ddit
What does being a new user have to do with seeing new feeds? Also is there a new user guide anywhere?
Edit: Also lol can you view my saved posts or is that only something I can view?
I have the option on the app to view other people’s saved stuff but it’s blank
Only you should be able to view your saved posts. I’m not sure what app you’re using.
Thanks! It says “view saved posts” on each user but it’s always blank, so I was just making sure.
App is memmy on iOS. Do you recommend anything?
Sorry, I have an Android, so I don’t have any recommendations for iOS apps.
What about Android apps? I finally joined today after boost totally stopped working this mo
I’m liking connect personally
I’m using jerboa. I heard boost is making a lemmy app, so that will prob have a similar ui and ux to what you’re used to.
https://vger.app/settings/install
Works on both platforms I believe, and is based off of the Apollo UI.
What app? I doubt you see saved posts unless there’s an option to share somewhere otherwise that goes against 100% of the idea of privacy.
People probably use different accounts to filter content. Instead of flipping around settings and shit you just have one account for reading all the mindmelting horrible shit and another where you don’t subscribe to any of that. Who knows though
Ohhhhh that makes a lot of sense.
Thanks! It says “view saved posts” on each user but it’s always blank, so I was just making sure.
App is memmy on iOS. Do you recommend anything?
On desktop it does look like you’re viewing other people’s saved posts, but it’s actually always just showing your own. The app you’re on maybe has the same weirdness.
I’ve been using liftoff on android. Not sure If there is an IOS version but I really like it. I see your user name is Buffalo, GO BILLS, if your also a buffalo bills fan like me.
Test from liftoff
I see that too on Memmy but it shows blank on everyone but myself.
I have a feeling that Memmy just reuses the profile page view for everyone.
I created my Lemmy.world account when Beehaw defederated, and it’s now my main.
What did beehaw defederate from? That site seems pretentious.
They claimed it would be temporary and was to ensure “safety” of their community as other instances have open signups, and apparently the beehaw admin thought there’d be an influx of bots, or excessive posts requiring moderation. It doesn’t seem like that has happened though, and it also doesn’t seem like they’ve re-federated.
They defederated (at least at some point) from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. Probably more, but I’m too lazy this morning to go digging through their instances list or posts. Also ironically their ‘safe space’ doesn’t give me a very welcoming or safe feeling, so I prefer to steer clear of it.
I have alts on several instances but lemmy.world is still my preferred instance even with all the hiccups.
I also appreciate that m.lemmy.world uses the Voyager PWA by default.
That’s me. Jumped a couple of instances as I started to understand federation and defederation.
I’m one of them. Not using my lemmy.world account as much the past couple of days
My main has the same name as my ancient Reddit account that is fairly well known in certain circles. This alt feels like a totally new, fediverse only experience and I kind of like it.
Yeah I created accounts with the same name as my Reddit username, but then thought, why would I want to create a trail from Reddit to Lemmy? The point is to be able to be anonymous. Just started fresh with a new name
I’ve had to make so many different reddit accounts over the years just cause I would change a device and I can’t be bothered to remember the passwords. It’s just whatever at this point.
I did. Was having issues with lemmy.world. so signed up for another one and was using that. Today that instance is down, so I just jumped onto lemmy.world. I guess we will see what happens long term.
I ended up deleting my main on .world to make my alt on a smaller instance. I hope we can all learn and spread out or at least join instances relevant to our hobbies or geographic position more than defaulting to the general instances.
.world has been my main account, but now that I figured out how to transfer my subscription list to another instance, I’m starting to use a small instance to reduce .world loading.
Honestly excellent news, there should be no center to this new universe.
As it is always said, “everyone is an equal, unconditionally”. No ifs, nor buts.
That’s poetic let me just steal that sentence from you
If everyone already here just stays here, I’d be happy. We’ve already hit a nice place.
Lemmy is not a business, so it doesn’t necessarily need a constant influx of new users. Sustainability is based on user experience, not endless growth.
Edit: actually last sentence kind of dumb. Sustainability based on keeping the servers running and user experience.
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I think being able to register on other instances and interact across is virtually the whole point of Lemmy.
It reduces server costs because content is spread out. If something happens (like the custom emoji XSS exploit or vlemmy.net’s disappearance), it doesn’t take out the entire network. It’s good against anti-censorship. It’s good against powertripping mods/admins, but on the other hand also can be modded with a heavy hand to help curate a specific culture (see beehaw.org in contrast to lemmy.world)
So all around good. Disadvantages are some fracturing of content and lack of tools to sync and properly moderate between instances.
I don’t fully understand the instances, other than it provides the whole idea behind this, being multiple servers, no one master that can run and change and whatnot. But if I join one of these other servers (I’m on world), do I have access to the same things or does it change? My reason for staying on world in spite of some of the hiccups is my subs are here and it’s where I’ve been active.
From my understanding, you can subscribe to & view other communities regardless of the instance they’re hosted in.
I’ve only been using Lemmy for a couple days, since Boost finally shit the bed. My only gripe so far is that there are multiple communities with both the same name and purpose but on different instances.
And that’s good. No more “subreddits” monopoly. If a mod or mod team goes against the will of their users they can just move on another instance without needing to use another name (and it’s easier to find afterward). As a user, you just need to subscribe to these redundant communities (or not if you don’t care about federation but if not why are you on Lemmy) and it will appear in your front-page as if it was one and only community.
I agree conceptually, for sure. I don’t want a monopoly on any community or topic/subject matter. I’m enjoying the old school forums vibe I’m getting from the federated nature of Lemmy.
I’m having trouble putting it into words, and I’m sure this has been repeatedly explained better elsewhere, but I’ll try my best…
The initial encounter with Lemmy is challenging for new/potential users. So many options for instances and little in the way that explains how to find the best fit, why there are so many, what the differences are, and why you don’t necessarily have to join the biggest ones. I ended up with lemmy.ml but probably would have started out with lemmy.world had I seen it because it has a bigger number.
Once you get through that barrier and want to start building your subs, it isn’t obvious to a new user that there even are multiple variations of the same community. Everything I searched for was only on my instance and I was unimpressed by the amount of activity and options. My default feed was just a flood of old memes and other posts from 20 hours ago.
This is a particular issue to those who are migrating from reddit looking for comparable replacements. Let’s just say I wanted World News. On my instance it was essentially dead. I thought that was just it. A bunch of dead or floundering communities.
Casual users would stop there and possibly move on from Lemmy after that. As a slightly less casual user I figured it out. But it still bugs me.
Which, honestly I don’t think it should. I don’t need Lemmy to be the next reddit- and I don’t want it to be. I do want interesting people posting interesting content and having engaging discussions, and not all of those people are savvy enough to figure out how and where to sign up.
Right now it feels like the early early days of when I joined reddit 14 years ago, mixed with present-day vibes. I’m extremely excited to be here and hope it grows organically into a net-positive place for entertainment, education, and information. When we finally get the reddit monkey off our back we’ll start to see Lemmy’s community personality become its own thing.
Cheers and sorry for the wall of probably incomprehensible text
So? Just sub to both/all and you get content from every one in your feed. It’s no different than the two/three subreddits that existed for every community on reddit.
Sure it takes a bit longer to search for all of the comms you want to see but in the end you have more places to go and naturally one is going to probably rise and be the biggest one.
If that happens then you just stick with that one, if it goes to shit people will just migrate to the next biggest one that isn’t run by morons.
I’m signed up through lemmy.ml and subscribed to communities on several other instances, including Kbin.
Federation means your account credentials are accepted as “good enough” by other servers standards.
So you make an account on lemmy.world, and lemm.ee/sh.itjust.works/lemmy.ml/etc. All look at your account and go “yeah, that’s cool. You’re allowed to subscribe to our instance and it’s communities, post content, and engage.”
Literally the ONLY limitation is that you can create communities on your home instance, nowhere else. Outside of that, it’s free reign on every server that’s federated with yours. Post, like/dislike, comment, do whatever.
Without multiple instances, Lemmy would effectively be more like reddit (one entity controlling the whole thing). If that instance goes down, or it decides you can’t talk about topic X, or it does anything that affects you as a user – you have no option but to love it or leave it.
With multiple instances, if one becomes trouble, you just move to another. You can read and post to other instances from any other federated instance, so you get some freedom in that regard, and you’re not really tied to any one entity (you’re always beholden to the rules of your home instance, but you can also freely instance hop).
The best reddit analogy is probably using subreddits: imagine if one subreddit actually ran the whole site. R/spez one day decided to change the rules on yoiu, and you disagreed-- what option do you have? Well, in that setup, you simply start interacting on other subreddits. Lemmy kind of works this way, but there the subreddits are instances which control your login info, and there are communities within those instances that everyone elsewhere on the site can access.
The related technical advantage is still that no one instance runs the whole federation. Lemmy.world is big (likely because a lot od ex-redditors thought it was the one to switch to), but it doesn’t control the rest of the federation. If it got shut down, for example, users on it would need a new instance, but the federation itself would be exactly as it was.
It’s kind of like grass-roots networking, if that makes sense to you. One could also argue it’s a bit like like bittorrent for forums.
I imagine any time a given server’s quality drops, people will just move to another one. I had login issues for a few days on lemmy.world and started using lemmy.ml.
I think its a good thing, healthy for the ecosystem that there’s not only redundancy where one site having a moment doesn’t kill everyone’s ability to use lemmy, and also provides a clear incentive for individual servers to provide good service.
Were you able to export your list of subscriptions and import into another instance? I thought that would be a feature, but I can’t find it on lemmy.world
It’s not a feature of Lemmy itself yet, though I’ve seen one person attempting a PR and there are issues for it. It will arrive at some point but could be awhile.
I made a tool to do it (subscriptions, blocks, and profile settings) in the meantime: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
Very cool, thanks! It’s funny, because I went to your repo and I already had it starred. I’ve been wandering through so many instances/apps/websites during this Lemmy process - I’ve lost track of some things I’ve stumbled upon in the last month,
No I just logged onto the different instances and manually copied over my content, I have only one community that so far isn’t very active that I run so that was easy to move over as well. I’m sure its a roadmap feature, but who knows what the development road for lemmy is going to be now.
Isn’t that instance full of Canadians?
Ya bud.
Can I suggest you lot make a AskACanadian or AskCanada community? There’s a photo I’ve been wishing to share and ask Canadians about for a few weeks now but can’t on Redit cos I’m banned. Either that or tell me which communiy would be ok me asking the question?
/c/canada@lemmy.ca is probably the place to do it. Doesn’t appear tonbe any rules about not asking questions.
Thank you moose whisperer! I shall reply again once over posted my question so you have a chance to have some input.
I wish you many happy ‘ice skatings’ from Barry of Grandad Britain!
I love this idea. Thank you, we will do that.
!canada!canada@lemmy.ca probably isn’t going to be the best place in the long term
Yeah, I started with beehaw a month ago, then lemmy.ml, and then lemmy.world. I switch between ml and world bc i dont really care about my account itself. And if one is slow, I go to the other. It ends up being pretty convenient.
I haven’t fully settled on a “home” instance yet.
I bounce around between Lemmy.world, Beehaw and Kbin the most. As things stabilize with the various software updates and federation between instances gets worked out I will probably settle on one, but I could also see jumping to more niche instances (really hoping a sports-related instance like Fanaticus takes off) being the long term strategy, too.
Ooh, i will def have to check this one out. I manage to find a few telegram channels to keep up on nba trades and soccer transfers, but I know I miss out on quite a bit due to my lack of twitter.
Did you just call it the “Threadiverse”?? dafuq?
Still not sure I get how this all works. I am using the Memmy app. Created a login with lemmy.world. How do I see threadiverse? Can I do it from Memmy? I tried to search threadiverse on Memmy but there’s nothing there. Am I doomed to never fully comprehend this?
You’re on it bro, I’m on kbin browsing this post. We can all see and talk to each other.
Honestly people talk too much about the fediverse and federation to newbies and it creates this false barrier to entry. Here’s this person, commenting on a post not knowing shit about how it works or where it’s from. You don’t really need to know about all of that stuff to get going. Just go to any of the instances and get browsing.
Yeah people tend to spew information because they’re excited about the fediverse but it’s really not complicated to actually use.
People definitely make it seem more complex than it is.
How about that. I’m a newbie!
Like 95% of us weren’t here a month ago, we’re all newbies.
Yeah I’m on sh.itjust.works, another lemmy instance and can see ya
Lol. I think I expected it to be more complicated. Thanks
Threadiverse is a term for all Lemmy instances.
And kbin!
The threadiverse is just the name given to all of the Lemmy and Kbin instances as a whole.
I thought it was fediverse lol
The fediverse includes all services that implement the ActivityPub protocol, which includes the reddit-like “threadiverse” but also Twitter-like services (like Mastodon), Instagram-like Pixelfed, and others.
So some of the things I’m seeing in Memmy are from mastodon?
Could be, though it’s a little clunky to use it that way still. You can subscribe to Lemmy communities from mastodon but you will see every comment as a ‘toot’ and it’s a bit of a clusterfuck to view larger subs that way. It can be great for smaller ones though. I have seen people post and comment here from mastodon but that platform seems like it is built more for following individual accounts and hashtags. Kbin has more capability in the microblogging dept. if that’s what you’re looking for.
Probably not because discoverability of Mastodon content from Lemmy is not very good; kbin supports it better. I have managed to view a Mastodon user profile from a lemmy instance by searching for it, but I wasn’t able to find a good way to see their posts.
I’m with ya man! I am a member of 4 servers but I am not really understanding the difference between them so stick to lemmy.world mostly.
There isn’t much difference really. Some instances/servers block more instances than others, but generally speaking you’re getting the same experience on most of them.
I’ve only got one account on kbin, but I can see communities from a ton of different places and users from everywhere. For example, I’m browsing this from kbin.socal but it’s on lemmy.world.
I’m on Kbin as well. I just don’t overthink it too much, but the idea is that you can interact with all the different places whether it be Lemmy or otherwise. Either way, you can comment and interact and post everywhere so if it works it’s good. And so far it seems to.
I think beehaw is defederated from Lemmy but I don’t know if that means it’s defederated from Kbin. I can see their things fine.
So beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.world (not Lemmy in general) , and all it does is that users on those two servers can’t interact with each other.
But everyone else in the hundreds (thousands?) of other Lemmy & Kbin servers can still see beehaw.org & lemmy.world content and interact with them just fine.
The magic of Federation.
Gotcha. That’s pretty cool. I don’t suppose there’s a reason why just those specific places (instances?) defederated?
Either way, I like the general mashup of being able to see pretty much anything from anywhere here. Organised chaos in a positive sense, bring it on!
Beehaw was built as a safe space (even before all the Reddit furore) - it’s all laid out in their main sidebar, and their docs.
So after the big migration last month, users started flocking to the 'verse. And apparently beehaw mods were having so much moderating issues with users from two of the bigger instances (lemmy.world & sh.itjust.works). So after a meeting of admins from the 3 instances, they decided to amicably defederate for now.
And this is the beauty of Federation. You can join instances that align with your values. You can join a safe space and have a curated experience, or enjoy the lawless wild west.
The instance I’m on has defederated NSFW instances, for fear of legal issues. It also means that my “All” feed is safe to browse from work, which is exactly what I’m looking for.
Thanks for the in depth answer!
And that sounds like a mature and adult decision. On the internet. Who knew such things were possible…
Not overthinking things is quite the skill, honestly. Well done.
There’s about as much difference between servers as there is between email providers. Sometimes there’s technical differences or some might be more reliable, but Lemmy will be Lemmy wherever you go.
Crongrats boss, you already made it lol
Well I’ll be
I created an account on lemmy.world before I’d understood how the Fediverse works. Later on I went and searched for a smaller instance that’s better aligned with my interests and whose moderation I was happy with, and I
abandoned lemmy.world(Edit: Bad choice of words here. I still subscribe to communities on lemmy.world; I just stopped using the account I had created there). It had served its purpose well as a landing zone for a Fledditor like me.Can you share what your search entailed and how you undertook it? I’m on lemmy.world and not really dissatisfied, but I am curious for potential future use. Thanks!
Sure thing.
I just went through the instances listed on https://join-lemmy.org/instances and visited each one that caught my eye and I’d just glance over the welcome message, rules, and check to see if they have a website or a Matrix Space where you can talk with the admins, get support or just chat. Eventually I found one that’s hosted in my country, is better aligned with my interests (browse the list of local communities!), has no moderation rules that I disagree with, and is being maintained by folks who are passionate about FOSS and whom I wouldn’t mind supporting in maintaining the instance (financially or otherwise). Most instances will have one community where people can ask for help or discuss anything related to the instance itself, like the state of the server and updates, whether or not the instance should defederate from some other instance, etc… For example, ours is https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/tchncs and lemmy.world’s is https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyworld. Be sure to take a look at those “home” communities as well.
If it’s a smaller instance, it would also be a good idea to check the state of funding. Are they getting enough donations to maintain the server already? If not, would you be willing to help them out? Then just create an account and test the stability of the server for a week or so. This may sound like quite a bit of effort, and it is, but it’s worth it in my opinion. I love that I’ve stumbled upon this community https://tchncs.de/ and I’ve already switched to using their servers for a bunch of other stuff I’m using (Matrix, for example).
Edit: Forgot to mention you might also want to check the list of blocked instances (desktop website: scroll down to the bottom and on the right you will see “instances”) just to get an idea of the admins’ mindset and whether or not you agree with what they are blocking/allowing (I strongly advise not to actually check out those blocked instances; the names alone should tell you enough).
Just wanna say, great work on looking around and finding an instance that fits you. That’s exactly how Lemmy is supposed to work. It’s a great sign of network health that people are shuffling around to places they like better.
Saved, thanks internet person/strong A.I.!
That is really awesome. Well done!!!
username does not check out 💀
They’re probably leaving due to all the problems this instance has been having. I’ve only just recently been able to log back in after several days of it just refusing to let me in. Although I’m not sure if it’s an instance issue or a Lemmy issue since mastodon.world has been working just fine with no issues.
lemmy.world was hacked recently, you needed to delete login data.
Does this mean something other than changing your password? I’m not clear what I should delete.
delete the cache/cookie data for lemmy.world in your browser settings. Directly after the hack everything was working mostly fine for me but if I would open comments in a new tab instead of the one I was already in it would log me out and I was unable to log in. cleared my cache/cookies and logged in again and I’m back to being able to open comments in a new tab without issue.
i think “clear your cache” was the advice? There was a pinned notice about it, maybe check the admin’s post history.
I’m not surprised. Lemmy.world seemed to be the default, but you’re now seeing subs from Reddit coming over with their own instances and others realizing it might be better to make their own instances with blackjack and hookers.
I think users are jumping over to instances that more fit their personal values. Its why I left lemmy.world and created unilem.org. An instance for no defederation. It might not be for everyone. But i prefer to be able to access everything in one place and do thr moderation/blocking on the user level.
There are many instances that have 50k+ bot accounts because they didn’t protect their sign-ups. Those instances should be defederated by everyone until they get cleaned up.
Not de-federating for political reasons is a personal preference and one that you are free to have, but if you aren’t protecting the fediverse from security risks like bot swarms, you’re doing more harm than good.
Not de-federation for political reasons is a personal preference
There is also defederating for legal reasons.
You may not want to risk someone on your instance subscribing to a community on some other instance that publishes content illegal in your jurisdiction and have your instance keep a copy of it.
This is honestly one of my biggest fears, as an instance owner, because it’s really hard to stay on top of this. Unless you only explicitly federate with known-good instances, the likelihood of this happening is very high.
That’s why strong moderation is so important. These wide-open instances (even lemmy.world is too lax on account and community creation) are a major risk.
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Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !lsbsupport@lemmy.world
Nice! Good bot.
fmhy is really good on that front, they’ve only defederated Lemmygrad and Exploding-Heads.
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There are tool to export and import subs and blocks but as far as I’m aware at the moment there is no account transfer utility yet.
There really needs to be some way to… “federate” logins. Associate your identity on one server with another
I suggest creating your own lemmy instance. No one can tell you what to do and you can have your own quality server umlike garbage world.
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I’ll do that for a small monthly fee and an identity verification.
You pay me up for the privelege 🤣
Nothing is free
I just decided to host my own private instance. But that might fall apart as the disk space usage grows, lol.
Probably because lemmy.world stops working with half the apps every other day. Some days I can only use it with Thunder, other times only Jeroba, other days it works with every app except Liftoff. There’s just no predictable pattern to it and I’ve found myself just avoiding lemmy.world lately because I don’t want to type out a 3 paragraph comment just to find that my app isn’t logging in to lemmy.world today.
heh, would you look at that. It won’t let me post this comment on Jeroba so I had to log in with a browser. This is fuckin bullshit. I’m going back to sh.itjustworks until this gets fixed.
If it’s the same issue as me, you just need to logout/login inside the app. JWT secrets had to be rotated following a recent exploit, and the apps I’m using haven’t accounted for this case. Liftoff still thought I was logged in for example, but as far as the instance was concerned I wasn’t. No issues after I logged out/in manually.
For a few days my jerboa was logged out every time I went to use it.
Bummer, I think it should be all good now that the initial problems with updating the instance and closing the exploit vulnerability are sorted though.
Other than being signed out twice I haven’t had any issues using wefwef
I think those instances we planned as I have had the exact same experience. App update and login again is a small price to pay for not having to live under the boot of capitalism!
if lemmy.world won’t let me freely use my vpn i’ll seek out another server.
I have done it and you should too.
Timeout for no reason, getting logged out for no reason.
The frequent and random log outs are really annoying! I was wondering if it is just me.
Happens to me too.
I’ll get randomly logged out and then it won’t let me log back in.
Happens to me as well. But I find that if I click sign out (no idea why it’s saying that, as I’m being told I’m already signed out and need to log back in) it will bring up the log in again.
Also, if that doesn’t work, if I click on my photo at the top it will bring up the log in and let’s me back in again.
Weirdness.
Huh. I just realized how much of a flex it is to make an account on Lemmy nsfw and use it as your main
Thinking it was just me.
I think a problem for new users is failing to understand how the Fediverse works. It’s not something apparent and not something you can expect everyone to understand right off the bat. A user may start out on a heavily loaded instance and get discouraged by poor response. They either figure out they need to find a better instance or base their opinion of the whole on that one experience and give up altogether.
Lemmy.ml and lemmy.world can suffer from heavy user load and bog down at times. That situation can be avoided by selecting an instance that’s not too heavily loaded. There’s a large number to choose from. It may be necessary to shop around for a good one. In technical terms, find a regionally local instance with low hops, fast ping, and good server response. Also admin settings and quality can be a consideration. I actually signed up on four instances before I found one I really liked.
I’ve been here for a few weeks now… And I’m still not entirely sure how fediverse works. I was under the impression that it didn’t really matter which instance you sign up for, they would still communicate with one another.
I think there needs to be a better/simplified explanation on the website of how everything works.
Ideally speaking, it shouldn’t matter much which instance you pick, but that’s one of the biggest miscommunications about how all this stuff works, speaking ideally rather than realistically.
Realistically instance choice matters both regarding technical stuff like how well it handles traffic and social stuff like whether folks are discussing anything that interests you to begin with and whether the instance’s moderation style appeals to you. When all of this pans out, the tech should fade into the background, but as we’ve seen, it’s early days yet in that regard.
Lemmy uses a queue to send out activities. The size of this queue is specified by the config value federation.worker_count. Very large instances might need to increase this value. Search the logs for “Activity queue stats”, if it is consistently larger than the worker_count (default: 64), the count needs to be increased.
I’m with you except for the “whether folks are discussing anything interesting to you.” So maybe I’m not understanding that part. On Memmy, or Wefwef, or a variety of apps, I’m fed posts from all different instances so it really doesn’t matter to me what instance is my home base provided that I agree with the moderation style and they are fully federated. Is it just because I’m using a third-party app that my choice of home base doesn’t matter as much?
So, it’s a subtle detail and may not matter for many folks, but your instance choice affects your remote communities via the All feed, as the people there choose which of those to subscribe to & presumably discuss the posts there & post there themselves. It’s something that isn’t as clear on Lemmy yet as many instances are more general subject than focused at the moment and communities are still in the works, but it’s really clear on smaller Mastodon instances.
Easy example would be like a tech or programming instance that strictly limits the creation of their local communities, e.g. programming.dev. Off the bat you know a lot of discussion there’s to do with programming, and in turn there’s a decent chance that many of the communities people follow through there may also be programming or tech related, so the all feed may have a largely tech/programming focus to it.
As time goes on, you may see more focused instances with stricter sign-ups specifically to ensure their all feed relates more to their community’s focus, but honestly probably not too many as people enjoy flexibility in their posting.
It’s like email. When you sign up for Gmail, you get all the Gmail features, use the Gmail website to access your email, and can send email to any other email, like Proton or Hotmail or whatever. But if Gmail goes down you can’t read or send any email.
With Lemmy, you can see communities from any other server, like lemmy.ml or tchncs.de. But some servers might have a different interface, slightly different features, and if your instance goes down you won’t be able to access log in unless you have an account somewhere else.
The extra cool thing is this extends beyond Lemmy. Some other social medias like Mastodon and Pixelfed communicate the same way that Lemmy does, they just look different. You can see Lemmy communities on Mastodon, and see Mastodon toots on Pixelfed.
A complete lack of documentation has made the whole process of converting to Lemmy a massive pain in the ass.
Another main problem is that it’s not working how it’s designed.
If an instance gets bogged down, or an instance is misconfigured, then data doesn’t always replicate. Comments go missing from certain instances, etc.
The most basic explanation I can give is that: yes, instances can communicate with each other, but the don’t share data automatically. A user from instance A must go interact with data from instance B by directly browsing to it via the correct URL string (instanceA.com/c/community@instanceB.com), and then interact with content in that community. Data from that specific community will then show up.
That’s a large part of the reason that smaller instances have partial data from larger ones. Their users haven’t interacted with enough communities outside their own instance.
If I’m on a different instance, but I access communities on lemmy.world, would being on a different instance actually make a difference in user experience? Isn’t that community hosted on lemmy.world still subject to overloading?
I believe that your own instance pulls the feed from the other instance, so you’re not actually browsing that other instance directly. If other users on your local instance are also subscribed to that particular community, then your local instance is already syncing the feed. Essentially, I believe that each federated instance replicates a copy of the other instances’ communities, if and when those communities are requested or subscribed to by a user on the local instance. Hope that makes sense, and if anyone has a better (or more accurate) explanation, please feel free to correct me.
Think that’s more or less correct, but regarding @drturtle@lemmy.world’s question about overloading, I think that it may affect folks even on other instances if Lemmy.world’s overloading affects its response time to other servers attempting to sync with it.
E.g. Lemmy.world is bogged down -> Lemm.ee tries to sync posts/comments from .world -> .world takes a longer time to fulfill the request -> Lemm.ee sees older posts/comments for awhile until .world catches up to requests.
Glad to hear I’m not totally off the mark. I wonder then if instance-to-instance transactions would cause less overall congestion than local user traffic in such cases.
For example, if there are 25,000 users spread across 5 instances (with some overlap in community participation), would the instance-to-instance transactions needed to facilitate these users result in less of a performance hit than having all 25,000 users on the same instance? I don’t know nearly enough about databases to make an educated guess.
The problem I found is that when I looked at lemmy.world content through lemmy.ca for example, it would not be up to date. Comments would be missing, upvotes and downvotes wouldn’t match, etc.
Pretty much every instance was having federation issues with lemmy.world due to their server just being overloaded. It’s significantly improved but I’m not sure if it’s 100% perfect yet.
Yeah I found this issue as well. Although it actually seems to have improved in the last few weeks. Not sure what changed.
I’ve found since 18.2 that Lemmy.ml is as reliable as ressot for me. Compared to June I’ve had no hanging, errors, or issues accessing pages.
I’m really grooving on multiple instances. I like that Beehaw and kbin offer meaningfully different audiences and experiences.
How would you describe their differences? I’m always curious to see what people think about the different instances.
beehaw.org is a lemmy instance explicitly chartered as encouraging politeness and diversity. They are also tightly curating the locally hosted communities – none of these thousands of copies for subreddits, just a couple of pages of very carefully chosen communities. But, for all that, traffic seems pretty high.
kbin.social (and other kbins) are not Lemmy, they are a competing code base that uses ActivityPub in a way that is mostly compatible with Lemmy and can federate with other Lemmy instances. kbin has no externally facing API, so there are no third party apps that will work with it (and so far, no prospects for them at all). It’s pretty similar to lemmy.world, but maybe quieter, and with a more technical user base. Arguably the web site works better, as the code is a bit more stable.
lemmy.ml is most similar to lemmy.world, it also seems to have a more technical user base. Has a lot of Linux and FOSS-related communities on it.
lemmy.world you know about :-)
UItimately, you can get to most communities through your lemmy.world account, as lemmy.world is federated with the others. But I do find myself logging in directly sometimes to get the best experience.
