Day 2 here, and I can see the growth already. Personally I really like the notion of how its gonna shape up in the future but at the same time I really feel for the average user as of now its too complex to understand the working and how the cross servers thing is working. I mean yes still early days, UI will improve further leading to a better UX but the core mechanism yet is little tough to get along. For instance, still unclear if I made the right choice by signing up on lemmydotworld why not lemmydotml , beehaw etc… and where does this stop? like in the coming times i it would be like a thousands of servers lemmy.this lemmy.that lemmy.etc or anything.anything. That’s soo confusing for someone who just wanna join a server. Would be interesting to see how “signup anywhere, its the same thing” evolves.
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I’ve been on mastodon for a couple of years, here’s how I handled instance fomo there. I made an account on a few different instances that I liked, got a feel for each instance’s rules, what was allowed, what wasn’t. Over time, I started to realize what kind of mod styles I liked, whether I cared much about the local timeline vs my subscribed timeline (I didn’t care as much about this on masto, but here, I’m much more interested in the local timeline, which I’ll get into in a bit.) Eventually, I settled on just one account, but really you never have to if you don’t want to, lots of people have alts, even back on non federated social media.
I’m doing this process again here. I currently have accounts on Beehaw, Kbin.social, and slrpnk.net, where I’m posting from currently. No matter which one, I can follow any community I want from any of these accounts provided they aren’t defederated. But, I also get a unique local timeline view, and a specific culture brought on by mods and users for each. I really think this gives power to smaller, more topic focused instances like slrpnk.net. Specifically, I’ve noticed two things it gives me that Reddit didn’t necessarily have
- a quick “show me only posts related to this specific topic I’m interested in” button via the local timeline. (This could technically kind of be built with multireddits, but that wouldn’t quite be the same)
- (what I think is even better) show me more general topics, but hosted by people also interested in this one specific root topic (for my instance, the root topic would be solarpunk, but for others, I’ve seen instances dedicated to star trek, cyberpunk, local towns, the list goes on.) This I think has more community building power in an a way that is unique to here and that I’m interested in seeing more of, personally. After all, someone could make a subreddit called, idk, r/startrekurbanism, but I don’t see that taking off on Reddit. It would be weirdly extremely niche, and the chances of it showing up on your TL (which you need to happen to encourage engagement) over more popular posts is minimal. Here though, I bet a community dedicated to discussing city planning and design ran by Star Trek fans could have some engagement just due to the local timeline bringing it to people’s attention. This has potential to allow Lemmy to be weird and unique in a way previous aggregator sites couldn’t pull off.
Tl;dr: local timelines are cool. try a few instances out to get a feel for what you like (and to get over instance fomo), and give fedi time to grow on you. It may not work out for everyone, and that’s okay, but I really have grown to prefer Mastodon to Twitter, and I’m excited to see a federated alternative to Reddit gain traction.
I moved from aussie.zone to lemmy.world already to get around federation issues.
Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world 🤷♂️I don’t want to have half a dozen accounts so that I can access all the niches of this system, and yet it’s beggining to look like the dream of federation is stillborn.
Yea. I feel like Beehaw cutting a lot of the larger general communities out from two of the biggest instances is highlighting early a major hurdle that’s gonna make the whole fediverse thing difficult to get a lot of people on board with. I don’t want to have to keep making new accounts to access stuff, but like… half of the communities I had subscribed to are just gone now because the admins over there decided they don’t want to play with anyone else, I guess.
To be fair, that’s how things used to be on the internet. You’d sign up for various forums or message boards with different accounts. Then it all became consolidated under one roof, and message boards started dying. What’s happening with reddit now shows the danger of that.
It goes both ways though, if beehaw isolates itself enough the rest of the fediverse will make its own communities that effectively replace the ones we lost from them defederating.
As of now they’re blocking 387 communities according to this
What were the federation issues with aussie.zone?
That’s lame. I just run my own instance. I’m based in Perth and the server itself is in Sydney, so nice and fast.
Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world
Fucking wonderful.
If I’m not mistaken both Beehaw and Lemmy.world are pretty big mainstream instances.
Why has Beehaw decided to stop federating with lemmy.world?
What federation issues were you having with aussie.zone? I used that one for a while before creating my own instance.
The issue was the owners choice of not federating with anything nsfw.
By moving to lemmy.world I could still post as much as I wanted to [email protected] AND upvote boobs.
Hopefully large instances keep federating with the small, self-hosted ones. I’m not sure how to check but I think really small instances still have the most reach.
I self hosted precisely so I can federate with who I want to. It’s nice to be able to see posts from multiple instances of (for example) self-hosted on different servers within my own instance, and comment on them directly within my own instance.
The only issues I’ve had is the comments can take a bit to federate across, but that’s to be expected.
I’m new here, can someone explain how this whole federating thing works?
You know how discord has multiple servers?
Now imagine if those servers where actually owned by a person (self-hosted), and each server could connect with the other servers, so you can see content on whatever server you are.best explanation I’ve seen for the fediverse
For reddit folks - imagine there are 10 different reddits with all of their own individual subreddits. You have the ability to only view and comment on yours, but also can look and comments on all of those others ones if you want to.
The instance you sign up on doesn’t really matter. For technical people, the server you sign in on, can be important, but for the average user it doesn’t. In fact, you could make an account on mastodon.social and comment on this very thread. That’s pretty much the goal of federation.
This feels disingenous to say. Each community has its own rules and culture, which you may agree or disagree with. Beyond that, there’s the matter of trust as the instance admin holds everything on their server. This isn’t even getting into the whole mess of defederation. like with Beehaw, who seems intent on forming an isolative culture despite having some of the largest communities on the site.
I believe it will improve over time as the Fediverse matures and grows to handle larger loads and less techy people, but I think saying that to people will do more harm than good. A lot of the newer people have been reasonably freaking out in response to losing access to several large communities they frequented because they were told “instance doesn’t matter”, when quite frankly it does at the moment.
Entirely fair, we are in the midst of significant drama between the reddit burndown, and the infancy of the lemmy platform as a whole. For someone wanting to talk to people, and get their feet wet in the fediverse, I think its reasonable to say that the server doesn’t matter. Once you have used the platform, and know what you want then exploring the options is highly encouraged. The exact circumstances of server federation will absolutely change, probably a lot, in the near future.
I treat it akin to someone saying “I want to learn how to play guitar.” I think reasoanble advice is get a cheap used guitar and start learning cords. Once you know if you plan on sticking with it more than a few weeks, go right ahead and start looking at better equipment. I don’t think expecting someone at this stage to start taking musical theory is the best advice. Maybe that is a weak argument, but I don’t think its entirely wrong.
Nah, I get it. I expect it to be a much better situation as the platform matures, but right now it’s really hard. Just like Mastodon, Lemmy will have to go through a ton of growing pains to meet the demands of a rapidly growing userbase. Hopefully we as a community can make this a much better situation for newbies going forward.
that be a thing in the future that ppl would wanna be on the server that allows maximum federations?
Maybe, but I doubt enough instances are gonna go follow the beehaw route for that to take off. The only issue is that Beehaw had a ton of really big general communities that were used by a lot of people on other instances.
Why did you post this to selfhosted? lol
that i just realized, lol
on kbin there was a long period of no federation and so I think we kinda ended up with this “kbin is kbin and then there’s this other stuff” mindset. I think it helped ease a lot of us into this fediverse stuff lol. the analogy I use is email :) why pick yahoovs gmail vs protonmail? same idea.
That analogy doesn’t hold when yahoo can block gmail and proton can block all yahoo content, etc.
they can do that though. it just doesn’t happen with big email providers. but many large email providers auto-block smaller ones.
Email, the true OG federated protocol.
Pretty sure that was Usenet
I somewhat went through that. Signed up on one instance cause it seemed a cool science based one to check out but then realized that if I wanted to make a community for anything else, I couldn’t do it there
Ah interesting point, never thought of it but you’re right, in this regard with lemmy it is kind of important where you have your account. Good point! I had the feeling that with lemmy it really doesn’t matter where you have your account but this is a very valid point.
If you don’t plan on running communities it’s a non issue but otherwise, yeah
