this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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General Discussion
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Welcome to Lemmy.World General!
This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.
πͺ About Lemmy World
π§ Finding Communities
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π¬ Additional Discussion Focused Communities:
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- [email protected] - The opposite of the above, for more laidback chat!
- [email protected] - Into video games? Here's a place to discuss them!
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0. See: Rules for Users.
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This is not a good thing. Part of the problem is third-party apps like Sync and other Fediverse advocates that direct Reddit users to sign up on only one instance, lemmy.world. This is understandable to keep things simple for the Redditors but it hurts lemmy.world (cost and performance-wise) and the Fediverse as a whole (centralization) to have a lot of accounts on one instance. I hope lemmy.world can make an announcement or guide to encourage users to spread out to more instances.
I think another reason too is that .world is run by Ruud who is a trusted actor in the space (he already runs Mastodon.world, a large mastodon instance), and so many (including me) probably felt it would be a safe harbor and not likely to get shut down or run poorly.
Maybe ony Lemmy.world's registration page thay can list other instances that they trust and endorse.
Not a bad idea. Might need assistance vetting servers and admins right now though as Ruud is probably busy taking a fire extinguisher to the server room every other minute.
This is a brilliant idea. Drive all the traffic to lemmy.works as it seems like the "main hub", then when registering drive users to a few other instances as well
Maybe we should set up a separate site that monitors different instances and tries to suggest instances in the federation group that you want and then everyone gets directed there.
I stumbled into lemmy disoriented and just went with lemmy.ca because I always want to support 'local' domains. I'm surprised people go for for something like '.world' tbh. Although, I think your logic makes sense I also know how little people read and its safer to say people just signed up for the instance that was the path of least resistance (low application threshold, links guiding them in, etc)
I scrolled through a few that were recommended and world seemed like it was just generally the best fit for me. Especially since I didnβt want any chance of running into explicitly queerphobic communities while having plenty of variety in topics
I made an account on both world and .CA while I was figuring things out.
I mostly use lemmy.ca now though.
I am waiting on my lemm.ee confirmation. Might daily drive it if it gets heavy here.
I did exactly the same!
Itβs just that I really donβt care about what happens in my area within this context, I can just go outside to know whatβs going on. And if I want to talk to local people I donβt do it on here either, so I prefer more international communities than just my town except itβs online
For anyone that's using Lemmy.world and wants to lessen their burden on the admins, look for a Lemmy instance closer to you (in the physical world) using this site:
https://fediverse.observer/map
Sign up on that instance, sign in on your Lemmy app, sort based on All, and you should be able to see the same content as if you were on Lemmy.world!
Me just now - Oh that's a good idea! (Looks up the instances near me and sees the names) Oh, that's right. I live in conservative hell. :(
I'll go a little further and find a less crazy instance...
Looks at location-based fediverse list.
Looks outside window.
Yeah, that tracks.
I only have Mastodon instances near me. Can Mastodon instances browse Lemmy instances?
I believe Mastodon is a different software compared to Lemmy. Lemmy is an aggregation software of the entire Fediverse, while Mastodon is more like Twitter. My limited knowledge of Mastodon makes me think that it wouldn't be possible to see Lemmy instances, but if you sent your comment using Mastodon then there might be a chance. Hopefully someone else in the comments will sound off.
You can see posts and users on Lemmy instances from Mastodon. However there are some limitations.
It would be helpful if they would allow you to filter by which instances allow sign ups. Unless Iβm just not seeing it.
There's a 'Signups' column in the list view.
I tried lemmy.world, it seemed to slow. So I signed up to lemmy.nz... much quicker and more relevant to me.
Kia ora, Greetings from another lemmy.nz user!
And another! It's nice having our own little corner of the world
Similar-ish for me. Although not speed, just saw lemmy.ca and couldn't not support the 'local' domain. Understanding the fediverse enough to know I can still access it all (for the msot part) helped.
I think we're trusting them to crunch the numbers and simply shut off registration if it gets out of control. At least, I'd hope so.
That wouldn't be good either if third parties are still funnelling new users to lemmy.world. They'll see a "sign ups closed" message, assume there is only one forum and it's closed, then go back to Reddit.
Actually it's even worse than that. I tried yesterday to register on https://lemmy.ml but it let me go through the registration process up to the submit button before returning an error message "Registration Closed".
This is good feedback! If you haven't already, you might post it to [email protected]. They may have already gotten this feedback, so you might do a quick skim of other posts before doing so, but honestly it'd be good to post just with this point specifically, since others may have only tossed it in amidst more general feedback.
A necessary evil but one that can be overcome. I would hope there'd be a way to leave a message about trying one of many other instances or at least a link to a Fediverse FAQ.
Some degree of centralization is inevitable. I think it may be 2-4 main instances that people will predominately use.
I think the best approach might be general subject-specific instances? Like, video.games with a main games community, meme community, then smaller communities for various games - or sports.social, with communities for each sport.
I feel like we're going to end up with a particular community on a particular instance ending up as the "default" community for that subject, but it'd probably be better (in an ideal world) to have those on separate instances to maintain some degree of decentralization
If a community goes to shit due to power tripping mods you can just switch instances too.
I know that it's inevitable, but the signup flow should try to weaken that effect instead of contribute to it. An example of how not to do it is Mastodon's old homepage which led to only one instance, mastodon.social, to "make onboarding easier".
Hi, I'm new here. How can I move to another instance? Is there a way to migrate, or do I just have to register another account somewhere else? Thanks :)
I'm new, but slightly less so, and haven't yet found a way to migrate my account to a new instance. But it's also fairly trivial to just create a new account on another instance, especially when you don't yet have a ton of subscriptions or much of a reply history to lose. Lemmy doesn't have a running karma like reddit did, so it's not like you're even losing fake internet points in the process.
I think there was word that they were going to add that functionality at some point.
I don't think you can migrate, since if that was possible your "karma" would also be able to move with you. People have been asking for that recently, but others have been saying that the Lemmy software doesn't support that.
I think the best thing you can do is make a new account on a new instance and look back at the rest of the fediverse from that instance.
I gotta give it to this instance tho. Right now it has the fastest loading time ive ever experienced on the internet in a long time. Dont browse too fast tho, or you might get rate limited.
How is it possible to decentralise sign ups and see/searchable content and tabs? I used to be tech savvy but these days I struggle a bit. Turning into a dinosaur.
I have a "when I stop being bad at web development" project idea for this, hopefully someone who has a development background can pick it up.
The idea is an open-source onboarding portal that takes all Lemmy instances from awesome-lemmy-instances and Kbin instances from FediDB and lets their admins tag their instances with what the instance is focused on, maybe through a dedicated community or something. This list of instances and tags is public so instances can't cheat the system with fake tags or get secretly blacklisted just because the project maintainer disagrees with them.
Users get directed to the portal and fill out a quiz with questions like "what are your hobbies", "do you prefer strict or lax moderation", and get matched to a list of the closest servers and recommended communities. There will also be a simple load balancing algorithm to make large instances less likely to be recommended. Of course, because it's open source, the algorithm and list of instances can be changed if someone wants to host their own portal.
Basically, something like Spread Mastodon that covers the entire known network and not just a few of the largest instances that are approved by mastodon.social.
I like the idea and it sounds like a fantastic tool for people who would have been interested in the Fediverse anyway. I just fear taking a quiz is too cumbersome to be an optimal onboarding method for Lemmy as a Reddit replacement. The reason .world exploded in popularity was the simplicity (just go here and sign up and you're posting within minutes and your Local is the biggest instance so you're going to find content even if you've not discovered the All button).
Doesn't every major social media website have an onboarding quiz these days? Whenever I created an alt on Reddit or Twitter, there would be this prompt asking me what I'm interested in, then it would recommend subreddits/accounts/hashtags to follow. I know Facebook and Instagram prompt for your contacts and interests to generate recommendations too. If the average social media user can manage this, so can future Threadiverse users.
Find instances on https://join-lemmy.org
Find subs (communities) on https://browse.feddit.de
These are great suggestions, but for finding communities, I would recommend https://lemmyverse.net/communities instead.
The Interface is nicer, you can directly get the [email protected] string for searching it locally, and it doesn't use a large blocklist like feddit.de sadly does.
At least, users of lemmy.world (and from different servers when we are at it) should be educated, so they feel relatively confident to switch and understand why this is important.
Why not have a central hub though? I'd much prefer communities with higher populations