I'm trying to understand it still. I understand you can visit communities from any other instance, but are communities shared between them? I mean, if there's an r/NFL in lemmy.world, can lemmy.ml also contain an r/NFL and would those two be two different things?
Your account (and every account) has a home instance. Both you and I have our accounts on lemmy.world.
And every community (aka subreddit) also has a home instance. The home instance for this community happens to be also be lemmy.world, same as our accounts.
But through federation, the posts from each community gets copied from the communities home server onto each subscribed user's home server. So you can subscribe to any community on any server that lemmy.world federates with.
So while it's possible for multiple instances to have an nfl community, it's not necessary since you can sub to the NFL community on another instance and that's totally normal and expected. Think of it as the subreddits name includes its instance name, so [email protected] is just a different subreddit than [email protected], just like on Reddit you could have competing subs named /r/nfl and /r/nflfootball. And just like reddit, when things start to calm down, I think you will see that in cases where a bunch of dupe subs exist... one or two with active mods start to dominate on user count and those end up being the most interesting. It will be a bit wild west for a while though. Lemmy is a lot smaller than reddit, though, when I find dupes of a topic I care about, my strategy had been to subscribe to them all and I'll cancel the ones that flopped a few months from now when it's clear what is active and what's dead.
Thanks for the link, that clears things up. I'm looking forward for everything settling down a bit, but I will admit the new experience is exciting.
I like your idea of just subscribing to interesting stuff and manage it later, I'll start doing that so thanks for the tip as well!
You can use your lemmy.world account to access communities in other instances. If you look at my username, you will see that I am replying to you from sopuli.xyz even though this thread is on lemmy.world.
Figured it out mostly. Seems like some instances have a "main" community you can navigate to. Others just have their name, like this instance's lemmy.world's local feed viewed from another instance world be:
Yes this would be two different communities on two different servers. Right now everything here is still wild west but overtime you will get something like a "default" NFL community where most people visit and several smaller sub-communites on different servers.
We have a gaming on lemmy.ml and we have a gaming on beehaw.org. The later is already bigger and way more active than the former.
First time here for me, and I’m confused as well.
Say there’s a ‘movies’ community on this server, and one on lemmy.ml, and over time the one on ml becomes the definitive one, do I need to have an account on the ml server as well or is there a way to be able to see multiple communities on different servers in my stream?
Thanks for taking the time to help us newcomers out.
You only need one account to access the entire Lemmy network. So you can still access the movies community on lemmy.ml if it does become the definitive one and considering that it's the "main" instance right now, that shouldn't be hard either.
I mean, I'm commenting here in lemmy.world from lemmy.ml
Ah, thanks, that makes sense - I went to ml and it said I needed to register in order to comment, and thought if I found communities on 8 different servers I wanted to post to I’d need to register on each of them and switch every time.
I’ll get used to it.
For PC: At your startpage (should be lemmy.world) in the top left should be "Community's". If you click on that you get to the community list. Here you can sort by subscribed/local/all.
Choose "All" to get all possible Communities (subs) from all servers. You can also search for keywords like "gaming". Just click the subscribe button for the communities you're interested and you should be good.
Similar with the Android App. At the bottom menu, the second from the left (looks like a list icon) you get to the community overview/search function. Here you just simply have to search a keyword, visit the community and press the subscribe button.
check out Mlem! You can get via apples Test Flight app for Beta apps. App is pretty intuitive and would you believe has a better sorting function than the official reddit app? Reminds me of Apollo in this way.
First of all the r/ doesn’t apply here (okay, I’m being pedantic, sorry), but if I understood correctly what you’re asking, you can see any community from all instances. Each instance can also create a community of the same name (so in that case they wouldn’t be shared) but you can access !community@instance everywhere and it’s the same for all
Depends on the policy of the instance where you are creating the account, for example, beehaw doesn't allow for creation of new communities but lemmy.ml does
beehaw has a strict policy on new communities, but you could create a new account on a another instance like sopuli.xyz and the create a new community there, then you can add your account on beehaw as a moderator
This is also the confusing part to me. If I want to see content for NFL, are we all fractured among hundreds of servers and there is no way to see all new posts on all of the verse at once?
Yeah that's right. In practice though, over time you'd expect most people to eventually congregate on 1-2 big communities where there is the most quality content and moderation.
The upside is that no single server or moderator(s) own any community. Like on Reddit there can only be one r/NFL so if the mods decide to do something unpopular with the subreddit then everyone is just stuck with that.
Here someone can just create a new NFL community on a different server or start their own server with their own mod policies.
Really it's not too different from how things were with reddit though. Often subreddits would fracture and people create a new subreddits dedicated to the same topic. There are a lot of very similar subreddits that for the same topic that co-exist
Think about how r/FreeFolk split from r/GameOfThrones because people got pissed at the moderators and then later it ended up becoming more popular than the initial subreddit
Lemmy is really sick. Honestly, I was pretty heartbroken yesterday about Apollo after 12 years on Reddit. Lemmy has been a breath of fresh air in what’s felt like a cave full of shit this week.
You would just have to subscribe to both so they are in your feed. I don't know if there's any way to merge them into one, but that shouldn't be impossible. That doesn't mean it's a currently implemented feature though...
I meant merge like how multireddit works, where you combine multiple subs into a single distinct feed that doesn't include all the subs you're subbed to.
Oh no yeah that would be good! I guess someone should open an issue on GitHub, if there isn’t one already
I wouldn’t know how to implement it myself but I don’t think it would be too challenging