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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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!
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://discuss.tchncs.de/c/[email protected]. 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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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/[email protected]), 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.
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.
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.
Lemmy.world had problems since day 1 for me. When you get to a smaller fully updated sever like lemm.ee the service is excellent and you see how good Lemmy is.
That's the intended effect. With the current population on Lemmy/Kbin, most instances are still generalist in nature. People will naturally gravitate to the instance with admins who are best aligned with their personal needs, and I expect badly managed instances to simply turn into Voat and die out, as well as more topic specific instances like MTGzone or startrek website to pop up.
I have an account on lemmy.world, but when I ping it, I'm in the 100ms. I ended up on lemmy.ca where the ping is 3ms average, it makes a big difference in responsiveness.
That's a terrible justification. lemmy.world is using Hetzner, and not a CDN whereas lemmy.ca is using Cloudflare, which is a CDN. Pinging is a terrible benchmark for comparing server performance.
It's not a bad name. It's the fediverse, but for threaded conversation. The threadiverse nickname has been floating around far longer than Meta's rushed Twitter clone.
I'm really having hard time grasping what goes through people's minds when deciding to be so damn aggressive off the bat. We're all just trying to have a good time here.
Threadiverse predates threads I'm pretty sure. Reddit is composed of threads, reddit fediverse being threadiverse makes sense. Maybe less so now though.
I kind of think that's how it's supposed to go in my made-up-right-this-second knowledge of the evolution of open source Federated social media sites. Pick the largest/most active/most variety to get your feet wet and make any weird mistakes you need to make in a crowd where you're one of many and sheer speed of posting means you'll be forgotten in like, hours. Then you get comfortable and see if this is a forever-fit or just a okay-right-now fit.
I mean, I hard-bond to my first and pretty much settle immediately for life unless something is seriously awry, but even I made a backup in another one that I mirrored all my favorite communities in and I am seriously getting one more in a smaller, more specialized server. Yes, I do get the point of Federated, you do not need to explain, but here's the thing: intellectually I know that actually, the population of the Fediverse is orders of magnitude smaller than reddit or pretty much any other social media site, but feelings do not agree: Reddit was like a large, slightly hostile country with a lot of states you avoided always but especially between dusk and dawn; the scope of Fediverse is like being on a very small planet in an expanding universe you can watch growing in real time and it never stops. It's great, but there's something very unsettling realizing you're eight servers from home surrounded by kpop or wake up to find you posted in three communities in servers you don't recognize at two AM and if you can get a reputation for that kind of thing.
My ADHD is living the dream, let's go, but I can see how it would throw people a little.
Have you figured out how to save your subbed communities to make migrating to another instance more fluid? I've only been here a couple days and want to do the same
made a backup in another one that I mirrored all my favorite communities in and I am seriously getting one more in a smaller, more specialized server. Yes, I do get the point of Federated, you do not need to explain
I have a second account on a much smaller server as well. and when I was going through the other day subbing to different things that I was already subbed to here I realized that even though everything gets federated out to everything it's more a pull to the server than a push to all servers. There was a few communities that I subbed to that I had been subbed to on this account since the beginning and I was apparently one of the first on my other instances to go there because the communities were barren. When opened on this account they were full of life. so following the communities you want to early on a small server seems pretty important to me so you continue to have access to everything in the event your main fails for whatever reason.
That's a good thing. Keep the fediverae alive without overemcumbering servers. That's what's so strong about it, we can keep growing without too much costs.
Yes, there were multiple problems in a row that got some people making accounts on other instances, and some people probably stuck with those.
There were some people who were angry that .world wasn't automatically defederating from Threads and said they were moving to other instances (or already had).
There were posts about the high .world growth not being a good thing, and more people should sign up on smaller instances. Undoubtedly not everyone who has recently started on Lemmy will like it and stick with it, so if other instances have more of the growth and .world has at least as much attrition, it will look flat or declining relative to others.
I signed up for TTRPG network, not realizing I also can access Lemmy through it! To be honest I don't know a lot about how the fediverse works at all but so far I like what I'm seeing. Reminds me of reddit circa 2009. In fact, I think this is going to replace my use of Reddit altogether, as it definitely serves the purpose of providing endless content to scroll to.
Treat it like email, except emails are public(posts) and your instance can block sending and reciving emails from another instance. You are not required to create a new email with that instance to interact with a post unless that server has blocked your instance.
E.g someome with gmail is free to message people using yahoo, outlook, proton, but may block some domains (e.g spam domains)
This is very cool because a lot of online forums were completely gutted when Facebook took over, and seeing communities adopt the fediverse is awesome.
Less reliance on a single instance means, the single instance is less likely to fuck over their members (via advertising or data sharing)
Less likely of a situation where one instance can create a sort of monopoly of Lemmy communities and take them private via defederation, leading everyone to join that singular Lemmy instance to see the content.
I think I meant more so like does it matter because we can still all see the same content regardless where we sign up right? From my basic understanding of this fediverse or whatever the hell it's called lol
Can someone explain this like I’m an idiot (because I am)? This sounds like at some point I’m going to need to create a new account because shit will get too….popular? Dafuq? I downloaded Voyager, spent a bajillion hours looking for communities to add to my feed because fuck Reddit, and this conversation is scaring/confusing the shit out of me.
.world was having trouble because it grew really really fast (like it's only existed for about six weeks at this point), and the Lemmy software had never been tested with the sorts of numbers we very suddenly saw during the Reddit migration. So naturally there were performance problems, as nobody had ever run a Lemmy instance that large.
A few instance admins put their heads together and figured out various fixes and optimisations, and now it's running fine. Maybe we'll get into more issues down the road, that's just the nature of being the first to try something new. But it's nothing to panic about, think of it more like you're a brave pioneer into an exciting new world :D
I'm having massive problems with Connect on mobile. I can see my feed but can't vote or post. Every time I try it says, "user not logged in". Hopefully whenever that's smoothed over I can contribute more.
There was a server reset a few days ago when the Lemmy hack happened, mods logged everyone out.
I had the same issue on Connect and logging out and back in fixed it.
Well I mean when you have connectivity issues and authentication issues making you unable to log in, I more than get it. It's all well and good though as I hope Lemmy takes off. Growing pains is all!
Well this is good. It makes much more sense to spread out. I'm glad to see people stick with it and move to another instance instead of just quit altogether.
This instance took a "wait and see" stance to Meta. It lost a lot of subreddit modteams when it did, who are now pushing their userbases to the comms they've made in other lemmys by putting up links and sticky posts in their old subreddits.
I have several subreddits where our teams argued internally about it, we were mostly in support of coming here until the instance was soft on Meta.
I mean, not my subs since I'm a communist. Being on the platform doesn't mean liking it. You have to be where people are though if you want to do anything to help spread your ideology or fight libs. It's a matter of treating reddit as a theatre of operations for us, much like our presence on twitter remains so. But yeah you're right about the majority of moderators.
I tried going to another server when I read something about a lemmy instance turning down FB. I go there and I'm prompted to make yet another account to use that instance.
Does this mean, that I need to make a new log-in per instance, per server just to use it? If so, that's entirely exhausting for me to keep track and I already have an abundance of accounts as is, to where I had to make a document that records every account with every password. We need an internet where it's less of that.
Hey, you're getting some well-meaning but quite confusing answers on this so I'll try and sum up:
Each instance / server is its own self-contained thing, so yes if you want to change which instance you use as your home you'd need to set up a new account on it. But...
You DO NOT need to do this just to join and interact with communities from other instances, you can do that from your lemmy.world account
Some people are uncomfortable with the idea of .world potentially federating with Threads down the line, so are pre-emptively making the jump to another instance
There are other reasons to have multiple accounts, for example I have one account that is mostly subbed to gaming stuff and then I have this account that is mostly subbed to crafting stuff, because I like to have the two separate subscription feeds. I did the same thing over on Reddit, on Mastodon, etc etc. Some people have a dedicated NSFW account. Whether you personally have a use case for multiple accounts, or whether you personally want to steer clear of any potential future federation with Threads, is up to you.
Maybe it would be confusing to add this but your second point could clarify that you can interact with any other instance so long as:
lemmy.world hasn't defederated from them
That instance hasn't defederated from lemmy.world
For instance (accidental pun), I believe behaw.org is/was defederated from lemmy.world. Additionally, I believe I heard that lemmy.world defederated from lemmy.online (the reddit spam instance).
I know my instance is also currently discussing defederating lemmy.online among other choices
No. You 'can' log in to each individual server if you want, but, because Lemmy is Federated you don't need to. Pick a home-base and you can interact with all the others (that aren't defederated). (Edit: tip - choose an instance that shares your interests for your home-base. It may make things more comfortable for you in the future.)
In practice, this means instead of clicking another instance you just Search:All and subscribe to what ever Lemmy communities you're interested in. Annoyingly this can mean duplicate communities (think r/cute, r/aww, r/pics, r/pictures, r/awwnopitbulls, r/awwcute....) but this downside is easily tolerated. Post and comment on other federated communities as you wish.
This is how mastodon works, you need account on each instance to follow it all and post there.
On lemmy you can have account on one instance and follow and post in all federated communities. Still doesn't solve following "local" from several instances but is already much easier.
Also apps like liftoff store your login to different instanxes and it's quite smooth to switch feeds.
I reckon it can be possible to compartmentalize by topic with several accounts (for example a .world account only for news and politics, a lemmy.ml one for tech and laughing at reddit, a third one elsewhere for memes, each of them subscribing to different communities on all the instances)
Had the same problem, and someone pointed me to lemmy_migrate by wescode on github, and it worked well. Although it do require a recent version of python installed
First, when leaving Reddit, people are going to gravitate towards one of the larger instances. That's what I personally did. I don't think I'd say I fully understand Lemmy and the Fediverse now, but I've been here long enough to now know more about how the instances thing works.
So second, as the userbase grows and people stay for longer, they learn how this place works. And third, if they dislike moderation or direction or server performance or what have you, they have enough experience to start from another instance or frequent it more and this less.
I expect we'll see other communities start to grow now, while the larger ones stay relatively constant.
There are a number of tools that monitor the fediverse. Here's one. The thesis does not appear to be correct though. As lemmy.world's monthly active users is stabalizing, Lemmy as a whole is declining.
Full keyboard navigation (j and k to focus up and down posts, u to go to user profile, c to enter comments…) including toggling expandos, and regex keyword filtering for me.
A kindred soul. I never got why r/fatpeoplehate was lumped in with the rest of those awful subreddits... the worst part about the subreddit was its name.
I agree, I actually ended up gaining the weight back, but when I was working on losing it- I loved that sub for its motivation. I'm actually about to re-embark on that very same goal again now.
/r/fatpeoplehate- to reiterate, did help me. It didn't make me hate myself, it didn't inspire the eating disorder I came to be under, or are under now- it made clear to me that I had things to deal with. A healthy person does not lose over a hundred pounds of weight, and then gain it back in a fairly short period of time.
For all of it's failures, flaws, and imperfections- that sub may have very well saved my life by bringing to my attention; I have an eating disorder.
The theis here does not really appear to be correct. Comparing MAU here, lemmy.world's MAU is flatter than the entire Lemmy platform's, implying that other platforms are seeing users drop off at a faster rate.
I'm still not sure I understand how communities and instances work.
If I create an instance here will it show in other instances? Because I did create one on Lemmy world and I can't see it in the other instance I am at with my other account, even though I look at "all"
When you create a new community, other instances don't automatically know it exists yet. They find out when the first person from there, searches for your community (search syntax is given in the community sidebar: !community@instance <-- note the ! at the start). Once someone subscribes, it shows up in that instance's All feed.
To get the word out to other instances you can post in the various relevant communities as well as make sure to drop the link into any relevant conversations where people might be interested in checking it out. Since you have at least two accounts, if you create a community on one of your instances you can also use your other account as a shortcut and search for it yourself on the other instance.
I moved off lemmy.world after looking for a large-ish server in the same country as me, and the difference in load times has been really quite impressive.
It's completely completely broken for me on what I believe are the most current versions of both Jerboa and Liftoff... Let's me browse as anonymous and try to sign in ... And it acts like it works but it doesn't... Maybe that's an app problem but I've seen no updates yet from either and idk
My lemmy.world accounts been completely broken since the exploit. It wont it me log in on the browser (chrome) or either of my apps (jerboa, liftoff), so I think I'm gonna stick with sh.itjust.works
I've created multiple accounts and tried different instances out. If I am representative of the general population, I thought I had settled on one and then changed my mind like a week ago. A lot of it had to do with lag. If you can't use the thing, you try to use the other thing, and back and forth. I think it's a bit early to draw any conclusions from anything right now. Any software update or hack could turn things around at any moment. But, then again, maybe not. It's a maybe, maybe not situation.
Prolly also some people who heard about this fediverse thing and signed up to the most obvious instance and lost interest when it wasn't just like the old site.
I made an alt on a smaller instance when all the trouble with lemmy.world was happening, and I was thinking of making the alt my main, but I'm too lazy to port all my subscribed communities over, so this is still where I'm gonna be. I still browse from my alt sometimes, because the feeds are different.