I'm one of the people who has very recently tried Lemmy and decided to drop Reddit. Initially because I will no longer be able to use SyncForReddit, but now also because I just like the vibe a lot more here than Reddit.

I'm not a massively technical person, but I understood the broad concept of federation - different instances/servers that sync to form a big conversation/forum of sorts.

I heard a lot of people joining and saying positive things about lemmy.world, so I signed up there.....and that's it.

But, am I using it right? Is the idea to sign up in one place and use it to participate across the LemmyVerse/FediVerse? Or should I be seeking out lots of niche instances of interest?

I hear lemmy.world is the biggest instance. What if most people end up here, does that defeat the purpose? Is this inevitable?

You need a critical mass of users, so a quiet instance with few posts is not attractive. If I search for Xbox, there are lots of empty places or places with 3 posts. If there's one big one (often ends up being in lemmy.world) that's where I'm subscribing.

How are you using Lemmy, are you participating in a bunch of instances or just one?

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

It only really matters for the "local" feed which instance you choose. I don't really see much point to that one honestly, except if you're on something like startrek.website where "local" is "show me all star trek stuff", or something similar.

And yes, it is important to spread out the user base across multiple servers and not all end up on lemmy.world.

So I'd say find some smaller instance, maybe with a community actually physically local to you, and make that your main one. Or don't and stay on lemmy.world, I'm not your dad.

Perpetual plug to my userscript which changes all links to point to your home instance to make this even easier :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Omg fuck yeah, sick userscript! I'll have to try it tonight. Is this the beginnings of LES? 😁

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'll probably have post/comment links working tomorrow or Thursday :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Nice work dude, I see you have the code on GitLab so I can also check it out :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yeah as I noticed it became bigger than just a simple few functions I had to do some actual software development :D

Did just split it up into separate files with a build step at the end compiling the actual userscript.