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] 11 points 1 year ago

i think the whole design of most of these the platforms missed out a better paradigm. It's super restrictive and terrible for global discovery to have content communities and account communities be one thing. To me the design only really creates a good experience if you don't need the fediverse and what's outside your instance's walls. Instances that people browse should ideally act more like a subreddit vs an entire reddit. People should add different servers from people or groups that run a community that you want to see posts from. Your main feed app would aggregate the diverse set of communities that make up a persons interests. the current system forces you to pick which restrictive box you describe yourself as, and then makes discover-ability and interactivity of everything outside of that bubble a terrible chore. I think maybe one day Nostr might be able to do something like that with its relay technology. Right now the relays focus more on being like a customized redundancy, but I think that community relays could work similarly. Nostr is weird because in ways it's simpler but also not packaged so that it feels that way. It feels more complicated, but it's early days.