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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I'd argue one of the most pressing concerns right now is the lack of migration tools

Currently you can't just create an account on instance X and move to Y. You need to create a new account. Eventually if we get the functionality to migrate from one place to another, people will be able to spread out across the fediverse and the risk of a single big server going belly up reduced.

From a technical standpoint if one instance gets defederated from other instances, all the users on that instance are stuffed. Their content won't appear in the wider fediverse (so less engagement)

[–] RedSquadCampFollower 6 points 1 year ago

A lot of the fediverse reminds me of usenet and usenet was destroyed by spam. (Not by september(s).)

For my own purposes as a flesh n blood user I agree with you. However when I consider spam and its modern descendants, idk. Would it then be the case that any spam (etc) instance could just transport all its "user" data to a new instance?

load more comments (4 replies)