With spez ascending the last few remaining levels of becoming an absolute wanker, it’s about time I got more active and I have been wondering how should I be using Lemmy efficiently? Like many I migrated from Reddit and I was primarly using Apollo to browse through my subscribed subreddits.
Over here on Lemmy.one, I have subscribed to communities and I scroll through my feed by sorting “All > Top Day” because sorting “All > Hot” means I end up seeing the same threads.
Then earlier today I discovered https://beehaw.org/communities where I found many communities I would love to subscribe to but then I got confused because I am also subscribed to more or less similar communities on lemmy.one.
I think I am sort of struggling to wrap my head around how lemmy really works and where I should be hanging out. It was easier on reddit in the sense that if I wanted to go LOTRmemes, there was only subreddit but here on Lemmy, there seem to be multiple instances of the same community :D
To top it off, it is proving hard to login to beehaw [probably the server is under stress] with the same details I use to login into Lemmy.one.
Not to forget there’s also Kbin which I haven’t even begun exploring. Phew.
ps - my apologies if I am sounding slightly incoherent as this is all new to me. If there is anyone out there who has this all figured out, I’d appreciate any help here.
You don’t have to think of the servers as different entities, all servers are Lemmy, each one slightly different sure but you can participate in every server equally so nothing changes to you
It’s becoming painfully clear that federation is the most confusing part for new people. It felt less so with Mastodon but the Reddit migration seems to be bigger. (I don’t know since I was already on Mastodon a few years before the Muskaning) I think we need an easier way for people to understand how instances work.
Mastodons federation has become pretty seamless. Just browsing around, it seldom takes you off-instance.
Lemmy still does that a good bit, and it throws people off hard.
That makes more sense now. I was really lost around all these different servers and Reddit experience had spoilt me because it was so centralized by construct that I came in here expecting the same!
Maybe I can be of help with explaining how Lemmy and the federation works. (Hope I have this right, anybody feel free to correct me)
Lemmy itself is just the software used by the different servers (beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, etc…) that belong to the federation.
These servers can each have communities and users that belong to them, but these communities and users can all interact with and be interacted with from other servers. Example, I am currently logged into and browsing this post from the sh.itjust.works server)
So the communities that you see on lemmy.one are hosted on one server and the communities from beehaw.org are hosted on a different server.
Because of this setup, communities aren’t just as simple as Reddit (/r/wellthatsucks) because there can be !wellthatsucks@lemmy.one and !wellthatsucks@beehaw.org. These communities are different and run by different people.
Now the way the federation for the servers works is that in order for servers to know that eachother exist, communities or posts from one server have to be searched for on another one. (Ex. searching !wellthatsucks@lemmy.one while on beehaw.org) by searching for the communities, your server now knows they exist and will work in the background to sync those communities so that you can browse them from your own server.
The idea is that you only need 1 account on 1 server somewhere in order to participate in the federation.
Unfortunately, because of this system and the rapid growth from the Reddit exodus, communities have been splintered onto different servers. That is why LOTRmemes exist in many different places. They are all different communities.
In order to find the communities that you are looking for on beehaw, search for them while logged into your account on Lemmy.one. You’ll probably be able to find them.
Keep in mind, this federation works when the servers are okay with communicating with eachother. You will find there are posts talking about defederation of servers.
My home server is has been defederated from beehaw.org. I cannot find their communities or interact with anything on their server, and the same with them to my home server. Both of our servers however can still participate with other servers though, because only the metaphorical link between beehaw.org and sh.itjust.works is broken, all the others are still intact.
I hope this sorta clears things up a bit for you. Welcome to Lemmy!
Now what might really cook your noodle is the info that the developers of the Lemmy software are pro-Russian genocide deniers, and there’s a growing sentiment to not support that by dropping Lemmy in favor of kbin or something else.
Just as I was starting to get the hang of this, it feels like I stepped into another wasp nest.
Ookay, then let’s look at kbin, right? Well, there’s literally only ONE developer and the current version still very much a (good) beta version. So, not kbin either, then?
What’s left? Beehaw, who act like snowflakes and have disconnected from where growth and interesting stuff is happening?
I feel pretty lost in the sea of the fediverse right now. Go back to Reddit? Naw, not right either.
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The Lemmy project maintainers are communists, and quite possibly Marxist-Leninists, but I’ve never seen them make any statements denying genocide. They’re been fairly explicitly against genocide, and have made statements directly to that effect. Meanwhile, the actual software has seen contributions from many people from all over the political spectrum. Because that’s how the open source development community works.
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Reddit’s seen significant investment from Tencent, a Chinese company with well-known ties to the Chinese government and the CCP. Whether the people running the company believe China has committed genocide or not, those continued ties are implicit support for the government’s actions (made even stronger by the Chinese government set to take ownership over a significant chunk of the company). They’ve been invested in Reddit for years, but that hasn’t stopped basically anyone playing the “evil communist” card against the Lemmy devs from using Reddit. In fact, it’s been used for a while now to try and convince people not to leave Reddit.
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Reddit’s also seen investment from white supremacist and actual fascist Peter Thiel. He invested almost a decade ago. Once again, no one seems to have any issue with the politics of the people backing Reddit.
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The politics of the Lemmy devs can be separated from the usage of the software. The software is free, contains no ads, and usage of it does not directly financially support the Lemmy developers at all. Meanwhile, Reddit investors who implicitly deny or actively support genocide both in China and in North America stand to make considerable money off of farming our content out to chatbot developers and/or selling their stake in the business to greater fools.
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Beehaw defederated from like 3 Lemmy instances. Most of us on the fediverse still have unfettered access to their communities. All it takes to not be disinvited from their party is to not shit all over their rugs.
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Let’s say they are - who cares? They write the software, they don’t run the server you are on unless you are on their server, so don’t be on their server then. That’s the whole point of federation. If one developer at some company you like is a tankie, you wouldn’t use that software?
I think the algorithms are not quite doing what you expect, on top of server delays or whatever.
The way I am set up, I start in ALL and sort by HOT. If the post start to feel too familiar I will go by active, then new.
What I feel works the best however is to subscribe to all the communities that you are interested in (don’t be precious) and you will find that the subscriptions page has the content you want. It is nice, they don’t get lost, or you can jump into a single community and see all they have.
The most useful way to use lemmy of course is to post content.
I’m going down the same rabbit hole and have struggled trying to figure out the fediverse. The other comments on your post explain things well. From my experience, I had to research which instance was federated and populated with what fits my interests, then sign up for it. Jerboa doesn’t do well with it’s search function yet, and I almost exclusively use the app to browse (I did so with Sync for Reddit ((3rd party app)) too and never used the browser unless I was looking up specific questions), but I did find out that when using a web browser to login to my instance they have a community browser that lists every and all communities locally and federated where you just hit Subscribe to. Once I subscribed to everything that peaked my interests I went back to my app (Jerboa for Lemmy) and sorted by Subscribed and New (or hot). I now have an experience very similar to that of using Sync for Reddit.
To answer your questions about seeing the exact same communities (instead of a singular subreddit) to subscribe to, it’s just because each community is hosted on separate instances. Some of those instances are federated with yours (ie lemmy.world) but for users who are signed up on that particular instance may not have the same federations your instance has so they created their own version of the community.
Another comment on this post explains it well using minecraft as an example. (Idk how to cross-post or @ another user yet)
Some of those instances are federated with yours (ie lemmy.world) but for users who are signed up on that particular instance may not have the same federations your instance has so they created their own version of the community.
Is this why I can read this while on kbin?
kbin has a ‘federated’ instance that’s shared w/ lemmy?
i have no idea wtf I’m talking about. still trying to wrap my head around the fediverse.Yes. Kbin is federated with basically every Lemmy instance that exists, so you can use Kbin to view, comment and post to other Fediverse instances.
You can kinda think of Kbin as being a Lemmy instance with a different paintjob (it isn’t, but from a user perspective it’s not that far off): Kbin user wants to read/comment/post to Beehaw.org Gaming community? https://kbin.social/m/gaming@beehaw.org. Beehaw user wants to comment to Kbin Tech Magazine? https://beehaw.org/c/tech@kbin.socialHi there @JohnEdwa - I am a week late to respond to your comment but it helped me finally crack the basic level of understanding behind lemmy and kbin :) Not to forget the fact I can subscribe to different instances on Lemmy from lemmy.one which I signed up for when I joined Lemmy. Knowing what I now, I am able to check out other instances from Lemmy.one and subscribe to them!
