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?

  • Ulu-Mulu-no-die
    0•1 year ago

    (i.e. non beehaw members cannot post on beehaw, but beehaw members can go interact on other instances). But as far as I understand that’s not how it works.

    It depends, you believe that’s not how it works because you’re thinking of both sides defederating each other, but defederation is one-side.

    For example, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world but lemmy.world didn’t defederate from beehaw, so lemmy.world people cannot participate on beehaw but beehaw can participate on lemmy.world.

    It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, since lemmy.world people can still participate in beehaw discussions but only lemmy.world people would see those comment, I think also other instances that are not defederated can but I’m not sure about this.