I’m very new to Lemmy, I’m trying to see how it all works and what happens here. But honestly I feel like it might be a little too decentralized? Like, I know it’s the point but I feel like this doesn’t make for the best experience. Communities can be on any particular instance, and you can have repeats of communities for the same things. This feels overcomplicated, but I understand why it’s that way.
Also, how many people are actually doing a full switch from Reddit? I personally don’t intend on leaving Reddit, I’m just leaving temporarily, but not for any specific amount of time. I think that’s what most people will do, or I guess I hope so, because Lemmy still has a long way to go before it gets good enough to make a competition, especially considering the drawbacks I said before, and I don’t want us to lose all those communities that went black indefinetly, even if I supported the decision.
The point of the blackout was to protest, expecting an end to it all, although many are already wishing for an end for Reddit altogether from what I can see.
Idk, I still hope Reddit doesn’t die tbh, I hope they listen to reason and backtrack a bit, or we find a way to bypass the restrictions somehow, I think I saw a revanced patch to many Sync work iirc, so maybe there’s hope still.
One thing to note is that while it is true that you can create duplicate communities in different instances, eventually one is going to be more successful than the others, and will end up being the one community everybody goes to.
I mean yeah, they just really have to make a seamless way to see other instance’s communities. From what I understand they have to be searched manually, at least for the first time, or use a separate site to search for them. And in Reddit a huge way to find new subs was with crossposts (which idk if they exist here) and recommendations you got on your feed (which many people hated, even if I think they were useful, if not we’ll implemented) so it’s not as simple
Keep in mind that it’s a new, evolving platform. It’s always possible to make improvements, especially when the user base is small
A separate site for community searching, if anyone’s curious is https://browse.feddit.de/
If you have your own instance, that is true. Otherwise, on a good instance, I’d assume the host has already taken care of linking all the communities. Especiall, because otherwise the posts won’t be aggregated.
That only works if they’re actually discoverable when you search for them, so you can pick the correct one. On reddit if you search for a specific thing, you get a list of all possible subreddits in one go. On lemmy… it really depends on the instance you’re on, and if anyone else on your instance has discovered the other communities yet. You never know if the search results are complete. Even https://browse.feddit.de is not always showing all the communities I noticed.
And even now I have to keep rechecking communities/interests I have already subscribed too because new duplicates get made all the time with new instances showing up.
I’m not sure if this is different on other Lemmy instances, but on Lemmy.ca I just need to click on “Communities” at the top, which brings up a list of all the communities. Then I can click either Local (Default) or All, which will bring up the community list for just my host or all Lemmy instances. I can also search as well for communities within that page.