I really want to like lemmy, but it’s difficult. I’m new to all this fediverse thingy, and I might just have old habits and perceptions how things should work but… I keep seeing the same posts more than once, iOS experience is not that good really, sometimes I see dead posts from 2 years ago for some reason, despite having subscribed to like 30 communities there aren’t that many new posts to read.
Part of it probably that subreddits had millions of people so a lot of posts every minute, but it still feels underwhelming.
It’s not as doomscrolly. Maybe I should find something else to waste my time on haha
What is your experience with lemmy? Maybe I just do things wrong. Let me know
The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example. Lemmy should prevent this, community names should be unique, it should have an index of all the Lemmy Fediverse where instances can lookup if a community exists instead of waiting for a user to import that community to his instance. Something similar to what BTC does with the decentralized ledger.
I agree, to an extent. You’re right in that if you were part of the vibrant community of /r/piracy then it’s miserable to see it shatter here on lemmy. That said, this only applies if you’re expecting lemmy to be a 1 for 1 reddit replacement. For this type of community to remain cohesive, /r/piracy would have had to spin up their own instance and in /r/piracy direct everyone to lemmy.piracyinstance.whatever.
You can’t really “fix” this in a central way because even if you did, it would be trivial to create an instance that would allow duplicate community names. Also, I can see a lot of use cases for lemmy which do not intend to be federated.
That said, it’s not necessarily as big a problem as it appears, if you just accept that this is how the fediverse works. There’s no single source of control, so of course people can create 147 different /c/piracy communities if they wish to. Once you accept that, then it’s not really that difficult to subscribe to all the /c/piracy communities you can find.
The problem itself could be diminished by a few new features which I feel certain will emerge in the future:
I think that makes a lot of sense. Reddit was also like that, I moderate /r/me_irl, rival of /r/meirl. But now you can also use the same names if you want.
What about usernames though? Are they universal throughout Lemmy?
Usernames are only universal in the same way an email address is. Any instance can have an @citizenpremier but only you can be @citizenpremier@lemmy.ml.
I don’t mean to be a douche about it but you’re still thinking about it in a very corporate-social kind of way. For something to be universal it requires a central point of control, which doesn’t exist in the fediverse.
Having ‘no single source of truth’ is part of the joy.
If you’re not happy with /r/cars moderators banning everyone who drives a Skoda, then you’re out of luck. Here in federation land, you can just go to a different lemmy.something/c/cars place.
Of course you can still follow and interact with all the /c/cars communities from any Lemmy instance (and interact a little from Mastodon).
Part of the issue is that we hardly have enough people to sustain one random community, let alone several semi-independent ones. That barrier alone will turn others away and the cycle of not having enough souls will repeat itself
Right, but everyone can follow the lot, so there’s no need to divide.
I think what they really need is an autosubscribe, so you can autosubscribe to /c/Piracy on all federated servers. (Then of course be able to block certain instances if they’re horrible)
I love this idea, but you would need a list of communities for a given topic, and some way to curate it.
Fragmentation is definitely annoying, but if names had to be unique across the entire Fediverse then you would likely see a huge amount of name squatting where someone mass creates community names just so they have control of them. The way it is now, eventually one community on one server will likely end up becoming the defacto one when it is moderated well and a significant number of people flock to it. I don’t think the fragmentation will be a problem in the long run.