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.
Unfortunately I think it’s gonna be like this for a while as more and more people come and get exposed to this concept for the first time. Some folks have made very helpful introductory threads to guide newbies into the Fediverse, but at its core it’s a very different paradigm to “log on this website to see and interact with this one thing” that people have gotten used to.
I would say that in an update that allows you to redirect links to your own instance would be great, and I was told I was wrong thinking that would need an extension. Take link, copy to search wasn’t obvious for me when I started with Mastodon, but I eventually figured it out.
If I was an instance I would try and find a way to make a FAQ that linked maybe to Wikipedia or something that everyone can update for common questions, and a local community with FAQ posts for anything specific to that instance.
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!
You’re on street(ActivityPub), you have your home(lemmy.ml) and in your home there’s a bunch of rooms with people hanging out(communities), but you can visit other houses(Beehaw, kbin) on the street and hang out in their rooms too.
There may be rooms in different houses that have similar purposes, but you can freely go to whichever is best for you and aren’t required to stay home. It doesn’t matter if there are multiple rooms in different houses for the same purpose; just check them out and see which one works best for you
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.
Thanks @DidacticDumbass@lemmy.one
Just as a follow up to your comment - is there a link or something where one can see how many different Lemmy communities exist? I’d be up for casting the net wide like you said and right now I am mostly hanging around lemmy one.
One is https://browse.feddit.de
You generally shouldn’t be logging into another instance, you subscribe to beehaw communities from within your home instance. For example, https://lemmy.one/c/technology@beehaw.org
It would be great if there was a feature for grouping like-communities you’re subscibed to into a single feed. I’d almost bet that there’s a feature request somewhere about it
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.
You can’t login like that. You login on your home instance, your home instance is federated with beehaw and so has a “window” into all its content, but you are still grabbing it via your home instance. Put the url if the instance you want to join into your home instance search bar and the community will show up and you can subscribe through there. Same content but different url.
This is going to blow your mind too but…you don’t HAVE to create accounts on all those servers. I’m reading your post right now from Kbin.
This is all very confusing for me, too. I have an account here (posting from kbin), and one on lemmy.world. I assumed it was a good idea to make an official presence in as many of the instances as possible. So, is the fediverse just a content aggregator for everyone who officially joins it? How do you decide to cut off one or more of the different sites/apps if you wanted? I have a lot of questions I can’t quite formulate. I have sort of an intuitive understanding, but I feel like a kid using the Internet for the first time in another way, too.
Which I really like.
Think like this. On reddit, you had old.reddit.com and www.reddit.com, here you have lemmy.world, kbin.social, and many more.
On reddit you have (I making the names up): /r/politics, /r/politicaldiscussion /r/truepolitics etc. All about the same, but slightly different. Here you may have politics@lemmy.ml politics@kbin.social and many more.
The rest goes behind the scene - fedeverse decentralized, run on many different servers, but you can simply ignore all that, and think about all of that as names and themes.
Isn’t lemmy.one and beehaw still federating? Why did you make a second account on beehaw? Same for kbin, what do you mean you are not exploring it? All the content on kbin is accessible from lemmy.one?
If you have an account on one instance, you’re already able to access all the content of all other instances. Including kbin. Kbin’s content is already in your “all” feed, and you’re already exploring it.
Regarding many similar communities, that also happened on Reddit, just maybe on a smaller scale because it was a bit easier to see which subs already existed. /r/translation and /r/translator both existed, only one was actually used. Subscribe to all of them, I predict that over time (when things have calmed down) one or two will emerge as the most popular ones.
I think am sort of struggling to wrap my head around how lemmy really works and where 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
This one took awhile to wrap my head around as well. I’ll try to explain. Each Lemmy instance has its own unique communities. So you might find LOTRmemes on lemmy.one, lemmy.ml, and Lemmy.world. Each is a community of its own and unrelated to the community of the same name on a different instance. You can choose to subscribe to each one you find or only the ones that seem to fit your tastes.
This site might help a lot with finding the equivalent subreddits on Lemmy and Kbin. It even tells you which ones are “official” ones.
Personally, I use kbin because it seems to federate with the other services more easily. I see so many posts from other Lemmy sites on it, plus it runs pretty well. I also like how it gives you Fediverse-friendly URLs for sharing, with makes it easier to post things from Kbin and Lemmy on Mastodon.
I’m really confused about a lot of things here. For one, you’re talking about Lemmy, but from my perspective it looks like you’re posting on kbin.social.
When I started my kbin account, I searched for “magazines” to subscribe to. Most looked like they were either on kbin, Lemmy, beehaw, or shitjustworks. I had heard that Beehaw had become unfederated, so I unsubscribed from those communities, although I’m unsure why I was able to subscribe to them from kbin in the first place if they were I federated.
Now I’m reading that shitjustworks is unfederated too? Also Lemmy.ml? Can Lemmy servers be h federated? And again, why can I subscribe to them through kbin in the first place if they are unfederated? Do I need to be doing research on communities before joining to make sure they are federated? Does it matter if they aren’t?
Defederation doesn’t disconnect an instance from the whole network, only specific instances.
The news about beehaw defedrating referred specifically to beehaw.org defederating from shitjustworks and lemmy.world. Only users on those instances cannot see posts from beehaw, and users on beehaw cannot see posts from those instances.
shitjustworks and lemmy.world have not defederated from the fediverse at large, and are still communicating with all major instances other than beehaw.org.
Beehaw.org has also not defederated from kbin.social which is why you can still subscribe to and interact with them on kbin.social.The kinks really need to be worked out and it all needs to be made far more noob friendly. When I opened this thread, I was super confused. I’m currently reading it on kbin.social with my kbin account. And it looks like this:
https://i.imgur.com/2R8HjMa.png
I read the title, next to it: kbin.social. But obviously this thread isn’t on kbin. It’s on lemmy. Still showed up in my feed, even though I’m not subscribed to m/asklemmy. You’re now saying beehaw is unfederated, but I’ve also subscribed to stuff on beehaw from kbin.
I assume it’s largely because it’s still early days, but oh boy. I’m relatively pc literate. I grew up using dos, have installed linux, and have no problem using the commandline in windows or osx. I’ve seen people far more pc literate than me getting confused by it all.
I can only imagine how confusing this must be for casual users.
To use the ever popular email analogy, trying to log-in to beehaw with your lemmy.one credentials is like trying to log-in to gmail using your hotmail account just because you want to send an email to someone with a gmail address.
