This roughly corresponds to my guide “My 12+ steps to improving your Reddit experience”, but in this case is written as a brand new Lemmy user (as of 6/18/2023). To be clear-- I’m a Redditor who’s interested in giving Lemmy a full test drive, entertaining the idea that I might fully move here one day.
EDIT: Here’s an update, two months later. The question was “How do I find the FV?” and here’s my reply:
I agree with others that it’s not yet suited to take on a mass exodus of Redditers. While the basic look & feel is mostly there, many advanced features are *not*, including ones provided by the great “RES” (Reddit Enhancement Suite).
For example, right now there’s only the “All” or “Subscription” streams available, and no “multi-reddits” or “Friends” streams. Multi-reddits in particular were incredibly useful, as they provided a way to build an unlimited number of custom-themed subreddits.
Another problem it seems to me is that the ability to page through a stream is very limited right now. Only 20 topics show up on a page, and getting to new content can be a bit of a chore unless one keeps the tab open, I suppose. The current inability to hide posts just exacerbates all that.
Btw, HERE is an interesting thread, with lots of people making interesting points about what they like & dislike, currently.
I’m not quite done with the new comments above, so I’ll add more, later. Original comments are below:
Now let’s see what I can figure out. :D
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I’m currently using “lemm.ee” as my homebase, but there are in fact almost 900 current “instances” (i.e. servers or server groups) within which to access “The Fediverse.” [see handy chart] That said, this particular instance (server) seems to be one of the best across the Fediverse, and so far I’m very happy with it.
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As I understand it, on any of these instances, someone can create a user name just like mine, and create “communities” (like subreddits) named exactly like other communities on other instances. This confuses me on one hand, but OTOH, seems like a natural property of the P2P nature of the Fediverse. [NOTE: Haha, you can create anything, anywhere, but populating it with material? Good luck, son!)
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As has been explained to me, my posts & comments made on this one particular instance (again, “lemm.ee”) are stored locally to its servers, but also copied to other instances just after my submissions are created. In other words, if this instance permanently goes down for whatever reason, at least some other instances will preserve any content I’d created while they were online.
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There’s no restriction at all (far as I know) from creating multiple ID’s across multiple instances, and indeed, it seems to be a pretty decent way of ‘locking in’ my username across The Fediverse, such that bad actors & copycats will have less opportunity to cause trouble for me one day.
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I’m not sure whether the same approach is a good idea in terms of communities. I’d rather think not, actually, as I see little reason multiple name-matching communities shouldn’t exist across multiple instances. Friendly competition and all that… let the users decide where to go.
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As a longtime Redditor, finding communities can be tricky, but one can do it from both one’s home instance, as well as resources like these: [1], [2]. So far I find that those latter sources catch more communities than my home instance, with the caveat that one most manually paste in any communities that one wishes to subscribe to. So again, the decentralised nature of The Fediverse makes the Lemmy experience slightly trickier than the ‘one-stop-shopping’ nature of Reddit. Still, that’s also the safeguard against Lemmy trying to go profitable one day, and against CEO power trips, as there isn’t a CEO in The Fediverse.
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As a small-time Reddit content creator (commonly graphic novel reviews and sample scans), I’m not quite sure where to post new material. For example, most of the subreddits I’m used to publishing in don’t seem to exist as communities here… yet! My working idea then is to try publishing either here, on my homepage, or possibly on my blog, than cross-posting my content to a range of communities here that might be able to appreciate it. I’m frankly not a huge fan of that, but am unsure what other approach would be best at this time.
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I have utterly no idea how able Lemmy’s instances are going to be able to handle sudden influxes of Rexxiters, for example when the 30th comes, and the 3rd party apps die en masse. For example, our local admin seems to imply here that there can be a certain amount of strain to these things, and I recall seeing a couple admins on a Dutch instance publicly complain that the increased traffic has made it much harder to meet their agreed-upon development goals with the NL govt, which cuts in to their actual salary. As I understand it, that’s because their two-man dev crew has been almost totally consumed with customer support and patching bugs & stuff.
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This is perhaps a little premature on my part, but I’m going to add it anyway-- knowing how Reddit mgmt operates, is it possible they one day make a concerted effort to crash the Fediverse via bots, spam, DDOS, false actors, false controversy and whatever else? Do the body of Lemmy instances have a way of combatting things like that. I wonder. EDIT: Even now, there’s evidently massive bot signups going on. Whose are they, exactly? My admin is responding thusly.
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My eyes aren’t the best, so I’m happy to see that in Chrome (and hopefully Firefox), increasing text size up to 125% works well with Lemmy’s sidebar. (CTRL-plus and CTRL-minus to play around with that)
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Some major features of Reddit (and RES) seem to be missing, such as the ability to hide posts and to create “Multi-Reddits,” which are custom streams, i.e. a different set of communities in each stream.
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I see talk of Kbin 1) currently having better features than Lemmy, and 2) Lemmy core devs & their home base having a questionable stance on human rights. So at the very least, seems like a good idea to make a Kbin acct as well and try surfing from that side of the Fediverse.
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Despite fiddling with sort methods, the ALL stream seems to pull new content to the top (beginning) of the list, which makes it a lot harder to keep my place and make sure I’ve glanced at everything. In other words, it means that I need to scroll both forwards and backwards to find new content. Very strange.
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Despite whatever little kvetches & complaints I’m making, it must be said that I also feel a sense of excitement & empowerment, hanging out here and learning how things work. On Lemmy, I feel like I’m part of something legitimate, maybe even noble, as opposed to being part of a corrupt machine, as with Reddit. And while I’m still confused about how lots of things work, I’m loving the challenge of learning and adapting.
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Altho I’d hoped to full transition over in a relatively short amount of time, I’m coming to realise that it’s probably best to see the Fediverse as a long-term adjustment (and investment). There are multiple reasons for that, such as the general learning curve, hooking up with communities that correspond to my favorite subreddits (many of which don’t exist yet), and letting the Lemmy & Kbin suites & instances improve and catch up to the load of Rexxiters.
–Johnny
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if you do start a community that you want to expose, you could make a post about it here: https://lemmy.world/c/newcommunities
Thanks for the guide! If I read this Lemmy’s docs correctly, your posts and comments posted to a community are copied to another instance if there’s a subscriber on the instance. In other words, the post will only be sent to subscribers.
Did you make that “handy chart”? That is so good!
I have a very natural method of finding new communities - I browse All and when I see interesting posts about a topic I am interested in I can go to the community it is posted in and subscribe.
This is a great perspective that a lot of us feel (and may be holding back others). As far as where to post on your last point…I hope the Lemmy users don’t overbias on a bunch of niche communities. That took years for Reddit…we need to start with more generic communities until they saturate and organically break out.
That is also a unique benefit…we can get exposed to more ideas and topics versus the potential vacuum / groupthink reddit has turned into.
Appreciate the reply!
Do you possibly have alternative ideas on where best to post my new content? It bothers me that if I want it to get seen, I might have to spam a dozen generic comics communities. Thing is, I’m not sure there’s any good alternative right now.
And I forgot to mention above my idea to -also- post new Lemmy content back to Reddit, to help get eyes over here. I’m hopeful that if enough of us do it over time, it could really help shift userbases.
Btw, I added two more points to the OP, altho they’re a bit gloomier in nature. :/
I would start by checking out https://lemmyverse.net/communities – not knowing exactly what your posts look like, why not include in /c/comics or similar?
As I understand it, on any of these instances, someone can create a user name just like mine,
Nope, since you are @JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee and not @JohnnyEnzyme@randominstance.com.
Best way to view them is like an email address. John.Snow@apple.com is certainly not the same man as John.Snow@android.com.
No no, that’s what I’m saying. That aside from the instance details, usernames can look exactly the same at a glance.
That’s kind of a good point, but at the end of the day they have to be viewed the same way an email address would be. More of a UI challenge than anything else. I would keep that in mind before trying to snatch up your user name on other instances.
Some more food for thought: ultimately, the security of your user name rests with your instance admin, who will be able to impersonate you from the instance they adminstrate if they wish, theoretically. So by spreading your user name around different instances, you are actually increasing the attack surface by exposing it to more instance administrators.
This is also why it is a great idea to host your own instance if you can, because then you can be the administrator of your own instance. That’s a heavy ask for a lot of people, but I think it is reasonable if you have serious reasons that you need to be on the fediverse and have hardened security against being impersonated - much better than leaving it up to another party, even a large corporation with security controls.
Still, I would love to see a signing mechanism make it’s way to lemmy and kbin for posts so people could verify the user it came from.
Very interesting. Thanks a bunch for weighing in. <3
Hey, mind if I ask you a couple Q’s? If yes:
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Any idea what the typical beefiness (and therefore cost) of an instance needs to be to handle current & future load? For example, I recall my admin stating that his instance was in the cloud, which I took to mean that he paid a subscription to a server farm to host his instance, i.e. lemm.ee.
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I tried to sign up to a kbin.social community earlier today, and it didn’t seem to work the same way that Lemmy communities did. Specifically, it didn’t give me an opportunity to copy-paste a cross-URL in to my instance in order to subscribe. Still not sure if I didn’t bork something up, tho.
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Any feedback on my two ‘gloomy’ thoughts near the end of the OP? For example-- I’m hoping to bring my share of Rexxiters to the Fediverse in the coming days & weeks & months, but I’m a bit worried that the total sum of all such folks coming over soon might cause serious havoc with server load, etc.
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Also, as you can see, I might be a bit paranoid about Reddit / Huffman’s lackeys deciding to fuck with the Fediverse at some point, but hopefully that’s just me worrying too much.
Thanks for shedding any light upon this stuff, Sparking.
but I’m a bit worried that the total sum of all such folks coming over soon might cause serious havoc with server load
People join lemmy based on the impression join-lemmy.org gives to the average user. People think that if they join the most popular instance, they will see the most communities which causes a headache for everyone. Even I used to think like this initially till I read lemmy.ml’s pinned post but I can’t expect this from everyone.
If this perception can be cleared right during the join process and the load is distributed in some intelligent manner, this point will not be a huge issue.
I’ll try to answer.
- I haven’t personally tried to host a lemmy instance yet, so I don’t know the system requirements from experience. I can find them listed either. My understanding is that it is pretty lightweight, but keep in mind that these instances need to be beefier the more that people use them. I am on lemm.ee as well (makes sense that we both are because that is where this post is hosted) and the guy running it seems to know what he is doing, and was able to set everything up on a cloud service. He mentioned that he has an autoscaling system set up (horizontal scaling), so he probably has a load balancer and some autoscale groups that will spin up compute instances that run the lemmy service as traffic increases, and can scale them down as traffic decreases. He said that it had a cost of $147 per month, but that might change if more or less people use the instance.
You don’t have to go about it this way. Keep in mind that lemm.ee is allowing open sign ups and has the goal of allowing tons of users onto a single instance. I’m planning to self host an instance in my server cabinet. I won’t be doing any scaling for traffic, but I am also not going to let others create accounts on my instance - it will be a private instance.
- kbin is a different piece of software than lemmy, but what makes everything in the fediverse connected is the ActivityPub protocol. I haven’t had the oppurtunity to learn too much about it, but my understanding is that ActivityPub works by providing standards for individual pieces of contents and users, and exposing tagged fields that software can interact with over an API. So kbin has magazines, and lemmy has communities, but they are each a collection of posts that are activity pub content under the hood. What is interesting is that even though kbin and lemmy are different pieces of software under the hood, they can both view each other’s posts because it is all the same activity ActivityPub posts behind the scenes. Kbin also has functionality designed to view posts as what it calls “microblogs”, which you can use to view stuff that is created on mastodon as well.
This is both the really interesting part, as well as the experiemental and cutting edge part of the fediverse. It would be like if you could view and upvote a tweet directly from reddit, instead of making a reddit post linking to the tweet. But since it is so new there are still a lot of kinks, experimental features, rough UI features, and bugs surrounding it. This will probably get better over time if development can continue on all these platforms. I wouldn’t worry about choosing one - in the long run we will probably have really great pieces of software that can view ActivityPub from all over the internet. It’s kind of like asking what a website is - websites are delivered to browsers over http, but I doubt anyone would call a website simply a collection of html documents.
If you want to view a remote lemmy or kbin magazine from your own lemmy instance you have to use the url format https://[your.instance.domain]/c/[remote.instance.community]@[remote.instance.domain]. So if I wanted to view mildlyinfuriating at lemmy.world, I would use the uri https://lemm.ee/c/mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world. Unfortunately, lemmy doesn’t make it very easy to back navigate to viewing a remote community from your own instance without editing the URL, at least in my experience. This is especially bad on mobile and the apps. But we have to give lemmy a break since it is so early in development, their are only really 2 major contributors working for donations, and the work that has been done so far is super impressive. I’m sure it will get better at some point, or maybe a new tool will come along that will make it better. Once you are subscribed to a remote community, it get’s a lot easier because posts from the remote community start showing up in your feed, and then it is pretty much like using reddit. Reddit also kind of has a subreddit discovery problem as well if we are being honest.
- I think we all ultimately want people to keep comming over to lemmy. Just let people know that it doesn’t matter what instance they join initially, because they can subscribe to remote instances. Lemm.ee is a good recommendation I think, because the stated goal is specifically to allow as many people to sign up as possible. They can also use something like https://join-lemmy.org/instances to find an instance.
It’s counter-intuitive, but my advice as this point would be to consider joining a smaller isntances, especially one that wants more users. You would think that going to a bigger instance would give you access to more content, and it is indeed easier to access local content than federation content because of the aforementioned URL shenanigans. But, once you wrap your head around federation, it isn’t that hard to start viewing stuff from remote instances. The real risk you run with the larger instances is that another large instance decides to defederate from it, and then you are unable to access it from the instance you signed up on. This is a risk for any instance, but it seems the large visible ones are getting defederated from certain instances over moderation concerns. There is always a risk that you could end up on an instance that gains a nasty reputation and gets defederated a lot, but then you should probably consider switching to another instance anyway.
The best solution would be hosting your own instance, and owning your own data, if you have the technical know how.
- We can’t live our life in fear-paralysis of forces out of our control. Spez is going to make his decisions and it is up to us to make ours. The only course of action is to evaluate what is going around you and to make up your mind to move forward. I used reddit for over a decade now, happily, and knowing that it was backed by a for profit company. I considered the reasonable service reddit provided to be worth trusting them with hosting public conversations I had with strangers on the internet. Now reddit is deciding that relationship isn’t working for them anymore, so I have decided to look for a new platform and found one in the fediverse. This technology, and the ActivityPub protocol did not exist when I started using reddit and social media, and we did not ever think that we would be in the economic situation where companies would change the way they did business for years. Things changed, I changed too, and now we have the opportunity to foster a forum and community out of goodwill. The federation process seems to be working to keep power and authority from being too centralized. And ultimately, if this doesn’t work out, I will just have to find another way to talk to strangers on the internet about interesting things, so it is not exactly a high risk activity. I’m worried too about the state of tech, the way tech research and development is funded, and the power that these incompetent CEO’s wield over so much electronic communication. But, I am also excited to use the fediverse and see what happens next.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I hope that provides some helpful answers.
Thanks much for that extensive answer. There is much to think about and reconcile with other info I’m coming across, but this really helped!
Out of curiosity, how do you think Spez and his goons would be able to foul up the fediverse? I would imagine the distributed nature of the software would prevent them from exercising too much influence. I suppose they could theoretically buy up the more popular instances, but users would still have a choice of avoiding compromised instances or just starting their own.
He could always try legal action against the developers. Other tech giants could also seek to subvert the open nature of it. Own the majority of servers, start spamming ad content through federation and bot accounts, astroturf, “seek, integrate and extinguish”… the list goes on and on, and certain unsavory interests are already trying to destroy the internet. But we keep moving forward. I am surprised that a viable alternative sprung up so quickly, so things are looking pretty good from here imo.
I’m sure they could throw a legal team at it, but as far as I can tell they aren’t infringing on anything Reddit would have claim over, and further I’m not entirely sure Reddit is using anything proprietary that they could claim is infringing on their IP (though I could be very wrong). The only thing I can think of is what you said, infiltrate different instances with bots to make an absolute mess. Here’s to hoping this doesn’t get FUBAR’d.
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