My WIP guide to understanding Lemmy and The "FV" (Fediverse)

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

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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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