I am new and trying to understand how Lemmy works. I am posting this from my lemmy.world account, on a lemmy.ml community. It seems like you can read, post, subscribe to whatever community outside of the instance you’re registered with. So… Why register on lemmy.world vs lemmy.ml or any other instance, if all communities are accessible to everyone?
Yeah I guess that’s what I’m struggling with, say for example I’m into baking and there’s a baking community here on .world, but maybe there’s another one on .ml and wait here’s a good one on .ca or something. So I’ll be subscribing to three different baking communities in three different instances, it seems a bit redundant/divisive? But maybe it’s just because it’s early days, and with time the “best” communities will conglomerate and people will know the “best” baking community is on the .ml instances, but the best cooking one is on .world, etc, instead of subscribing to multiples of the same.
I guess if you like to actually visit each community and look at their latest threads from there it could be an issue, this is presumably what the feature request for “multi-communities” is all about where in theory we could group them all together for our viewing pleasure.
I do think certain communities will become the “main” ones for each topic though over time, we just have to try and make sure they’re spread around and not all just on lemmy.ml.
There’s a similar thing going on with gamedev communities, I’m subbed to at least 4 or 5 at this point. But in reality nobody was posting much to any so I just picked one at random to post in and kickstarted some convos, now it’s the only one that seems to see any action. But since I’m subbed to all of them, if one of the others does suddenly kick off, I’ll see it in my feed anyway and won’t miss out so having four of them doesn’t really seem like an issue.
I don’t think I’ll be visiting each community to look at each thread, but in my experience on Reddit, once you’re subscribed to a certain number of communities you won’t be able to see them all in your feed, so that’s why I wonder :) Though I guess Reddit has some kind of interest algorithm to show you stuff, as I noticed that if I visited a subreddit directly it would then start coming up in my feed more often - I wonder if Lemmy would have the same kind of thing - the more you interact with a community the more likely it is to come up on your subscribed feed.
Yeah the current sorting options aren’t ideal for surfacing posts in small communities if you’re also subbed to large ones, but I’ve seen a few threads with the devs and contributors talking about better ways to handle that so fingers crossed someone comes up with something clever 🤞