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.

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!

I think what will eventually happen (I may very well be wrong) is that when there are several communities that are very similar on different instances (e.g. lemmy.one/c/aww and behaww/c/aww) one of them will eventually grow significantly bigger/more active than the other, and the other will be more or less abandoned, with its subs/mods moving to the bigger one.

That may not necessarily be a good thing, but over time I think thats what will start happening.

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.

I’m going down the same rabbit hole and have struggled trying to figure out the fediverse. The other comments on your post explain things well. From my experience, I had to research which instance was federated and populated with what fits my interests, then sign up for it. Jerboa doesn’t do well with it’s search function yet, and I almost exclusively use the app to browse (I did so with Sync for Reddit ((3rd party app)) too and never used the browser unless I was looking up specific questions), but I did find out that when using a web browser to login to my instance they have a community browser that lists every and all communities locally and federated where you just hit Subscribe to. Once I subscribed to everything that peaked my interests I went back to my app (Jerboa for Lemmy) and sorted by Subscribed and New (or hot). I now have an experience very similar to that of using Sync for Reddit.

To answer your questions about seeing the exact same communities (instead of a singular subreddit) to subscribe to, it’s just because each community is hosted on separate instances. Some of those instances are federated with yours (ie lemmy.world) but for users who are signed up on that particular instance may not have the same federations your instance has so they created their own version of the community.

Another comment on this post explains it well using minecraft as an example. (Idk how to cross-post or @ another user yet)

Let’s say they are - who cares? They write the software, they don’t run the server you are on unless you are on their server, so don’t be on their server then. That’s the whole point of federation. If one developer at some company you like is a tankie, you wouldn’t use that software?

Well, you can always put one foot on each side. Make an account on both, use both a bit.

kbin has a better interface, in my opinion though, I’m cheering for them!

1. The Lemmy project maintainers are communists, and quite possibly Marxist-Leninists, but I’ve never seen them make any statements denying genocide. They’re been fairly explicitly against genocide, and have made statements directly to that effect. Meanwhile, the actual software has seen contributions from many people from all over the political spectrum. Because that’s how the open source development community works.

2. Reddit’s seen significant investment from Tencent, a Chinese company with well-known ties to the Chinese government and the CCP. Whether the people running the company believe China has committed genocide or not, those continued ties are implicit support for the government’s actions (made even stronger by the Chinese government set to take ownership over a significant chunk of the company). They’ve been invested in Reddit for years, but that hasn’t stopped basically anyone playing the “evil communist” card against the Lemmy devs from using Reddit. In fact, it’s been used for a while now to try and convince people not to leave Reddit.

3. Reddit’s also seen investment from white supremacist and actual fascist Peter Thiel. He invested almost a decade ago. Once again, no one seems to have any issue with the politics of the people backing Reddit.

4. The politics of the Lemmy devs can be separated from the usage of the software. The software is free, contains no ads, and usage of it does not directly financially support the Lemmy developers at all. Meanwhile, Reddit investors who implicitly deny or actively support genocide both in China and in North America stand to make considerable money off of farming our content out to chatbot developers and/or selling their stake in the business to greater fools.

5. Beehaw defederated from like 3 Lemmy instances. Most of us on the fediverse still have unfettered access to their communities. All it takes to not be disinvited from their party is to not shit all over their rugs.

Mostly just wanted to make my first comment

I haven’t signed up for Lemmy. Between the Lemmy and Kbin I like this Kbin a heck of lot more and decided to sign up here.

I haven’t abandoned Reddit and I have no plans on doing so. I’ll probably be on both platforms if this one takes off or until Reddit becomes something like a Myspace. For now I’m just exploring here.

This is the first time I hear about the Lenny developers being pro-Russian. Do you have any source where we can look into it?