I’m trying out using my lemmy instance as a personal blog, more or less.

I have one community with pretty locked down settings and super SFW policy. Over time I will post things that might be of interest or that I want to show off. I selectively subscribe to some other communities on larger instances to get some visibility and be part of the conversation. But really Im using lemmy to drive traffic to my custom domain and as a way to SEO.

I have another personal use account on another instance I don’t own but that I align with philosophically. That’s where I keep my main collection of communities Im interested in.

I’d argue one of the most pressing concerns right now is the lack of migration tools

Currently you can’t just create an account on instance X and move to Y. You need to create a new account. Eventually if we get the functionality to migrate from one place to another, people will be able to spread out across the fediverse and the risk of a single big server going belly up reduced.

From a technical standpoint if one instance gets defederated from other instances, all the users on that instance are stuffed. Their content won’t appear in the wider fediverse (so less engagement)

We’re all figuring this out as we go! Since the great Reddit migration, we’ve already seen our first big drama with the Beehaw defederation. Some Beehaw users disagreed and left for other instances while users of other instances liked the move and joined Beehaw. The Lemmy fediverse is what WE make it for better or for worse.

The idea is you can subscribe and interact with any instances, no matter what instance you came from

Sure, most will jump the bandwagon into lemmy.world… at least for the near future. I can say that with confidence because when you search “how to join Lemmy”, most guide will point you to Lemmy.world instead of… lets say… coughLemmynsfwcough

Over time, some will eventually move to other instance (mostly just the account, because they want ‘cool username’ for themselves). Sooner or later, things will balance themselves out.

Maybe you can even start by deploying your own instance, for no other reason than claiming your own ‘cool username’.

I subscribe to communities on multiple instances. My main activity is on our niche instance. If people are happy signing up at lemmy.world and limiting themselves to the communities available there, I see nothing wrong with that.

That being said, I think if you search lemmy.world for wetshaving, as an example, our instance does show up in the results because there is federated cross-over (for lack of a better term).

I generally scroll through either local or everything sorted by “New Comments”. That’s why I’m replying to this two month old post, because someone else did, so it rose to the top. Feels like a combination of Reddit and a classic forum where you’d have posts that would get bumped by activity.

I’m on kbin.social. When I browse the tag “All”, I can see all Lemmy communities that federate with kbin.social and all kbin magazines that federate with kbin.social (including those belonging to kbin.social). It’s very seamlessly, and at some point you don’t realise you’re commenting in a post from a different server. But you can also browse those communities and/or magazines you’re subscribed to, in a similar fashion to Reddit.

I’ve made accounts on a handful of the bigger ones, just to have them. If one is inaccessible for any reason, it seems like a good idea to be able to log into other instances.

As for where I’ll spend most of my time, it’ll probably be in whichever is the most open and least likely to defederate others.

why is lemmy’s mascot a mouse? what’s the folklore?

i think the whole design of most of these the platforms missed out a better paradigm. It’s super restrictive and terrible for global discovery to have content communities and account communities be one thing. To me the design only really creates a good experience if you don’t need the fediverse and what’s outside your instance’s walls. Instances that people browse should ideally act more like a subreddit vs an entire reddit. People should add different servers from people or groups that run a community that you want to see posts from. Your main feed app would aggregate the diverse set of communities that make up a persons interests. the current system forces you to pick which restrictive box you describe yourself as, and then makes discover-ability and interactivity of everything outside of that bubble a terrible chore. I think maybe one day Nostr might be able to do something like that with its relay technology. Right now the relays focus more on being like a customized redundancy, but I think that community relays could work similarly. Nostr is weird because in ways it’s simpler but also not packaged so that it feels that way. It feels more complicated, but it’s early days.

I personally host my own instance, from which I interact with communities on many other instances.

This ensures my Lemmy account can’t just be decimated because my admin decided to stop maintaining their instance and I avoid defederation of content I’m interested in (including the infighting among larger instances.)

When I first started looking around here, I had no particular reason to pick one instance, so I didn’t. I initially registered with three (kbin.social, lemmy.world and lemmy.one). I was sort of planning to try them out and compare them before settling on one, but I ended up just rotating through them as the mood hit me, and I still use all three. And in fact, I’m planning on adding a couple more.

The thing I like about using multiple instances is that I can change my experience quickly and easily.

Mostly I go back and forth between kbin.social and lemmy.world, and they’re notably different. In the first place, they use different software, so the interfaces are quite different. The kbin software is a bit more feature rich but also a bit harder to get around in while the lemmy software is a bit simpler in both respects. And the instances are notably different, since .world is federated with virtually everyone while kbin.social has defederated from a number of instances, and most notably all of the botfarms.

So kbin.social has less content of generally higher quality, so it feels more serious and sedate, while lemmy.world has more content but a lot of it is botspam, so it feels more hectic and noisy. And I just go to whichever one appeals to me more at the moment.

And I’m actually looking for a couple more. I’d like to find one that’s deliberately reserved and sort of scholarly - high standards and serious discussion - and one that’s overtly goofy snd lighthearted.

And I have no doubt that if they don’t exist, they will.

I signed up on a smaller instance and only follow a couple of communities there, so I had to go out and search for things I was interested in. I pretty much just subscribed to anything that sounded remotely interesting, figuring I could leave later.

i mostly found stuff with https://browse.feddit.de/ and https://lemmyverse.net/, as well as just going to the bigger instances and looking at the local lists for anything interesting. So I’m following communities across several of the larger severs - lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, kbin.social, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ca, sopuli.xyz - and a few smaller ones that sounded interesting or relevant. Also fedidb.org is a nice tool to see info about the fediverse in general, including stats on Lemmy and Kbin servers.

I looked at a few instances a week or two ago and decided on fmhy as they seemed, by name, prepped for Reddit users. I then subscribed to a lot of communities often on other instances or kbin. I’ve found that my local feed is not what I want, lots of piracy & porn, and my subscribed feed has a lot of repetition as a lot of communities are cross posting stuff. Also uploading media seems broken.

I’ve created an account on a smaller instance with a local feed that is fairly quiet, inoffensive and a little more niche, which makes for a pleasant homepage. Switching to the ‘All’ feed gives a nice overview of the lemmy & kbin world.

I think I’m gonna avoid the subscribe button for a while and watch, post, comment & vote instead. The entirety of lemmy & kbin is about the size of a medium subreddit at the moment. I think the ‘All’ feed with some sorting options alongside the search and alert system may be a better way to navigate the current landscape than subscribing to 1234 communities with liberal use of copy & paste.

Alright so I have a question and can’t figure out a better place to post it than this comment thread.

Kbin is neat and I’ve enjoyed it a reasonable amount for the past week or so. But 80% of my feed is either news and discussion about how bad Reddit is (I know, guys!), memes about about Reddit, and depressing climate change articles that make me panic about things I can’t change. How do I filter stuff like this out of my feed on Fediverse communities?

Thanks.