How do you choose an instance and does that have a significant effect on your Lemmy experience?
I originally chose to make my account on lemmy.world since all the content seemed to come from there. But I've since learned that I can fill my feed with stuff from any instance so it feels like it doesn't actually matter if I'm on lemmy.world or not. At the same time, Lemmy.world seems to be frequently under attack so I'm wondering if I should change instance but have no idea what I should even be looking for when choosing.
You are viewing a single comment
Smaller instance is generally better. I've got a couple of seeder scripts automatically federating content in order to populate my All feed, which definitely helps the place feel less empty.
What does this mean, exactly. I'm still trying to figure this all out. I'm on kbin.social. I'm hearing all about Lemmy and fediverse. I see helpful pictures that people post of clouds with arrows, indicating that there are different servers, but I'm confused as fuck.
I can't figure out if there are two version of /r/politics, if someone else could have my username, or if I can see everything on every server, or how do I control what I see?
If anyone reads this, which I don't think anyone will, I am really looking for a Ukraine update page. That's the thing that made me log into reddit every day.
Yes, there are multiple people that could have your username, and you can have multiple accounts with the same username. For example, this is my third TheSaneWriter account on this platform, my first was on the defunct instance VLemmy and my second is partially active on the instance lemm.ee. Same with /c/politics, there can be as many versions of that community as there are instances, though the largest will probably be on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world. Most Lemmy frontends have 3 feeds, Subscribed, Local, and All. Subscribed is only communities that you are subscribed to, you can subscribe to any community on any instance from any other instance as long as your instance hasn't defederated from them. Local is all of the communities on your instance, All is all of the communities that anyone on your instance has subscribed to. You can also block communities from any instance that you would like. Here's a fairly active Ukraine community, !ukraine@sopuli.xyz. There are other ones out there, but this one is the most active. I found it here: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=ukraine. Lemmyverse can see any community on any instance that is public to the internet, so if you are ever looking for a community feel free to check there.
This is the best explanation of the difference between Subscribed, Local and All that I've run into so far. I thought I understood the All tab but apparently that was a huge misconception I had before asking this question.
Reading this post should be helpful.
This is super useful, thanks for sharing! This should be included in an orientation like "first time using Lemmy?" or something, though I have no idea how that would be organized.