Lemmy: What am I doing wrong or is it not me?

bennysp@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 10 points –

My disclaimer is that I am excited using the fediverse as alternative from Reddit (I have switched to Mastodon from Twitter).

I have been trying a combination of lemmy.world, kbin and a lemmy app like MemmyApp. Each one, I look at "All" and try various things like "hot", "active", "top day" and etc. Each one produces different results. And it is not even close. Rarely are there same posts across each. Also, on lemmy.world, after I sort on one of these, a few seconds go by and it won't stop scrolling with a blast from same communities and users.

So.... what is it I am doing wrong? How do I make my experience more enjoyable? Am I the only one?

(Note: I am aware that kbin/lemmy have their own local and therefore, that would be different, but the "All" filter?)

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my limited understanding is that the federating of information between disparate instances is not real-time. it takes a while for things to filter through the fediverse

Its definitely different, and it's been crazy active the last few days. Have you subscribed to a healthy amount of communities? Then you can sort subscribed and at least know what your getting. I subbed to a ton.

I have been sorting by all > top day, new, active/hot, depending what im doing. It's become fairly predictable for me, but tbh, I am mostly here for the comments so, my needs may be different. I am finding it pretty intuitive actually.

I think for now it’s working as intended. There is an unprecedented amount of new users, after all. I imagine that over time, probably by the end of the year, communication between instances will be much more seamless once bugs get squashed

I keep getting that "blast" of posts you describe, too. Glad it's not just me. Probably just growing pains as others have said

It's a known bug; you can work around it by navigating to page 2, then changing the 2 to a 0 in the url. Page 0 is basically page 1 but without the clearly-broken auto-update feature.

"All" will be different on different instances - it's basically all of the communities/magazines that anyone on that server follows. On large servers this'll cover just about everything but not on smaller servers. Plus there is probably a lot less cross-subscription between Lemmy and Kbin than within each. The two may also have different algorithms for the hot/active lists.

The scrolling thing is a bug with Lemmy. It's been resolved with version 18 but some instances, including lemmy.world, haven't updated yet.

@bennysp my experience is that kbin has more new Lemmy posts (under all and new) than Lemmy has (also under all and new).

Welp, I'm new too, but I think this is more or less working as intended.

The federation mechanism is a "best effort" thing, so there's literally no guarantee that you'll get the same view for the same thing loaded through two different instances.

I started writing a userscript to "normalize" URLs so clicking on a link to kbin.social on a different instance would transform the link URL to keep you on your original instance, but with the distinct possibility of missing content because of it, I'm not sure it's actually a good idea.

The auto-refresh-and-btw-lemme-close-the-image-you-were-looking-at behavior isn't happening on every instance, but it definitely happens on lemmy.world. Maybe this is an artifact of the websocket approach, and that'll go away in 0.18? No idea.

At this point, the usage pattern I'm leaning toward is to find good communities/magazines, subscribe to them, and stick to the "subscribed" view. The most consistent results will always be with subs that are local to the current instance, so if most of your subscriptions are on instance X, you probably don't really want to have your account on instance Y.

That is helpful and makes sense on different instances, but I do have some concerns on the "best effort". I see posts across other instances and it says a disclaimer at the top that I may not be seeing all content. This is not a great experience if I have to always go to another instance to view ALL content and then, if I want to interact with said post... It is just not a great thing for Fediverse if that is the "acceptable response" from it. And I see you are trying to work around that with some uncertainty too (url normalizing). I laughed at the auto-refresh... bit, because I didn't mention that, but I am seeing that too. :)

I appreciate the the perspective, help and pointers.

One thing I do still want is that "surprise" of finding something on a hot/active topic that I may not be already following. Even on "the other site", I would flip back and forth between my Home and the top/popular to find new things to follow or get a quick chuckle.

I agree, but there's a non-zero chance I don't have a full picture of things yet, and maybe things aren't that bad. Or won't be that bad.

On the surface, inconsistencies like this seem like they might encourage users to group themselves on a few massive servers that have a lot of local content guaranteed to be consistent rather than spreading themselves across many small instances (power law graph goes here.)

But maybe not. I don't know. Maybe the system naturally converges toward clusters of interests where each instance is primarily focused on a few things, and while the federation mechanism exists and is mostly useful, it is a secondary feature behind a primary use-case where folks preferentially engage with their local communities.

Overall, I wonder how much of all this is colored by expectations we've developed while using Reddit.
All this fediverse stuff is built on very different foundations than things like twitter or reddit, and while it's easy to gloss over it because the UIs look superficially similar, they've made some fundamentally different trade-offs.

But maybe the consistency stuff could get better over time too. Maybe there'll be a smoother experience to better flag when and why things are inconsistent ("instance X hasn't sent us activity updates since T", "instance X has partially defederated from us", etc.), and maybe even offer targeted palliative measures rather than a generic disclaimer.
All this stuff is under fairly active development still, so there's hope.

Great thoughts on all of it. I am definitely trying to keep and open mind, but also trying to find an experience that works. With that said, I do understand that it is growing too.

Part of my questioning is more about understanding "what is to be expected" as per design vs "what is a 'known bug'". So maybe I should have made that clearer from the start too.

Side note - I saw someone post a meme on here where they showed that Lemmy is the power of multiple instances bound together, but that felt "off" given the current experience. It feels more like they are interwoven, but the strands are a little loose still. My hope is that over time that changes and the data in each community, at the very least, is consistent.

I remain very hopeful for sure.