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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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Fediverse
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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 3 years ago
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While I think there's some merit to the idea of talking about the fediverse on corporate legacy social media platforms, I think the best and most effective thing we can do is put in extra effort to engage with the fediverse itself, making posts and comments, building up new communities, and so on.
Reddit is no doubt getting worse and more closed off all the time. They treat their users like shit, or at least, like a resource to be harvested for profit.
But at the same time, Reddit users will sit around complaining about the platform until the cows come up, but when it comes time to do anything about it (like, for example, go check out the fediverse...) they don't ever take any action. And this problem isn't unique to Reddit either, people just love to complain about X on X, complain about Facebook on Facebook, complain about Tiktok on Tiktok, etc. It's hard to tell how much of that is just performative internet shit vs genuine addiction to their particular algorithm of choice, but in my view it's a real problem...
In other words, the question is "where we should be spending our energy?"
Should we be spending it on Reddit, trying to convince a bunch of people (who frankly range from ambivalent to straight-up addicted) that Reddit sucks? Or should we spend it here on the fediverse building the communities from the ground up?
Yeah, came to say more or less the same thing. I genuinely believe we're big enough where we don't need to tell people we exist. We can spend our time making the fediverse a better place so that anyone coming to look for an alternative to Reddit can look at the fediverse and think "that looks like a cool place".
I mostly agree, but I don't think it should be 100%. How did any of us get here? Almost certainly it was someone talking on the legacy platforms. We shouldn't spend time trying to convince people to join, but some people should spend some time spreading the word that the alternatives exist, and why they're better. Honestly, I don't think we want the users that need convincing. We do want the users who see the advantage and leave on their own, but they need to know about it first.
spreading the word is good, but those platforms censor us explicitly so it's of limited value. we need alternative ways
Most frictionless places to push for I think would be in sites like linktr.ee and in the bio of services that aren't direct competitors. Though also of minimal benefit if you're not a public figure (journalist, artist, developer, someone actively posting whatever, etc.)
I'd guess there is a balance to be struck.
lemmy world is the top result when searching reddit alternatives. I agree the best thing you can do is to make this a good active community, anyone who is done with reddit will have no trouble finding their way here.
The only thing that's confusing to me, is like there is not a pottery group on here but I have no idea how to make one. I tried to figure it out I have no idea how to make an instance or anything.
You don't need to create an instance (requires server administration skills), just a community (requires a few clicks). On the top right menu, there should be a create community entry.
Thanks I'll try it
when you search for a community, make sure you're searching "All" communities instead of just "Local" communities
this one already exists !pottery@lemmy.world
THANK YOU! I did look but I don't understand the fediverse at all. The instances are confusing. Like I joined discuss.online but is that the same as lemmy? Idk I think Reddit has so many users because it's easy and clear to use
Discuss.Online is one of the BEST instances! It has super-high uptime, meaning the admin team is very highly technically proficient. I left other instances due to very long delays causing problems, but I rarely to never experience such things with Discuss.Online.
In case it helps, Lemmy is the name of the software that is being run, which implements the ActivityPub Protocol that makes the Threadiverse (the threaded conversion style subset of the Fediverse, different from the microblog style of Mastodon) happen. Then Discuss.Online (DO) is the name of the "instance" (a server machine, running Linux as the OS). Our primary admin is I believe m_f, since jgrim the owner stepped back a bit to take care of his newborn child.
DO will share content with everyone else on the Threadiverse - not only other instances running Lemmy software but also PieFed, mBin, nodeBB, soon flarum may be added, and more. That's the beauty of federation: you aren't limited to just your instance, or even just Lemmy, you will access all of it, at once. I am not sure how your apps/clients handle things but I know that some of them hide the instance names - you can turn them on if you prefer to see them? It helped me get a better feel for the place - e.g. Lemmy.World holds about half of all users on the Threadiverse, and perhaps 90% of the most active communities (but people are trying to change that, to mix things up so that it's not all in one place like that!!).
I guess you already know that a "community" is like a "subreddit", which we denote like c/pottery rather than r/pottery, and then add the instance name. That said, the absolute best way to refer to it is with the exclamation point !, then community name, the at symbol @, then the instance name. This will make a link that anyone from any app can follow to navigate directly to the community. Like this: !pottery@lemmy.world.
DO would be happy to host a potty community here! See in the sidebar text:
That said, the other community mentioned, the one on Lemmy.world (LW) seems to be struggling mightily, with only a single person posting to it and zero active moderators (the single mod there hasn't posted or commented anything in the past 3 years). So you might talk to the single person that is posting, Arcanepotato@crazypeople.online (if I had put an at @ symbol in front of their name, it would have tagged them, sending them a notification and making it into a link), and see if they want to collaborate with you, either here on DO or over there on LW. Either way you might make a friend of mutual interest!:-D And/or just start posting in that community and see what happens:-). Others occasionally do that I see, it's just far more rare. If you did make a community here, expect to have to do similarly: people won't know right away and you'd be the only one posting for a LONG time, perhaps a year or more. The Threadiverse just does not have a large userbase to support communities, especially outside of tech or politics.
Thank you so so much for your reply. It helped me understand a lot better! I already am using discuss! I really appreciate your answer
You are very welcome! 🤗
To @mangobanana@discuss.online, if you make a community, either the pottery one if you feel like making a second one or any other community, feel free to post about the newly made community to either/both !communitypromo@lemmy.ca and !newcommunities@lemmy.world.
The more people follow a given community, the more it propagates whenever a post is made, and the more it propagates, the higher is the chance of someone feeling like interacting with the community or even following. And making the post to either/both communities helps giving an initial boost, though persistence in keeping posting until it gains traction should still be needed.
yes that's a part of Lemmy, that's all you need
It's kinda like email. Think of it like you're on Gmail, I'm on Yahoo Mail, and the pottery community is on MSN. We can all talk to each other because we do like
@mangobanana@gmail.com(in reality you're atdiscuss.online) and@die4ever@yahoo.com(I'm atretrolemmy.com). Usernames start with an@like Twitter, community names start with an!So when you do a "Local" search you only see stuff from "Gmail" like yourself, but usually you want to search "All" not "Local".
For viewing posts on my feed I prefer "Subscribed", this can be set as your default in your settings page.
have you tried an app on your phone? they can be a bit simpler to use than the website https://join-lemmy.org/apps
here's another community that might help !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca
I'm using the brave app, and thank you so much! So far I've been able to create a question on one of the groups! Yay!
I don't see your post. I think in Brave you would have to click to expand the Sidebar in order to make a post
for a phone I would better suggest Boost, Connect, or Summit
https://join-lemmy.org/apps
Yes I'm also using the boost app. I go back and forth depending what device I'm on
reddit is becoming like fb, bots and more bots.
If Reddit account is still available and you've got the time & energy to convince some people to switch - go for it. Make sure to not enrich Reddit with anything else. I've decided against this way, because I wasn't sure if I'm still talking to real people and the possibilities of spreading the word are very limited (posts often get deleted by mods).
Feels much better to feed the fediverse with content in my opinion.