I'm one of the people who has very recently tried Lemmy and decided to drop Reddit. Initially because I will no longer be able to use SyncForReddit, but now also because I just like the vibe a lot more here than Reddit.
I'm not a massively technical person, but I understood the broad concept of federation - different instances/servers that sync to form a big conversation/forum of sorts.
I heard a lot of people joining and saying positive things about lemmy.world, so I signed up there.....and that's it.
But, am I using it right? Is the idea to sign up in one place and use it to participate across the LemmyVerse/FediVerse? Or should I be seeking out lots of niche instances of interest?
I hear lemmy.world is the biggest instance. What if most people end up here, does that defeat the purpose? Is this inevitable?
You need a critical mass of users, so a quiet instance with few posts is not attractive. If I search for Xbox, there are lots of empty places or places with 3 posts. If there's one big one (often ends up being in lemmy.world) that's where I'm subscribing.
How are you using Lemmy, are you participating in a bunch of instances or just one?
Instances can defederate. For instance, lemmy.world was defederated from beehaw because of a bot influx. So if you liked what was on beehaw you’d need another account there.
But generally you only need one account in one instance to see most everything.
So pretty much right now I can't see any content on beehaw correct? Or can I just not interact with anything from there?
Right now, until such time as they feel like they have the mod team/tools to handle the influx, you won't be able to see any new posts or comments from Beehaw or its users.
There are old pre-defederation threads from maybe a week or so ago that you could even comment in, but no one on Beehaw's side would be able to read it until they refederate because your instances aren't passing that information between each other.
If you both comment on a post from a neutral instance, both of you can see and interact with every other user, but you shouldn't be able to see each other.
I can still see some of the posts from Beehaw. Can someone explain?
Since lemmy.world didn't defederate from beehaw you can still see posts and comments. But if you go to make a comment on a post from beehaw people on that instance won't be able to see or respond, only people from your instance or other federated instances. Hopefully that explanation helped, it's hard for me to explain some things through text.
Thanks. That clears a lot of thing up.