A lemmy instance will only show communities that someone’s has previously searched using the full url. You can find a list of all available instances here: http://browse.feddit.de/
To add, after finding them, you then have to copy the fed link, search for it, and then wait for it to be fetched (takes a few seconds, usually doesn’t require clicking search again, just waiting)
How is this expected to become popular if you need to go through all of that? I figured I could just search for a topic then subscribe, but if they’re all separate then surely they’ll all just become segmented with time and contain duplicate communities in many cases?
UX and UI are both pretty bad for lemmy imo. It’s pretty early the development state, so while mastodon got a small but measurable amount of Twitter exiles, I expect far fewer for lemmy as it has far too many rough edges for now.
I disagree. I still prefer Twitter to mastodon even though I only use mastodon these days. I do already feel at home here on lemmy though even though I’ve only been here a day.
I partly agree, duplicate communities is something that needs to be addressed somehow.
Strongly agree on this one. If there’s already multiple gaming communities. Popular topics might have multiple communities on multiple instances very soon and that’s confusing for people.
I think it could be a good thing overall
each community might have a different culture so you can choose which to participate in
like r/gaming vs. r/games on reddit
both are ‘gaming’ communities but are not really the same in content
As long as it is like that, i would agree. But i fear there might be competing communities that are mostly similar. Might be that through Darwinian selection at one point the fittest community survives but until then it might get confusing.
yeah I’ll be interested to see how it all plays out starting on the 12th, and especially after July 1st
we will likely see multiple communities vying to be ‘top dog’ in their respective specialties
as far as I can tell this really isn’t a problem for other federated software like Mastodon because people just use hashtags over there instead of defined communities with rules like reddit/lemmy where people ‘join’ and generally hang out
either way I’m excited to see what happens
popularity is actually the solution to this specific problem. as things get more popular they will have been loaded up already.
you’re only able to have this issue at all because it’s new
Only the very first user to subscribe/search for a new community needs to do this. It’ll just appear for everyone else on that instance from then on.
And the devs are working on a solution to make this happen more automatically.
Segmentation was a problem on Reddit too. Anyone could make a sub with a similar name to compete with another. Users on lemmy will probably slowly gravitate towards one or two big communities for each topic. It’s just early days.
I think it’s quite an important point that it only needs to happen once. I’ve not seen that mentioned anywhere else so thank you
Ok, but question: If anyone can start up a Lemmy server, how do you expect existing servers to know about the new ones without someone explicitly making the connection?
There’s no central Lemmy mainframe that every server is connected to. There are no hardwired or mandatory connections, and there shouldn’t be. I’m the face of that, what alternative solution do you propose?
That’s really bad UX though isn’t it ? Probably something that needs to be looked into sooner rather than later.
Yeah I can appreciate the goal, and I can deal with many of the minor technical issues but this seems like a killer for me personally. The small community is already massively segmented due to the model, and I don’t see it getting better if each new person that joins up is on their own random instance and there’s no common way to cross them all and to dedupe magazines.
But anyway I don’t want to be too negative as I realise this is all fairly new but think I’ll leave my account active so I can try this again in a while but it’s not for me yet.
That was my next question :D, thank you both.
Well, they’re two different websites. I imagine that has something to do with it.
