Why is https://[your lemmy instance]/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 different for every instance? https://lemmy.ml/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 shows asklemmy at 2.09k users per month, but https://lemmy.directory/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 shows asklemmy@lemmy.ml at 1.51k users per month.
It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just “Join Lemmy” and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren’t and it feels like it should be the other way around?
There used to be a daily progress bar on the front page of Reddit to show if the sales of Reddit Gold that day were enough to pay for that day’s worth of server usage. I recall it usually hitting over 100%.
Remember that Chrome extension for YouTube that would replace YouTube comments with a Reddit comment thread instead? Couldn’t you do something similar between Reddit and a Lemmy instance? Scrape all the posts like this RSS feed but replace the comments with Lemmy comments?
I’m definitely not utilising all the features of being in the wider Fediverse yet, but I’m starting to get the hang of the Lemmy-verse. This federation stuff is really cool and definitely the future of social media in some form or another. Ironically this is closer to a real metaverse than Meta has ever got.
There are definitely rough edges everywhere, the joining process could do with being streamlined significantly and I have some issues with accounts being tied entirely to a single instance. Generally though this is perfectly usable and the main issue is the lack of content. It’s annoying coming back to my front page after several hours and everything is 16 hours to 2 days old, hopefully this will improve quickly as the migration gains steam.