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?
The idea is you can subscribe and interact with any instances, no matter what instance you came from
Sure, most will jump the bandwagon into lemmy.world… at least for the near future. I can say that with confidence because when you search “how to join Lemmy”, most guide will point you to Lemmy.world instead of… lets say… coughLemmynsfwcough
Over time, some will eventually move to other instance (mostly just the account, because they want ‘cool username’ for themselves). Sooner or later, things will balance themselves out.
Maybe you can even start by deploying your own instance, for no other reason than claiming your own ‘cool username’.