the thing to do, though, is just pick the one that best serves you and don’t worry about what’s going on on the other side of the fence
Not sure we have enough of a userbase and content posted to recommend that
Comment on Welcome, new users!
Kichae@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Welcome, new neighbours!
While checking out this wacky new space, I’d like to emcourage everyone to check out the Local tab, either at the top of your feed, or in your app menu. That’s where yoi’ll find posts from “communitues” (Lemmy’s “subreddits”) that are hosted on lemm.ee!
A lot of communities are on different sites, and are ported (tarriff free!) for your enjoyment, but as with most things, it seems, the most sustainable way forward is to support Local!
One thing that many people new to Lemmy and the wider “fediverse” (because it’s not just people on Lemmy-based websites that you’ll find posting in the communities here, surprisingly enough) struggle with is that each website on the network has its own “name space”, meaning that each community name can be used on each site. So, you can have, say, !pottery@lemmy.ca, !pottery@lemm.ee, and !pottery@lemmy.world. People often fret over “having to follow all of them”, and wanting ways to collapse them into a single forum. And for a really niche topic, that might make sense (the thing to do, though, is just pick the one that best serves you and don’t worry about what’s going on on the other side of the fence). But for bigger topics, this “splintering” is often a godsend, since we can all have real discussions about the topic in smaller spaces. And, of course, !politics is going to just be meanibgfully different on .ca vs .ee vs .world.
If you look to local first, it becomes much easier to stop worrying and love the bomb distributed network.
the thing to do, though, is just pick the one that best serves you and don’t worry about what’s going on on the other side of the fence
Not sure we have enough of a userbase and content posted to recommend that
It totally depends on how many people one needs in a community, and how much content they’re posting to feel served, doesn’t it?
The persistent FOMO that has floated around Lemmy for the past two years has not been a positive for the space.
yawn@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Respectfully I would disagree with part of your message - it sounds a bit like you’re encouraging some degree of instance tribalism, but the whole beauty of Lemmy is that I can be a regular and full member of
!something@lemmy.ca
with my@lemm.ee
account.For new members, I would have the opposite advice - don’t pay too much attention to what instance a specific community is on. Just treat each community as its own entity and each person as an individual.
The reason I bring this up is that I think useless instance tribalism can be a real issue on Lemmy sometimes. I have seen statements too often along the lines of “oh you have an account on X instance, so I will just ignore you”.
Kichae@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
It’s not “instance tribalism”, it’s making sure the website you’re using isn’t just some dumb terminal, and preventing the network from collapsing down to “lemmy.world and some empty tributes”.
It’s creating a space that is resilient to network splits, and accepting the fact that, at some point down the road, network splits will happen.
It’s seeing the fediverse through a “Local+” lens, and encouraging people to treat their local site as meaningful. And rejecting the illusion that this is centralized social media.
Look for what you want on other sites. But there’s no reason to look off-site first, if what serves you is already hosted locally.