Submitted 8 months ago by BothsidesistFraud@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Here are some specific questions.
Are the upvotes and downvotes I make, private? If I report a comment, is my report private?
Can someone follow me across lemmy instances based on my username?
If I want to make a community, is there a reason I would choose one lemmy over another?
Are the powers of moderators similar to reddit’s?
Where can I find a list of most active lemmy instances?
Any other differences from reddit I should know about?
Votes are semi-public. Not every instance makes them public, but anyone who is on an instance that does can see them.
Your comments and posts are public, I think your subscriptions as well, so if you need to protect yourself from harassment the remedy is just like reddit: have accounts that don’t overlap, one for politics, one for anime, one for whatever.
You should definitely only create a community on an instance where it fits. For example, a muni about fashion doesn’t belong on the the solarpunk instance, and a muni about ocean life doesn’t belong on midwest.social. Many instances are “general” instances, though.
Moderation here lacks the robust toolset of reddit, so it’s hard to compare them. But you can have posts and comment threads removed (lemmy removes whole threads, not just the parent comment); you can be banned from a muni or even a whole instance; but no one can ban you from all of lemmy. Unlike reddit, your home instance can be defederated, which is basically shadowbanning your entire server. Defederations and mod actions are public; other admin actions can be done stealthily by directly editing the database.
You don’t need an active “home” instance if you have a robust subscription list, honestly, because you can subscribe to munis on other instances.
Votes are semi-public. Not every instance makes them public, but anyone who is on an instance that does can see them.
I thought it was the other way? If your home instance makes them public they can be seen by anyone otherwise only the home instance admins can
Thanks. Is lemmy.world the best instance for general discussion?
Depends on what you’re looking for. Each instance has a general vibe of user, so while .world may be good for someone, .ml may be good for another, and beehaw.org may be good for another, and so forth! .world is generally a generalist instance, but ironically because people with more specific interests are already on more specified instances, .world is more likely to house people that don’t fit well into other servers, paradoxically creating a type and it’s own unique vibe.
No, probably mander.xyz. .world is plagued by bots and trolls and a lot of uses block it outright.
Others have already answered, so I’ll just add to it: the decentralized nature and lack of a profit motive help keep it from going downhill like Reddit did, but at the same time this nature attracts a lot of leftists and tech enthusiasts, so Lemmy overall definitely leans in that direction more than Reddit does.
originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 8 months ago
yes
no
somewhat, lemmy is still kind of new. mod abilities are being expanded.
https://fedidb.org/
lemmy cannot use the 'microblog' part of the fediverse (tweeting, communicating to Mastodon)
i use mbin for this reason. it can do both. https://moist.catsweat.com
cabbage@piefed.social 8 months ago
Not sure I agree with you.
There's absolutely good reason to choose instances wisely when making a community. Some instances defederate from others, and you want to make your community somewhere where you agree with the moderation policy. Also, it might be easier to immediately reach people on a larger instance.
If you create your community on lemmy.ml, you might not reach everyone because some people and instances have blocked .ml due to different philosophies. If you make it on Beehaw, you'll reach fewer people as they have a higher moderation standard than most, which could of course also be good for your community. Lemmy.world is more neutral in their moderation policy, but I'm sure there are pros and cons there as well.
I like it when there are specific instances for specific niches, as it gives the community control over who to federate with. But of course, that's not always possible.
They're not public at least. Few things on the Internet are truly private.