I just don’t get how Lemmy is going to act as a proper replacement for Reddit.
I understand the basic concept of Lemmy and the Fediverse, and people are touting the concept of it being federated and not centrally controlled, but it is an absolute mess and nobody seems to have an idea about what to do with it.
How are communities going to grow if there isn’t at least some form of central management. Other than there being an underlying framework that connects the servers, they’re all just doing what they want.
Outside of the underlying framework, there’s no ‘guidelines’ or consistency. The servers have random names, and the main Lemmy.ml is telling people to register elsewhere.
How is this going to bring in a wider audience if people are being directed to lemmy.fmhy.ml, sopuli.xyz, or sh.itjust.works?
What is the purpose of the Fediverse when forums for niche interests already exist on the internet?
Does it make sense to have something like a ‘sports’ server that has communities for soccer, NFL, basketball, MMA? But then how do you get a consistent naming scheme that lets people know it’s part of the fediverse?
Maybe Lemmy could work as a replacement, but it seems like it needs a ‘flagship’ server with a group of people maintaining it to set an example. Then other servers that cover more specific areas, such as sports, can be set up and potentially work closely with that flagship group.
If this doesn’t happen, then I can’t see how this doesn’t just fizzle out.
P.S. I’ve also compared two different Lemmy servers and looked at the same post in a community, and there are different numbers of comments on each where they haven’t synced up…
I also wanted to post this to the main Lemmy community, but as I had to register via a different server, I’m not able to access that community from the server I’m using for some reason…
While there is no central authority, there is the Lemmy Community Browser which lets you find Communities across servers, like some central directory
That really should be built into Lemmy.
This is great - I wish I’d known about this sooner.
Check this out, it’s a great guide to finding new communities on Lemmy: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827
It includes a link to the community browser, discusses other non-intuitive community discovery tools, and how to subscribe to a remote community when you’re the first on your instance to find it, which is a bit janky as well.
This is great, too - this or something like it should really just be stickied on every instance. This answers so many questions that get asked.
Consider reaching out to your instance admins and suggesting that. There’s no central power who can make things happen on every instance, we just all have to coordinate together to increase the reach of good info.