Fediverse

I’m trying out using my lemmy instance as a personal blog, more or less.

I have one community with pretty locked down settings and super SFW policy. Over time I will post things that might be of interest or that I want to show off. I selectively subscribe to some other communities on larger instances to get some visibility and be part of the conversation. But really Im using lemmy to drive traffic to my custom domain and as a way to SEO.

I have another personal use account on another instance I don’t own but that I align with philosophically. That’s where I keep my main collection of communities Im interested in.

I subscribe to communities on multiple instances. My main activity is on our niche instance. If people are happy signing up at lemmy.world and limiting themselves to the communities available there, I see nothing wrong with that.

That being said, I think if you search lemmy.world for wetshaving, as an example, our instance does show up in the results because there is federated cross-over (for lack of a better term).

I'm on kbin.social. When I browse the tag "All", I can see all Lemmy communities that federate with kbin.social and all kbin magazines that federate with kbin.social (including those belonging to kbin.social). It's very seamlessly, and at some point you don't realise you're commenting in a post from a different server. But you can also browse those communities and/or magazines you're subscribed to, in a similar fashion to Reddit.

I generally scroll through either local or everything sorted by "New Comments". That's why I'm replying to this two month old post, because someone else did, so it rose to the top. Feels like a combination of Reddit and a classic forum where you'd have posts that would get bumped by activity.

I've made accounts on a handful of the bigger ones, just to have them. If one is inaccessible for any reason, it seems like a good idea to be able to log into other instances.

As for where I'll spend most of my time, it'll probably be in whichever is the most open and least likely to defederate others.

So theoretically you should be able to make one account and view a majority of content. This is barring of course any instances or communities defederated from your home instance.

There’s merit in making a community for your interest on your home instance even if you’re subscribed to it on a different instance, for reasons like outages and a diversity of content. Lemmy being bigger than other instances just means there’s more content available here, but if you like the layout of kbin or Mastodon or what have you better you can still see it all.

Plus, just because two instances are federated doesn’t mean the users actually see all the information exchanged. You have to actually opt into it which is cool- ie if an instances particular community is problematic you can just block it and sub to the rest.

Edit: got so wrapped up in my TED talk I forgot to mention- I’m currently trying out Lemmy, sh.itjust.works, and kbin.social until I can settle on one (hopefully kbin gets an app soon lol.)

know how 🥁