Lemmy resembles the old reddit experience so well that they even emulate the old reddit server performance

Ha, I applied to two smaller instances and have heard nothing but radio silence. The smaller instances are of no help if they don’t let anyone in.

Use and recommend lemm.ee, lemmy.one, and vlemmy.net to others
Seriously, stop recommending large servers when lemmy hasn't been optimized for that yet. The point of decentralization is spreading out and still being connected; let's not waste that advantage.
- I run https://thelemmy.club - people are always welcome here :)
- Where my VLemmy peeps at?!? 🙌
  
  Me!
  
  Yeah, boooyyyyyy! 🙌🙌🙌🙌
  
  👋
  
  Up high… 🙌
  
  🙌
  
  Yo!
  
  Boo yaa! 👊
  
  Aussie.zone
- Ok, but what if the instance I choose just ends suddenly? Do I understand it correctly that on each one I have to create a new account and re-subscribe to all the communities etc,?
  
  That's correct though account migration is planned for some point in the future, or at least noted as a desirable feature by the Devs. Maybe even linking accounts across instances?
  Having to resubscribe to all your communities is annoying but I imagine third party apps could streamline that process when they get released/refined.
  
  Aside from what Coelacanth said, those instances are no more likely to shut down than lemmy.world (I can't recall a Lemmy instance that's not for personal use ever shutting down); they've functioned just fine for years and have even been upgraded for the surge of users too
  
  Lemmy.fmhy.ml shutdown and hasnt come back yet. My understanding is that it won't be back, but that was the instance I signed up for initially to spread the server load
  
  well this just happened with vlemmy.net, i was affected by this and had to manually resubscribe to 50 communities and recreate one, because of this someone made a tool to download your data off of lemmy and upload it to another instance https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
- But isn't this the main website? Why can't I use it?
  
  There is no 'main' website. It's all connected. People just started joining that because it's big and overloaded it, and now it's having federation and stability issues.
  
  I am new here so sorry for asking this, but am I expected to join the same communities on 75 different Lemmy clones?
  
  Federation means you can search for your community on your instance and it will fetch all the information if you want to subscribe. I am writing this comment with my account on feddit.de. I just switched to the „all“ feed, which shows all content from all servers feddit federated with. If I am looking up a new community to join like communityname@servername.tdl feddit will copy the posts for mento be able to interact with them. My reactions will be synched back.
  
  I just created two communities: Sudoku, and Nonograms, in Lemmy World. Can you see them?
Fair point. Tye small one’s Re being hugged to death and aren’t letting any more people in, so people are gravitating towards the juggernauts, and the juggernauts are collapsing under their weight.
Next couple weeks should be interesting
My instance (civilloquy.com) has open sign-ups. ;)
When I first joined, I never got a confirmation that my account had been accepted. After a few minutes, I just typed the username and password I used during registration and I was able to log in.
When I applied, I never got a notification that it got approved, but I could post and comment on that instance. So you might have been in a similar situation as me or the admins are still dealing with a large influx of people
- Oh wow you're totally right. I was just able to log into one that I had never heard from! Thank you, good call!
I started on lemmy.ml but it was unusable for the past few days. Today I managed to get into programming.dev pretty quickly and it has been smooth sailing.
try mine.
- I don't want to be locked in with a stelletje Nederlanders zoals ik.
  
  IDK what you meant by "locked with" but there is feddit.uk too.
- Good for you. I'd been trying that for months with no success. Finally .world let me in last week.

That’s where join-lemmy really missed out. They should have introduced a set of rules like join-mastodon where instances must have at least two admins, a clear code of conduct, and clear rules as to how they manage closedown. That way users would be reasonably safe in picking an instance at random. But they didn’t so everyone should go to safe choices like lemmy.world.

Everyone keeps saying to join the smaller instances, but the reason people aren't is because they are harder to find and usually have application gates thrown up. Because you can't apply through the app, and because I am on mobile, I don't even know how many Instances I applied for and then forgot what the instance was even called by the time they may or may not have approved.
All of this needs to be laid out better from the get-go. Even simply listing a server strain metric or warning (even if it's something admins set themselves) would be useful.
- a server strain metric or warning
  Ha, that would be really useful in directing the flow especially at times like this.

I was on world at first because I thought each instance was its own subreddit, so I went with the one with the most users! After a day and a half I somewhat understand instances now and have switched to a smaller one. Hopefully other reddit refugees will do it too.

Thanks for being so welcoming and patient with us. I'm really glad to be here.

Are you avoiding all interaction with the communities on lemmy.world, also? I'm not clear if I should just avoid using this .world account, or if I should avoid all .world communities to prevent overloading.
- Just the account. If you post to lemmy.world from different instance, it's ok. Though be prepared that users may see your post with a delay depending on the state of lemmy.world.
- No I'm not avoiding anything at all. I personally switched instances, just to try and ease the load on the .world server while we flooded in here. I'm sure they would appreciate you switching to another one. I found my countries one, a bonus is that it comes with my local communities! Don't be put off by the smaller populated instances.
  Also juuussssttt in case you weren't sure, generally speaking you have access to the same content between instances (some are more strict than others and don't allow certain content like NSFW stuff, but they do tell you in advance).

Unless it defederates like beehaw keeps doing.

What's going on with beehaw? I'm a bit out of the loop.
- Beehaw is a community that wants to create a specific type of experience for its users, it wants to create a safer space and has stricter rules.
  I think it’s personally a non-issue that people get riled up about. They’ve temporarily defederated from lemmy.world because of the large spikes in new users and wanting to have the moderation tools necessary to handle that while keeping their community the way they want it.
  There is a subset of new Lemmy users who think this experience needs to be Reddit 2.0, that it needs to be perfect and totally smooth for new users, or else it will fail?
  Personally, I don’t agree. I don’t want Lemmy to be Reddit at all. In the last month, I’ve found that I didn’t realize just how bad my Reddit experience had become. I’m okay with the experience being a little rough around the edges here and adjusting together. It has become obvious based on how good my interactions were here. How solid and interesting the content was. I’m not fiending for my specific subreddits, I’m good to move on and find new areas to focus on the internet.
  I have a separate account for Beehaw, all the iOS apps already have way way better functionality than the Reddit official app, I can seamlessly switch between accounts. It’s been absolutely amazing to see how much this site and experience has evolved in one month. I’m super excited for the future here.
  
  One thing I don’t miss is the "culture"… I hope this shift into the fediverse frees comment sections of the endless same dumb low effort puns, and even worse puns in the replies. Or fucking award speeches in comment edits, the same shitty jokes that nobody likes but somehow still perpetuate…
  I really look forward to something new
  
  I'm late to the conversation. Yeah, that's what I hated about Reddit. I've been using it since 2009, and I noticed that it got progressively worse the moment they introduced karma.
  
  I too like the rough around the edges. Little tricks and nuances I’ve picked up. Makes it fun.
- All in all, they have some of the biggest communities for gay folks, Trans folks, and other minority groups. Lots of trolls from large open instances were shit posting lots of hateful crap in those communities.
  The Lemmy’s mod tools are still kind of janky and they couldn’t keep pace with the toxic trolling, so they made the call to defederate from instances like Lemmy.world temporarily, until some new mod tools get built.
  All the admins from the defederated instances get it and they all appear to be on the same page.
  That said, users got pissed because beehaw has one of the best tech communities. So now people on Lemmy.world don’t have their posts / comments show up in those communities.
  Basically, they had two shitty options, and they went with protecting the vulnerable minority.
  It’s temporary.
- Beehaw defederated from other instances as users were getting around bans by creating new accounts on those instances. The admins in question are talking about how to address this.
  
  Federating bans?
  
  Right now there is not even a notification to the original instance that an user has been banned on some other one's community. That means people can follow the rules on their home instance, like by not participating, while freely breaking them on federated ones, without their home instance admins ever knowing... until some other instance's admin either contacts them directly, or defederates the whole instance.
  
  Lemmy isn't really set up for that. Its current structure is such doesn't allow for that, and developers are still trying to do more for new user verification.
  This is something that larger websites spend a ton of money and developer time to fight, which is something Lemmy currently doesn't have.
  
  How would that work though?
  
  Hell we don't even federate usernames which I find extremely problematic. But we'll get there... I hope.
- Post by beehaw admins
  Basically, due to the size and open registrations on some large instances, Beehaw admins decided to defederate because they didn’t have the manpower or systems in place to deal with the large volume of content.
  
  I think I read that they have 4 people running everything and 2 aren't techy.
- They are overly sensitive special snowflakes that pipi their pampers if anybody that doesn't have 100% the same opinions as them is allowed to use the internet
  
  Motives aside, the point is one account won't always get you everywhere. Doing a little research before picking a home instance can't hurt.

I tried getting on both of those for a couple weeks. I could not get through on either. Found lemm.ee and have had zero issues.

So signup for a smaller instance

Unless you want to create a community on that instance. You can only create communities in the instance you sign up.

...so create your community on that instance. Others will still be able to access it just like you're accessing communities elsewhere.
Some instances disallow community creation. That's the only part where this argument has any merit. Otherwise which instance a community is on doesn't really matter.
- Technically it doesn't matter, but I expect communities will take off better in instances better suited to it. I doubt a gaming community on lemmy.ca will become the massive gaming community. I doubt c/Toronto will take off in a UK instance. Etc.

I only had luck making an account on my 3rd attempt, on sh.itjust.works

What does it mean to say that Lemmy is federated?

Basically there are many different Lemmy servers. Http://lemmy.world Http://lemmy.ml Http://shit.just.works Etc etc
It doesn’t matter which one you sign up for. Most of them talk to one another. For example. Lemmy.ml people can subscribe to and read Lemmy.world communities.
Lemmy can also talk to other “fediverse” social media platforms like Kbin. You often see a lot of Kbin users in Lemmy comments.

But why do I have separate profiles for each instance? Is it because I signed up in three instances? Is the only way to rectify this, to delete accounts?

Imagine if you registered an email address with gmail, hotmail, and iCloud. You’d have three separate inboxes.
And like email, which is also federated, you don’t need a gmail address to message gmail people, or a hotmail address to message hotmail people. You can signup with one domain / instance, and subscribe to communities from another domain / instance.

The problem is that it uses WebSockets in a completely braindead way. There is absolutely zero reason to waste server resources on that for every single user. Of course it fails to scale..

Well you're in luck because Lemmy 0.18 rips out all WebSocket code.

The real magic is that you don’t even have to use Lemmy. You can use Kbin if you like that interface better.

What happens to the communities on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml if they’re no longer around? It seems like the most active communities are mostly on those two instances.

A good example is what just happened with beehaw. Beehaw cut ties with lemmy.world temporarily until some new mod tools roll out.
If you were subbed to a beehaw community from lemmy.world, you can still post to that community, but only LW people can see the post. You can use that capability to tell people to migrate away to a new home.
Or, if an instance gets big and valuable, I’m sure their will people champing at the bit to take on the domain and instance if the OG admin wants out.

How does that work? Still confused.

Basically, in the beehaw example, all of Lemmy.world’s messages to beehaw communities are kind of stuck in an old deprecated beehaw outbox that is not being checked by beehaw. Lemmy.world people can see all the messages sitting in their beehaw outbox, but beehaw ain’t coming to get their mail, and they’re no longer sending mail to Lemmy.world.

That’s where join-lemmy really missed out. they should have introduced a set of rules like join-mastodon where instances must have at least two admins, a clear code of conduct, and clear rules as to how they manage closedown. That way users would be reasonably safe in picking an instance at random. But they didn’t so everyone should go to safe choices like lemmy.world.