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Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Averrin@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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Correct me if I'm wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I'm a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any "balancers" to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?

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[–] Aninjanameddaryll 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Discovery really has been the biggest drawback for me. The r/system combined with wikis and sidebars made it very easy to find interesting things.

That's lacking in lemmy so far. Which, it isn't a bad thing, barriers to entry have benefits. But from a user perspective, trying to replace reddit, the difficulty in navigating and finding things is frustrating.

But I'm coming from reddit, and they aren't meant to be the same. The issues are part of what makes it next to impossible for what happened there to happen in a federated system. And I'm so fucking sick of corporate bullshit ruining good things . I figure that lemmy will catch up in feature parity soon enough, and there's bound to be apps that make it easier to use at some point.

I just wish I had the resources to run a server myself.

[–] Mummelpuffin 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, by just searching topics in the search bar you can typically find instances related to the search. You need to click the "chain" icon rather than the "federated star" icon to view the post "from your instance" and stay on your personal account.

[–] SickIcarus@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You need to click the “chain” icon rather than the “federated star” icon to view the post “from your instance” and stay on your personal account.

Woah. I’ve been clicking the star the whole time. This may make things a looot easier.

[–] Mummelpuffin 5 points 1 year ago

It does! That way, you can immediately subscribe to the community regardless of what instance it's on.