Right now the user count Lemmys is comparatively tiny when held up against reddit - but the user count isn’t the thing that makes a social media site, it’s the engagement
So even if you’re used to lurking, try to get a little more active! Post memes, vote on posts, talk in the comments, whatever!
If people come here and see activity, content, and discussions, they’re more likely to stay and contribute their own - if they come and see a ghost town, they’ll just go back to reddit
It might help to think about Mastodon, Lemmy and other fediverse portals as different email programs, like gmail, outlook, thunderbird. They all use the same protocol (mail) to communicate info. ActivityPub is the underlying protocol that makes the fediverse work but conceptually your instances are like mail servers some run Lemmy, some run Mastodon, but they all talk the same language under the hood.
I can understand this, but im looking at this post from my instance (lemmyNSFW) and it has 16 score and 89 comments. But on lemmy.ml this same post has 1.28k score and 662 comments.
Why is that so different? If they are like different email programs, shouldnt the email chains be the same no matter which program you use?
that’s very interesting. my instance shows the same stats as lemmy.ml - I am thinking this is possibly due to more restrictive federation settings on the NSFW instance - one thing that looks a bit odd is that on NSFW there are hardly any subscribers to their non-local communities, so I think perhaps they are restricting this locally - are you able to subscribe to [email protected]?:
I suspect it only reports the activity from that instance. Definitely feels like there is some room for improvement.
Good Analogy. Thanks!
Thanks for replying! The more I read about it, the more I’m starting to get the picture, but don’t different app/site functionalities and layouts make content incompatible. For example – the tree structure of the long form reddit style discussions of Lemmy / KBin, would look and feel really out of place in Mastodon in my opinion.
I agree with you that Mastodon and Lemmy are quite different - the point of the fediverse is that you can communicate across them if you want. Here’s our conversation showing up in Mastodon:
Lemmy is more like Reddit - principally short, text-based, Mastodon is more like twitter and there’s a lot more graphical stuff there. Personally I find lemmy more intuitive - but I was never really into twitter, whereas I wasted a ton of time on reddit.
Interestingly in the screen shot above, the reply I made to the other poster about the NSFW instance that shows a graphic doesn’t show up - I don’t know why that is, but you can see our exchange shows just fine in Mastodon. In short, I prefer Lemmy but Mastodon has loads of photography and graphical content if that’s your preference - but you can most definitely interact between them. This should be a key factor as the fediverse matures and should help to ensure that our communities continue to grow.
That’s awesome! Thank you for taking the time to write out such a detailed response!