I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
Is there one overall community just mirrored across all instances? Or is the “Nintendo” on lemmy.ml different than the “Nintendo” on bee.haw or whatever? (Just an example - no idea if these communities exist)
It’s accessible from every instance that is Federated with the other. So for example if I’m on sh.itjust.works and there’s a Nintendo community on lemmy.ml, I would be able to access it just by searching !nintendo@lemmy.ml for example. The same goes for other communities on other instances, you would just replace lemmy.ml with the instance url.
I really want to like this but the fact that two separate Nintendo communities (for example) can exist on two separate instances is a non-starter for most users and very nearly for me. Is there not a mechanism of some kind to join them so anyone joining their instance’s Nintendo community gets plugged in with every instance’s Nintendo posts? This will truly confuse most new people coming in from Reddit where communities had single canonical names.
I’m also new at this, and agree that it’s confusing.
I also think that subreddits were ready confusing at first. When reddit was new, I had to explain to people that the front page was garbage and that they had to find the right communities.
As the Lemmy ecosystem grows, I picture communities on certain servers becoming the clear winners, and the equivalent communities on other servers withering.
For example, I’m following the Linux community on both Beehaw and Lemmy.ml. I think the Lemmy.ml one is gonna be a lot busier, and folks will naturally gravitate towards that one. On Reddit it took me a while to figure out that /r/meirl was so much better than /r/me_irl.
Ok that makes sense… but in this example, they are still two distinct communities? E.g., the comments are different in each?
