For anyone in the USA, I highly recommend the Discuss.Online instance - it has a great server and admin team, as evidenced by its fantastic uptime stats, plus is quite welcoming to casual discussions. I bounced around a couple of different instances before making this one my primary home and have had zero regrets since.

Also if anyone wants to see a peek of what’s coming up in the future, while it’s just shy of being fully ready for the masses yet, PieFed is an amazing project that will soon enough overtake Lemmy. It already has tons of features that Lemmy lacks - like Categories of Communities, hashtags, YouTube embedding, an absolute ton of customization options, and much more - even if there are a few still missing in reverse (like “searching” for content, user account tagging, the ability to preview a message prior to sending, receipt of notifications is quite buggy… - for early adopters though, it’s almost fully functional, especially for someone experienced in knowing how to fall back to Lemmy when necessary).

There are lots of exciting things happening on the Fediverse lately!:-)

Other reasons to avoid, besides those already mentioned here, include that you will not be allowed to say things offhand about countries such as Russia or China or North Korea with your same account even in communities located on other instances. You either comply FULLY, even when elsewhere, or else you are banned from the entire instance. You can read more about such practices in communities like !fediverselore@lemmy.ca.

Also a lot of other “not extremists” have blocked that instance altogether, so besides having access to your community able to be yanked out from under you at any time (far more than usual I mean), you also will miss out on interactions with those other people. You will be willfully choosing to remain inside of that echo chamber, which is such to a significantly higher degree than the vast majority of Lemmy overall, and legitimately much higher than even Reddit (no joke, again, read for yourself the stories in that and other communities). Whereas if you choose a community not on Lemmy.ml, then you can still interact with people from that instance, just elsewhere.

Also, you could be told that the mod hopes to kill you someday. Sadly, I’m not joking there either (some selected quotes: "nono I don’t want to shoot for pointing that it’s a game, I want to shoot you because…”, and then later tripling down still further, e.g. stating “I hope you die soon.”).

See e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/22359447.

It’s been too long, but there might be a way to click all at once or some such. But those are details, compared to Lemmy that has All or None (and empty Subscribed), with nothing whatsoever in-between. It’s a step in the right direction I am saying.

Nothing will ever entirely “solve” anything at all - people even on Reddit complain about “lack of content”. There’s tons of content here though, it just gets really difficult to find it. However, check out this link for Arts & Crafts. There are lots and lots of posts there - PieFed shows like 5x more in a listing than Lemmy - virtually none of which would make their way to All bc of being swamped out, and yet if that is the content that people are TRULY looking for… this brings them straight to it, with one click! Why isn’t that a “solve”, at least for the issue of content discovery?

Then they can subscribe to the communities they want to see in their Subscribed feed, which is less relevant due to being able to use those Categories. Also you can trigger a Notification for anything at all on PieFed - a user account, a community, a post, and I especially love seeing that you can turn OFF notifications for a particular comment, if abusive trolls decide to spam you for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, which is a real story that has happened to me at least twice on Lemmy, once on hexbear.net and another on lemmygrad.ml - in either case, my consent ceased long before they eventually got tired of harassing me (in fairness, that is supposedly what communities such as !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net are for, so it’s not that I want the community to cease to exist so much as to not have its content promoted as if it were adopting the same standards of behavior as every other space that I was used to across the Fediverse, without at least a warning of some kind delivered, which is yet another beneficial capability that PieFed offers).

So in addition to Categories and Subscriptions, I also have Notifications sent to me for lesser-trafficked but highly desirable content for me to see like !tenforward@lemmy.world. And sometime this year there will be yet another method of handling all of this, in user-defined topic areas like a Favorites or other category of content that the user asks to be separated from all the rest.

And respectfully I disagree, bc depending on implementation, Categories of Communities has the advantage that it could make discovery of new communities obsolete - e.g. if there’s a !lotrmemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com and a !lotrmemes@midwest.social, it could put both of those into the same Category, and isn’t that what you are essentially asking: that wherever the content ends up moving, that the software go and find it and bring it to you, wherever you happen to be at?

Granted, the solution that PieFed offers needs to be improved upon:-), but at least it exists now.

Not Fediverser per se but the underlying concepts. In detail:

Content is King

Here, PieFed is no better nor worse than Lemmy. It uses ActivityPub to connect with Lemmy, as well as having its own communities, like Mbin (except unlike the latter it doesn’t have its own separate voting system, nor does it federate with Mastodon).

One thing PieFed does have though is the ability for someone to block all users from a particular instance of their choice, without requiring admin approval. This helps SO MUCH for certain instances that nobody wants to defederate from… yet I don’t want to read content from either.

Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

There is a wizard where you choose what content you want to see - News, Politics, Arts & Craft, Technology, Movies & TV, Science, etc. - which then signs you up to communities in those Topic areas. You can later unsubscribe or subscribe to any individual communities that you wish, but the wizard helps the onboarding process so that you don’t have to simply stare at All bc your Subscribed feed is initially empty, as Lemmy does, bc on PieFed it would not be empty. It thus makes it much easier to find less prominent content, such as poetry, that would otherwise get swamped out by all the memes and politics and such.

A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third.

There are Categories of Communities that combine posts from all of the topic areas, whether you joined those communities or not. So if you don’t want any politics filling your feed, yet you occasionally do want to look up something related to politics, it is just one click away. So not quite mapping specifically to Reddit subs, but yes mapping to content areas - which imho is so much better, bc that would also help someone migrating not just from Reddit but from X, or Bluesky, or Mastodon, or Lemmy, etc. You don’t need an account to see this feature btw - just visit https://piefed.social/ and look at the top.

Or here is an example post showing the Categories above the post, hashtags below it, YouTube embedding of the link, a link to watch that rather on Piped, and if you scroll down note how the sidebar text appears below every single post (some apps make that exceedingly difficult to find on Lemmy, but it’s very often helpful to see not just when on the community page, and rather when in an individual post, e.g. to read the rules).

Does it provide a separation between topic instances and user instances?

No, there are extremely few instances so far and the whole project is still in late alpha as it adds features to catch up to Lemmy, although as detailed above it already has many features that Lemmy lacks. And I didn’t even begin to get into some of the best thoughts for how to democratize moderation practices to rely less on authoritarian control of “remove” vs. “allow” content, by expanding upon those binary choices to include user options to control their own experience - e.g. automatically collapse any comment with >20 downvotes (though it can easily be uncollapsed with one click), and labels next to usernames (e.g. “account <2 weeks old”, “may be an unregistered bot account that posts but never comments”, “controversial user receiving >50x downvotes than upvotes”, etc. - except these are icons not words as I relate here, plus you can add your own icons whenever and to whoever you wish, that only you will see, on top of these conditional-based ones), and even more than this besides.

When it catches up to feature parity with Lemmy, damn it’s going to be so exciting! Right now it’s more of a future thought, except I (who know how to fall back to Lemmy when the occasion demands, e.g. when searching for a post) already use it as my primary daily driver - not that I would recommend that mind you, just saying that it’s possible, if that gives you any indication as to how close it is to being ready for the masses. It’s very close, I do believe!:-)

no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

PieFed solves all of that. It isn’t quite ready for the non-technical masses from Reddit, but those particular issues at least it does solve.

I kinda want to recommend people to simply visit https://piefed.social/ and see what will eventually become available as a standard Threadiverse software suite just like Lemmy and Mbin.

As the developer himself states, and me as someone who uses it as my primary daily driver concurs, it is not quite ready yet. e.g. a good fraction of the Notifications I receive end up being dead links to posts that don’t exist anymore, or to users that I have blocked, etc. Also user tagging is not implemented yet and searching often does not retrieve things that you can find much more easily using Lemmy, plus tools for moderation of remote communities remain very primitive.

Soon now, it will be user-friendly enough to recommend to people, but for now it’s primarily for beta testing the software and those of us prepared to use an early adopter mindset when using it - e.g. switch to a Lemmy alt to do things that PieFed cannot yet.

Though more features get added seemingly weekly or at least monthly, it’s so exciting to see! I love the new inline comment feature, though inconsistently applied e.g. not yet available for edits. But it’s coming!

There is just an absolute ton of nuances involved.

SOME types of Federation issues is due not to the local instance but rather Lemmy.World and overall lack of distribution of users and communities across the Fediverse (some of which is better now than the past, but not nearly enough).

Other types involve the instance, and in turn its hardware and even more so its number and skill of admin support. Like if you have to wait several days for a manual sign-up procedure (people say quokk.au was this way, at least sometimes) then you may have already moved on elsewhere.

Some of the issues have greatly improved - like I switched from Kbin.social to Star Trek.Website and for super frustrated with how often I would try to do something - like vote or comment - and so switched to discuss.online, which I have been exceedingly happy with. The thing is, Star Trek.Website’s technical issues got WAY better (still not perfect) in the past year, and also I still have had issues with discuss.online - again, most often I would guess that Lemmy.World’s lack of updates to the latest Lemmy software was to blame for that (even though I understand that there are a whole bunch of reasons for the delay).

Yet people also report that Lemmy.World itself can be quite slow to access from some parts in the world like Australia and the USA. I don’t know how much that has to do with method of access like an app vs. the web UI, and even then, would an alternate front end app like https://photon.lemmy.world/ further affect the speed?

A simple score isn’t going to come close to describing any of this. But if it would, uptime % might come the closest? Especially in conjunction with other factors like avoiding recommendation of an instance that has only a single admin.

Discuss.online is tried and true, and I unreservedly recommend it. Anyone who likes can make an alt or two and see tor themselves how good the experience is in comparison between them. Also the admin is quite responsive, both in reacting to requests and remaining on the ball proactively before even being asked - see e.g. the pinned post on that instance.

Hehe go for it then:-).

Yeah, and while it may not solve everything, it could still help!:-)

And then only with deeper knowledge of how the Fediverse functions under the hood - like how “instances” relate to “communities” and specific moderator names, especially when working from a remote account on a different instance than the community structure… Hey, where are you going? 😯

The hard part is that for some people, News and Politics is actually what they are looking for. Others want only Memes and never not that, while still others want content types like Gaming or Arts and Crafts, etc.

So when Categories of Communities and/or Topic areas is implemented, this issue will be solved, but until then these are merely a best guess about what an “average” user desires to see, rather than allowing them to choose their own experience.

Well it is one of the top 10 instances, and defederated from almost no other instances, so it definitely is rather well-known:-).

True true. I think Lemmy.ml tends to be more insular than most instances though? e.g. the default sort is Local rather than All. Like basically for people who already had most of their Fediverse needs met, there was less need to join communities across the wider range?

Fwiw both PieFed and the Tesseract front-end for Lemmy have YouTube embedding. And probably some apps too but I don’t know which ones. This is the real dream: you don’t even leave the post to watch it, if you want, and the preview pic is just already right there.

YT does not (currently) show ads for those. Also you can switch between videos more readily, if you don’t really care about what you are watching and just want to be “entertained” (like a toddler) for 1-3 minutes.

And from YT’s standpoint, it boosts their traffic stats, while sucking in the Gen-Z watchers, who until it becomes enshittified can make great use of it.

It is indeed a damn cool name, and yeah I tried to carefully not imply that you did not want to have to solve problems - your asking here is already a sign that you could be a major help to others on that instance that likewise need aid joining communities and such:-). But… “managing” expectations, yeah I would expect to have more issues on the instances running still-beta software (though technically Lemmy itself is all still in beta!?:-P). On the other hand, so many issues running 0.19.8 in particular seems a good sign in general for that version specifically:-).

(1) When you go to the Communities page on your instance and do your search, make absolutely certain that the setting at the top is All, bc the default is Local and therefore it won’t show such communities on another instance.

When I do the search for fallout76 that way, I am able to see it: https://leminal.space/search?q=fallout76&type=Communities&listingType=All . But maybe that’s because you’ve already joined it?

Alternately, you can kinda force the community link by placing c/communityname after https://instancename/

(2) Clicking that link (https://leminal.space/c/fallout76@lemmy.world) will show no posts until someone from your instance joins, and even then it can take a few hours. Or more weirdly you could see only old posts but no newer ones. All of that is normal due to how the federation process works, trying to be efficient and only pull in content that someone on your instance has specifically requested.

But give it a few hours and you should be good to go:-).

(3) Being anonymous shouldn’t have anything to do with anything. I do note though that your instance is running the latest 0.19.8, which is still in beta. Being on the bleeding edge like that, you should expect to encounter more problems than usual on the Fediverse.

As Blaze mentioned, if you want a more seamless experience on the Fediverse, then you may want to switch to one of the top 20 instances (though I see that sopuli.xyz is likewise running 0.19.8). There is no rush though, so make sure to take time to think about what you want. Fwiw, Lemmy.zip is known for gaming (though it is also running 0.19.8!?:-). In the Settings menu is an account Export & Import pair of buttons that will transfer your subscribed communities and block lists, but note that messages to your old account will not follow you over to the new.

“Primitives” have the same brains we do today and were capable of understanding the same things we are.

Lol that’s the problem then - bc even today, what do we really “know”!? It’s not about intelligence though it’s cultural - what did they care about knowing then? Like what is a “point” and why would it matter if the universe came from one or many of them? And obviously it took a great deal of time - building anytime at all does not happen instantly.

Moreover there’s an ancient Semite vs. modern English translation issue with the words - that identical word “day” for instance is translated elsewhere as “season” and a bunch of other stuff, so basically 7 epochs / eras? Like LOTR where we came in on basically the end of the age of the elves, as it transitioned into the age of men.

It’s a story, meant to be told to children. The same way that we today preach the miracle of Santa Claus - which supposedly prepares kids for learning that not everything they are taught is strictly speaking “true”, and therefore that they need to question everything to sort the truths from the lies. Whether we think it through in those terms or not, that tradition survived somehow?

There are many philosophers, like Daniel Dennett the famous (and now late) atheist counter-apologist, that provide many examples of how religion has been helpful in the past, to get us from purely and literal tribal cultures to great nation-states. It’s our history, and it got us here to today, right or wrong.

Anyway you can go to ideological war with the 84% of people world-wide that affiliate with some kind of religion if you want (according to this Pew study, but I’m saying that there are allies within Christianity, within Muslim, within Buddhism, etc. who are capable of rational thought. Even as there are also a handful of atheists who, perhaps having inherited their beliefs, are dumb as fuck. There are fewer, and the system does not encourage that, but it does happen.

I outright enjoy talking with people of any religious background who genuinely believe whatever they believe, so long as they are willing to critically examine the nature of their beliefs. Such people are much more likely to arrive at whatever “truth” is out there to find, than someone sitting still who isn’t listening to anyone. Question everything - sound familiar? It’s both the atheist creed (or was at some point) as well as literally commanded in the Christian worldview (not that people give a damn about what the Bible says) as well as practically the scientific motto.

Or at least it used to be. People seem to be redefining what “science” means these days, as in science is why planes fly - it’s not though, science is the PROCESS that lead to the DISCOVERY of HOW planes fly. So how is it that religious people are doing the questioning process more than some modern atheists, who simply say “this is the way the world works”?

To be clear, I have no idea how the world works. I wasn’t there when it started, I only know what I can see now, which is extremely limited. Hence why I prefer my answer as being “I do not know”, rather than “I know and let me tell you how it happened…”

What the fuck are you even talking about here?

Our two answers are much more similar than I think you realize. But they do differ somewhat in important ways too, although it sounds like you are triggered so let’s end it here: I know exactly what you are saying and if you think about it you’ll see what I was trying to convey, but there seems little point to going more rounds just emotionally venting our upset feelings at the fuckers who misuse their authority as “leaders” of their communities to abuse people - including but not limited to children. Maybe authoritarianism thought control to abolish all religion everywhere would do the trick, but so long as wishes were horses then we all would ride, and I think there are better ways - and that’s what I was trying to convey. Not that magic exists as a replacement for science (although again, it does exist when viewed from the other side of it - i.e. to those who don’t understand the principles yet, how could it be viewed as anything but magic? If we were suddenly picked up by sufficiently advanced aliens, we would react no differently ourselves, bc as you said, we really aren’t any different at all from those that came before, only our culture has shifted).

If I were a time traveler, or alien, or something, that’s almost how I’d explain how the Earth came about to primitives.

• Day 1: Light (despite no stars yet?! yes literally the entire universe was on fire at one point, just gleaming light but no matter yet)

• Day 2: Atmosphere

• Day 3: Dry ground aka continents & plants (tbf here “plants” is a little incongruous, unless things like photosynthetic bacteria and algae are meant rather than later more complex multicellular forms)

• Day 4: Sun, moon & stars -> the volcanic air clears so you can finally look up and see them, also the O2 paved the way for mitochondrial-containing eukaryotes

• Day 5: Birds & sea creatures (birds is highly incongruous here, unless it just means “flying things” aka insects in which case it matches perfectly)

• Day 6: Land animals & eventually humans

• Day 7: no more “magic”, i.e. humans are so recent that nothing else major has happened in the last ~350k years or so.

• Day 8: nothing prevents this from coming - perhaps we’ll go to space, perhaps we’ll die out, perhaps this simulator will end and our personalities will become used to make us all into sex/worker bots for the “real” people one dimension above us. Wouldn’t that suck? 😕 Or be fun I guess, depending on the person. 😳

I cannot say what the nature of reality is bc I have no clue, myself. All I’m saying is that if a preacher says “let me ass-rape your kid”, maybe someone should say no, but if they say like “hey, workers deserve their wages so maybe people should not be slaves?” then it’s worth paying attention to - not because and rather, I get it, in spite of the fact that it comes from a religious person, but even so it’s what is said rather than who says it that seems the most important.

Fuck “religion”, but “love one another”? THAT I am down with:-).

As Jesus Himself once said too, then made conditions for women better than they had ever been before.

Anyway “magic” is simply something that has not yet been explained. Fire. Electricity. Herbs. All were magic at one point, to those who did not know how they worked.