Yes yes, I take the point about the sorting-algo choices and karma absence and so on. I acknowledged it in another comment.

My fundamental point (which you are ignoring) concerns the motivations and incentives for downvoting. My contention is that downvoting thoughtful and well-expressed opinions is always (always) toxic and unhealthy. Others don't see it that way. So be it.

That would explain. But that comment is in answer to the top-level comment about the lemmy.ml instance.

I have trouble finding um what are they called here... Communities?... for the subjects I'm interested in. When I search, all I find is old posts or unrelated posts.

That's my biggest problem

The developers of the Lemmy software are the admins of the lemmy.ml instance and are problematic. The complaint is that the software itself can't be separated from the priorities of the .ml instance.

Piefed doesn't have the same issue, even if the flagship instance federates with .ml

Where is this option? I looked everywhere and can't seem to find it.

I don't even know what truths you think I'm not accepting here.

I don't change my views because people bully me for them. I change my views when someone demonstrates to me that they're worth changing and that haven't happened in this thread. What ever convincing arguments you may have seen clearly have not been convincing to me.

FYI, your instance is shuttting down soon: https://lemm.ee/post/67603898

To find communities, [email protected] is usually a good place

Piefed solves that issue: https://piefed.zip/post/100161

All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view

A few options

• https://piefed.social/ - flagship instance
• https://piefed.zip/ - lemmy.zip team
• https://piefed.ca/ - lemmy.ca team
• https://feddit.online/

Oh, brilliant. Thanks.

I like the scaled sort option when I notice that.

There was a small window where Reddit could be used to find good answers to things, but that ship sailed long ago.

As soon as the site started to become popular in the mid 2010's, every "expert" was someone who maybe once took a related class in college, or think sharing their girlfriend's uncle's neighbor's relevant story means they have the definitive answer.

"Hello Reddit, does anyone else catch themselves acting differently between family and friends?"

"As someone who once took a psychology class in college, your symptoms are 100% aligned with dissociative identity disorder, and you should seek help immediately."

Arguably, lemmy is going to be more private than reddit because your data are being queried, refined, quantified and categorised by reddit to be sold off to the highest bidder. If a different actor is just scraping activitypub they need to do all of that themselves.

I don't think there's any "arguably" that Lemmy is more private, it's a completely open platform. Sure Reddit is a closed platform that can sell data to whoever, but Fediverse data is freely accessible to anyone who just has a bit of technical know-how to set up an instance, after which they can query, refine, quantify, and categorize it all they want. If there's profit to be made with that data, someone will do it. I am assuming that our info is already being collected by both private interests and governments.

Smaller user base. It is both good and bad but the community for my city is dead (probably there were only like 8 of us on here).

Am old enough to know from experience that the early people on any platform are the computer geeks so expect the tech communities to thrive first - but as someone else said, music communities die, sports, arts, things that are pretty widely popular. Honestly happy with the slow and steady growth of the [email protected] so if it's an indicator, the general interest people are joining just not quickly but some must be sticking. I would guess at some point it will be perfect then too big but who knows?

Personally I also miss the nonsexual nudes threads like nakedprogress and normalnudes. Again that's a lack of users issue, you need a lot of people willing to post, to have even a few willing to post nude.

My first try at the Fediverse, I didn't know how important it is to instance-hop so when mine was down a lot more often than it was up, I temporarily went back to Reddit.

Surprisingly better than I would have expected for a community about a state.

The tankies

the architecture of lemmy, both socially and technically, is not working as hoped and it's likely it will suffer an effective death before it evolves sufficiently to enable distributed communities

the federated model is too lumpy and fragmented at the same time

That's honestly not very helpful.

• It's not exactly at a place where someone joins lemmy. Most people likely join via downloading an app, and if they are lucky that app links them to join-lemmy.org, and more often than not, it doesn't link them anywhere and just asks them to either select an instance from a dropdown without further information or it asks them to enter an instance name from memory.
• The advice is very questionable and not really helpful without context.

• Lemmy.world is too big

There are Lemmy-reasons for why that's a problem, but in any other context, the biggest is the best. And even in regards to lemmy, bigger instances have a higher chance to remain, to be decently moderated and to be decently stable. Before joining Lemmy.world, I was on Feddit.de, and we all know how that ended. And even before they vanished without a warning or an explanation, Feddit.de servers were always outdated, slow and unreliable, and moderation was arbitrary at best and non-existent at worst.

Lemmy.world is stable and works just as expected.

• Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )

That's a somewhat decent reasoning, though not immediately understandable as a new user. And not relevant anymore because Lemm.ee will shutdown within a week or so from now.

• sh.itjust.works names contains “shit”, which can deter users

Thanks, I'm adult enough to know whether I'm offended by the word "shit".

lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric
feddit.org, is German-centric, but technically English speaking too
programming.dev is topic-centric
blahaj is queer-focused
infosec.pub is topic-centric
aussie.zone is country-centric
midwest.social is region-centric

None of that really matters thanks to federation.

dbzer0 federates hexbear

Like Lemm.ee, apart from the fact that it still exists

beehaw is way outdated

That's some relevant reasoning.

sopuli.xyz (neutral name

See also:

discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name

Sopuli.xyz isn't any easier than discuss.tchnics.de, and jet discuss.tchnics.de was excluded for the name only.

While down in the comments it says

Sopuli doesn’t support gifs

Which is a really hard reason to avoid that instance, much more so than "has a difficult name". That's got much more practical implications.

But what's left regardless is: Even that link that is supposed to make instance selection easier isn't exactly easy to understand for a newcomer.

Relevant XKCD:

The tankies are far and away the largest problem. It's the number one reason why lemmy hasn't grown. Even when I signed up years ago from the reddit exodus every post I saw was heavily cautioned with "it's filled with tankies". And now every mention of it is being scrubbed for that reason. The second problem is the smaller size but see reason 1 for that.

Third problem is the sign up process being so excruciating. I understand it's to prevent bots but for every 2 bots it's preventing it's probably also preventing 1 actual user from signing up. I love this place despite the small size, because I can just sequester off all the tankies entirely on Connect, but if the creators don't realize they're actively standing in the way of growth by the actions they're taking and step away from all their moderation actions to focus on administration and development instead the outlook doesn't look too great.