this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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I have to be honest, the fact we have an active alternative(s) to reddit at last makes this a complete success for me. I've lowkey despised reddit for years. Particularly from 2016 on when bots kind of overran the website and the front page was just filled with toxic garbage that never really went away to this day. I actually did use the revanced patch to get my RIF app working again (though I can't get my ad-less premium back unfortunately), but I've been on here far more than there. I think im just having more fun on Lemmy than I have been on reddit in years. The only reasons I hop back are for sports team specific communities (and really the game threads because I like interacting with other people watching when im watching alone). On the instance i'm on currently there are generated game threads but it hasn't got the users to make them particularly active as of yet. If that ever happens i'll happily cut off reddit for good
If the only people who leave Reddit are the ones who understand what a federated FOSS link aggregator is, I think I'd be cool with that. Lemmy's share of the 3% who have moved on is already pretty impressive, at least in terms of where it was a couple months ago. And the quality of the discourse has been significantly better.
I dunno if Reddit won, but I certainly did.
I'm really liking the lack of bots as well. Im hoping the sports stuff takes off here but I guess that just takes time. I'll check out that instance though. When football and hockey start up again I'd love to have gameday threads back
I bet an instance geared specifically towards sports would be a relatively popular one
So, I'm new here, but I'm still struggling to see the advantage of smaller and more focused instances. I mean, Lemmy.World was pretty sluggish in the first days of the Great Migration, but it got better fairly quickly.
I can imagine smaller instances can do a better job of screening new sign-ups, and they tend to be a little faster than (some) larger instances. Is that it? I've also noticed that they tend to have more lag on content updates on the communities I am most interested in, and the front page seems a bit more static.
I created an account on a smaller instance when perfomance here on .world were at its worst, but now I find myself using this account more and more. Maybe more instances is good for Lemmy, but I'm not yet sure if ti's good for me.
It's federated, so yeah - you can interact with the fediverse from any federated node
The node you call home matters though. You'll run into your local users more, you'll come across certain communities more.
The experience is very different. Use multiple accounts, but find a home
My home instance, Lemmy.sdf.org, is full of geeky/retro communities that tickle my fancy. I like setting my view to "local" to see what pops up locally, even in communities I'm not a member of.
I'm also a member of feddit.uk, which focuses on UK stuff. That's handy for folks in the UK because it's easier to find locally-relevant stuff.
I would imagine that instances would really compete on channels/communities/magazines and the mods/admins running those. At a certain point, then, the instances would also tend to have some kind of home field advantage on new users who sign up specifically for that instance's sports communities. Users from other instances can still interact with the most popular communities, but that's what I imagine when people talk about instances that focus on a particular niche.
One benefit of focused instances is that we can sort of insulate ourselves from de-federation conflicts amongst the larger, user-focused instances. I'm not sure if you we around for the beehaw.org defederation from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works but those were 3/4 of the biggest instances and those users can no longer interact. Users from lemmy.world were basically blocked from all new content on the communities they were subscribed to on beehaw.org and vice versa.
I host a sports-focused instance fanaticus.social where all we talk about is sports. It's a non-controversial topic (most of the time) and because we're focused on that one topic, users from all the instances like beehaw, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, can still interact with and create content for sports without worrying about losing access to the communities they're a part of. That's the major advantage as far as I see it.
I don't care about user registration counts because most of our content comes from users on general instances. In the future we will probably disable registration altogether. I have only left it open for now to reduce the friction for new fediverse users if they happen to find our instance first and want to make fanaticus their home instance.
We're out here! I'm an admin at fanaticus.social. We're a sports-only instance. We're the instance /u/Garrathian was talking about.
If you miss your sports and want to discuss them, come on over and check us out. We have all the major sports and their teams' communities set up and have ported the game bot (for baseball right now) over. We're planning on having the game bots ported over before the start of the other major sports' seasons.
We've only ported over the MLB game bots over to lemmy right now (because it's the only sport in season) but we'll be porting the other major sports bots over before the season starts! One of our users created communities for all the major sports teams in preparation for this. If you'd like to mod any let me know!
Check out realgm forums for sports. Was hard cutting off sports community on reddit, but realgm is active and been around for years.