I think most people would agree with the sentiment, but it’s probably a side effect of people being a bit lost.

If you can’t find the community or discussion where you could contribute more niche information, having the general reddit exodus topic at least lets you participate.

And I think that is the common thread of optimism. Even with the confusion and the jank, it still feels good to be somewhere welcoming and new.

Yeah I’m right there with you. I probably made about 5 accounts not understanding why I couldn’t interact whenever I clicked certain links.

So now I’m trying to help others figure it out when I see a fellow lost redditor!

How federalization works can be a bit confusing. For me the biggest hurdle to get over was how the different instances - lemmy.ml and lemmy.world - are separate websites. They can connect and interact with each other because they’re federalized, but your account is only on lemmy.world.

Now for some magic!

Relative links for communities (subreddits) can work across instances:

• eg: [/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml](/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml)
• becomes: /c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

As long as your instance knows the community exists the links should work.

I think just that is the confusing bit! Instances translate into separate reddits - as in completely different websites. Instance admins have as much power as reddit admins within the instance.

Communities are like subreddits, the main subdivision of an instance.

Where it gets confusing is you can subscribe to “subreddits” (read: communities) on other “reddit websites” (read: instances). It’s pretty cool but can take a second to wrap your head around!

The next layer of confusion comes from how everything also interacts with things like Mastodon, Kbin, Peertube, and any other ActivityPub project.

I would give them a little benefit of the doubt. There were probably less than 50 Jerboa users last week and it was a slow hobby project.

With all this renewed interest there has already been a lot of fast progress and a massive update is coming out soon (I think). There’s a community for the app though if you want to see how development is going!

Jerboa@lemmy.ml

That sounds like a pretty novel way to go about it!

I wonder how hard it would be to implement in practice?

That works! You can also do relative links like this: [text](/c/community@instance)

/c/megaten@lemmy.ml

Link it here!

I think it’s a little confusing for everyone right now. I’ll try to explain the easy bits at least.

You can do relative links for communities like this: [text](/c/community@instance)

• Chat@beehaw.org
• asklemmy@lemmy.ml

But these will only work if your instance has already discovered the communities. I think that’s where a lot of the confusion behind all of this first becomes an issue. Some links only work if your instance already “knows” it exists.

To get your or any instance to learn about a specific community, you first have to search for it. The most reliable way to do it is to just put the full url of the community into the search box.

And then wait. It sometimes takes a moment to actually find the community. Once it’s found the rest should work.

For comments, posts, and threads it’s different. Since those will have different unique identifiers on a per instance basis, my understanding is that it’s much more complicated for relative links to work. I haven’t seen a simple solution yet, unfortunately.

If you’re interested in reading more thoughts and comments, there was a massive thread on the same subject the other day:

https://sh.itjust.works/post/5137?scrollToComments=true

Need to get a lemmy static going for the new tier!

👿⬆

we already have that with /c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml!

Hah! I actually typed out that what I did figure out felt like subscribing to a “lemmy rss feed”, but wasn’t sure if that was just me being lost in the interface.

I guess that would be the best way to think of it. Then you can reply to comments as they come in? That part I’m not sure about but I think it works something like that.

Yeah that’s really cool too! I tried to mess around with it but it was super confusing and I gave up. I should try figuring it out again!

It definitely takes a moment to stop the reddit brain from thinking of everything being on one website. If we picked up the hotlink convention it would probably solve all that confusion:

• /c/music@lemmy.ml
• /c/music@beehaw.org

That’d also make the email comparison clearer while providing solid examples of federation.

I had to go find how to escape the formatting 😂

[Text that will be shown](/c/community@instance)

It’s not exactly obvious how to make them, so here’s a more clickable link for all instances: amateur_radio

How I’m beginning to make sense of it is by thinking that each instance is a completely separate “reddit”. The admins of each instance are as powerful as spez or any other reddit admin.

The community subdivision is then just that, a subdivision within a custom reddit rather than a “subreddit” under the centralized “main reddit website”.

The federalization aspect of it is then completely alien, but understandable. At least to me!

I’ve been thinking about this as well. Most reddit clones or reddit-likes in the last decade have failed after a wave of talking about how much “better” or “different” it is from reddit.

There’s an imbalance in the userbase that makes it impossible to compare to the digg migration or past forum community migrations.

What I mean by that is before digg died or fark or slashdot or msn messenger or myspace… the competitor was not only alive but thriving with an organically built local community.

The difference here can be seen in how “reddit refugees” are not looking to integrate but rather supplant. If not intentionally, simply by sheer numbers.

I don’t think there is an answer to this in a world where the internet has become 5 or so companies. At least not until there is at least an attempt at a more federated possibility. Like there was in the days of friendster and before.