Here is a hopefully minor thing…
Reddit has multireddits where you can have a few that follows a certain selection of subreddits under a label. You can have multiple ones defined as well. Therefore, you can have a view for all things news (following multiple news things) without having to view those things on your main home feed (as well as any other defined topics that you can think of).
It would be nifty if such a thing could exist inside of Lemmy as well.
If you don’t know, Reddit updated their interface in February and made it worse by doing so. People who tolerated the older “new” interface can find a way to use that (at new.reddit) while the older interface is still there too (old.reddit).
Still, it seems like Reddit keeps making changes to drive away their older user base which hypothetically is drawing in new users (otherwise it seems a bit silly for them to be doing those changes).
Can I comment on Beehaw (or lemmyNSFW, but I’m at work so not going there right now) using this account I have at lemmy.world?
Beehaw, no. They defederated from Lemmy.world. More information is at https://lemmy.world/post/145337 (iffy formatting) and https://beehaw.org/post/567170 (easier to read). A bit more information is also at https://lemmy.world/post/149743
LemmyNSFW, yes. The answer is yes for most instances.
Is there a way to easily see which instances are defederated from others (or conversely which instances are connected)?
To add to what others are saying, there is a list that may be helpful. Let me explain it a bit though.
The list below shows various Lemmy instances in a table. An instance can block another instances (this is what they control). The instance can be blocked by someone else (which they can’t control). Either way, a block is in place so the two cannot communicate.
The column header BL specifies how many instances they are blocking. The column header BB says how many instances are blocking them.
If they have a high BL, they likely do not want to federate with many other instances which can be a drawback. If they have a high BB, that instance is likely acting in such a poor manner that nobody wants to interact with them. Basically, you may want to reconsider instances which have an excessively high BL or BB.
Note that there are pretty bad places out there so having a BL of 0 can be an issue as well. A BB of 0 may indicate that an instance is very new so nobody really knows about them yet.
The list is sorted by how many users are at an instance. If the instance has a high amount of users, the service is likely a higher quality service that can grow over time. Small services aren’t bad per say but they may eventually disappear or overload if too many people join them.
Like most things, this is just more information to help guide you in your decision making. The best decision is one that you make on your own after you do your own research.
Anyway, the list is below.
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances/blob/main/README.md#all-lemmy-instances
Can we sidestep the usual complaints about federation or instance-specific issues?
We could… but people have concerns about their communities being always operational and their accounts always working. They want to easily register here and have a smooth experience. They cannot easily register because they need to know a few things (like where to register) and if their experience will be significantly lousy if they make any mistakes. This is for both people providing content (users) and people managing communities (moderators) who also need to know that their jobs won’t be significantly harder when they come over here.
Great work on the https://fediverser.network/ site! A simple guided pathway towards a great Lemmy instance (and perhaps a Lemmy instance which hosts many communities that they want to interact with) would be a welcome addition. Perhaps there could be a similar guided pathway for mods trying to find a great place to set up their community would be helpful as well.
I think that you would first want to have people using both services and annoyances/problems with one service will cause people to abandon the lousy place to use the better place.
That being said, the Lemmy instance I registered to had broken federation approximately half the time and was down for significantly long amounts of time as well. People interacting there had their comments take a long time to federate (only catching up during the rare times federation would work) and they had no idea that they were shouting into a closed box during that time. I’m not even addressing other federation issues such as this instance being blocked by another instance (Beehaw) which is causing some fragmentation.
Lemmy likes to emphasize that you should register for smaller instances and not with larger ones. This “spreads out the load”. You can create your community there as well. You then run into the “annoyances/problems” relating to your smaller instance and migrate to a more stable option… which is Reddit which you still use.
So while federation is a strength for Lemmy, it is also a weakness when it doesn’t work. Migrating people to Lemmy doesn’t tend to focus on migration to a specific server (like lemmy.world ) but focuses instead on migration to “Lemmy” which can be any random server under the sun (stable or not, reliable or overloaded, federating reliably or not). Once issues come up, the person could move to another Lemmy server or they can move back to Reddit… and I think many choose the Reddit option.
It doesn’t help that federation is a complicated topic to understand and the recommended new user approach to Lemmy is to join a tiny server where you are required to use federation and to hope that it is working (while also having no obvious indication if federation is working today or not). To use the email analogy, I get a “bounce back” email notice if my email being sent out cannot be delivered and I get that notice quickly. With broken federation, I have to do research and visiting external sites to determine if my message got through or if I am even receiving any new messages at all. People can get a little annoyed when things are mysteriously not working or when things “may be working or not, who knows?”.
I think how the headset looks only somewhat matters…
Apple has generated an image of being “the innovator” in technology. There was “no smartphone” until the iPhone came around (even though that statement is not completely accurate). Their computers are “superior” (even though that statement isn’t necessarily accurate either). Still, the point is that the masses feel that Apple is a technologically innovative company and they still want to own some Apple technology rather than dealing with anything else.
In some realms, this is arguably working. The newer generations (today’s school children) see iPhones as far superior than Android (statement accuracy not relevant) and that anyone not having an iPhone as something being too poor to own the superior phone. Apple wants to keep that brand identity - of being superior technology.
Things like VR put a bit of a damper on that vision. If VR is the “latest and greatest thing” then why does “the owners of Facebook” have their own VR technology while Apple has nothing similar? There is a feeling that Apple introduces products when they are finally ready for the masses… but there is also a growing feeling that Apple is just falling behind and can no longer be innovative. The lack of innovation feelings is something that needs to be removed.
So we have the Apple VR headset. Does it look good? Well, it looks innovative in advertising. Is it for you? No. They would prefer that you don’t use the headset but instead that you “have feelings of technology superiority” when thinking of Apple products. Actually using the headset could harm those feelings. So they make sure to actually release something VR that only people with a ton of money could actually use so that those people can brag about having the latest innovative thing (while also not mentioning any issues with the device). Those people help deliver the actual product…
The actual product is the “innovative feelings”. So, to conclude the point, I feel that something that looks “so dorky” is sort of the point here.
MiXplorer - https://mixplorer.com/
A file explorer allowing for me to transfer files over the network. When Solid Explorer suddenly didn’t seem to want to do network transfers anymore (likely because Windows updated something), I waited for that app to update to fix the issue. It never did. I found that MiXplorer was a good alternative that transfers files over the network just fine and works nice and fast as well. The interface takes a bit to get used to (meaning it isn’t the same as Solid Explorer) but the app is certainly worth using. Importantly, I can transfer files over the network without issue again.
Notably, this app is free to download (from XDA) however the Google Play version is not free. The Google Play version (which supports development) is a one time paid fee.