This site is currently struggling to handle the amount of new users. I have already upgraded the server, but it will go down regardless if half of Reddit tries to join.
However Lemmy is federated software, meaning you can interact seamlessly with communities on other instances like beehaw.org or lemmy.one. The documentation explains in more detail how this works. Use the instance list to find one where you can register. Then use the Community Browser to find interesting communities. Paste the community url into the search field to follow it.
You can help other Reddit refugees by inviting them to the same Lemmy instance where you joined. This way we can spread the load across many different servers. And users with similar interests will end up together on the same instances. Others on the same instance can also automatically see posts from all the communities that you follow.
Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements. That way the server will only go down sooner.
I’ve experienced a taste of this already. I checked the instance list a couple days ago, and didn’t see one that stood out for my interests, so I created an account on the main lemmy.ml instance.
I just registered the same username on another but as far as I can tell, there is no way to merge or link these two accounts. So all the setup I’ve done and all the communities I’ve subscribed to, I have to do over again.
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Another “issue” (a bug or feature?) I’m seeing is there are a lot of duplicate communities between the instances. I guess one will eventually “prevail” and become the defacto instance for that community.
Fore niche-y communities, probably. For more generalized ones (like “gaming”), I can see several communities evolve in parallel, each with its own culture and preferred content.
That’s me right now.
Started on beehaw but switched to lemmy.ml because beehaw doesn’t have communities I want.
You didn’t need to switch. You could’ve followed the same communities on lemmy.ml straight from your Beehaw account. It’s one of the benefits of federation.
That needs to be made more clear, in my opinion.
Also, how does a ban work in that case?
If you’re signed into an account on Instance A and subscribed to a community on Instance B, and the Instance B admins ban you… Couldn’t you just sign up for a new account on Instance B or Instance C and rejoin/participate in the Instance B community again?
Also, if the Instance A admins ban your Instance A account from their entire instance, couldn’t you just login to your Instance B account and join all of Instance A’s communities?
For instance, if LemmyGrad banned my LemmyGrad account for being a “lib”… couldn’t I just use my Beehaw or Lemmy.ml account to participate in the LemmyGrad communities? Would this force them to detect/ban me twice?
Seems like admins/mods of Lemmy instances and communities are going to have to be doing a multitude more work than the Reddit admins/mods.
And they’ll have to also be detectives, to suss-out whether or not a user is someone who has previously been banned from their community.
Once this gets going with bots and whatnot, the federated system seems to be a bit of a spaghetti nightmare.
I went for beehaw first too, couldn’t get registration to respond but then saw they didn’t offer downvoting. Strange decision IMO.
Downvoting is just used as a disagree button, not for its original purpose of promoting discourse and hiding comments that don’t add to the conversation.
Any comments that add to the conversation get upvotes. Any that don’t, can be reported and removed. I prefer it that way.