I'm one of the people who has very recently tried Lemmy and decided to drop Reddit. Initially because I will no longer be able to use SyncForReddit, but now also because I just like the vibe a lot more here than Reddit.
I'm not a massively technical person, but I understood the broad concept of federation - different instances/servers that sync to form a big conversation/forum of sorts.
I heard a lot of people joining and saying positive things about lemmy.world, so I signed up there.....and that's it.
But, am I using it right? Is the idea to sign up in one place and use it to participate across the LemmyVerse/FediVerse? Or should I be seeking out lots of niche instances of interest?
I hear lemmy.world is the biggest instance. What if most people end up here, does that defeat the purpose? Is this inevitable?
You need a critical mass of users, so a quiet instance with few posts is not attractive. If I search for Xbox, there are lots of empty places or places with 3 posts. If there's one big one (often ends up being in lemmy.world) that's where I'm subscribing.
How are you using Lemmy, are you participating in a bunch of instances or just one?
I'd argue one of the most pressing concerns right now is the lack of migration tools
Currently you can't just create an account on instance X and move to Y. You need to create a new account. Eventually if we get the functionality to migrate from one place to another, people will be able to spread out across the fediverse and the risk of a single big server going belly up reduced.
From a technical standpoint if one instance gets defederated from other instances, all the users on that instance are stuffed. Their content won't appear in the wider fediverse (so less engagement)
I don't see how that's a problem. It's entirely painless to create a new account or to switch between accounts. I do it all the time.
I guess if a particular instance folds, I'll lose the stuff I posted there, but I don't see how that's a problem either. I've written countless thousands of forum posts over almost thirty years, and the vast majority of them are undoubtedly gone. What difference does it make? I didn't write them in some vain bid for some sort of immortality - I wrote them because there were specific things I wanted to say at specific moments, and because I enjoy writing. So they've already served their purpose.
There are different ways of relating to online content.
In some contexts I am more motivated to make contributions when I have reason to believe they will be persistent for years. I post on forums that have been around for 20+ years, where I search for things and come up with posts from that whole time. So when I write on there I kind of do it with care because I am thinking of people in the future who will find my stuff.
OTOH there is also a place for ephemeral communications. That is the whole draw of snapchat for example. The promise this will be deleted soon. Whether that is true or not is another thing.... But people do want it sometimes.