this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I chose not to sign up on lemmy.ml as it didn’t seem that they were looking to become “big”, and seems more focused on a specific niche. How come they are so popular despite those points?
People see that they have the highest user count and gravitate towards it. Most people don't really get how federation works, so they worry about getting "stuck" on an instance with no one to talk to
This is 100% me, but my understanding is that you can see all community content and interact with everyone regardless of what server you're on, is that more or less correct? I went with beehaw because it seemed moderately popular (I'd read that servers can disappear, and figure more users=less likely?) and is focused on keeping out assholes, which I am 100% cool with.
A good analogy I'm seeing thrown around is email: everyone has their own email provider - gmail, yahoo, outlook, or a corporate email server, etc - but all of those can send and receive emails from every other one. I have gmail, but I can email you at yahoo, and recieve emails from my friend on hotmail. If gmail starts being shitty and corporate or making decisions I don't like, I can switch to a different provider, and crucially, gmail doesn't get to decide how the rest of the email universe behaves.
Lemmy instances are like the email providers, and "sending emails" is like interacting with communites on any instance. If my Lemmy instance starts serving ads or something I can just leave it, and still have access to all the other communites on every other instance.
That's really helpful, thanks!