I think many people were looking for a reason to leave but kind of stuck seeing all the alternatives being either dead or abrasive.

Lemmy seems to have captured the soul of what a significant portion of people have already been looking for.

Lemmings

Socks are not "just as good" as coffee filters.

Thanks et merci! I'm happy to call sh.itjust.works my new home 🎉

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.

I'm feeling the same way, but I suppose we'll soon see.

Even if the reddit exodus doesn't turn into another internet legend, I am enjoying having fun participating in a forum for the first time in a long time. Probably since reddit stopped feeling like one in the early 2010s.

It feels oddly nostalgic. I think it reminds me of the fun I used to have when I first joined reddit.

Rather than just mindlessly scrolling with a couple "hehs" or a blowing air out my nose slightly faster than normal.

I think creating too many accounts as you try to find a home and figure out what instances are is a normal thing. I certainly did it as well 😂

You can think of each instance as a separate reddit website. The magic of the fediverse is all these separate full on websites are still the same thing and can interact with each other!

Lemmings

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 already mentioned a few times here how I have similar feeling. An added effect to that is actually leaving comments again.

At some point I stopped really engaging with reddit and became a passive lurker. I thought I simply grew out of it, but maybe it's more about how the site stopped feeling like a community.

Or how it started feeling like everything on reddit eventually became a witch hunt of one flavor or another. The days of karmanaut or years later unidan may as well be forgotten history to modern redditors. If they're brought up it's for the drama or the cringe.

The feeling of actually enjoying them and how the community interacted with itself at that time has been lost.

When I was feeling overwhelmed by all the cumbersome clicks that come with getting used to lemmy, I found kbin to be a better way to just explore what's across all instances.

https://kbin.social/

It's a different project but can access and interact with everything on lemmy.

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.

It's similar to lemmy where you first have to pick and join a server.

https://joinmastodon.org/

From there it's essentially twitter with a larger character limit and the ability to follow hashtags.

scrap the current https://join-lemmy.org/ we need a screenshot of this comment up there and nothing else NOW

On the main page you can toggle the Subscribed | Local | All thing to get different feeds. You can set the default in your settings.

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.

we already have that with /c/[email protected]!

In the age of endless uploads everywhere, we all forgot that hosting large files for many people is not always easy!

I think of those early 00 stories in the time before we called content creators, content creators. Too many people visiting their self hosted videos was a bad thing that would end up costing more money than they made!

caaaaaaaaaaarl