On Lemmy I browse Subscribed until I run out of new posts. Then I switch to All and look for communities to add. Over time I’ve been spending more and more time on Subscribed, as my list grows.

This post is about Mastodon, I haven’t been able to figure that place out yet.

I think this is getting downvoted a little unfairly. I suspect this is mostly because the title went a bit too far in the “provocative” direction. If you were to build on this, I’d say extract the parts about setting up your own instance (everything after “In Comes Lemmy”) and expand that.

A couple other thoughts:

• I agree that !unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org is awesome, if you contact pmjv he’ll probably respond
• You say: “When you use Lemmy, you have to subscribe to specific communities in order to see the content from those communities.” which is not literally true – you can just set your account to read “all”, and a lot of people do that. Not sure what the default is, especially if you set up your own instance.

ikr. I never thought of reddit as hipsters.

Some Lemmy phone apps have ads.

go for it, fam! Yeah, I think it’s a lot more fun to be posting when someone else is already posting there. (instead of just posting by yourself.)

The big three are:

• memes
• politics/news
• tech

There are a couple dozen people who keep a smaller community alive (like PugJesus on history, anon6789 on owls, JohnnyEnzyme on euro graphic novels, LaurenceWolse on b movies, Nexius Lobster on traditional art, etc); occasionally someone takes over a community and starts posting regularly, and occasionally someone burns out and the community dies.

Also give us a chance to make a comment that will be seen, and maybe encourage discussion.

It looks like your “edit” is right (version of lemmy and instance configuration are an issue), with the additional complication that sometimes where it is hosted makes a difference (sometimes the youtube summary is in a different language and/or won’t grab it because of regional restrictions) and sometimes the reader app/web interface grabs their own thumbnails and/or may not display thumbnails and/or may even try to just embed the video. There was a post on techsupport a while back about this: https://lemmy.world/post/20180043

I post to !fullmoviesonyoutube@lemm.ee from slrpnk.net and to get a thumbnail, I do the following:

• get a thumbnail image file. either grab it from wikipedia, imdb, or by a screencap that I trim. put that file somewhere on my computer.
• use the web interface with default client. It has a “thumbnail URL” field (which I didn’t see back when I had a lemmy.world account - probably version differences) but I can’t just upload the image to that field, so I have to…
• go to the post “body” input field and click on the “upload image” button to upload the thumbnail image file from my computer. This uploads the image to the server and adds a line of code to the body input field that looks something like this: ![](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/a-long-UUID.png)
• copy the part from “https” to “png” and put it in the “thumbnail URL” field
• usually I then delete that code from the post “body” input field
• edit: of course, I still have to add the youtube URL in the “URL” field…

I think this adds thumbnails, but of course I can never be sure because someone can always use a client or configuration I’m unaware of. That’s the price of freedom from a single corporate server and a limited choice of viewer clients.
Ideally this whole process would be easier or automatic. I imagine the situation/process will change as time gones on.