xapr [he/him]

It can be confusing, which server do I join? Why that one vs this one?

Good grief, this argument seriously makes me want to pull my hair out…

“Which [email] server do I join? Why that one vs this one?”

I would suggest blocking the communities that post all the content you don’t like. After I did that, it’s been smooth sailing, and I read the All feed. There’s not that many large news and politics communities that you would need to block to get rid of that stuff on your timeline.

Good tip about browsing by New. I don’t do that very often, and I don’t think I have since I blocked a bunch of communities. I’ll try it again, thanks!

You can still use All, if you block the communities that you don’t want to see, one by one. It’s exhausting and new ones continue to be added, but otherwise it’s hard to know about new communities that come along that you might like.

Yes, this was pretty much the same way I thought about it since I want know about new, interesting communities and hope that eventually the smaller ones will thrive like they did on Reddit. Honestly, I didn’t even think it was that exhausting. I would browse the home feed and as soon as I saw a stupid post that seemed to be typical of a particular community, I would click directly on the community link from the home feed and then click block this community. The nice thing about doing it this way is that you tend to quickly get rid of the worst offending communities which has the most significant impact on your timeline. After that, it was more of an occasional block for me.

When I look at the feed, I mostly see memes, US politics, and some tech.

My solution to this (same experience here), was to block all the communities that were flooding with this stuff and anything else I didn’t care for, and then just browse All. Now my home feed is pretty nice.

No problem!

home.arpa

Yes, I’ve been using this too. Here’s the RFC for .home.arpa (in place of .home): https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8375.html

It still does? They have a version for people with internet access, and a version for people without, with a heavy dose of offline applications and information. You can also download more offline resources after you install it.

https://www.endlessos.org/os-direct-download

This is the first I’ve heard of “a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues” and “Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute”.

Can you give a summary or examples? I’m not trying to argue, but would just like to know more. I don’t follow Lemmy development more closely than reading the dev summaries they post, so wasn’t aware of any of this.

For sure. The growing pains haven’t been too bad for me either. I think that things will definitely get better with Lemmy.

You’re welcome.

Yeah, unfortunately that is a thing. Example:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/collapse@lemmy.ml (lemmy.sdf.org’s local view of Collapse @ lemmy.ml) shows 22 subscribers. In effect, this is the number of people on lemmy.sdf.org who have subscribed to this remote community.

https://lemmy.ml/c/collapse (the original/direct view of Collapse @ lemmy.ml) shows 2.11k subscribers. I don’t know whether this number shows only subscribers from lemmy.ml or an aggregate of all subscribers across the fediverse.

Unfortunately, another issue even if the count on the direct link to the community is an aggregate, is that it’s probably not counting people who are stuck in a “subscribe pending” state. A ton of the communities I subscribed to weeks ago still show in this state on my communities page. I understand that what this means is that I’m subscribed on my end so that everything works for me, but the original community hasn’t acknowledged my subscription, so I expect that this means it also doesn’t count me as a subscriber.

It takes some effort to build up and shape your Home feed on Mastodon. One good starting point is to search for hashtags that you’re interested in, like #sports or #gamedev or whatever. It may take some trial and error to find the most popular hashtags being used in your topics of interest. Once you find the hashtags with stuff that’s interest to you, follow those hashtags so you will continue to discover new people and posts in those topics in your Home feed. Once you find interesting people posting in those hashtags, follow them. The name of the game on Mastodon is to follow, follow, follow. I’ve heard it said that your feed will get pretty good when you follow around 200 people or so.

It sounds like he’s trying to copy zombo.com (listen to the audio for at least 30 seconds to a minute - the animation is a little broken by now)

Search for hashtags first, like #TopicOfInterestToMe. Follow those. Then, look for people who post interesting stuff in the hashtags you follow. Follow them. The trick to Mastodon is to follow, follow, follow. This may also be a good starting point to find interesting people to follow: https://fedi.directory/

Yes, follow lots of hashtags of interest, and follow lots of people that post stuff you’re interested in. I’ve seen it said before that once you have about 200 accounts you’re following you will have a nice volume of interesting posts in your home feed.

I’ve been thinking about this too. Only been on Lemmy a few days, so still only have this one account, but definitely considering creating others, for the same reason as I had different accounts on Reddit: to compartmentalize different interests and purposes. For instance, a technology account, a news/politics account, an NSFW account. The cool thing about the Fediverse is that you can also create those accounts on instances that match the purpose of the account, like tech on programming.dev, NSFW on lemmynsfw.com, etc.

Edit: I just realized now upon re-reading your question that it was specific to Lemmy vs. Mastodon. In that case, I would say definitely. I think the two systems are sufficiently different to warrant having separate accounts. I do have another Mastodon account. One on each system for now.