People need to realize you can use alternatives
tbf people just wanna sign up and click on funny links, not browse through 100 rando instances to find the one that lines up with their exact interests and wait for approval and worry about uptime and whether their instance will still exist in a year
I feel that, while lemmy is still a work in progress, it is already pretty adequate for solving this need. If you want to subscribe to other instances you can do it from within your insance by going up to communities and searching. You can also click the all tab and see a bunch of instances from around lemmy that your instance is federated with.
I think mastadon struggled with this because the twitter model is to follow people and depending how far removed the servers are this can be trickier. Compared to lemmy where people interested in a single subject will likely target and find the subject theyre interested in and bring themselves together naturally.
Furthermore I think some people are splitting up and dividing into sub instances and tiny subjects a little prematurely. Reddit didnt get super esoteric with it's subs until it got big and the larger subs either declined or got too noisy to talk about certain things. Like for example how beehaw has an operatingsystems instance instead of a linux, ubuntu, macos, windows, fedora, archinux, opensuse, openbsd, etc. Right now there arent enough of us that we dont need to subdivide.
I've seen people literally signing up here just to make like 50 empty communities and not post or comment on anything at all. Definitely a lot of folks just trying to stake some territory that they think will be valuable in the future.
Let me see if I underatand this correctly:
If I create an account on a random, small instance. And then go to the "all communities" feed. I can automatically see all communities that are in my instance. In addition to that, I can see all communities of other Lemmy instances, that are "federated". But I cannot see other communities from other nstances, unless I go on there, find the communitis and manually subscribe to them (I believe there are other ways to get them to show up, like using the search etc.?)
So, as a normal user. Who's just looking for a replacement for /r/all, wouldn't joining the largest lemmy instance that is fedarated to many others (Just by how many users it has, because it's the users who link instances by their actions?) make perfect sense?
I joined sopuli.xyz because they have a cute fuzzy animal in a hat as their logo.
Yeah I have been finding it hard to wrap my head around this federation part.
I tried subscribing to a specific feddit.de community using Jerboa and I haven't been able to yet. Not sure whether I'm misunderstanding something or whether that's not possible.
Jerboa doesn't let you create an account. Just do that step on the web first.
I joined lemmy.world and it took 2 minutes.
I have an account and I'm logged in. I'm posting this from Jerboa. But it's not a feddit.de account. Maybe I'm missing something.
Jerboa search only finds communities that at least 1 person on your instance subscribed to, to find new communities from other instances easily I like to use https://browse.feddit.de/
Then when you find a community, go to the web version of your instance (don't worry it's (mostly) mobile friendly) and type !name@instan.ce (don't forget the !) Then you can subscribe there. Close and reopen Jerboa and your new community will show up in the list. The Jerboa devs are working on fixing this.
lemm.ee gang