Looking at it on my desktop right now, I’m seeing everything I’d expect, for both local and federated communities. Most typically lately, I’m browsing on my phone, but that’s just hitting my instance directly via mobile Firefox, not using an app, so I can’t imagine that would have meaningfully different results.

Sounds most likely that this is just a perceptual thing where I’m not consciously realizing that communities Y and Z are posting way more frequently than community X, making me feel like I’m “missing” posts from X that are then trivially found when I go to X directly.

I’ll keep an eye out for this a bit more consciously for the next little while and see if that’s what’s actually going on.

I’m sorting by New. My expectation was a linear chronological feed of posts across all subscribed instances. And yeah, I’m still missing some posts in that view.

I recently switched to sorting by New, which sounds insane coming from Reddit, but Lemmy is much smaller right now, and New is actually viable and interesting.

I’m sure with more growth that will change, but it’s definitely kept my feed fresher and more interesting than either Active or Hot.

(This does of course assume that you’re subscribed to a reasonable number of communities you’re interested in.)

I’m one of the newer transplants from Reddit, but for the last several years I’ve only been a lurker there, because I haven’t felt like I really fit in with those communities and that culture well enough to fully engage.

Lemmy feels different, in similar fashion to how Mastodon felt so different from Twitter when I switched over there a year so back. I haven’t looked back on Twitter, and I doubt I’ll look back on Reddit. The water’s way nicer over here, for me.

I do think it’ll take a while for most of the disruptive newcomers to fully bounce off the Lemmy/Fediverse culture, but I also do think they will eventually bounce off it, as long as we all stick to our guns in terms of the culture we want to build, the rules with which we want to govern our communities and servers, and the social norms we want to tolerate.

There are just going to be 1973629092 tedious arguments about defederation between here and there. 🙄

I’m also finding it really effective. I only hate that backing out from a post is a crapshoot on whether it preserves my scroll position, resets to the top, or reloads the entire feed.

I’d like to be able to easily keep in touch with friends and family members. Because many of them are less technical, they haven’t adopted federated technologies like Mastodon; they either tried it and bounced off, or are so confused/intimidated by the new thing that they refuse to try it at all.

As a result, I either have to make a Facebook account to connect with them, or else be okay with only talking to them in person, SMS, or phone calls. This is not so different from a future world in which Meta is federated, and everyone else blocks them: in that world, I’d still have to make an account on the Meta instance, or else only talk to those folks offline.

So our choices then are either to a) federate and risk the rest of the network, b) defederate but make secondary accounts on their instance to talk to those less tech savvy folks in our lives, or c) cut ourselves off both technically and socially (at least as far as the internet is concerned)… and none of those feel like great choices.

I feel like the only real answer is that we need to get higher quality, more accessible, better polished Fediverse tools into the hands of those people who today only understand Facebook, and that’s a really high bar. How do we make it easier for our less techy parents, friends, etc. to join smaller, more privacy-focused instances, or even have their own instances, without having to think about, frankly, much of anything at all? Because that’s the proposition of Facebook for them right now: it’s easy, it just works, it has all the features they need, and they don’t have to think about it or put any work into it at all.

For instance: Mastodon is a good start, but so many people trip over the “pick a server” bit. One suggestion I’ve seen is to be able to send server invites, so I could click a button on my instance and send an email to my mom with a link inside that takes her straight to account setup on my instance and all she has to do is pick a username and password and install the app. That could still be even simpler (e.g. could there be an app install link that somehow pre-configures the app with a target instance, and sign up takes place within the appln first launch?) but at least it gets past one of the big apparent stumbling blocks of federation right up front.