Please indulge a few shower thoughts I had:
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I wouldn’t worry about Lemmy having as many users as reddit in the short term. Success is not just a measure of userbase. A system just needs a critical mass, a minimum number of users, to be self-perpetuating. For a reddit post that has 10k comments, most normal people only read a few dozen comments anyways. You could have half the comments on that post, and frankly the quality might go up, not down. (That said, there are many communities below that minimum critical mass at the moment.)
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Lemmy is now a real alternative. When reddit imploded Lemmy wasn’t fully set up to take advantage of the exodus, so a lot of users came over to the fediverse and gave up right away. There were no phone apps, the user interface was rudimentary, and communities weren’t yet alive. Next time reddit screws up in a high profile way, and they will screw up, the fediverse will be ready.
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Lemmy has way more potential than reddit. Reddit’s leadership has always been incompetent and slow at fixing problems. The fediverse has been very responsive to user feedback in comparison.
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My problem with Lemmy is the lack of activity in niche communities. You’re right that there needs to be a critical mass and arguably Lemmy has it, but only for the most mainstream, generic type of content. It doesn’t have the mass to sustain any sort of niche, outside of maybe tech related topics because of the way the userbase is slanted.
I find myself going back there often because of that, but I hope that the userbase for generic content enough to sustain and grow, from where more active niche communities can spring up.
I think things could get a lot more interesting if other software that is more like classic bulletin boards and forums would implement ActivityPub. I mean, such online forums are still able to thrive in their respective niches. If such forums would become compatible with Lemmy, Kbin or Friendica, it could bring a whole new dynamic to this part of the Fediverse. At the same time, it would help these niche forums get more attention (even though I’m not sure if all or even most of them are interested in that).
When I first looked into Lemmy, which was probably well over a year ago at this point, I saw that they had an alternative front end called LemmyBB which resembles the older style phpBB boards of the late 90s and early 00s. It looks like the demo instance is offline now, and it wasn’t federating to begin with, but it certainly looks like an interesting use of the tech.
I run one of that niche communities and right now things are quiet, but I’ll keep at it and grow it over the next few years.
Someone the other day referred to posting in niche communities as shouting into the void currently, which I thought was apt.
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Oh, I see you have zero posts, ever. Well why don’t you go and contribute to that niche community you are nagging about. Maybe that’s what it needs to grow.
Ad hominem
Wait let me do it right so you know I know it’s Latin
ad hominem
Wait, I can’t read your comment because I keep seeing ads.
Ads for hominy? Weird.
Lemmy needs both content generators and content consumers. Not everyone needs to do both if that isn’t what motivates them to come to the site.
I don’t really love comparing to reddit because what reddit became isn’t what I hope for lemmy, but to make the point… What percentage of people do you think made content on reddit? I’d guess it was a fraction of a single percent.
I’m trying to, reached 300 subscribers, but three of them posted once, several commented once and that’s it.
What community is it, maybe I’ll try to plug it whenever it’s relevant to my comments.
It’s rare that it could come up in conversation outside the topic of photography, but here it is: !streetphotography@lemmy.world
Ah, nice, I’ll be a member and will be an OC poster as well though I rarely bring my sony mirrorless. It’s it okay to upload mobile photos?
I am of the opinion that cameras don’t really matter, beyond a certain technological level. Does it take pictures? Then it’s a camera, capable enough to use. There was a quote in Michael Freeman’s book on visual photographic literacy that I found quite interesting. He wrote that only ameteur photographers obsess over camera technology and settings.
So you’re more than welcome to post on there!
Thank you so much.
I’m sure they’ll get right to it after reading your smartass comment.
I follow damn near every community on lemmy that I followed on reddit. I follow 97 communities on lemmy with all communities active and none with 0 posts. I left reddit immediately and haven’t looked back. All the news, whether political or tech related, I get from lemmy. I think people just haven’t found the right communities. You have to put in some time to find them since you may have 5 or 6 with the same name. But, once you do, you should be good to go.
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Comparing the two communities, reddit nearly always has way more quality content and news for me though for the time being. Often even with big news it’s just not here on Lemmy at all. Many posts also have 0 comments and you just wouldn’t see that on Reddit. Once Sync can create posts I will probably start x-posting more from reddit to lemmy for communities I am most interested in.
For now I think I will start browsing Lemmy and then visit Reddit for anything I missed. Keeping my posting and commenting over here mostly because I’d like to see this place grow.
for me, reddit nearly always has way more quality content and news for me though for the time being
It’s not just you.
As constructively as I can put this, reddit has been building community and goodwill for many years. Lemmy has only recently become an option and it’s done wonderfully in the short time it’s had.
The challenge is the catch 22. People go where there is more content, they produce content there, and then there is more content there. There no vacuum, reddit didn’t disappear. It became toxic and people apparently care less about avoiding toxicity than filling up on dank memes.
All I can say to that is we all need to be the change we want to see in the world. Adopt a Lemmy First mentality, and go to reddit only to pick up legacy slack. Continue the conversation from there over here. Link it up.
This is a good comment. There is no vacuum. Well said.
Yeah, I wish there was more reposting from Reddit, because that’s what a lot of communities need tbh
Well it sounds like you weren’t into subreddits like sewing, knitting, or plant goths… Little less userbase there…
The key there is that it takes some effort to go find all the stuff. People are generally lazy so it’s hard to get them to do it.
So, what do they want, lemmy people have to do over time in posting so the lazy people get what they expect from lemmy. If they are lazy, they can stay with reddit.
Next time reddit screws up in a high profile way, and they will screw up, the fediverse will be ready.
And it doesn’t seem entirely impossible that our Elon Musk fanboy Steve will screw up again.
I won’t be surprised to read in the future:
- Reddit Introduces Its Own Version of X’s (Formerly Known as Twitter’s) Blue Checkmark
- Backlash After Reddit Strikes Exclusive Deal to Provide Trainingsdata to OpenAI
- Reddit Introduces Paid Membership Options for Communities
- Something Money Grabbing Reddit Related
Reddit charges a subscription for people to mod a subreddit.
That will be when they remove old.reddit
I’ve been wondering if the API change was actually a move to prevent anyone but themselves from using Reddit’s data to train AI.
Likely so, though scraping will still yield the data. Maybe they will make scraping harder too.
Maybe that’s why their mobile app and new website sucks lol
Yes, they specifically have said they don’t want AI companies to get their user data for free. What’s interesting is that we as a culture have internalized and accepted the idea that our user-made content is something only tech companies have the right to profit from and fight over.
That’s what I assumed from the beginning: think of the gold rush for generative ai and they are using Reddit data. Actually, it even seems fair to share in the potential (but what about the users who created it all?).
However if that was their intent, they sure screwed it up
Lemmy has enough user activity to fulfill my time-wasting needs.
There doesn’t need to be one website that EVERYONE is at. The Web didn’t used to be so damn consolidated.
I don’t give one shit about “Lemmy vs. Reddit”. I care about Lemmy having active communities to engage in, regardless of what is happening on some other website.
Yes this is my thinking as well. Before reddit I was more than happy participating in forums on subjects I enjoyed. I had want I wanted. I almost have that here as well. That’s success in my eyes.
I think so too. I used reddit up until rif stopped working about a week ago (for me at least). Ive always been a reluctant participant in social media largely because of how consolidated everything is. Which, at the end of the day just means we’re easier to market to or monetize. I’m excited about the possibilities of lemmy in a way I’ve never been about social media before. The content is currently a little sparse; you have to go looking a little, but that’ll improve quickly I’m betting. There’s no shortage of content to be had. In a small way it feels like the Internet 25 years ago
To me, the smaller userbase is actually a real problem. I’m willing to stick it out and hope it grows. But for over half of the subreddits I subscribe to, the corresponding lemmy communities have 0 posts this last week.
Yes, I don’t need 10k comments on my posts. But memes or mainstream news was never the big value of reddit for me - I can get these anywhere. Instead it is about the niche communities with a few thousand subscribers. And for now, I still have to use reddit for them.
Yeah the very top post on hot right now has 9 comments lmao.
There is no one here. I mean I love the platform and the apps. I don’t go to Reddit anymore on my phone. But there’s no one here.
If I don’t go to Reddit at least once per day I’m going to miss news and events that are important to me.
Just FYI hot is probably the worst way to browse for news and events, I’ve found top of 6h is far better if you check often, Active if you check every 24 hrs ish.
That’s been my experience as well. I usually do top 6 or top 12.
That’s mostly on the sorting algorithms being slightly fucky wucky. Lemmy has enough activity to satisfy me, but lacks niche communities.
Reddit has a lot of international subreddits which don’t really exist here on Lemmy (they have like 10 users and they almost never post).
Reddit has huge lively communities. I’m having a ball here on Lemmy, but I too must check Reddit once a day to know if important stuff happened.
Sure, someone could say I should work on jumpstarting these Lemmy communities, but I’ve only been able to to what I can so far (that is, replying to posts and joining the conversation)
Ninja edit: fixed grammar
Yeah the issue is that with large online communities, your largest user group is always going to be that of least engagement.
So users who just read stuff is your biggest group. Then comes users who made an account. Then comes users who up and downvote. And last comes users who post.
It makes it very hard to grow a new social media platform.
If you sort by “active” there should be posts with more comments. The “hot” sorting is not really representative for how active users on lemmy are, since it favours younger posts over older posts with lots of comments. You can read the details of the reasoning here .
I swap between active and hot. Seems to work well
Yeah, you need people to post and comment to develop a community. I’ve got one community where I post five times a week, but I’ve only had two posts from other people and only one person commented on a post.
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Lack of posts is one thing, but lack of comments is something else. People seem to be engaging with the posts with the like button, but that is all that is happening for now.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !no_context_art@thelemmy.club
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Firefox + ublock (it has filters that block the “install app” on mobile, but need to be enabled from the settings) is useable.
What about now?
Still visiting several subreddits that don’t have corresponding active lemmy communities. Once of them actually has an “official” lemmy community (run by the same mods) but none of the people moved over, so it’s empty,
“You could have half the comments on that post, and frankly the quality might go up, not down.”
This is probably my favorite part of Lemmy. The comment section feels more meaningful, and not a landfill of garbage posts. Additionally, if I make a comment, there is a higher chance that it will be read and responded to, so it feels like I am actually engaging with a community, and not just chucking my thoughts into space and hoping they land on a planet.
People actually talk here instead of racing to make an one-liner based on an in-joke to maximize karma usually. It’s nice.
Absolutely. It’s nice a solid portion of the silly Redditness is relegated to Lemmy Shitpost and Meme communities.
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I think the biggest value Reddit had to humanity was its original content. The kind of stuff that has people putting “reddit” in their Google searches for myriad topics.
As such, I’m not hung up on the numbers. If one really looked at it, that content generation is such a small fraction of what activity goes on over there. I’ll take quality over quantity here.
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No surveillance capitalism. unlike reddit, lemmy isn’t trying to monetize/track you.
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Freedom/openness. Already, someone can use a third party app to use lemmy. Moving forward, I think, people will come up with new ways to utilize lemmy/activity pub.
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Difference is: when that happens, it will be forked and will live on!
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Reddit has now checkmark/verified or whatsoever they call like any other centralized social media. Extreme cringe
twitter has transformed my view of people with verification checks to “most likely to be an idiot”
It could also be that they are forced to be an idiot, like for content creators (MKBHD, Tekking101)
i did say “most likely” :P
Paid speech.
Those people should be double and triple posting to different platforms.
There’s no reason MKBHD can’t post to both Twitter and Mastodon. You get the reach, and you enable an alternative.
Yes, it went from “person of influence” to “dumbass pays for attention” rather quickly.
That’s why musk now allows people to hide their check
Lol I didn’t know, I haven’t been there in months now. That’s awful… But good for us. :)
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Success is the best revenge.
R*ddit is a swear word now lol.
To me there is no vs. My web browser has tabs and I can have multiple ones open at a time. It is cool to have more things, I don’t need to commit to anything like an app or website.
Get outta here with your rational thinking! /s
One problem I see:
You can google
site:reddit.com whateverBut if you googlesite:lemmy.world whateverthen you’re losing a significant amount of results. To get good results, you need to know which Lemmy instances is likely to have your answer, and with communities duplicated over different servers, that can be tough.In the end I find I prefer this federation model, although I’m not sure although I’m a bit concerned about funding it if it scales up to the size of Reddit (same with Mastodon vs twitter).
Google should be finding searches with “lemmy” keyword, but it isn’t at the moment.
Lemmy needs some SEO people.
I don’t think lack of SEO is the issue. There’s just not enough content and brand/domain authority to get results from here high in SERPS.
There might be something fediverse related that would affect performance in search, but I’m not knowledgeable enough about this setup to speak to it.
I think it’s just lack of content, general awareness/interest, and longevity that’s keeping Lemmy low in search
Lemmy contents are replicated by federated servers, so you might find what you want by using
site:lemmy.worldor other big instances because they might also has replicated contents from other smaller instances.This has more to do with how bad Google has gotten, such that you’re forced to add restrictions like Reddit to get rid of SEO sites and get useful answers. A proper working search engine would show these (and any that are found in Lemmy) high up by default.
I’m sure the search problem will be solved somehow. Like all the content is on each instance so its just a case of it being accessible and indexed by google I guess?
I’m sure it’s already being indexed by Google. But people like to add site filters like
site:Reddit.comorsite:stackoverflow.comto prevent google from barfing up a bunch of garbage results on the front page, when they know that’s probably where the results they want will be. There is no way to add a Lemmy-wide filter to a Google search, because Lemmy instances are all different sitesDoes it actually matter though because Lemmy contents are replicated by federated servers, thus big Lemmy instances such as lemmy.world might have contents from smaller federated instances as well. Try using
site:lemmy.worldnext time and see if it’ll improve the search result, though Lemmy.world is just 2 months old so maybe Google hasn’t indexed it allThat’s a good point. If you filter by a major site, then it’ll have content from all the major communities.
That won’t help if you’re looking for niche content, but that’s not as important.
I wonder how replicated data shows up to the indexer. I don’t know enough about search engine indexing or SEO. Will google index replicated data? Presumably it won’t index feeds or searches, it’ll index the actual posts, and I wonder if replicated posts are considered posts for the purposes of indexing or if the indexer will only look at local posts.
Google isn’t thrilled with duplicate content. Following this thread here, it sounds like identical content might be hosted on multiple servers? If that is so, it’s not going to be high value in Google’s eyes.
If it’s indexed, you’ll be able to search it with Boolean modifiers, but it might not get priority in organic searches.
Yes, contents are replicated across federated instances. For example, here is the link to this thread on my instance: https://lemmy.institute/post/49173
If you check the html source there, there is a canonical link in the header that points to https://sh.itjust.works/post/2334723 , which is in the OP’s instance. I think google will respect canonical links when indexing duplicated contents, so maybe the SEO aren’t affected too much?
Presumably how it should work is that that even if content is duplicated, the crawlers would only index the “local” for Mastodon/Lemmy/etc servers, so they wouldn’t see the duplication.
But idk how it actually works, and we’re right back with my original concern of
sitefilters
Ideally it would be popular enough that you wouldn’t need the site modifier. Google would see that Lemmy has the most seen and perpetuated answer just like it sometimes does with Reddit now, whatever the instance.
In the eyes of a search engine, yes.
But once a site is popular enough for traffic and engagement to influence it’s position in search, it’s def going to be popular enough for bots, trolls, bad faith actors, grifters, etc.
People still often out the site modifier on just to prevent google from barfing up a bunch of crap they don’t care about, even if they know that Reddit results will be near the top.
Welcome to the old Internet. Decentralization is good in a way, people will have to try harder instead of having everything spoon fed to them by Google.
I’m not personally a fan of that brand of elitist gatekeeping. Having it be harder to keep out the plebs is not a look I think we wanna get behind.
Decentralization is important, but the goal isn’t to keep people out.
I guess I didn’t exactly mean it as elitist gatekeeping, I see it more like people are being abandoned by major websites and this is the result.
People having to work harder is good? No I disagree with that entirely.
Part of what makes reddit so amazing is the amount of amazing knowledge and answers you can find from google.
I hope Lemmy never gets to be the size of Reddit. We’ll have some level of Eternal September eventually, but please not at that level. I really hope not. It’s overwhelming unless you’re in one of the niche subreddits.
If it never gets to the size of Reddit then it’s destined to become 9gag with porn.
Honestly, I don’t know if it’s the fewer users, the lack of trolls, the newer apps I’ve been forced to use or the topics that I’ve been getting into since joining Lemmy. But I have been considerably more active here both commenting and posting, than I ever was on Reddit.
It may have started as a way to do my part for the growth of Lemmy, but it’s not been about that for me for some time now.
For me it’s the smaller number of users. It is very likely that your comment will just end up at the bottom and nobody will see it if you comment on a reddit post with thousands of comments. If you comment on a Lemmy post with 25 comments or less it is way more likely to actually be seen by people.
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That’s an issue of your instance, not of Lemmy. Smaller, less populated instances tend to be more stable.
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Correct, I have an alt account on a different instance because .world is down so much.
Yes, the network load should be distributed among many small servers. That’s why my main acc is on monero.town
Do you have accounts on two (or more) servers?
I think, for now anyway, that that is something everyone should do, hear me out!
I have a server up and running but no users, I would be relieved if people subscribed but not with their sole account for the whole lemmyverse.
So if you want a quick server, for an alt account/backup account head over to lemmy.mindoki.com!
I might be slow at accepting, I have a full-time job, but it will be done!
I see no point personally in actively using more than one account.
If you want many users registered on your instance, I suggest you make the server about a general topic people can identify with. E.g. programming.dev is generally about programming, so it hosts communities for all sorts of programming languages. It seems like you like art, maybe make the server about art generally or a (popular) direction of art and advertise your instance with that. I don’t think we have an instance about art yet
Hey thank you and except my computer related hobbies&work I do like the arts very much :-)
I have a super user on the server otherwise I’m trying to use only one account too, mostly because hopefully my instance won’t get DDOSed all the time!
hobbit.world has some great LotR related art btw.
Good tip
Most of the communities I’m interested in are on LW. If LW is down, Lemmy is down for me. It is also important to understand that LW is experiencing these issues because it has the largest population. The more people come to Lemmy the more instances will cross this threshold and will go offline.
The more people build instances and the more people create communities outside of lemmy.world, the more resilient all this will be. Lemmy is the kind of place where you can fix your issues by building alternatives.
Hosting an instance has some cost and technical difficulties, so I don’t go around recommending that, but creating an account on a mid-sized instance and creating communities there for what you like to talk about is in everyone’s power.
One issue I see is reports as recent as a month ago of people bringing an instance to it’s knees with a python script on 1 desktop computer. It’s one thing to ask for more instances and investment into the hardware to run them from more people, but it’s another thing not realizing that the code itself is heavily under optimized. For now, and you can see this everytime there’s an outage via the atlassian uptime tracker notes, server owners are throwing more resources to bandaid issues.
I myself am currently running an under optimized application for my company, we are using 4x the amount of money to run it as what it’s meant to replace currently. At a certain point even throwing the kitchen sink at problems stops working.
Lemmy’s code needs to mature more, but im excited about the future for sure.
There is a nice button on each instance that turns off new registrations. Once an instance owner has enough users and don’t want to upgrade the instance anymore, he checks that one.
It will be impossible to ddos every Lemmy instance, not very efficiently at least.
If I’m interested in community X on instance M and M is down it is irrelevant that instances N and O are up - I still can’t access X on instance M.
I don’t know how you people browser Lemmy, but I only read subscribed feed. And most of the communities I care about are on LW. Thus it is absolutely irrelevant that other instances exist. And no, I don’t want to read the cache - I already saw old content.
But even if I’m on my instance, lemme.ee, and LW is down, I’m not going to see anything from that instance. Which is where the most activity is. So I might see the same link for an article locally, with two comments, and no interaction from the instance with 300 comments.
I mean, eventually other instances will grow, but then they will face the same problems as Lemmy.world.
While world is down, you can still read everything that was posted and federated before it went down on other instances. It’s not like you suddenly don’t have anything to read (unless you are on here 24 hrs / day).
It’s not really just about reading, it’s the engagement. I can read something from a couple of hours ago, comment now, and then somebody might read it in a couple of hours. And then comment back. But then I’m barely interested in the conversation because I’ve moved on.
But I’m just nitpicking. I know it’s going to balance out. Or it won’t and we’ll move on to something else that does LOL. Or I can always spend more time outside. Gasp.
Being outside is dangerous, it has fresh air and sunshine. :)
Try using one of the medium-size instances. You get the same experience as on lemmy.world, minus all the scaling problems. Just create an account on one of them and copy over your settings and subs with lasim. You can even use the same username if it’s still available on the other instance.
If communities I’m interested in are on LW then it doesn’t matter which instance I use. If LW is down then Lemmy is down.
You can still see posts and comments from lemmy.world while it’s down. Making new posts/comments might be an issue though
I can see old stuff on archive.org from all over the web. But when something is down - it’s down. Because the whole purpose of communities is online communication between their members.
You’re right. On the other hand, beginning to use smaller instances might help to reduce the overload of lw in the long run. It might also make the Fediverse more resilient. Reducing the dependency on big instances in my opinion is a good thing.
Yeah, if I were LW, I would stop allowing new users. I feel like servers should be either user or community based, not both. One for users has nice things like alternate skins (e.g. a.lemmy.world or old.lemmy.world) and ones for communities are focused primarily on having good moderators and being super reliable so that federations to them work 100% of the time.
I beginning to feel that lemmydotworld isn’t totally acting in the interests of the lemmy community.
It won’t help if the communities you’re interested in are on LW. It doesn’t matter if you register elsewhere - if LW is down then your community is down. The end.
I know that. That’s why I wrote “in the long run”. What I meant is this: If more users register on different servers in the long run more communities will spawn on those servers. If everyone just registers on lemmy.world, new communities will find their homes there.
It does matter. You can still browse and even post and comment on LW communities, even when LW itself is down. But maybe more important is that LW is having problems because many people are using it, so switching to different instances actually helps LW be more stable.
Mmm, nope. If you are on instance X and view instance Y when it’s down, you only see a cache. If you post or comment your content will only propagate once Y comes up. If Y is down it’s down.
I would call that browsing, posting and commenting, even if it doesn’t sync to other instances until the source instance is back up.
You can use notepad to the same effect.
It depends on your instance. I have account on lemmy.world and it’s indeed been having stability issues. However some other instances seem a bit more stable, like lemmy.ca.
I’ve seen posts on lemmy.world asking for more voluntary admins because of the sudden growth. And apparently they are also the preferred instance to be attacked.
It feels like it’s up all the time when I use it. Must depend on the instance. Even Reddit was frequently down for maintenance and other issues.
Do your part and try a smaller instance. http://lemmy.today has not been down even once. I’m a heavy user there.
But if you don’t like that one, pick any other smaller instance and you won’t have this problem.
Yeah, I joined lemmy.today so I could have a place to go when my OG lemmy.world is down. I like lemmy.world, but it’s constantly down (like right now). I suppose there’s no reason I shouldn’t just use this one as my primary, though I do like the other skins that lemmy.world added (old.lemmy.world and a.lemmy.world) when I’m on desktop.
I haven’t looked into it but couldn’t those skins be installed on other instances also? Hopefully open source thingies.
Yeah, but they have to be installed by the server admins. lemmy.world added them. I’m not aware of any other instances that have them, but I’d love for them to be standard. The a.lemmy.world is my favorite lemmy experience so far (though I can’t…ummm…use it right now).
Admin of Lemmy.today added all of the them yesterday. I like how fast old is actually, but I’m on mobile app almost always anyway.
The main difference for me is that I feel like I’m part of a global project, not just a product in some big tech’s ecosystem.
