Here are some specific questions.
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Are the upvotes and downvotes I make, private? If I report a comment, is my report private?
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Can someone follow me across lemmy instances based on my username?
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If I want to make a community, is there a reason I would choose one lemmy over another?
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Are the powers of moderators similar to reddit’s?
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Where can I find a list of most active lemmy instances?
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Any other differences from reddit I should know about?
Votes are semi-public. Not every instance makes them public, but anyone who is on an instance that does can see them.
Your comments and posts are public, I think your subscriptions as well, so if you need to protect yourself from harassment the remedy is just like reddit: have accounts that don’t overlap, one for politics, one for anime, one for whatever.
You should definitely only create a community on an instance where it fits. For example, a muni about fashion doesn’t belong on the the solarpunk instance, and a muni about ocean life doesn’t belong on midwest.social. Many instances are “general” instances, though.
Moderation here lacks the robust toolset of reddit, so it’s hard to compare them. But you can have posts and comment threads removed (lemmy removes whole threads, not just the parent comment); you can be banned from a muni or even a whole instance; but no one can ban you from all of lemmy. Unlike reddit, your home instance can be defederated, which is basically shadowbanning your entire server. Defederations and mod actions are public; other admin actions can be done stealthily by directly editing the database.
You don’t need an active “home” instance if you have a robust subscription list, honestly, because you can subscribe to munis on other instances.
Thanks. Is lemmy.world the best instance for general discussion?
In my opinion, the major difference between instances is moderation practices. There may also be technical aspects such as down time or frequency of updates that may affect your experience.
I find that lemmy.world has well balanced moderation. They don’t allow spam or abuse, and they’re not pushing an agenda.
It’s a good place to start.
We try to do our best in that. We try to keep us out of community matter. We know its YOUR community. Of course sometimes, it requires admin intervention but only if we see urgent matter, otherwise we want to talk to the mods first for their point of view.
We have a discord server for better communication too. https://discord.gg/TnqAFsdgy4 and a matrix space too: https://matrix.to/#/#space:lemmy.world
Good to know! Are there other Fediverse sites with different moderation practices? Like what’s an example of one with a VERY strict policy, and what’s an example of one with a very loose policy?
For example, beehaw.org is known for more strict moderation. It’s a very positive place in my opinion, but there’s a trade off that not as many different voices are tolerated. There are also some like lemmyNSFW.com that let users post/say whatever they want as long as it’s legal.
Cool. Can I ask you one more question? Can I comment on Beehaw (or lemmyNSFW, but I’m at work so not going there right now) using this account I have at lemmy.world? The reason I ask is, I see that I can comment on other lemmies (e.g. lemmy.ml) using this account, but only if I find them through lemmy.world’s communities|All tab. But I don’t see Beehaw there.
Or more basically, in general for another instance running Lemmy, how do I access it using this account at lemmy.world?
Thanks so much…
You cannot comment on Beehaw communities as they defederated from Lemmy.world. You can see that here: https://beehaw.org/instances
The fact that they are defederated means that no traffic is being sent between lemmy.world and beehaw: Users of one website are invisible to those on the other.
Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world as they struggled to keep up with the high number of users, not all of them good actors. As creating a friendly space is the top priority of Beehaw, they chose to prioritize friendliness over activity.
Yes. Any instances that are linked with your current instance basically become one—all communities, posts, and comments become intertwined into one big social network and you can interact freely. Behawshould be included so you probably haven’t come across a community hosted there yet. You can always see what instances are linked by going to the homepage of any Lemmy instance, scrolling to the bottom and clicking Instances
Beehaw, no. They defederated from Lemmy.world. More information is at https://lemmy.world/post/145337 (iffy formatting) and https://beehaw.org/post/567170 (easier to read). A bit more information is also at https://lemmy.world/post/149743
LemmyNSFW, yes. The answer is yes for most instances.
Is also worth noting that it’s not just the moderation practices of your instance that affects your experience, it’s also how other instances perceive your instance. Hexbear, for example, is an instance filled with “tankies” and a lot of other fediverse instances don’t agree with them or their values and choose to defederate from them. So a Hexbear user, while they might personally like their own instance’s moderation and values, will not see any content from instances that have defederated with Hexbear, which could impact their experience enough that they’d rather move instance.
(Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a comment from a Hexbear user that I’ve loved. And I’ve definitely personally blocked several of their communities from showing in my feed.)
In the past, I know some instances defederated from lemmy.world because it was seen as kind of spammy. Some of them re-federated after lemmy.world tightened up its moderation, but I don’t know of all of them did. (I’m not a lemmy user so it doesn’t affect me personally and therefore I don’t keep too much track of it.)
Inter-instance politics aren’t necessarily a thing you need to be hyper-aware of, but they can definitely shape your experience.
Depends on what you’re looking for. Each instance has a general vibe of user, so while .world may be good for someone, .ml may be good for another, and beehaw.org may be good for another, and so forth! .world is generally a generalist instance, but ironically because people with more specific interests are already on more specified instances, .world is more likely to house people that don’t fit well into other servers, paradoxically creating a type and it’s own unique vibe.
Best is very subjective.
.world is a good general purpose instance for just about anything. I think it has the biggest population at the moment, so communities there are likely to get at least some engagement.
For “general discussion” it doesn’t really matter. The instances are federated so you’ll likely get general discussion in comments from lots of people from lots of instances anyway, wherever your community is based.
Some people get almost nationalistic about their chosen instances or have grudges against people from certain other instances. There’s sometimes inter-instance politics with some servers defederating with others or threatening to for various reasons. It’s kinda fun to watch in a popcorn drama kind of way. For the most part, the instance doesn’t matter.
No, probably mander.xyz. .world is plagued by bots and trolls and a lot of uses block it outright.
I thought it was the other way? If your home instance makes them public they can be seen by anyone otherwise only the home instance admins can