Francisco Reyes

From what I see, Lemmy is growing and it may, eventually, grow if you create a local community for a city / region. My advice for anyone that would like to create a new community is to ensure you are creating content on a regular bases until there are enough other people to also contribute, with the knowledge could be a while (weeks / months???) before others discover it.

I am new to Lemmy, but from what I can tell you can create an arbitrary community, as long as the server allows it. Same name on different instances are treated as totally separate entities. In my opinion, as a new user, I think that is highly non optimal as it creates a fragmented set of users for a given topic. If you go to feedit.de and search for technology you will see a number (seems about 10 or so) different communities with the exact same name. It is up to you to go to each one of them and figure out which one, or ones, you want to follow.

Why not create it?

When federation works it is good. The instance I signed up for was missing quite a bit of posts across many of the different communities I had signed for. It seems better now after a recent upgrade, but unless one checks manually there is no way to know for sure if one’s instance is federating properly.

The other issue I find is that because anyone can create a topic on any instance, that can cause fragmentation of less popular topics so basically none of the instances has a good representation on that given topic because the few people interested in the topic are scattered.

New to Lemmy. When creating new communities does it matter which instance one creates it? For instance already have seen a few communities with the same name.

Is the approach in Lemmy that it is more of a <community>@<server> vs just <community>?

Only concern I have, or perhaps don’t understand it well enough, is that what if one creates a new community on a small host and then that host goes away. One would have to start from scratch on another server the same community and all the old posts would go away?

Desktop browser - Firefox running on Ubuntu. Even on Reddit, never quite warmed up to mobile so probably will do same for Lemmy.