Unfortunately that link doesn’t help much. Currently among the list of “recommended instances” (followed by a claim that it “doesn’t matter” which of these you choose) are a French-speaking instance, a crypto instance, and an anime instance. Hardly welcoming places for your average person, unless you happen to be a French crypto bro looking for porn in which case you are definitely well catered for.

OP might not have all the details worked out but their point is a good one, and it’s an issue on Mastodon as well. It’s all well and good having a one-liner description about each instance but it can be quite a trawl to find the actual important info you need to make a decision.

A couple of the apps do have this “multi community” feature, if you’re a mobile user. Summit definitely does, Raccoon (the one I’m replying from now) technically does but it’s pretty broken so I’m hoping that gets looked at soon. And tbh maybe more of them do now, it’s been a while since I checked!

You’ve had some well-meaning but ultimately not quite accurate answers in this thread so just to clarify:

You can follow, post to and interact with Lemmy communities from Mastodon, because they’re treated the same way as a “group” on Mastodon in general.

You can NOT follow and interact with Mastodon users from Lemmy, because Mastodon accounts are individual “users” and Lemmy doesn’t have the concept of following and interacting with users, only with communities. If Lemmy ever does add a feature to let us follow other users, then in theory following Mastodon users will also become possible.

I’ve not “used” it but for some reason they’ve decided to include one of my accounts in their gaming feed so I checked it out.

Just seemed like a too-broad-to-be-useful repost bot, although apparently there are real people “curating” too. Why they’d repost my inane ramblings if it’s actually human-curated, I do not know.

I do however know quite a few people who blocked them already since it just looks at first glance like complete spam. Like most Fedi stuff, they could probably do with communicating better what it is they’re actually trying to do.

Bit of a weird one, I use the default UI myself and haven’t had any issues with it. But maybe if you can post a pic it’ll help us figure out what’s going on?

There are some opt-in directories for finding people by topic.

Such a weird way of framing a cool new feature.

The problem it solves is that typing on a phone is annoying, and that’s a problem every other app has too.

The “problem” of people not being able to find you if you give them your handle instead? Based on recent experience of a lot of non-techy friends signing up and finding and following me with literally no problems, I’m pretty sure that isn’t a thing.

It’s how both platforms (and I assume the rest of fedi) work. If you follow an account from Mastodon, that your server has never seen before, it’ll be blank until new posts are made. That goes for other Mastodon accounts, Lemmy communities / users, Pixelfed accounts, PeerTube channels, etc etc.

If you subscribe to a Lemmy community, and your Lemmy server has never seen that community before, same thing. Blank until new posts.

It caused a lot of confusion and tech support last summer but now that most servers know about most other ones I guess it’s not as common to run into these days :D

Pixelfed only shows media posts, so if you’re following a Mastodon account you will see any posts made with images attached but not text-only ones.

The blank feed is just because nobody from your Mastodon server was following this account yet. Works the same as following any other new-to-your-server Masto account in that respect, but it should start showing new posts made since you followed.

0.19 broke federation for quite a lot of people for the majority of December, probably has something to do with it.

I’ve been an almost daily Lemming since last summer but when nothing I posted was making it off my server for about three weeks there wasn’t much point!

Same situation, for the most part. I was, however, originally on an arts & crafts server that had to shut down because the admin was being bullied by the folks over at .art, so I have seen a bit of the nonsense.

Seems like most people on there are just normal nice people, but unfortunately as in the real world being awful gets you attention and power and disproportionally affects the reputation of your server, platform, state, country, etc.

There’s also a ton of crossover, again as in the real world but also as on Lemmy and everywhere else, between people who obsess over politics and this kind of toxic behaviour. So I think in having most of that filtered out we kill two birds with one stone.

Raccoon managed everything but the sub/superscript. Not too shabby!

That’s definitely the way to go for now. PT is pretty ok software from the creator pov but it’s atrocious as someone just looking to view! We’ll see how things develop, maybe that changes at some point.

Yes you can follow channels from other servers without much of a problem. The issue that this on something like Lemmy or Mastodon, that follow would then bring the followed content into the search results of your server. It doesn’t seem to work that way on PT.

Example: I have two channels on makertube.net. My husband follows them both, from another PT server (I can’t remember which). But just the act of him following doesn’t mean my channel shows up in a search from his server.

I think it’s just a misunderstanding. With most other Fedi software, servers federate via the users themselves following content from other servers and then the admins have control over whether to sever that connection by defederating. With PeerTube it doesn’t work that way, federation is controlled by the admin of each server in the first place and they tend to keep the list quite short (on a particular theme, or just servers by other admins they trust, or whatever).

I expect the fundamental reasons for that are the expense of hosting video content and also the risk of extremely NSFL material if you throw the doors open by default. It definitely results in a lot of behaviours that seem very strange if you’re used to the usual fedi way of doing things.

Came here to basically say this, especially the first couple points. I’ve talked a few people into trying various Fedi services and cannot overstate just how much they DO NOT CARE about the techy underpinnings of it all. People just want to know a) it’s cool b) where to sign up c) where to find the content they’re looking for.

Anything else can wait until they learn it naturally over time or specifically ask the question.

The more the merrier, indeed!

That’s just my Lemmy subscription feed but with extra AI “art” lol. But thanks, always interesting to learn about the up-and-comers. I wonder if we’ll end up in an endless forking situation like with Misskey 🍿

We were born too late to explore the globe or pioneer new settlements, but dammit we can try out weird new online platforms and nobody can stop us!