I was just scrolling through my feed. This whole Firefox Chrome instanced post I have seen literally 15 times. Most of my feed is nothing but that post.
I understand trying to get Lemmy popular. And I understand distributing knowledge of this.
Sorry if I sound like I’m complaining. I want to like Lemmy. But I’m struggling. And I can’t do reddit.
Maybe I need to figure out a different algorithm like more threads to follow?
Maybe I’m part of too many technology threads. :)
I believe what you’re experiencing is just part of the growing pains of Lemmy. I’m here from reddit as well, and something to keep in mind is this: According to the-federation.info, on May 1st of this year, there were 2,750 active users on Lemmy. Today, there are 85,045 active users, an increase of ~31x. The sorting algorithms for content on Lemmy are meant to handle a few dozen posts a day, not thousands. This causes things like Hot to show four year old posts just a few pages in, or the same article to be posted to the many duplicate communities that are springing up as Lemmy explodes in size. Over time, centralization will happen to a degree (it’s already happening with lemmy.world vastly outstripping lemmy.ml as the largest instance), which will consolidate the horde of communities into only a few, like how subreddits that offered the same type of content eventually consolidate into one or two.
Is there really a meaningful difference between /r/damnthatsinteresting and /r/interestingasfuck (prior to the protests)? Not really, but then there’s also /r/interesting, /r/mildlyinteresting, /r/moldlyinteresting, /r/interestingaf, /r/interestinggifs, /r/utterlyinteresting, /r/interestingbutcreepy, /r/reallyinteresting… I think you see the point. Right now, you’re subscribed to ALL of those, and people are aggressively trying to grow each one, which means they see a LOT of duplicate content. As Lemmy stabilizes, a lot of them will wither and essentially die off. It just takes time. The tough part is not knowing which communities will become THE community for a topic, so subscribing to all of them for now makes sure you won’t miss it.
It’s a bit of a concern though that as people decide which instance to post things to, they’ll tend to settle on the biggest instances, and after a while we’ll have a single centralized site that just happens to be federated with a bunch of sites no one uses. Federation will become irrelevant to how most people use it, and other instances won’t attract users or posts.
Because I don’t want to see Lemmy morph into Reddit, I try to scatter my posts to different instances. For each post I’ll pick a couple of instances and I’ll try to vary my choice a bit from post to post. I’d rather see some duplication and have things remain distributed, than have a single instance where all the activity takes place.
I hope moving communities and accounts from different instances becomes possible. I would like to see communities start moving away congregating on the largest instance, and instead maybe start joining instances based on topic. So all music related instances whether it be specific genres or bands go to a music instance. And tv show ones go to an entertainment instance. So everything just kind of becomes categorized into something easier follow and find when it comes to looking for new communities.