People who joined Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin this week, how confusing is the experience?

I've been interested in computers and IT generally for more than 2 decades by now, so I don't think my experience reflects the experience of a standard user.

It didn't take long for me to grasp the concept of the fediverse and federation in general and I really like that specific aspect of lemmy. Still, I think there should be an infographic like the this somewhere visible or mentioned and linked directly on join-lemmy.org for new users to understand. It's a very nicely summarized text with visualizations of what this actually means in practical terms. If you've been living your whole life in the "single-owner" Microsoft / Apple / Android circle, the terms "decentralized" and "federated" might seem like foreign concepts.

I found the linked infographic in the "welcome" thread for new users on lemmy.world.

I joined lemm.ee because it was the most active of all the servers, but in retrospect, I should've joined sh.itjust.works just for the name. FYI - the second most active lemmy server (when sorting by activity on join-lemmy.org) is lemmynsfw.com, so congrats to beating the horny people!

It's also interesting to see which communities you really subscribe to in a completely new network. On reddit I joined so many subreddits, sometimes just on a whim. And now, most of them don't even interest me anymore. A nice, fresh start, really is the perfect time to apply the lessons learned from past mistakes.

[EDIT]

I'm using the Voyager for Lemmy app on Android as that one is open source and on GitHub. And the progressive-web-app version can be self-hosted in a docker container.

So far it's kind of like a breath of fresh air compared to the dumpster fire that reddit has become, but so far I haven't seen any videos of gifs come up in my feed and it's got me thinking that it's not a thing here, which is pretty disappointing. Correct me if I'm wrong though

Honestly not too bad from an understanding perspective but I'm finding there are clearly drawbacks to the federated model. All these spread out parallel communities on different instances with very little engagement. It feels very quiet compared to reddit, seemingly beyond just the smaller userbase.

I'm sure there's way less bot activity too, mind you. I was always blown away by all the /r/AITAH (and other) posts with thousands of comments responding to clearly AI-generated scenarios. Is it bots all the way down? Are people throwing away thousands of hours in aggregate engaging with these things? Puzzling.

It's not too bad, but I'm wondering if the is a community like [email protected] but for asking if communities exist.

My two main subs on Reddit are pretty small, so I'm not sure they'll ever develop here. One maybe has more tech savvy people, the others folks don't really have extra time to explore new social media.

I joined sh.itjust.works during the third party app debacle with reddit. I was using it for a while then stopped. So I went back and started using it again and was surprised how little has changed. I feel like the momentum for lemmy kind of surged then faded a bit mirroring my own personal usage so many others must have done the same. After browsing around I found differences in the posts that appear when browsing on sh.itjust.works vs lemmy.world. I couldn't see any reason why this would happen as all the fixes I came across from a year or two ago are already turned on in my settings.

Second the ability to discover communities is still difficult. The old site I had used before was gone so I used lemmyverse and the built in search on shitjustworks to try and find communities that were active. I was surprised to see some communities with a couple thousand members but very little activity.

Third the ability for different federations to communicate with each other has not improved much. There is still a lot of difficulty and confusion there. I found a good summary of the experience at: https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-future-of-social-is-here-a-show-and-tell-part-4-lemmy-piefed-mbin/

Then I decided to give Piefed a try and I like it. I like that it has topics which are similar to multireddits. This subscribes me to enough communities that the content on the front page changed from last night to this morning where on sh.itjust.works it was pretty much the same stuff. Its confusing when I subscribe to a community that isn't part of a topic though. Sometimes I subscribe and see it was already part of a subtopic but I just wasn't subscribed to it? Like what determines which communities appear in a topic or not? I still haven't figured that out. It'd be nice if it provided formatting tools when replying to comments. Like I didn't want to paste the URL to that blog above but use text you hover over and can click. I also wish the front page of Piefed was more like old reddit. Its a bit disjointed between image posts and texts posts at the moment. Just give me thumbnails and expandos for everything.

The biggest thing I'm seeing though is people just need to start contributing. Feel free to steal from reddit posts, go out and start reading a gaming news site or a regular news sites or whatever. See something you like? Post it up in a community here. Who cares if the community hasn't had a post in 30 days.

Confusing.