I saw a reddit post about alternatives and lemmy was what stuck out the most, and then there was another about how it works (not that indepth) and from there I got to lemmy.world and been here since yesterday

In theory, Lemmy and Mastodon are compatible with one another, as they both use ActivityPub.

In practice:

Mastodon users can only see Lemmy posts as Boosts ("retweets"), and from what I hear, it's fairly annoying and not a good experience

Lemmy users can't see anything on Mastodon at all, Lemmy doesn't have a way to federate with Mastodon instances yet.

This is the first time Lemmy has seen this many users ever, so I'm confident both of these issues will be fixed sooner or later. When they are, you'll be able to see Lemmy posts on Mastodon as if they were posts ("tweets"), and you'll be able to see Mastodon posts on Lemmy as some kind of post (not sure if the format has been decided yet).

I would like to add to your picture yggdrasil and matrix based messengers, as this will help infrastructure to be more robust and expand

@pankkake @ubergeek77 I'll actually use this as a an opportunity to test something - I copied your comment's link into mastodon and am replying to it with my mastodon account. I can see the thread in mastodon, and in theory, this reply should show up properly in Lemmy too.

It's all a little arbitrary. When you create a new service (like Lemmy, or Mastodon), you can have them link with anything, in any fashion you like. The defaults are mostly sensible.

For example, I've just made a mastodon post asking /r/casual a question. Once that synchronizes across, you'll see the topic over there.

@ubergeek77 @pankkake you can comment and make lemmy posts from Mastodon and others. I'm on Friendica for example and made this comment from my Friendica profile.

Yeah, I think it has a certain charm. However I fully agree, without it being addressed this will lead to issues and setbacks in the future trying to build communities. For now I'm subbing to all and trusting the process that creases will eventually iron themselves.

I think, kept this way, instances should be more clear what kind of 'country' they want to form. For example a group that has tech as the primary interest, should go about starting the instance as such, and setting ground rules for communities therein. Tech related, even if loosely, and differentiated from the masses. Or a better example would be, a European - English Instance could require a suffix like EU or UK like newsUK or photographyUK simply to attract the more locally relevant audiences.

A more involved solution could be to tag your community like Twitter into topics it wants to show up in feeds for (as well as tags that exclude it).. like 'technews' tagged in the 'news' and 'technology' but excluded from 'politics' and 'finance' and 'onion'

Another one could be to allow communities to federate with one another. If a news community spots some large news audiences in other instances, the moderators for each community could federate with one another and create a supercommunity (like a multi on Reddit), allowing the super to operate on both instances but share hosting of something along those lines.

You could also have moderators agree to join forces by migrating one community over to the larger server and closing up shop. This may happen naturally with time.

It's not necessarily a bad thing, but especially with the amount of news users (and subs) migrating from Reddit there is a certain potential for chaos for sure.

However, for me the pros of this approach still outweigh the cons as, like you said, it also provides more choice with which community you want to interact.

Like chess, but are a bit tired of googling en passant? Just find a community, that is more focused on the game on a different instance.

Although this issue might be more severe for Lemmy, I think it still occurs on Reddit, but it ends up working itself out. For instance, there's also a "r/tech" and (at some point) there was a "r/technologynews" subreddit, which you could view as redundant and possibly confusing to new users. But r/tech seems to have focused on longer-form more in-depth discussion while r/technology is certainly the larger and more general of the two, so most users will probably just sub to the larger one and maybe others will decide they like the vibe of r/tech more. In the long term, I'm sure a similar thing will happen to communities with the same, or close to the same, name.

For me it clicked instantly after reading e-mail analogy.

Thanks! Just looks like they've been a bit, uh, hugged to death.

I'll check it out when it comes back!

It would be great if the instance kept a pulse on how federation to other instances is going and showed a health check in the app sidebar and near instance names to temper user expectations.

That sounds like a great idea!