1: is lemmy good for macro blogging? Like how you’d use something like Tumblr or the like.

No. You’re looking for Mastodon/Sharkey/Misskey/Friendica or kbin for that! Lemmy is more the federated equivalent of a site like reddit.

2: when you create a community for yourself and post in it, does it reach other people or is it only if they actively search for it? Is it common here to create a community just for yourself to post blogs and the like? Can you even do that?

There is no such thing as a community for yourself. Every community is either visible to everyone, or you can lock it down to just people on the same instance as you. But you can’t ever make it just for you. You can make it so that no one else can post to it, but you can’t stop them reading it.

3: how does the federation thing work exactly? I’m from an instance that has downvotes disabled, so what happens when someone tries to downvote me?

Basically, the instance just ignores downvotes that it receives. Other instances don’t. So that means that the timeline you see will be different to the timeline someone on a different instance sees, because their timeline will factor in downvotes and yours won’t.

4: is lemmy safe from AI scrapping or nah?

Nothing that is publicly visible or searchable is safe from AI scraping.

Is this platform good for artists compared to something like mastodon, twitter, or bluesky?

Different things.

Lemmy is “reddit like”. Mastodon and Bluesky are “twitter like”. On lemmy, you subscribe to and follow communities. On mastodon, you subscribe to and follow users.

So it really depends on what you’re looking for.

5: is there search engine crawling on lemmy? Are all posts on here possible to show up in search engines or nah? How do things work on that front?

Yep, it can and is crawled. If you don’t want that, lemmy isn’t going to be great, as it’s impossible to avoid.

You do have more control over that on mastodon, as you can lock posts down to be more private, but even then, it’s imperfect.

6: how’s development? Is lemmy going to continue to build and improve or are things gonna stay as they are for the foreseeable future?

Active and ongoing, with a couple of competing alternatives that are also actively developed

7: how privacy friendly and secure is lemmy really? I’m guessing a lot better then reddit, but just curious.

Admins have full access to the database, and in theory, can pull out pretty much anything. Which is just the same as reddit. Your best bet for privacy is anonymity

8: are there normal people or communities here? From what I’m seeing all of lemmy seems primarily focused on politics and tech, am not seeing much beyond that.

Lots of meme communities too! It’s a size thing. Not as many lemmy users as there are reddit users, and the ones that are here tend to be more tech oriented.

Lots of queer communities our instance!

Which instance/picture issue?

June 4, 2023: First mention of “threadiverse” I can find on Lemmy

Yep, there had been zero discussions about it until that point that I had seen, which is why I posted that thread asking the question!

I’m a hobby photographer. I have to keep a windows machine in my house just so I can run some of the software I need for my photography.

I’ve transitioned what I can to linux equivalents, and digiKam and Darktable are my daily drivers now, but Darktable is a HUGE learning curve for someone who hasn’t used it before. You are literally starting again with learning how to edit your images. It’s not simply a case of learning “how to do the same things in a new environment” but “learning a new paradigm, almost from the ground up”. I love Darktable, but it took a dedicated desire not to run windows software and then months of practice before I could start to reproduce things that I could do in Lightroom in minutes with little experience.

And on top of that, dedicated noise reduction software (which requires a good GPU) basically doesn’t exist on linux, and is next to impossible to run with wine or even VMs, because of the reliance on a GPU. And that means I have to keep a windows machine around to run my noise reduction. Dual booting doesn’t even work, because that means my photo workflow suddenly needs a reboot. So, a second machine, which is not ideal…

Which is a lot of words to say that it’s not always about being resistant to change or accepting alternatives. Sometimes there are no alternatives, and sometimes the “change” is a HUGE change. Unless a photographer is driven by ideological reasons to move off Windows like I was, it’s not going to be worth the hit for most people. And even then, I still have to run a windows box too…

I mean if you recognise friendica domain names, yeah, but most folks don’t

You wouldn’t know them if you did see them. They look like any other account

Friendica is part of the fediverse and can talk to mastodon, lemmy etc. Plenty of users out there

Frankly, I probably wouldn’t move either if Windows didn’t permanently break my ethernet and WiFi drivers

I think this might be colouring your expectations a bit, and you might be projecting your experiences on to others.

I’ve said for years that it was gaming that was holding me back from running Linux full time. I don’t do a huge amount of gaming, but it is important to me, so for many years it was a deal breaker.

Now, gaming is good enough, even though it’s not perfect, and I moved to linux full time around 9 months ago.

People aren’t “lying”. They just have different priorities to you…

instances/hubs/rpcs cannot block a user account or community

Why would I want that? That sounds genuinely awful.

Edit - And the plebbit homepage talks about making a 4chan equivalent, and along with this post, there are pepe images everywhere. No thanks. Plebbit can fuck right off

And, if you can’t remember the options for commands, fish will offer you suggestions. So, if you type ls - and press tab, fish will give you a list of all of the valid switches and a brief description.

Fish

They were running a self maintained fork of lemmy that wasn’t compatible, though I don’t know if that was the original reason

Hexbear was the only instance with a sizable user base that used to do this, but these days they federate too

Think of it this way. All bans and content removals are local only, and don’t federate to other instances, with a few exceptions

The most notable of these exceptions are

i) a community moderator removing content or banning a user from their community. This federates. An instance admin doing the same thing does not federate, unless the community was created on their instance.

ii) an instance admin banning a user based on their instance, and choosing to remove all of their content. This will federate the ban and the content removal to other instances.

An analogy is that operating languages speak different languages. And an app built for one operating system doesn’t speak the language of others.

But in the case of Linux, there are lots of really good tools that let Linux understand Windows apps. Steam has those tools built right in.

Where it falls down is that the tools that let Linux understand and run Windows apps aren’t perfect. So things like DRM, anti cheat, propriety drivers etc, can be a challenge.

But currently, if you’re not running games that use kernel level anti cheat, the vast majority of games will work on Linux. The steamdeck uses Linux itself, so it’s a high priority for valve to get as much working as possible.

Thank you for the update. I honestly don’t mind if you’re not there in terms of federating out yet. As long as the plan for the project is to generate connectivity/community in some way, we’ll be better off for your project being here :)

The other part is, lemmy hides content from you unless you have the language enabled in your settings, and so, I have all languages enabled just so I can see all the content. And that makes navigating the language list really unwieldy without a default option

The content is coming from federation, so how is it being pushed to clubsall after blocking?

I blocked your instance based on your domain. But because you are using other domains to pull the content, you’re still receiving content from the domains you use that I haven’t blocked.

My request stays the same, give us some breathing room until some traffic threshold. Is that fair?

What is your plan for what clubsall will look like? I have no interest in killing a new and interesting platform for building community in the lemmy space. But if you’re just going to pull content from lemmy instances without giving anything back, that’s not building community…

Tell me you’ve got plans for something other than a content scraper, and I’ll happily work with you.

My concern is that you receive content from our communities without generating anything back

There are bugs, but they’re less annoying for me than the deliberate enshittified features that exist in current versions of windows.

That being said, I don’t run linux on a laptop, and so my experiences have probably been less buggy than yours