My disclaimer is that I am excited using the fediverse as alternative from Reddit (I have switched to Mastodon from Twitter).
I have been trying a combination of lemmy.world, kbin and a lemmy app like MemmyApp. Each one, I look at “All” and try various things like “hot”, “active”, “top day” and etc. Each one produces different results. And it is not even close. Rarely are there same posts across each. Also, on lemmy.world, after I sort on one of these, a few seconds go by and it won’t stop scrolling with a blast from same communities and users.
So… what is it I am doing wrong? How do I make my experience more enjoyable? Am I the only one?
(Note: I am aware that kbin/lemmy have their own local and therefore, that would be different, but the “All” filter?)
Welp, I’m new too, but I think this is more or less working as intended.
The federation mechanism is a “best effort” thing, so there’s literally no guarantee that you’ll get the same view for the same thing loaded through two different instances.
I started writing a userscript to “normalize” URLs so clicking on a link to kbin.social on a different instance would transform the link URL to keep you on your original instance, but with the distinct possibility of missing content because of it, I’m not sure it’s actually a good idea.
The auto-refresh-and-btw-lemme-close-the-image-you-were-looking-at behavior isn’t happening on every instance, but it definitely happens on lemmy.world. Maybe this is an artifact of the websocket approach, and that’ll go away in 0.18? No idea.
At this point, the usage pattern I’m leaning toward is to find good communities/magazines, subscribe to them, and stick to the “subscribed” view. The most consistent results will always be with subs that are local to the current instance, so if most of your subscriptions are on instance X, you probably don’t really want to have your account on instance Y.
That is helpful and makes sense on different instances, but I do have some concerns on the “best effort”. I see posts across other instances and it says a disclaimer at the top that I may not be seeing all content. This is not a great experience if I have to always go to another instance to view ALL content and then, if I want to interact with said post… It is just not a great thing for Fediverse if that is the “acceptable response” from it. And I see you are trying to work around that with some uncertainty too (url normalizing). I laughed at the auto-refresh… bit, because I didn’t mention that, but I am seeing that too. :)
I appreciate the the perspective, help and pointers.
One thing I do still want is that “surprise” of finding something on a hot/active topic that I may not be already following. Even on “the other site”, I would flip back and forth between my Home and the top/popular to find new things to follow or get a quick chuckle.