The reasons why almost nobody has heard of them don’t matter, the point is that nobody has heard of them - meaning they have no fame to steal or popularity to piggy back off of

120 stars… not exactly a common household name. Meanwhile zed the editor has 12k stars, gaining or losing 120 wouldn’t even register. Your comment is delusional

My first thought when seeing this post was “oh like Tonies but for movies, awesome”

I love Lemmy but I find the extreme pro-FOSS bias and hatred of everything else to be pretty abrasive and not conducive to useful or interesting discussion. And that’s coming from someone who both loves to use and contribute to FOSS. But my preferred desktop OS isn’t Linux which apparently according to the Lemmy hivemind is a big no-no.

I think more Lemmy users need to learn that the upvote and downvote buttons aren’t meant to be used to indicate agreement and disagreement respectively, it’s to indicate if a comment is valuable contribution to the discussion regardless of whether or not you agree.

In a post discussing Chrome, a few comments about alternative browsers make sense. But if there are 100s and 100s of comments all just saying some variation of “switch to Firefox otherwise you suck” and those are the only ones that are upvoted, then the whole comment section becomes pointless.

So the way Lemmy works is that a instance will only know about (and have the content of) a community if a user on that instance is subscribed to it. So when you browse All or search, only those communities that someone on the instance is subscribed to are included in the results. On a smaller instance that’s naturally going to be fewer communities.

Now if you search for a specific community by its URL that the instance doesn’t yet know about, it will actually go and fetch it for the first time. What this looks like to the user though is that the search shows no results, then suddenly 5-10 seconds later the results change and the community appears. Which is not a great UX for someone new. So again on an instance with more people it’s a lot more likely that someone else has already searched for and subscribed to what you’re looking for so that you don’t see that issue

I wouldn’t recommend small instances to newbies. New users will likely use the All feed a lot, until they discover the communities they like. And on a small instance the All feed isn’t going to have as many communities in it. Also the experience of searching for communities is worse on a smaller instance.

I think these aren’t problems for experienced users but I don’t think we want to expose newbies to them if we can help it.

Individuals can’t block whole instances yet (apart from via a browser extension), once that feature arrives there will be a lot less call for defederation I expect.