I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:

• The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I'm aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that's less than ideal)
• The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I'm aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it's vital to the success of Lemmy.

There’s a learning curve with “how do I know which instance to join?” and then “how do I find communities from other instances?” But I’m getting the hang of it.

What it needs most is a UI overhaul. If Apollo came to the fediverse it would be a game changer.

Echoing many things that other users are saying already:

Signing up/choosing a home instance is confusing. I don't think it's very confusing conceptually, but it is confusing from a UX/UI perspective. Subscribing to outside communities was the toughest part, I had to find them through a different instance using a search engine, then manually paste the community-specific URL into my home instance search, wait several seconds, then click into the community home page and finally click "subscribe."

Not something a casual user is going to want or even figure out to do. I trust that many of these growing pains will be fixed in the coming weeks/months. I just hope that it's not all a flash in the pan and then fizzles out totally.

People are much friendlier here, so far.

I like the concept
But it feels very much like its been designed by nerdy developers and has had little to no-input on user friendly design.

The federated idea can work but it needs to be more seemless than this.

1. Communities with the same name should be merged when viewing it from any instance, so you can see all the posts from these communities, they can be moderated seperatley and for advanced users you should be able to select which communities make up the merged community.
2. By default you should see all of the merged communities in a central place and be able to subscribe to them easily, at the moment its handled different per instance but you have to seek out these communities to subscribe or follow them.
3. I strongly believe there should be a centralised log-in system, so you can log into any instance with an account from another instance, this means if your instance goes down your account is centralised and is safe.

The app I'm using (Jerboa) is a bit lacking, but I'm sure it'll improve. I'm unsure about how accounts work with the servers, can I migrate my account if the server I am using shuts down? Communities are tiny and a lot are missing, but I'm sure those will grow and fill in as more people join.

Not a fan of Jerboa, but I realize that it's early days. Hopefully we can get some of the UI people from the 3rd party reddit apps on here to develop a better client.

Feels like this might be the fediverse flavor that sticks with me. I tried mastodon and diaspora, but they didn't stick. Didn't help that I hated Twitter and Facebook.

This feels chill so far. I like it

I am enjoying it so far. I usually tend to lurk but the community is, as many have said, very welcoming and it creates an atmosphere where it encourages you to contribute (not just with up/downvotes but also comments).

It's giving me some early reddit days vibes. I remember searching for communities that fit my interests, it felt less based on recommendations and more 'pick your content yourself'. never felt the urge to post much myself on reddit, this feels like a place I would though.

Biggest downside I see right now is user base size and UI of mobile apps. Have only tested Jerboa right now, which feels like a very basic app (still working fine though!). once I get some customization capabilities back on mobile I'll be happy!

And the user base will grow, the fediverse approach feels kinda nice.

I will make this my first ever Lemmy post:

Overall, this definitely feels like a promising alternative with some growing pains. The bigger communities are decently active but the decentralized nature of Lemmy carries the risk of some communities becoming too fragmented where communities are duplicated in different instances. As some other users have suggested, This could be remedied by creating "Super communities" spanning the Fediverse which could help with growing to a scale large enough to rival Reddit and incentivise even more Redditors to make the switch.

Confusing. There are communities I can't subscribe to because I can't access them from my instance, and I have no idea why that is. The experience has been interesting so far, and growing the network is going to be something I'll be keeping an eye on. For now, though, I'll have to wait until someone creates the communities I was a part of on Reddit.

Edit: It seems a community won't show up on your instance's community list unless someone in that instance is subscribed to it.

I’m enjoying the concept behind the fediverse, and while communities are small right now, they’re eventually gonna get bigger and be more centralized.

I think the UI/UX does need a little more work, but that’ll come with time.

So far so good - sh.itjust.works was showing off a solid looking infrastructure (which is so far seamless), so I joined there.

It feels a lot like 2010 era reddit in terms of content, with a whole bunch of people trying to resurrect memes and communities that grew up organically on reddit. I'm not sure if it'll work that way, because there's a natural difference in userbase, but best of luck to them. I worry that the difficulty of getting NSFW content online is going to give reddit a perpetual competitive edge, but totally appreciate the legal/moral difficulties wherein.

It took a bit to figure out how to sub to new communities, and along with a lot of other newbs, I'm hoping that that's something that can be tightened up. Like, a browser extension or something that could recognise you're logged into some instance, and then create a subscribe link on the page rather than the weird copy-paste-into-searchbar dance that seems to be the standard at the moment.

Overall, great to see that this works and grows. My thanks to the instance hosts and mods.

I love it here and I'll express myself and show love to all with manatees

New user and reddit refugee here! The instance system isn't as straightforward as something like reddit where all of the content exists in the same place, but once I understood how the system works (via the first few posts I saw after opening the Jerboa mobile app for the first time) I got signed up on an instance that ISN'T lemmy.ml and I've just began surfing in earnest! Thanks to the community that's made this possible!

I'll be honest. While I like the idea of decentralized social stiff, its also a huge issue. First you have to choose an instance, which isn't too bad, but you can't move. I hear Lemmy.ml being under pressure and I want to move somewhere else to help.with that. My account is 4 years old though and I can take nothing with me. Additionally this means all my content is on one instance. If that ever goes down, the network as a whole my keep existing, but my user and all I've put into Lemmy will be gone. And while I trust Lemmy instances more than reddit in terms of privacy, I'm not so sure when it comes to uptime and longevity. Finally, the whole concept of decentralized is hard to wrap my head around. My instance being separate from others but still being subscribed to communities of other instances feels unintuitive. Its the she issue I have with mastodon. I keep loosing track of instances, communities, apps etc. All with different names and logins etc.

For now, I'm trying to get used to Lemmy and just search for communities I'm subscribed to on reddit and see how it goes. It definitely works well enough. Just some conceptual issues I might have to get used to.

It's pretty nice. I do hope it picks up more activity of course, but it's just been a chill and low key sorta thing for me so far. Way less toxic than most other sites I've used.

I'm still a little confused but it's sinking in. The difference between an instance and a "sub", as well as how to join or interact with other "subs" without having to join each individual instance, was the part that was toughest to adapt to. I love it, though. Lemmy is giving me the feeling Reddit did when I first joined it a long, long time ago on my first ever account. It feels organic.

Confusing. The apparent 'segregation' of instances is difficult to get my head around. The Jerboa app is (understandably) in early days and not that intuitive to use. The layout of the website isn't much better (it wasn't at all obvious how you're suppose to even post stuff, for example). I get that we're all coming in on the 'ground level' here, but the whole set up feels very rough-and-ready. I'll keep an eye on Lemmy to see how things progress but at the moment, honestly, if feels like I'm working against Lemmy/the Fediverse rather than with it.

I'm so confused!! Still trying to figure out how to tell jerboa to show me communities that aren't local (and aren't showing in all - I did find memes and other juicy numbers there!)...

I might have made the mistake of trying to pick a server that wasn't struggling under the load of the Reddit refugees, but I still don't think it was a bad idea...

Quite a learning curve though. Some cheat sheets or heaven forbid, starter packs would be snazzy :)

I think my experience can be best summed up by:

404: FetchError: invalid json response body at http://lemmy:8536/api/v3/site

Jokes aside, the web portal is pretty great. Jerboa seems... like it needs some polish.

I like it here a lot more than Mastodon and its so much easier to go and subscribe to other communities at other nodes/servers also to engage in other servers as well. Mastodon was a little more complicated, you do that but it was a little fincky IMO and of course I love Lemmy more than Reddit and I hope it blows up also stays that way too lol (RIP all the servers)

Just got the account approved and checking things out. It feels comfortably reddity with a hint of newness that invites for exploration. I am curious how the community will shape this site and if and how it will establish itself in the greater vacuum I foresee will be left in reddit's once great tracks.

The one thing I'm struggling with is how do I find a subreddit equivalent? For example r/formula1 or r/UKpolitics on Reddit might be.... What?

Also is it possible to find these communities using Jerboa or so I need to login on my desktop?

Edit - spelling

It seems a pretty solid Reddit alternative 👍

It needs a mobile app though (like Apollo). Something simple, modern and easy to use. Hopefully at some point we can get something similar.

I love how it feels like a smaller but friendlier reddit. I hope more people can join

It's just something to get the hang of. Currently somewhat confusing, but not insurmountable. It does feel a lot like Reddit did some thirteen years ago. This is a nice blend of modern and easy to use, and has a whiff of my early days on the internet (bb's, forums, etc) without measuring internet speeds in kbps, which is nice.

It's not bad, but there are a couple of issues that concern me. One is that communities are fractured - that is, that communities about the same topics exist on different instances and don't connect with each other.

So I'm subscribed to a Books community on one instance, but that doesn't mean I'll see any of the posts on the same topic on other instances unless I subscribe to each of them. The total community of users on Lemmy who are interested in books are split up into small groups on different instances.

That's very limiting.

Of course there's also the issue of the relatively small user base overall. For some purposes a small community may be preferable, but for many others you really need a large user base. Looking for gamers for a face to face tabletop RPG, for example. Without a large user base, the odds of finding people within a reasonable real world distance of you is virtually nil.

I just signed up a few hours ago. So far it seems to be entirely dominated by posts about the recent reddit drama which makes it hard to judge if there is much regular content here that I would enjoy.

There's a learning curve for sure, but I think I could get used to it. I'm hoping this boom during the Reddit black out helps pick up steam and we see a lot of cool features roll out in the mobile app/mornptions for fedoverse clients.

Search is brutal. I dont want to open a new link, i just want to type what im searching for and then search for it.

Interface is better than "new" Reddit, not as good as old Reddit + RES.

Also: if I click on a link on another instance (for example https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy when I'm signed in on lemmy.world), I'm not signed in to lemmy.ml so I have to manually search for it in lemmy.world to post there - is there a common solution to that?

I'm brand spanking new to Lemmy ( like under 30 minutes) and I do feel that navigating isn't as intuitive as it is on Reddit, though I suspect as I learn to use it more, I will get better.

What I would like to know is if there is a mobile app I can use to access Lemmy since I really dislike using a mobile browser

I must have taken the wrong turn somewhere, I came here because I'm a Motörhead fan.

cool that it's written in Rust also decentralization (not the blockchain kind) is the future, but...
lemmy ui feels kinda unpolished, and sometimes community join requests just hang forever.

Very happy and reminds me of the old pre-digg Reddit days! My main concerns are

• If I pick a popular server it will go down due to performance issues, but if I get a smaller one it may go offline because it's just a small hobby project. I don't want to lose my account.

• I'm worried about communities duplicating on other instances and me not being able to ask questions to the same pool of people with xposting

I'm kinda hoping someone will point out this feature already exists, but I wish there was a way to subscribe to a topic. Right now it feels like multiple instances are forming their own, say, gaming community, and it feels like this is splintering the community rather than growing it?

Other than that, I actually really like the decentralised nature -- and, while this is likely due to the very early nature of things, man is it nicer here. Weirdly feels like early Slashdot days...

I think I'm getting the hang of it, I'm just concerned it won't ever get to the point of having as many in depth communities as Reddit, because that's what I like most about Reddit

Too confusing for the average user.

I dislike many things about the UI and UX.

Nevertheless, it's useable, and interesting enough to keep using for now and see how it goes.

I find it easier than using mastodon for the first time tbh

I barely just started but it feels almost as natural as normal reddit.

Lemmy federates Reddit better than Mastodon federates Twitter. Mastodon is confusing. But on Lemmy I can clearly see the relationship between instances, and I can use it all as one big system.

This is way too confusing for an average reddit user. Too much undefined jargon like 'fediverse'. And jargon based on other jargon, like an average user is going to know what 'federated' means, to be able to suss out any words based on it.

And finding communities with '!something@community' is not going to work for that average user longterm. If every search requires an exclamation point, just add it on the backend. And if it requires two pieces of data separated by an @ symbol, just have 2 inputs.

It’s welcoming but confusing. I think there’s two reasons for the latter:

1- Many of us forget how basic Reddit was when we first started using it, and the features we all know and love got added over time and repeatedly refined based on use.

2- Most of us here are because we have been users of incredibly well designed apps crafted by developers with a passion for great UI. If I try using the (new) Reddit site or their default app, I find myself equally confused.

There are still so many changes happening in Lemmy functionality, and as we’ve seen with Mastodon, we will hopefully soon be overwhelmed with great apps.

In the meantime there’s the great community already here and growing. I saw a comment that you can estimate that Reddit has 90% lurkers, 9% commenters, 0.9% posters, and 0.1% “community builders” I think it’s those latter groups who are leading the exodus, which is great news for us and terrible news for whoever ends up owning Reddit.

It's pretty good. Looks like early days but hopefully more users will bring more content and we can all do our part to contribute and help it to grow in the mean time!

Been here 6 days and here are some of my thoughts:

Pros:

• the community is great. I've been more active here than on reddit and I noticed people answer your posts/comments more to discuss than criticize your POV.
• it's nice to have a lot of options in terms of instances
• the app is surprisingly good. It's no Apollo/Joey, but for something that's in its initial stages is surprisingly useable
• on browser, kbin.social is nice (I don't use lemmy on pc)
• many of the subs I follow on reddit have their own communities here

Cons:

• it can still be confusing, specially for new members or people who aren't used to how the Fediverse is set up
• I still miss the niche subs I follow on reddit. i know I can start my own but I don't have time nor the experience to effectively moderate communities
• there is, of course, a big difference in terms of activity (again compared to reddit) due to the massive difference in the number of users

Is it a reddit replacement? No. Reddit is too big and established (and mainstream) to be replaced in such a short period. But imho lemmy is a great alternative. Like I've mentioned before, just participating here has drastically lessened my reddit usage. It can get better. I'm excited to see there it goes.

Edit: sorry for all the typos. I'm new at using flosiboard and it doesntl't have spell check yet lol.

Much like when I went from Twitter to Mastodon, finding "my people" is a lot more work. It's unpleasantly easy for links to a community to take me directly to that instance instead of leaving my on my instance where I'd be able to subscribe and interact. But also like Mastodon, the experience is much nicer once things start getting set up. Really nice not getting pestered to use the app constantly!

Very similar to how Reddit used to be. I expect higher quality content here, and so far, I've found it. Just waiting on a few niche communities to be created, but I expect they will pop up in time. Good riddance to Reddit.

And the less said about other social media sites the better.

Other that all of the sign up feature being very confusing, I kinda feel afraid of selecting a less popular space to create my account on, as its not really documented what happens if the space your account is created on dies.

It does remind me of Reddit when I first joined. I like federated services like Matrix and Mastodon, but Reddit was exactly how I liked interacting online. I'm really missing RES keybindings (in particular a/z voting, j/k navigation, x expandos, <Return> thread collapse) but the UX fits my needs very well otherwise.

Feels very early. The site design needs quite a bit of work.

• The usual confusion on fediverse domain boundaries and usage. Seems very easy to accidentally route to another server rather than viewing that content within the current server (community/user links).
• Doesn't retain sort/filter options on the home feed. I get that the default is local to promote some growth, but when I switch to subscribed I want it to stay that way.
• Excess visual space, cluttered design with avatars and community icons and excess padding. It falls into some of the traps that make me despise the reddit redesign.
• Strange prioritization of elements; visual emphasis on features that seem pretty niche or obvious (crosspost, tooltip text post preview, comment language, usernames), while more important elements get dwarfed or lost in the noise (timestamps, comment delineation + nesting).
• Live reloads are confusing and would be nice to be able to disable.
• There's a real lack of dom class tagging that would make it easier for me to remedy some of those issues with custom css and the number of !important definitions doesn't inspire confidence.
• Ultimately the above are all things that can be worked out. If the core systems work well enough then the design is something that can be augmented. I've had some navigation issues (including a page that wouldn't load because it received a malformed json response from internal service), but the core functionality seems to be mostly there. Whether it'll hold up to more load we'll have to see.

The instance system definitely makes it a bit confusing. I'm a programmer and I've played around with some Mastodon stuff during my study. Still, as a user, it's quite chaotic sometimes.

I'm kinda wondering what this will converge towards. Is everyone going to join the same instance? Are different communities be kinda randomly spread over instances, where for every community in the end one instance dominates? Or will there just be chaos?

There's also some buggy behavior every now and then, but that's easily forgiven imo.

I like the idea, but to be honest it feels unpleasant to use. Multiple different communities with the same topic are hosted on different servers, so I have to subscribe on them all if I want to keep track on what is happening. Would be nice to have some "mega community" that would have them all there. Also web client is broken, it feels so bad when my feed is moved down when new fresh post is added on top, this is borderline annoying and unusable

I think it's got all the potential, and I really mean it. I want to be here and I will try to contribute wherever I can. The onboarding of the platform is confusing, but everyone already knows that. I can see the growing pains, but that's totally fine.

I enjoy the format, and I very much like what Lemmy is meant to become.

It's weird, a little confusing, and a little janky. Love it so far. It's not a novel observation on my part but it definitely feels new and exciting the way Reddit and Tumblr did back in the day.

The web is okay, kind of, but the mobile apps (what I mainly use to browse this stuff) are sorely lacking, especially on iOS.

I decided to write my own client (mostly for myself) and so far the API seems very straightforward. Might eventually publish it to the stores, if its mature enough.

It's heavily based on Apollo (in case it wasn't obvious). One might even call it a rip-off 😅

What I'd really like to work on after the basic navigation is done is discoverability. I think the platform really needs some improvement there.

It's an exciting re-imagining of a few ideas (usenet, digg) seemingly mashed together.

I'm finding a lot of content that I've voted on, and I'm maybe done-with. I'd love to know (where to find) an option to hide content I've seen and voted around, so I can just count on regular in-mail to chase the conversation. I'm sure that nit will go away once I find some menu-option I'm just not seeing!

Liking it so far. A social network is only as good as its community. The community is small but high quality. I'm excited to see Lemmy grow.

It's gone quite smoothly so far - found an instance local to me and joined, subscribed to a bunch of communities, installed Jerboa and set it up - didn't hit any roadblocks.

The cross-server subscription thing is a bit counter-intuitive, but this seems to be an issue that people are already aware of. The Fediverse lengthy signup ritual of choosing an instance is there, but that's just a feature of how the medium works and I'm already familiar with the issues from Mastodon, so it didn't bother me.

The interface is nice and friendly, but the way the fediverse and the different instances works is kind of confusing. Still not sure what that's all about

Considering how new it is and how many people (like me) who have suddenly turned up from reddit I think it's doing brilliantly.

I'm using Jerboa and it's not bad but it could be a bit better. I'm getting a few bugs like the screen juddering when I scroll now and again, and the UX takes some getting used to.

But yeah, overall I'm impressed and excited to see this place grow.

Just please don't ever do a reddit 😂

So far im still confused, but I’ve learned a lot in the time I’ve been here, so i think I’ll come around. I feel like the main issue I personally have is population of communities and actually finding communities. Ive found a couple ill look at in an asklemmy thread and im sure itll grow over time, but I personally dont have much I can contribute yet, so im not sure how much I can do personally.

Like Mastodon, I'm getting used to the decentralized nature. Now that I found subscriptions and the option to change my view to subscriptions, things are easier. I'm just worried that topics are going to get big on disparate instances that aren't linked. But as I use it, I'm liking it.

For now it is nice to be outside corporate sanitation.

I'm new to this. I've always been a lurker and never really had the urge to connect to Reddit or other social platforms like twitter. But this feels better. It's daunting at first but after being on the platform for a very short time I see something good and its interesting. Some new but very familiar. So I connected and I want to contribute. That's how it makes me feel.

its just reddit tbh

much better experience than mastodon imo

I love it. I am genuinely excited to be on here, and it is literally the only social media I use at the moment.

The single feature I that I think would improve the site tremendously is some kind of indicator to know if I have posted in a thread before. It is silly, but sometimes discussions blow up and I cannot remember everything I write.

Like, just a colored dot next to the title in topics I have posted in would make the experience so much better.

Getting signed up was a bit hairy. I tried going through the lemmy.one server and still hasn't gone through, so I went back and signed up through lemmy.ml and that got approved pretty quickly.

Aside from that still getting a hang of things. Not sure how to search for communities for specific interests, not sure how many of those exist yet.

I downloaded the Jerboa app on Android and the UI is pretty familiar coming from the Boost reddit app.

I've been here for a while and i still don't like it for a number of reasons, many which have already been mentioned here. The UI/UX isn't as nice as old reddit and there a lot of complexities due to the fediverse that are just not easy to overcome. Why i think reddit will ultimately win out in this because most users will go back to it after a few weeks.

The app is good considering its in the early version. Have only been testing out for a few hours. The whole instance and server thing is still bit confusing regarding how it handles the post and comments in one server over to a user coming from snother instance. Any place to search for communities?

the UX can be a bit clunky, such as opening links to other communities and not being able to subscribe, but overall it's been quite fun so far. a lot more fun than mastodon as its quite serious (as any twitter substitute would be)

The website is super clean, the Mlem app is kinda not as great yet (presumably cuz it's in beta) but it runs really well! only worry is how easy it will be to find communities I want to join, I haven't been here long yet. That and moderation with how many people will be coming in.

I'm really enjoying Lemmy so far, it's a lot different from Reddit but at the same time feels familiar. I understand and like the concept of a bunch of small hosted servers federated together. I feel like if user logins were also federated that would solve a ton of the onboarding issues for new people. I really miss default subreddits too.

The webapp Is only fine on desktop. On Android I'm having to use Jerboa which works and does its job but still has an extremely outdated and unpolished user experience

I was new to Reddit (3 weeks of activity), and switching to Lemmy is a bit confusing. But one evening is enough to learn the basics, I hope. Let's keep it rolling. :)

I've been a Redditor for more than 16 years, and it's a little complicated understanding how this works. But I'm sure I'll get the hang of it.

The community has been way more friendly than any other social media I've been on. Th UI/UX is confusing and at times bad, but it makes do. It has been a nice experience.

It's pretty cool so far. Takes some getting used to, little buggy here and there, but nothing intolerable. People are more respectful on here. On reddit and most all other platforms, I just lurked for the most part to avoid getting "aKsHuAlLy'D" by some angry poster. It's chill here and it's got potential ^-

I think Lemmy seems like a good idea and generally like it so far, but i do think that users that aren't that tech savvy may have issues. It's also nice that the servers are customizable in a way, but at the same time if you pick certain servers you can't see down votes, or creating communities might be disabled which will seem inconsistent to newcomers that think of Lemmy as a more traditional platform like Reddit that only has one instance. The community search is also pretty clunky, a lot of users will probably have trouble understanding why they can't just find all available communities instead of writing an obscure email-like string that still says "no results", but then magically after searching again it will be there. I would say some areas are unpolished and even a bit buggy at times too. I figured these things out pretty fast, but being a software dev myself, i know that an end-user may struggle a lot more with these things, to the point where they may just abandon the platform out of frustration. I hope some of the rough edges can be smoothed out because the idea of this platform is definitely interesting, but if average people can't use it it's less likely to really succeed. I must admit that even i am a bit skeptical, and i may have to return to Reddit if not enough users/content migrate to this platform, even though i don't really like many of the decisions Reddit make. I'm giving it a fair shot though and i definitely like it so far.

I find the experience to be fine. It will be great watching as the community grows

Joined last night and I'm already really enjoying it. I'm still learning, but that's just part of the fun right now! I really appreciate the smaller size, so if it really does take off in Reddit's wake, I hope that doesn't change too much.

I'm a bit confused. Like some of the top comments, I've run into problems with how links work when interacting with instances other than my home instance on Mastodon before, and while I haven't been on Lemmy very long, I've already come across that problem but worse. At least on Mastodon, I can just copy/paste the Toot URL into my instance's search box and it comes up. If I get a link to a post on Lemmy I have no idea how to interact with it from my instance.

Some other issues:

At least on my instance, URLs are extremely vague. Reddit makes it easy to glance at the URL to see which subreddit you're on. On Lemmy I would ideally want to be able to see both the home instance of the post and the community within that instance. Instead I get just a single unique ID.

The way that instances sort seems to be different? Or at least there's something going on with sorting that confuses me. When viewing this post on my home instance, the second top comment is by @[email protected], which is the comment I was referencing earlier. But when I click the little colourful connected graph to go to what I presume is the OP's home instance, that post is way down the list and the second top comment is from "Craving0496". Which is another confusing point. I've noticed both here in this thread, and on the main community of my home instance that I signed up to participate in, some users have an @ at the start of their name, and some don't. I don't know why.

Discoverability is definitely also a big issue for me. On Reddit I could just think of a topic I want to explore and go to old.reddit.com/r/<TOPIC>. Or I can try variations of the name of that topic to find more options or if my first search doesn't work. Here I have to think which instance to try for that topic, and between the general-purpose instances and the specific ones, as well as the various different ways of phrasing the topic name, it's a huge space to explore. If I want stuff about programming, I might try /r/programming, /r/programmer, /r/programmers, /r/coding, /r/code, etc. on Reddit. On Lemmy I try all 5 of those community names, multiplied by the 10+ major instances, plus programming.dev and maybe other niche instances. If multiple of those are active, then when I'm searching for specific content, or wanting to start a discussion, I might have to do that multiple times across those communities in different instances.

I definitely want this to work. I love the idea of federated instances, and I want a place where I can go to be part of a great community without the bullshit Reddit is currently doing. And I'm going to give Lemmy a really good try. But if I had to guess, I'd say I'm not confident in its ability to provide that.

So, honestly, the only thing that concerns me is duplication of various "subreddits", for a lack of better term.

I searched for Technology, and I found two different ones. I know that's how the Fediverse works, but it may cause confusion and drive down user engagement

Enjoying it a lot. We just need more content over here. But I assume that is a problem that will solve itself very soon.

Joined kbin and checking out Lemmy through feddit.it I have a questin though: I wanted to subscribe to a medicine community in a different server but I can't find it when I search through "all" communities in feddit.it. How do I go about finding and subscribing to it?

Site looks very promising. Would be great to have an explainer video on how to find the right instance and how to join groups across instances for new comers. For sure the site has a learning curve but given the state of reddit, I for sure want to look for an alternative.

The Lemmy community are very welcoming. I've been here for a few days now and enjoying things so far.

It's obviously still early days regarding the whole Reddit fiasco, so there's not a lot of options for more mainstream and streamlined apps. I've been using the Jerboa app from the Play Store, which is good, but not perfected yet. So I decided to login to Lemmy on Chrome and install the web app version which is working for me right now.

What I'm keen to see is Lemmy grow and to come into its own. While it's both funny and sad watching Reddit kill itself, and is obviously the hot topic at the moment, Lemmy needs to be seen as the Reddit alternative, so when Reddit users come here - they see that there are community's here ready to go with each specific community posting and talking about their on-topic subject / news.

Lemmy / the fediverse is a little confusing (for myself anyway), as an outsider, I'm still learning the ropes of instance's and how things work specifically. As time goes on, I'll be more comfortable here without looking too much like an idiot, I'm sure.

I love the idea of Lemmy and I haven't found it too hard to create an account and get the gist of things.

BUT, the novelty will wear off and I'm not interested in general channels. I used Reddit for UX design, menslib, indieheads, OCD support, and lots of niche stuff that doesn't seem to exist here.

I know the answer is for me to get involved, but I work long hours and am a single dad to 2 .. I could set something up, but I don't have time to find quality OC and nurture multiple communities. I'd honestly be a poor mod.

I half expect Reddit to announce major changes to their official app, which may be enough to win a proportion of people back.

Hello World! It's cool.

The UI's a little bit sticky, possibly due to how busy lemmy.ml is right now. The set of communities is pretty thin as well, but that will probably change as time goes on.

For the most part it hasn't been too confusing for me. I'm new to modern federated social media, but not new to the idea of federation due to experience with the IRC model. I really enjoy the idea of instances and having your own sort of smaller space while being able to contribute to larger spaces still... though there's definitely still some user experience hurdles that need overcome on that front.

It’s really growing on me. I love the idea of being able to browse and participate in communities outside of my “home instance”. Where to actually set up as a “home instance” was a bit confusing, but once I picked one I kinda just forget about it.

So far, I find it's pretty good. I couldn't find a client for Emacs so I may create one.

I've been here for about a day and I've been very impressed! I happened to pick a pretty decent seeming instance to start from and I've not had too much difficulty figuring out this whole fediverse thing

I've also had a very good experience in Firefox on Android for browsing

I do think Lemmy is going to need to implement more load balancing and I'd love to be able to spin up a server to donate some cycles and bandwidth to help load balance an existing Lemmy instance

A bit confused but I'm getting there. Getting an account going was the most confusing part but it seems like overnight my account got approved, so thats done with!

First comment. Still getting used to the whole fediverse concept. Super cool so far though.

It has a ton of potential. I really hope it takes off because even if it doesn't replace Reddit immediately it's good to have another place to communicate with others. I have a tech background so it was fairly easy to figure out. I think once folks get used to it that it will be no more difficult than other social media sites. Mobile users will probably have the hardest time adapting but who knows.

I'm definitely not utilising all the features of being in the wider Fediverse yet, but I'm starting to get the hang of the Lemmy-verse. This federation stuff is really cool and definitely the future of social media in some form or another. Ironically this is closer to a real metaverse than Meta has ever got.

There are definitely rough edges everywhere, the joining process could do with being streamlined significantly and I have some issues with accounts being tied entirely to a single instance. Generally though this is perfectly usable and the main issue is the lack of content. It's annoying coming back to my front page after several hours and everything is 16 hours to 2 days old, hopefully this will improve quickly as the migration gains steam.

I posted a comment, one of my first, about something I think would vastly improve the user experience. I stand by it 100%, what I describe there was by far the most confusing part for me. I think the new user guide in general could use a pass-over by people who aren't tech savvy and are going to be more "casual" users, right now it's quite long and IMO a bit too technical for most people. It's too much all at once.

Now that I'm past that, I'm finding it quite similar to reddit. The biggest "problem" so far is that it's so small, so a lot of the small reddit communities I was in are non existant. I'm not comfortable moderating (I don't really have the time), so I won't make them myself, but I will miss them. Tbh for some things I'll probably still use reddit on desktop (until they kill old reddit) but lemmy on mobile.

My biggest concern from the beginning, and the reason I joined a big and established instance, is what will happen to people's accounts if their instance gets taken down by the creators. To me that seems like a kinda fundamental flaw here. I'm really not sure how or if it could be fixed, either.

I had been lurking on a few Lemmy instances for years (more or less since mid-2020 when I started getting more interested in FOSS) and with the Reddit shitshow I finally decided it was time to join, so I was already quite familiar with the concept of instances and how the Fediverse works on principle.

I'm slowly exploring more to find interesting communities to interact with, and hopefully there'll be more incoming users from Reddit creating more niche spaces.

One question I still have is how quickly posts and comments propagate across the Fediverse. How can I be sure the comment I'm writing actually shows up across other instances, and how long after I write it does it take on average to show up other places? Actually, if someone could reply to me and just tell me they even got this, that would go a long way to build confidence.

So far, so good. Excited to see more variety in communities as more users discover and migrate to lemmy.

I'm a bit torn. I really like the Lemmy project, but kbin being able to interact directly with microblogging fedi sites as well is pretty appealing to me. That is my primary social media usage, and it basically seems like a 2-in-1 which is great. To be clear, I know I can tag Mastodon users from Lemmy, and see Lemmy posts from Mastodon. But after looking at the way kbin handles it, it seems more 'native'. Not sure how I'm going to proceed.

I find the multiple instances very confusing and also have concerns about how this will split up communities. Like right now there aren't many "niche" communities, but if there were, say I would want to browse something like /r/eu4, but there are like 4 different ones, even if i am subscribed to all of them, how would I like... browse them all at the same time to get "all eu4 content". Like it seems very problematic to do something like that.

• I have to scroll all the way down to comment
• I can't collapse comments
• I need an app :/

I personally think that Aaron Schwartz would be happy to know we are here today.

Took me a bit to decide which instance to join and get setup, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. The registration process needs some feedback instead of just spinning if you're not yet approved though I saw this is being worked on.

It has been clunky to reference other communities or search for them, I keep finding links that send me to another instance and then I'm not logged in there.

Also, there seem to be a lot of duplicate communities. It would be nice to have some kind of system for groups of communities. So that they can link together as a super-community (if agreed by their mods) and if you subscribe to one you get them all. Or maybe over time the most popular ones will become apparent.

Overall its been neat to get setup over here and see the beginning of something.

I’m really glad that browse.feddit.de exists because it’s near impossible to find instances otherwise. However, I wish the “copy” button on the search results copied !communityName@instanceName rather than a simple URL to make it easier to sub to that community from any instance.

Joined today and I find Lemmy really cool. Of course there isn't that much content here yet but I'm hoping the June 12 Reddit protests and the upcoming Reddit API restrictions will bring more users in.

Having a lot of fun. I think the federation model works way better for reddit style websites as opposed to what we're trying to do with Mastodon.

I have found some difficulties getting set up, and there still seems to be quite a lot foreign about this tool, but I expect I shall grasp its concepts soon.

As a primarily mobile(Android) user, I downloaded Jerboa and found a list of instances. After being redirected to my browser to view this list and to sign up with my chosen instance, I came back to Jerboa to sign in.

Jerboa offered a preset list of instances, of which mine was not included. After multiple attempts at guessing what the "formal name"(?) of the instance was, I finally got an error indicating that the account didn't exist, rather than the first error that the instance didn't exist. After a bunch more bumbling around, I realized that there was a similar instance to the one I signed up on and I had to use a hyper specific identifier I only found in one place, then I could sign in.

I'm a bit disappointed at the lack of description on the esoteric settings. The app should define what is meant by All vs Local vs Subscribed. There are a few sort modes that I think I can puzzle out, but I'd much rather proper descriptions exist.

Frequently when a post is linked to and I click it inside Jerboa, the post is opened in my default browser... which doesn't stay logged in for some reason?

Unsure about community following / community discovery / community naming and namespacing.

Frequent incomprehensible errors when posts fail to load, I have to go back two pages then navigate to the attempted page to load it again for it to display.

Hopefully these are all just growing pains and everything smooths out and becomes more familiar rapidly.

Once I have already made an account, it turned out to be less confusing than. One of the things I like is the all tab which does not show 'random crap' like reddit's main page, but actually somewhat interesting content.

I'm loving a the idea and finding a bunch of nice people in communities :) The only thing I'm finding is that things seem to be creaking a lot, as I'm getting a lot of timeouts and such when I'm using Jerboa to upvote and search.

All in all though, it's great :)

Really liking it! I just want some simple tweaks here and there to this instance’s ui.

I'm also a new user and to be honest, it's pretty much the same browsing experience for me. I use Jerboa, and browse all for now, subscribing to subs that I like. I'm on Beehaw, and it federates with a lot of instances, I can pretty much find all the entertainment I would want from reddit.

Even more so, the community is much more frendly, cozier and there are much less noise and significantly more meaningful conversation which I truly appreciate.

I won't delete my account on reddit, because even though I loathe their practices, I also dislike removing information - I'm all for archiving discussions and information.

Seems pretty reasonable, even the federated stuff works fine - unlike Mastodon, oddly.

Long live federation! For me it’s just nice to see centralized social networks are losing popularity.

The thing with lemmy it seems that you can install your own instance and the "federation magic" shares content between instances, but not accounts ?? !!!

Same here. I do feel and see that a LOT of work will be required to get lemmy where it needs to be but something tells me that these are the interesting days for Lemmy!

It's gonna take a while for the chaos of everyone migrating from Reddit to die down and for the place to become useable.

Also, Lemmy seems to have the same annoying friction Masto has where it's too easy to get redirected to another instance's webpage. You suddenly can't comment, like, or basically do anything and it's not immediately obvious why.

Once again suggesting federated social media start using a centralized frontend on one single website and just let the servers themselves be federated. You would go to the same one website, ex lemmy.com and log into your chosen instance, staying logged in even if you visit another instance.

I like that it’s still so small. None of this karma farming just diluting from high quality content and conversations

Something that I will call out is that I really appreciate the live changes in the thread on the website itself. Makes interacting with comments and everyone a lot easier.

I like it so far, it has a low key relaxed energy. I mostly used reddit for the smaller communities so this kinda works for me.