I really want to like lemmy, but it's difficult. I'm new to all this fediverse thingy, and I might just have old habits and perceptions how things should work but... I keep seeing the same posts more than once, iOS experience is not that good really, sometimes I see dead posts from 2 years ago for some reason, despite having subscribed to like 30 communities there aren't that many new posts to read.
Part of it probably that subreddits had millions of people so a lot of posts every minute, but it still feels underwhelming.
It's not as doomscrolly. Maybe I should find something else to waste my time on haha
What is your experience with lemmy? Maybe I just do things wrong. Let me know
i mean so far, I'm enjoying it. sure, the community isn't as large, but that's mostly a good thing. on reddit, if i made a post, it would be like a 25% chance to get hundreds of comments, and a 75% chance to get none. here, I've gotten a few, high quality responses on every question post I've made. i do miss the "auto hide read posts" feature, but maybe that'll get added some day
Is there a way to stop the endless loading of posts on the website? Because every time I try to click a post, it moves down because a new post loaded, and this happens every ten seconds, constantly.
Fediverse currently reminds me of Reddit from 10 years ago in frequency of content. There is something nice about not being in the rat race, less toxicity.
The reality is that there was/is no reddit alternative and right now we're all in this transitory phase where we're all looking for a new home. We'll all just have to wait for the dust to settle. Lemmy isn't perfect but is improving and additionally other alternatives like kbin and tildes are in the works.
To your larger point, much of what you're feeling is the abrupt break in habits. I've been using the gap to develop more positives ones, and it's been great.
A thought came to my mind when reading your comment.
Instead of finding a new home, let's make lemmy our new home. Let's try to populate lemmy more, get its activity up, and post more than we would've on reddit (since we have less users, we would need more posts per user), so it can stand a chance at being a reddit competitor.
Yeah I agree and am working on it in terms of engagement. Usability is going to be key for whichever platform eventually takes over. It could absolutely be Lemmy, but I'm watching for other possibilities as well.
Yes, make homes! we need so much more hardware, while personal instances may not be a good idea, we are so short on compute that if you are inclined run your own instance, bring your friends!
The experience on smaller faster instances is already comparable, the content flow, really not bad either though it takes about an hour of finding and subbing to the communities you want and a day for your instance to really start grabbing the content for you.
Agree! with that also the smaller communities may help forever lurkers (like me) post as here it feels like comments will be seen unlike reddit where there is so much noise.
I've been told my handle should work on all the lemmys but so far it only works on lemmy.one. I tried logging in with this at lemmy.world and beehaw and it didn't work. I tried creating a new login on both of those and it also didn't work. I want to like it but I'm confused and frustrated. I'll give it some time and see where the dust settles as you said. Call me old fashioned though but I just don't think shitposting on a forum should be so damn complicated.
You should never have to go to the actual websites for the other instances. Just like email, you wouldn’t expect to be able to use your Gmail account to log into Yahoo, right? Use lemmy.one as your homepage and browse everything from there. From there, you can use the Communities section to search/browse communities hosted on any instance, including Beehaw and lemmy.world.
It will get better quickly—there are people working around the clock on apps and improvements right now. This isn’t like your normal social media site where they can use seed money and advertising to buy the best infrastructure right off the bat. This is a grassroots effort to make something that can evolve into a unique and independent service.
If we all stick it out with alternative options like this right now, we will be looking at a much freer future for online communication later. If we get annoyed and go crawling back to the capitalist overlords at FB/Twitter/Reddit, then we give them everything they wanted in the first place, and the internet will take one more step towards being a walled garden casino of ideas.
You don't need to create multiple Lemmy accounts. You can search for and find and join subs from lemmy.world on your Lemmy.one account. it's not instantly intuitive coming from Reddit, but once you make the connection to the other subs on different instances its established for you
Agree that it shouldn't be so complicated. I see that as a major flaw of the platform that will curtail adoption, but who knows, maybe one will win out over the others?
In any case, my understanding is that you can't log into the other instances with your username from lemmy.one, but you can read posts and interact with communities on different lemmy sites. For instance, I'm commenting from lemmy.world on a post you made using lemmy.one at a community hosted on lemmy.ml, but we can both read each other's comments, and so can people that signed up on other instances like beehaw.org.
Im talking to you from a lemmy.world account right now. Whatever instance you chose to create your account with is the website you need to go to each time you login. From there, you will still have access to search comment etc with any other community through your current instance.
Your handle does work for all of the various Lemmy servers. But to access them it's like your email, you wouldn't log in to your Gmail account from Yahoo. Yahoo has no idea what your Gmail username and password is. So how can it let you in? And like email because both servers speak the same protocol you can interact with other users on other servers just like if you had their email address.
In your case lemmy.one is your email server so to speak. You can access any other Lemmy community or set of communities on another lemmy server by searching directly for their address on your home server or if someone else has interacted with another server already that server's communities will show up in your home server's All list and you can see those posts there and interact with them as if they were local to your home server.
Are you on mobile or are you using desktop? The mobile app is definitely still in development so it's missing a lot of those QOL things that you are missing.
For me it's been helpful to use that fediverse search tool, and copy and paste it into the search. Seems to work better on desktop. I've got a decent feed going today, but it's definitely a work in progress.
I remember HATING Reddit after the great Digg migration. The information was presented in a different way and the discussions seemed to be the focus rather than the linked content. It took a while to get used to it and I'm feeling a bit of the same here. There are a ton of similarities that are already here, so it's not as jarring and things are improving every day.
I feel like I'm interacting more here than I did on Reddit for a long time. By the time anything showed up on my feed over there, it was 1 day old, had 5000 comments, and had devolved into memes.
Honestly that is the main reason i became a lurker on reddit, why comment? if im on /r/all then anything i could think to comment has already been commented by someone else most of the time if you scroll down enough. It was really only the smaller niche subs that i was able to engage with.
Honestly man, as much as I 100% agree on the UI difficulties, it's like a breath of fresh air. There's good music posted, people posted books and I looked and really wanted to read them. It's more human. There's this tiny little handful of content here, but it's not all same-y and in-joke-y and weird.
I'm not trying to hate on reddit, I still go to reddit for news because of more or less what you're talking about (the weird sorting in the newsfeed here and the lack of certain content). But what I like about here is that there are nerdy people, there's real content, there's not this weird hivemind and endless dopamine content. The great stuff about reddit was always the in-depth storytelling and unique content, to me, not just the gratification aspect of everything working right and new content popping up. I'm happy with Lemmy despite the hiccups because it seems like it's getting back to that.
What I'd recommend in your case is sorting the posts by "hot" instead of "active" which is the default setting. Posts get up the active sorting whenever somebody comments on them or upvotes (I think?), even if they are very old, whereas hot should only show you new and currently popular posts. You'll still see the post that you've already seen and a setting for that is clearly missing, but it should still be an improvement.
One of your issues is probably sorting by Active instead of sorting by Hot. A major difference in the experience on Lemmy is the "Active" sort method being the default.
The community and the app is still relatively new. To be honest, I prefer smaller communities where I can leave for a few hours without half the posts sliding to page 5 and beyond. Instead of uncritically consuming digital content, try to contribute to smaller communities, post a couple of cool links, or even (Gasp! Horror!) do something else for a while.
Damn some communities are huge and extremely participated. Such as the Gaming community (I don't remember the instance 🤓) - I've reached more than 170 upvotes and more than 150 long and articulated comments regarding how fucked up battle royale games are. I feel like there's more of a human sense here than reddit, where people are more focused on the quality of the shit they consume
I've always found that expression annoying, but it just occurred to me that considering most people use the internet on their phones now it's kind of nonsensical. Trivially easy to touch grass while doomscrolling or whatever.
I would say to breathe deep and take your time. Lemmy is not a clone of Reddit, and it shouldn’t be viewed as, say you would compare functionality between 2 third-party Reddit apps.
Think of it as coming in to a new MMO after having played the old one for many years. Some things will be familiar, and some things will be different. Some mechanics may feel like a “step backwards” while others are cool additions.
Lemmy isn’t new, but it’s getting fresh eyes on its user experience and that is a good thing. And unlike Reddit, each community/server/whathaveyou can be far more responsive to their users feedback. That said, not every response will be a “yes” but you don’t have requests filtering through various levels of technological red tape, which I understand has been a challenge for the Reddit moderators, who still do not have the necessary tools to effectively moderate their subreddits.
When I first joined Beehaw, and saw, originally, a “lack” of diverse subreddits (including my mainstays) I was a bit disappointed, but then I thought to myself: “damn the torpedoes, I’m just gonna wing it” and subscribed to a bunch of communities that looked promising.
I’ve been on Lemmy since the disastrous AMA and have not looked back. I’ve even engaged more in these last 5 days on Lemmy/Beehaw than in the last year on Reddit. And while I still miss my 250+ subreddits (including r/superbowl and the subreddits I collected as part of a Reddit gestalt (r/inthesoulstone, the subreddit for Purple button pushers, r/buddhistasfuck (created as a lark, someone posted it wouldn’t last a day and I stayed to prove them wrong, and while it was a quiet subreddit, every once in a while someone would post something they thought was “extremely” buddhist)) the Lemmy communities have provided more meaningful interactions. Plus, Lemmy will create its own gestalts, and I’ll have new ways to experience the never-ending stream of random data tidbits I have grown to crave.
People will rarely say they want to endlessly scroll, but given the options, they'll always choose the option that let's them consume more content, aka doom scroll.
The default sorting is by "active" which to me doesn't show a lot of new content (from the last hours). Switching to hot improves the experience a lot.
Another good sort is "Top Day". The blackout and subsequent activity here really highlighted an issue in Hot where the most popular communities just endlessly get interaction and stay at the top of Hot/Active. On the other hand, Top Day has been continuously bringing in new posts from all my communities.
The best experience is probably going to be using a combination of the two, swapping if one feels like it's getting stale.
IIRC, the upvotes used to be a 1:1, so 1 upvote meant one person liked it. Later they added some 'fuzzing' which caused the number you see on a post to be inflated. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
The default can also be set from your profile settings page.
I think most of the issues we're all running into are just growing pains. The sorting algorithms will be improved, performance and other bugs will be addressed. Most of us have been here for a day or so. 😅 I'm going to stick with it for a while longer and see what happens. If another service springs up that seems better, I'll check that out too.
Since Lemmy isn't built to trap you for hours on end to get that sweet ad revenue, you can just run out of new stuff to see and then stop lemmying. Bust open the eReader or get to that backlog of bookmarked articles.
In my opinion, were in the 'keep swimming' fishing boat scene from Nemo.
Reddit wants to stay the 'homepage of the internet' but also force everyone to go through their tools for ad bucks.
If we succeed, we can bust our communities out of the centralized net and reform on the other side.
We fail by not working together here today in this moment, we have to use this event to convince the average person to switch now, we might not get another opportunity like this.
You aren't doing anything wrong! This site/app (lemmy) and the concept (fediverse) are still super early days so there are going to be many problems. The site has some layout issues and there isn't nearly as much content as Reddit but that's just because it is new.
The most important bit, to me at least, is that the fundamental idea of the fediverse is good. We have had to many instances where social sites like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter can just decide what people can and can't say, they can remove our content and they can monetize it all without doing any real work of their own as far as creating content. The idea of the fediverse ensures that no one server, person or company has all the content and thus the control.
I really hope people stick with something fediverse whether it be lemmy, kbin or any of the other projects out there. Post content there, cross post it from Reddit if you really have to post to Reddit too for whatever reason. Please don't give these companies all the control anymore.
the hosters of the servers can still like decide who they are letting in and who not. And from what i heard it can even get bans but like only from the server people.
Even if this sounds bad it is a good thing because no consequenzes could make it toxic.
What we can do if we think the ban was unfair is: making an account on a server more fitting for you, looking in the moderation-logs (bottom of browser version at least) and looking if it made sense or even setting up your own server.
If something goes wrong you have options because of the federated system.
If I'm spending less time staring at my phone and more time picking up a book or something, all the better for me. I've found myself engaging more and doomscrolling less though, so the time feels more well spent even though I'm spending less time then I would have on reddit.
This is my biggest motivation right now. Its been a blessing in disguise as I am concentrating more and less mindlessly browsing reddit, both at work and in personal life.
The problem with Fedi apps is that they're built as replacements or clones of other apps like Reddit (Lemmy), Instagram (Pixelfed) or Twitter (Mastodon).
People come to expect the same experience that they had there and they're disappointed by the small community and confused because it's built on a fundamentally different philosophy and concept.
And of coruse, bugs are to be expected. It's not a multi million dollars company that's building these apps but a community of volunteers.
This is exactly my issue. I came from Boost (a 3rd party reddit app for android), hoping to the gods that this jurboa lemmy app offered card view so I can enjoy memes. Havent figured it out yet.
Also the termonology, "instances" "link aggregators" are confusing the f out of me.
And finally, even making a new account is confusing af.
I'm willing to bet a shit ton of people arent joining because of these reasons and the ones you made as well
I find it exciting. Very reminiscent of the Digg exodus. Sure, it can be a little frustrating at times. But reddit was going downhill for me long before the API stupidity. Lemmy feels like returning home in a way.
I also see same posts (I am looking at you two toilets in a bathroom) a lot but I think it is just lemmys way to show posts that ppl engage in and I guess two toilets in a bathroom is a very hot/trending topic right now because it doesn't seem to die down 😂
So I usually sort on all and new to find post that is lonely and maybe help them out a bit by commenting :D
I don't think this is a big different from reddit tho, on reddit do I see almost the same post all the time or even repost, here I just see the same post more 😂 just go and look at r/steamdeck, same question over and over again, but I will read them all! haha
I don't know what kinds of subs you joined but big ones like meme is posting a lot. But I saw this on reddit too, even reddit thought my feed was a bit lacking so I had maybe 50% posts from subs I hadn't subscribed to, to scroll through 😂
But also remember we aren't as many here(yet). we just hit over 100k users yesterday.
There are definitely a few bugs or perhaps performance issues that are annoying, but the experience seems already 1000 times better than just 2 days ago. I have also checked on lemmy every few months for about 2 years now, it's day and night. It already feels kinda like 2012 reddit to me, and that's a good thing in my view.
Hey same! Been really missing those days of reddit and lemmy has really been filling the void. I'm excited to see where things are gonna go on this site.
I'm still feeling my way around and have subbed to a community or two here and there, but (using Jerboa on Android) so far it's actually not that different from using rif (for me, anyway.)
The only real issue that I've encountered so far is I kept getting timeout errors whenever I tried to comment (though the comments seem to have posted anyway) or when I clicked into a comment thread, but those seem to have subsided for the most part...
It's given me an obscure error and timeout when hitting the post button while commenting once and it was a detailed comment that took a while to type. It did not post. That was a bummer
The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example. Lemmy should prevent this, community names should be unique, it should have an index of all the Lemmy Fediverse where instances can lookup if a community exists instead of waiting for a user to import that community to his instance. Something similar to what BTC does with the decentralized ledger.
The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example.
I agree, to an extent. You're right in that if you were part of the vibrant community of /r/piracy then it's miserable to see it shatter here on lemmy. That said, this only applies if you're expecting lemmy to be a 1 for 1 reddit replacement. For this type of community to remain cohesive, /r/piracy would have had to spin up their own instance and in /r/piracy direct everyone to lemmy.piracyinstance.whatever.
You can't really "fix" this in a central way because even if you did, it would be trivial to create an instance that would allow duplicate community names. Also, I can see a lot of use cases for lemmy which do not intend to be federated.
That said, it's not necessarily as big a problem as it appears, if you just accept that this is how the fediverse works. There's no single source of control, so of course people can create 147 different /c/piracy communities if they wish to. Once you accept that, then it's not really that difficult to subscribe to all the /c/piracy communities you can find.
The problem itself could be diminished by a few new features which I feel certain will emerge in the future:
linked communities, where one communities content is syndicated to another. So if you post in [email protected] then you also post in [email protected]. This would work differently to cross-posting, all comments would be reflected on both instances.
grouped communities, where you can subscribe to a group of /c/selfhosted communities with one click, so you see them all in your feed.
Having 'no single source of truth' is part of the joy.
If you're not happy with /r/cars moderators banning everyone who drives a Skoda, then you're out of luck. Here in federation land, you can just go to a different lemmy.something/c/cars place.
Of course you can still follow and interact with all the /c/cars communities from any Lemmy instance (and interact a little from Mastodon).
Part of the issue is that we hardly have enough people to sustain one random community, let alone several semi-independent ones. That barrier alone will turn others away and the cycle of not having enough souls will repeat itself
I got banned from Subs for asking questions, I couldn’t make my own without the original shadowing me on every search.
But theoretically on Lemmy every community can have a voice, if the rest of Fediverse believes it in, it can flourish. Other servers can’t report you or shadow ban beyond the confines of their server.
If a group tries to bully you they might get their entire server banned so the mod’s would likely terminate the user first
I think what they really need is an autosubscribe, so you can autosubscribe to /c/Piracy on all federated servers. (Then of course be able to block certain instances if they're horrible)
Fragmentation is definitely annoying, but if names had to be unique across the entire Fediverse then you would likely see a huge amount of name squatting where someone mass creates community names just so they have control of them. The way it is now, eventually one community on one server will likely end up becoming the defacto one when it is moderated well and a significant number of people flock to it. I don't think the fragmentation will be a problem in the long run.
I Think its a bug. if you subscribe to lemmy.ml communities it will say waiting or something else. but if you actually check your communities, you are actually subscribed to them. It's happening to me as well.
Recognise that I used to spend too much time on Reddit and I should spend less time on social media in general. "Not as doomscrolly" is a feature for me, although I recognise this isn't for everyone.
Half the reason I used Reddit was to cure boredom. I've decided to find other things to do. The other main reason I loved to check in was to make sure I don't miss big news. So far, Lemmy seems to scratch that itch. It'll take a long time for niche communities to establish, but I'll just deal with that for now. Maybe I'll just go back to some old forums for that purpose.
I think it's just going to take some getting used to. I've been riding the struggle bus for the last couple of days but it's getting better. I'm just excited to be somewhere new for a change. The echo chambers were getting pretty bad.
Mlem (iOS app) isn't great but I'm sure it will get better. The official reddit app is atrocious.
I was on reddit for over 12 years. I mostly lurked because my comments were never seen by the time I saw a thread. That's not super important tot me but I'd like to have more of a voice. Sure, things are easy now, but back in the day it was a pain in the ass in some regards. I'm still shocked the search sucks so bad over there. Give it some time to grow and see what happens.
Same! It just needs the ability to collapse posts or a compact mode for the feed. And to be a bit less crash-ey. But it’s in beta I expect stability and features to improve.
It's very new. Very valid concerns, but most of them are growing pains. If people just stick with this for a while it will improve by leaps and bounds.
Personally I've focused more on the community aspect than the software for now, since the latter is actively being worked on by a lot of people, so that's just a waiting game. The community has been fantastic, though. Already a nice feel in a lot of discussions.
I know what you mean. The biggest issue I'm having is finding and subscribing to communities that are not a part of the instance I joined with.
I kept seeing links that listed communities I was interested in subscribing to, but then it would ask me to log in, I'd put in my credentials, only for the log in to not work. I finally realized I had to make a new account with that instance, and then i could log in and join it. I don't want to have to juggle between 3 or 4 accounts to enjoy content, plus much if it is duplicated as some instance are linked, but others are not.
Also I use Jerboa to browse lemmy, don't have a PC, and would rather use an app than my web browser(Brave).
You don’t have to create an account for each instance. You hsve to get the link for the specific community you want to subscribe to/interact with and search for it within your home instance.
You can subscribe to remote instances from your own instance. You shouldn't be using multiple accounts.
For example, you are on lemmy.world, and the group you replied to is on lemmy.ml. I'm replying to the conversation from lemmy.blahaj.zone. The instances communicate with each other.
What you need to do is search for the instance you want to join. So if you see a cool group called CoolGroup on a server called some.instance, you would go to the search box and search for [email protected]. That will let you find it.
Yes, that could and should be easier, but lemmy is not a finished product, and it was not prepared for the reddit influx, so it will take time to iron out usability stuff.
I'm on mobile, but when I search for communities, I go to "communities" in the dropdown menu, then make sure I'm in "All". That should show you communities outside of your own server.
The mobile browser version is pretty much unusable for me. I select view All, then organize by either Hot or Active, and what I get is an endless stream of posts, but newly made and from two years ago (so, neither Hot not Active). And the page becomes unresponsive because of the endless stream.
The app works better but kept timing out when trying to upvoted stuff. Just updated to see if that fixes it.
So far, I gotta say squabbles is working better for me as a reddit alternative.
I just jumped on and mobile browser working fine for me. I changed to “new” and it’s all recent stuff. But I do think this is in early stages and more content will be generated as more of us make the transition, and I imagine UI of apps and web will continue to improve too.
I got the beta Mlem for iPhone. I’m liking it better than the mobile web. For two days it seems to be growing ok. I don’t miss the ads every other post for sure! (Didn’t have on Apollo either)
Mlem is off to a good start, but it’s just not far enough along for me to switch full-time. Once the dev rounds out some of the QoL improvements (collapsing), I think it can be great.
I find the mobile web to be great though, for the most part. I love to look (I use dark mode), and I have it saved to my home screen so it feels like a dedicated app.
I’ve had old posts pop up a few times, but not often.
I mostly lurked on Reddit, because it felt pretty useless to comment in larger subreddits. So far, it’s a lot more pleasant to comment here and see how communities might grow.
Getting out of the habit of doom scrolling has been the most positive change for me. I pop in a few times a day and check active and then new, then find other things to do. It’s better for my mental health and I’m more productive.
Yeah, that's been my experiance too. The platform only has about 12,000 active users on it. Mastadon, in comparison, has 1.2 million active daily users. it's alot more than previously, but still nothing in the grand scheme of things. More people are coming in though and it is still growing but at this rate, what I believe to be 3,000 new active users in a day, it'll take a bit.
In the mean time, thank you for taking the initiative and posting. To others be the change you want to see, try posting a bit.
Any new platform will have far less content to begin with. And far less tools.
I hope that people do create apps like Infinity, Relay and Apollo for Lemmy soon (or that Jerboa grows to that quality level).
The content will come, as Reddit becomes a shell of it's former self to satisfy the VCs.
I'm warming up to it. Actually, I was never not warm to it, but the learning curve is real. I am on the website right now because the iOS app MLem, which is in beta, doesn't (as far as I can tell) have a way to search for other communities. But I want to shout that creator out, because I think it's difficult, thankless work, and I really appreciate their effort. The fact there is an app for iOS at all is a wonderful start. Who knows how solid it will be a year from now?
Give it some time, you'll start to see more and a bigger variety of posts. Additionally, change your sort of posts once in awhile, and enable the "all" selection and you'll see a bigger variety of posts
@jaykay I'd actually like to see bots rip top posts from reddit to post to Lemmy, and the subreddits who would like to I would love to see them create their sister Lemmy instances and create an auto crosspost process. This way, they are keeping their subscribers happy and can make the transition whenever they feel like it if it really comes time to completely abandon ship... Which for me it is time!
Personally I am glad that decentralization is slowly picking up again with things like Lemmy and Mastodon. To me using it does not feel all that different from Reddit actually (UI-wise).
I grew up in the days of the old internet where newgroups and mailing lists were the way to interact with other "netizens" (a term I have not heard being used in years btw). Very little moderation and yet people behaved themselves, though of course the number of non-tech people on the net were far lesser as well so that certainly had something to do with it. Lemmy has that advantage too currently of smaller, ideologically-inclined, and willing-to-jump-a-few-hoops people.
TL;DR: I've no issues with using Lemmy and I like it so far, including smaller size of the community.
Honestly my issue with Mastodon is the lack of any algorithm whatsoever. I know algorithm is often seen as a bad word, but even just a simple upvote and interaction based thing would be nice to make cool posts more visible. I like that Lemmy has this like Reddit. For me Lemmy has been much more successful in replacing Reddit than Mastodon was in replacing Twitter.
Very little moderation and yet people behaved themselves, though of course the number of non-tech people on the net were far lesser as well so that certainly had something to do with it.
I remember the pre-AOL Internet, and what happened when AOL opened the gates to the masses. That was the day the civil internet died, and soon after the commercial internet devoured it, forever changing the way people can scam, deceive and show hate towards each other.
Yups, I remember getting AOL (or maybe CompuServe) floppy disks with some US Robotics modem purchase back in the day with a free one-month subscription or something.
Not being in the US, I never used it, but later found that AOL spammed everyone over and over with these disks and later CDs. That was indeed the beginning of the end I think. And then a decade or so later the proliferation of smartphones was the final death knell for the old internet. "Netiquette" is dead and people feel anonymity means civility is unnecessary.
True. Somehow the term popped into my head as I was reminiscing about the good ol' days and then I realized I haven't actually heard it in a long time. I liked the connotation it brought of a borderless global community distinct from the real world.
I am also new here and I am a long time lurker, 2008, from the place that shall not be named.
My initial feel is that Lemmy is very much like pre Digg days and a kin to the traditional style forum boards where discussions aren't old news when the post is only 12 hrs old.
This is a breath of fresh air even with the growing pains I expect may come with the sudden influx of refugees.
Other people have said the important parts. I'm not sure if you were on reddit for long. But if you think back to the early days of reddit it was not as stable as you might think now. The site was constantly down and there were many bugs. The user interface was still in development. Lemmy could be a diamond in the rough. Give it some sharpening and it will be a good place. I guess it's up to the users.
Agreed. I like the progress they’ve made so far, but it’s clear in alpha stage. And I find the mobile website to be pretty good for what it is. A few minor updates will make a big difference.
Mobile is pretty good, but I prefer the Reddit approach of asking over and over if I want a broken app, before showing me a broken mobile page. Maybe in time Lemmy can catch up.
I was the same way the first couple of days after starting, but I can tell you that after a week into using the platform it has gotten a lot less chaotic. I have learned most of the basics and figured out what are the features and what are the bugs, so I’m not so lost all the time trying to figure out how it all is supposed to work.
And I’m really enjoying it! It feels like a fresh start, and it keeps me engaged in the community and helping to build a better place for anyone else who is looking for alternatives. It gets better!
Yes, you' re right, I've been a Redditor for more than 16 years and have seen many subreddits come and go. Even today, there are subreddits like Android that only get 200 or 300 upvotes on a good day.
I’m on an iPad and using the web experience and am really liking it. I was able to find enough similar communities that I’m getting a similar feed to Reddit and it’s growing like crazy. I’m not seeing posts and content pop in very fast. On the home page I sort by new and subscribed
I agree, I think it has a lot of potential, but the difficulty in discovering other communities is a barrier that most won't want to cross. Having to manually search a specific string in order to subscribe is just too cumbersome. I hope that improves. I think if discoverability was better, everyone would be here and interacting. But it's too different that I could see most giving it a quick try and then giving up. Im an addict though so I'm muddling through it. I think people here don't really realize what the average user is like, and how most don't even know that third party apps exist.
Yeah I would agree with all these things. Hopefully, the fact that this project is open source will mean that someone or a group of people will put some time and effort into improving the UI bits as issues with it come up.
If you know how to use greasemonkey there is a script to make lemmy look more like old.reddit here Personally, it fixed a lot of the UI issues for me.
What do you mean by 3? you shouldn't need authorisation to join a federated community.
Fediverse is kinda just a fragmented mess. Communities of all sides, some moderated strictly, some not. Content not being properly labeled (looking at you NSFW communities), shitposts leaking into everything.
Then it's just a duality, communities are either open to everyone, and therefore spam, or they're super closed down, create an echo chamber and shut everyone off.
This whole situation isn't enjoyable and I'm not really sure for the future of it.
The problem is the client in our phone must have a sophisticated, user controlled and user tuned, content recommendation algorithm that does basic things like.
Filter out penis pill spam
But show you the same exact post 5 times.
Put new and highly upvoted content first
Inspect to make sure they are not counterfeit
Give low observed content a good chance, we don't want echo chambers or attention grabbing positive feedback loops
Know what you like, and, based on what people who like the same things as you, find things you might like that you haven't been exposed to yet
I'm hopeful that over time things will sort out on their own, certain spaces will become functionally the only one of their kind and put everybody into the same bucket instead of these fragmented duplicates of the same thing.
I know folks here keep talking about small communities, but that means infrequent content with little engagement.
On Reddit I sometimes see the same posts for days. In that respect I don't think there's anything different. It's about how you sort / filter and how much content is posted.
By the way, check your language settings in the profile. I had some issues with the posts that I could not get, because “English” option was somehow unchecked in the languages list…
My biggest pain point right now is that the iOS app is unstable, crashes constantly, and the web app is slow as molasses and inconsistent, randomly becomes unresponsive.
I think if they could work out the bugs, stability and inconsistent performance, and push stable working apps to their mobile platforms, there would be far more engagement and the Lemmy community as a whole would flourish.
So far I'm a big fan of kbin, it's basically Lemmy and Mastodon together. They are definitely creaking under the strain but I'm excited for what's in store over there. Will probably be my main account once things settle down.
Be the change you want to see. Start posting in the communities you enjoy for others to check out. If you're here just to scroll and not contribute, Lemmy won't improve quickly. If you wait until it gets to be another Reddit, you're not helping out the community.
it's not as big right now, but if you're using Active sorting that could make it even worse, try using Hot, New, Top Day, or my personal favorite, New Comments, which is similar to new but anything that still has an active discussion will come up again
I‘m experiencing the same, but I see it only as growing pains of a community that is still tiny. If corporate social media continues like it does (downhill), I expect all that to improve.
I'm confused to be honest, but I admit I just started. But like, where do I look at pictures of houseplants and post mine? Do I find a server devoted to houseplants? Or maybe I should just finally figure out Instagram for that.
You don't have to find an instance for X, just a community. Go to the communities tab and search for 'plants' and see what comes uob. It'll show the communities in your instance and then in other instances. Click onntnem subscribe its all connected.
Then on your Frontpage there is a tab on top between Subscribed, Local, All.
Subscribed shows posts from everything you subscribed only.
Local is posts from your instance only
All is posts from all instances federated.
Linking is a bit clunky and a lot of people post direct links to a community with its home instance URL, which causes problems when you're browsing around. That's an issue I hope improves over time as the software matures.
Edit: I don’t know if that link will work in apps. I’m using the TestFlight of Mlem on iOS and it just crashes the app 😂. But in the browser it’ll take you to the community in your home instance instead of the community’s home instance.
I've been happy overall with it. I was lost at first but I set my feed to All severs and New posts. I have found some cool communities this way. I plan to stick around and I hope others do as well!
@jaykay@kamasupra sorta… like I’m replying via my Mastodon account. Currently there isn’t post creation, though some googling has shown that it’s something they’re working towards.
But you basically copy the Fediverse Logo Link of a post and paste it on search in your mastodon client. It appears as a toot and you can comment; Lemmy will display it natively like this comment.
Favoriting the post on Mastodon counts as an upvote.
I have a similar experience, but its like a user base of 200k vs idk how many million on reddit. There wont be an infinite amount of posts until lemmy grows more.
I think only 1 percent of all users on lemmy and reddit post. So its 2k active posters vs 60k active reddit posters (assuming reddit has 6m).
The sorting has been bad i also see dead posts but overall im enjoying lemmy more than i had reddit in the later years (joined 2010).
I like it. So far my only issue is the convoluted manual search for communities, but that'll be a non issue as we spread out and get everything linked up. The other stuff is just bugs, like phone pics getting turned sideways when posting.
Overall I like it. I prefer a more intimate community and quality discussion as opposed to one line reactions comments and petty confrontation.
The long and short of it is that it is rough around the edges, but it's a good foundation that can get better over time. It definitely needs some UI improvements and better onboarding
I had trouble with Mastodon, primarily because I had a very curated list of people I followed and most of them didn't move to Mastodon. Those that did are clearly using some type of program to just copy posts over from other platforms.
But for Lemmy, it feels different. I've been able to find most of the same communities I was a part of over there. The fact that they are smaller and less busy means I can spend less time scrolling, but still feel like I got my "fix" in for the day.
Agreed. Its all a bit too confusing. I'm sort of understanding it all now after a few hours. I think great apps for android and iOS will definitely help a lot, but also I just really miss apollo :(
I mean, you're being realistic, and nobody can fault you for that. The jank is going to be too much for some people, they'll come here maybe but won't stick around. Other people will come and think that the positive aspects are more important than the negative ones and they'll migrate.
I'm a FOSS nerd and advertising makes me physically sick, so I'm more than willing to put up with the frustrating things about Lemmy.
My one advice is, if you want to see more content then post it.
One complaint I have is that I can't post a comment without having to click "Post". In many applications, Reddit being one of them, you are able to use the hot key Ctrl+Enter and it will post/send whatever you wrote.
I mean the user base is less than 1% of reddits. So of course you're going to have less posts. You're relying on people for browsing, you either can chose to be content with how much people are posting, or get to posting yourself.
i setup my own instance ('bin, not Lemmy), and have subscribed it to so much content my doomscrolling is sitting at a comfortable, pre-reddit-death level. i am still scanning the 'verse for new instances to subscribe to.
they just added a feature in mbin that automatically groups crossposts, which is very nice.
i guess i prolly shouldnt have answered cuz im not using lemmy, technically...but
i would recommend:
checking another instance, maybe you'll get better content ( mine is public!, https://moist.catsweat.com )