I run a few groups, like @[email protected], mostly on Friendica. It’s okay, but Friendica resembles Facebook Groups more than Reddit. I also like the moderation options that Lemmy has.

Currently, I’m testing jerboa, which is an Android client for Lemmy. It’s in alpha, has a few hiccups, but it’s coming along nicely.

Personally, I hope the #RedditMigration spurs adoption of more Fediverse server software. And I hope Mastodon users continue to interact with Lemmy and Kbin.

All that said, as a mod of a Reddit community (r/Sizz) I somewhat regret giving Reddit all that content. They have nerve charging so much for API access!

Hopefully, we can build a better version of social media that focuses on protocols, not platforms.

  • IncidentalIncidence@feddit.de
    14·
    1 year ago

    it is really annoying to subscribe to communities on federated servers – there should be a link that will redirect you to your home server. As of now I seem to have to copy and paste the community address into the URL because the feddit.de community search doesn’t seem to be working for me

  • diemunkiesdie@sh.itjust.works
    13·
    1 year ago

    Not a huge fan of the UI (so much wasted space!) but it works for now. I’m subscribed to a few communities but the content is pretty stale. I’ve seen the same posts at the top for a few days now. The “Active” selection keeps the same things over. I tried a few of the other selections (Hot, Top Day, etc) but there is this weird thing where it randomly refreshes the feed and adds one or two new posts at the top and then pushes everything down. Again, UI/UX issues.

  • dvlsg@lemmy.world
    11·
    1 year ago

    Enjoying it, but wondering if I’m missing a way to work backwards to find communities.

    I’ll give an example - Sleep Token, a band I like, released an album not too long ago. If I Google “reddit sleep token”, I can see a few communities like /r/metalcore and /r/progmetal discussing them, so I can guess I might want to join those communities.

    If I Google for “lemmy sleep token”, I get a bunch of random websites with articles about sleep token with links and quotes about motorhead.

    Whats the strategy for working backwards like that on Lemmy? Is there one?

  • unique_hemp@discuss.tchncs.de
    9·
    1 year ago

    It’s looking great! I joined just 2 days ago and the communities I subscribed to are already looking much more lively today. Thanks, Reddit blackout!

    Also written in Rust, btw :)

  • main_water@beehaw.org
    9·
    1 year ago

    I like it and was able to adapt easily, but some of the UI is terrible (and I mean this in a constructive way), specifically:

    • Page weight is too high, when I use back/forward or switch tabs on mobile my browser has to do a full refresh. Tildes and kbin are very lightweight by comparison, not sure what the JS code of Lemmy/Beehaw are doing to cause this issue.
    • Adding new subs is confusing, but mostly because the “Subscribe” button is hidden by default when you visit a community on another instance.
    • The process of subscribing is convoluted You 1. visit an instance, 2. find a community, 3. copy the url,4. go back to your community, 5. past it, 6. open the search link in your instance, then 7. click subscribe and wait a little. It feels like that can be streamlined or something.
    • Loading “All” is slow, I understand why, but the UI should do something to explain it to me instead of popping in posts.

    But, the discussion seems good, the actual UI is reminiscent of old reddit so I’m happy, and I’m surprised how easy it is to discuss things across instances.

    • lolcatnip@lemmyrs.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Another really clunky thing I noticed right away is that there’s a huge difference between viewing a sub through your home instance vs its home instance, in that you’re no longer logged in when using the remote instance’s URL, and there’s no obvious way to get back to the corresponding location on your home instance. This means, for example, that when someone posts a link to another thread, it’s always kind of broken for remote users.

      I feel like something could be done to ease interoperability using the same techniques ad trackers use.

      I’m especially baffled as to why the UI had a dedicated button to view content on its home instance. I can see how that might be useful in some circumstances and it would make sense to have it hidden in a menu, but I think it’s just a confusing distraction for new users who typically have no use for a crippled view of what they’re already looking at.

  • BitSeek@beehaw.org
    9·
    1 year ago

    First impression is very good. But many instances do not allow the creation of new communities. Which brings me to all the little specialized subreddits that I used daily on Reddit are not on Lemmy. :-( Yeah general ones like Movies is there but I need my fix for r/Dune! :D

    • SirElliott@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      The great thing about Lemmy though is that a community you interact with or even moderate doesn’t need to be on your instance. If you’re a member of Beehaw, which doesn’t allow community creation, you could start your Dune community on Lemmy.ml or another instance and moderate it with your Beehaw account.

      • BitSeek@beehaw.org
        2·
        1 year ago

        That is true, but for most users that is a bit convoluted. Also you have several communities with the same subject name. What makes Reddit great is how many users are at a single specialized sub.

  • Criton@feddit.uk
    9·
    1 year ago

    It’s ugly, difficult to understand, And the search function is fucked. All in all, it’s pretty crap and I miss reddit a great deal. That said, I’m never going back. I just wish lemmy was better.

  • notexecutive@sh.itjust.works
    9·
    1 year ago

    I like it - I just want a few Reddit-ish features:

    1. Hiding reply chains for scrolling cleanliness in comments of a post
    2. Hiding posts on the main page should be easy to do (buttons unclear)
    3. Dedicated copy link button - so it’s clear I’m copying the link to the page that is being spoken about in a post, rather than a link to the comments of the post itself.
    • xylem@beehaw.org
      3·
      1 year ago

      (1.) should already be here, at least - on the web version it’s the [-] icon next the commenter’s name, and on Jerboa you just tap the top bar of the comment. Agree that there should be a way to hide posts permanently - it’s kind of annoying to always scroll past the same pinned posts at the top of the “Local” view.

  • solarizde@feddit.de
    8·
    1 year ago

    Still very new here and most problems I have is with filtering. No matter if Main page or in a post.

    If you subscribed to a bunch of feeds it gets quickly very confusing to find things. You can choose top day or active, which is to long timeframe I would like to see some more customized preferences here like “Active but new 8h” or something.

    Also big downside is that lemmy seems not take into account the strenght of single subs. So if I subscribe a big one like Technology my mainpage in active will 95% now only be this. It would be nice if the Active Filter also takes a bit diverse results into account and not only showing the most active sub.

    • Jonamerica @midwest.social
      5·
      1 year ago

      My experience has been that the “Hot” view is most similar to Reddit if you’re looking for new content. You can read about the different sorting here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

      What I’ve noticed about the “Active” sort is that older posts that are still getting upvotes and have new comments can remain at/near the top of the list for several days. I think this is good if you want to see where ongoing discussions are happening. On Reddit, I often felt that an interesting post fell off my view very quickly. I know I wasn’t the only one, which is probably why people would post a “remind me” post or “following” post on Reddit so they could come back to it later. Regardless, someone might entirely miss a post that blows up in a community but sees it in the “Active” view and check it out. I like “Hot” because I can see what’s trending up, but I frequently switch between Hot and Active. I’ve noticed that many of the “hot” posts don’t have any comments.

      I agree with you regarding quieter communities. Reddit had something in its sauce that allowed posts from less active communities to show up in my feed through all the noise of busier communities. This didn’t happen for all the subreddits that I joined, but rather, the ones I showed an interest in. The downside of that kind of algorithm is it reinforces the echo chamber effect as the algorithm is learning what I like and then showing me more of what I like to get me to stick around longer. This system isn’t (currently) prone to that kind of manipulation.

      • zero_iq@lemm.ee
        3·
        1 year ago

        Active has a 48-hour cut-off, and the ranking function it uses seems to encourage the same few posts to stay at the top for 48 hours. It’s basically the same ranking as “Hot”, but using the timestamp of the last comment instead of the time of posting to decay its ranking over time.

        This means any comment activity whatsoever on a popular thread bumps it back up the rankings significantly, and I suspect leads to a kind of snowballing effect that keeps posts higher up. Ideally, it would use some metric based on user interactions over a time period to calculate a score of activity rather than solely the latest comment. In effect, it seems to act more like a “top from last 48 hours”. (Although I would add I’m a newbie to Lemmy, so might not yet have an accurate picture of its behaviour).

        Lemmy seemed to get much livelier for me when I switched my default to Hot, but I wish there was a way to disable the auto-updates (I’d rather see new items only on browser refresh). Active sort feels pretty stale to me.

      • MotionChris@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        I would like a “rising” option, one that is more a mix between New and Hot bacon reader for reddit does it very well.

      • solarizde@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        Thanks for explaining, will have a look into it. At the End I guess it is also just a hughe bit of getting used to the different way.

  • boomboxnation@beehaw.org
    8·
    1 year ago

    So far so good. This is actually my first comment.

    I had a hard time wrapping my head around how the federation worked. But figured out I just search here in communities only with my keywords. If I don’t get a result here and https://browse.feddit.de then it means no community has yet been created anywhere.

    I decided to make Beehaw my ‘home’ server after discovering it actually had an ‘interview’ that I jived with and a moderated/structured set of communities. As my first deeper ‘test’ of lemmy I have created my first community at lemmy.world since it seemed like the place for my random community about a grocery store chain: [email protected]

    If I was making a specific tech/software related community I likely would have chosen lemmy.ml as that’s where many other tech/software related projects have landed so far. But lemmy.world seemed the better choice for random.

    Does this seem relatively close to be how I should handle things in the lemmyverse?

    Edit: It would be nice if there was a user setting to open external links in new tabs.

  • archon@dataterm.digital
    7·
    1 year ago

    It’s buggy, but I’m managing. Weird things like having to press the “Subscribe” button twice. I’m assuming most will be solved when traffic stabilizes.

    The federation is… strange. Confusing when I click a link to another instance when trying to subscribe to a community, but also kinda cool how it works. I’m not sure federation should really be a concern for users, but time will tell. I’m sure it will only improve.

  • Mishmash2000@lemmy.nz
    6·
    1 year ago

    I’ve moved from Twitter to Mastodon and Reddit to Lemmy and am so far loving both. Even though they’re taking a bit to get used to they’re mostly pretty straight forward and familiar feeling in how they work. I will definitely miss certain subreddits but many of them are already here in some form or in the process of moving over. I really love the distributed model that is not at the behest of a single corporate entity or billionaire.

  • fwgx@f.fwgx.uk
    5·
    1 year ago

    For wide spread adoption there are a lot of issues with the fediverse. The main one is the home pages of fediverse instances or join-X.org sites immediately turn people away with their language, jargon and content. Nobody cares about the open source licence, or how it’s “federated” or what the developers can do, or that you can run your own server or what languages and frameworks it’s built on etc. These all will turn people away. Literally the first sentence on join-lemmy is “Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform”. Nobody wants to self host anything (well I do, but near to 100% of people don’t). Then there are screen shots of code diff’s and actual code, then a list of programming languages, then some Latin with hard to see ‘mod tools’, and then at the end back to self hosting “With Lemmy, you can easily host your own server, and all these servers are federated”. None of this is enticing people in. It’s turning people away.

    These entrances to the fediverse should be about community, discussions, engagement etc. That’s what people want to sign up for and start participating. Just get them signed up. Once they’re in they can learn about the other benefits and that they can move the profile to different servers, or whathaveyou. Keep all the other bumf hidden away behind a “benefits” link.

    Someone needs to come up with better terminology to fediverse and federated to avoid having to explain it all the time. It’s federated… You know… Like email. Well I’ve used email a long time and nobody has ever called it federated or used that term before when talking about any aspect of email - and I run my own email server.

    Tl:dr: just cut the crap and make on-boarding easier. Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.

    • Auggie_Otter@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      “Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform”

      Okay seriously, this was my first issue. Someone on Reddit recommended Lemmy to me and I saw that and immediately went back to them and was like “WTF?”.

    • SuitedUpDev@feddit.nl
      0·
      1 year ago

      In theory, I agree with you! A 100%, but the problem is that currently Lemmy doesn’t support migrating your profile to a different server. So that already slightly complicates things. So from the get-go they are forced to make choice. A choice which isn’t clear, what potential consequences are and the fact they currently easily migrate to a different server, obviously doesn’t help.

      “Like email” is basically the same description I’ve been using to explain it to non-tech people.

      Long story short, onboarding needs to get better. But that also applies for other Fediverse projects (like Mastodon or Friendica).

      • knowncarbage@lemmy.fmhy.ml
        0·
        1 year ago

        I’m not sure the ‘like email’ thing helps.

        Email is confusing and not what most people use to connect with others. I don’t know anyone who met via email.

        Trying to get groups of people to connect meaningfully over email didn’t work. Messenger apps did work as they removed user freedom to top-reply and break everything.

        I’m vaguely interested in IT, seflhost a little and compile a kernel from time to time but email still seems esoteric and confusing to me.

        Join the fediverse! It’s as simple as setting up an email server!

        • SuitedUpDev@feddit.nl
          1·
          1 year ago

          I’m not sure the ‘like email’ thing helps. Email is confusing and not what most people use to connect with others. I don’t know anyone who met via email.

          In my experience it at least helps in the sense that, when people ask “why are there more then 1 site?” ? And up to a certain degree you use that to explain the concept of federating.

    • redditcandoone@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      1 year ago

      Finding a good analogy is hard. But at the risk of sounding like a snob, a little barrier to entry isn’t always a bad thing…

      The thought of trying to explain this to one of our users (helpdesk monke). No thanks…

        • altz3r0@beehaw.org
          0·
          1 year ago

          Lemmy was not created last week, man. All you see here today already existed and was running when spez hit the fan.

          In that sense, part of what attracts me to this is a bit of the barrier to entry. I find it enticing, it reminds me of the good old days, where you had to earn your way in, in a sense. Of course that’s silly old man talk, because honestly, all you have to do is select any random site and sign up.

          Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, it all comes down to the same thing. This “barrier” to entry is almost fictitious, and I feel that’s the ideal type of barrier.