I run a few groups, like @fediversenews@venera.social, 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.

  • main_water@beehaw.org
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    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.org
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      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.

  • notexecutive@sh.itjust.works
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    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
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      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.

  • unique_hemp@discuss.tchncs.de
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    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 :)

  • Criton@feddit.uk
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    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.

  • boomboxnation@beehaw.org
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    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: !traderjoes@lemmy.world

    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.

  • Lemmy’s UI on desktop is… dogshit and really needs some love. Some web designer could volunteer for a better desktop theme? But thanks to the Jerboa app it looks amazing on Android!

    Only issue right now with Jerboa is that it allows very long images to occupy a large space on your frontpage, I think it should show them as thumbnails instead.

  • Sphere@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    I think having already used Mastodon, albeit mostly as a lurker, helped, but I didn’t find it difficult at all to get up and running on Lemmy and subscribe to a bunch of communities.

    On the desktop version, thanks to not having loads of useless scripts, ads and other “stuff” on the page like Reddit does, Lemmy’s interface loads quicker in my browser than Reddit’s and is more responsive. I have had a few hiccups with Jerboa logging me out of my account and images appearing too small to view, but in general, it works well - fast, clean interface, no distractions.

    The one downside really is that the content that was (is, but not accessible) on Reddit is not here yet, but that will change with time. Still, the atmosphere is much better, and I feel much more inclined to post here as there aren’t the hordes of people waiting to tear someone down who has a different opinion (cough, Reddit…) So overall, pretty good and glad I finally stumbled upon Lemmy.

    • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      The only thing that confused me as a complete newcomer to lemmy, mastodon, etc is the decision of which instance to join. I ended up picking one mostly randomly but I’m still not really sure what the implications of this decision were. Did I choose correctly? Does it matter at all?

      • hannes3120@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        The implication is what the mods of that instance allow you to subscribe to (which instances they federate) and how they moderate your content.

  • KerryAnnCoder@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    Honestly, I kind of hate it, but since Reddit is unusable, considering all the subs that have gone dark (presumably permanently).

    I’ll be honest. I don’t like the Fediverse concept - the fatal flaw of decentralized systems is that sometimes centralized systems are great. Basically, reddit was ONE BBS style forum for everything, which was the killer convenience. Similarly Twitter was the ONE microblogging platform for everybody, which was the killer convenience.

    Because the moment anybody can operate a service, everyone does.

    Right now, I need to buy a car, I can’t find a good Lemmy community to get advice from. Searching for ‘cars’ in all federated communities returns:

    Fuck Cars@lemmy.ml - 3.41K subscribers
    Cars@lemmy.ml - 104 subscribers
    Fuck Cars@lemmy.ca - 56 subscribers
    Self Driving Cars - 19 subscribers
    IdiotsInCars@lemmy.world - 11 subscribers
    Electric Cars@lemmy.ca - 4 subscribers
    RC Cars@lemmy.world - 4 subscribers
    Cars@lemmygrad.ml - 3 subscribers
    Fuck Cars@lemmy.world - 2 subscribers
    Cars@lemmy.world - 1 subscriber
    

    Leave aside for a moment that “Fuck Cars” has 34x more subscribers than the biggest Cars community - there are two different “Fuck Cars” communities, and three different “Cars” communities. It’s great that you have subscriber numbers, but there’s no definitive place to find out information on cars. Reddit’s CEO is right that Reddit was organized like a landed-gentry where a first-come-first-serve approach to the most popular forums was done, but that landed-gentry system solved this problem, whatever new problems it may have introduced.

    Now, you could look for a technological solution to solve this problem: For example, you could have a centralized server for all federated Lemmies, some sort of “lemmyhub.com

    We’d all have to agree on it. People could set up alternatives, but we’d all have to basically coalesce and say: Yes, this is the thing we want. Maybe it’d use blockchain, I don’t know. Point is, it’s centralized and easy to find information. It would work “just like Reddit” where you would have ONE authentication/authorization that works seamlessly across all instances (the current system is anything but seamless), and there would be ONE key/value combo for keyword. So, instead of going to Cars@lemmy.ml & Cars@lemmygrad.ml & Cars & lemmy.world, you just go to cars.lemmyhub.com.

    If you want to post, you just use your lemmyhub account and your post appears on the “default” community. You can still post on individual lemmies by going to the individual lemmy page as well, or by specifying which of your Lemmy instance accounts you want to post as.

    Here’s the problem with the merging all the cars communities together, though: There is nothing to prevent someone from creating Cars@NeoNaziHeartsFascism.com and spamming the community with bile or trolling. Lemmyhub could operate a blocklist for troll and hate communities and instances, but once you’re doing that, you’re making editorial decisions. And forget all the nasty ethics problems around “what’s free speech/what’s hate speech?” “what’s acceptable to view/what’s not?”, you have legal liability problems if anything slips through the cracks.

    Reddit wasn’t perfect, and certainly they could have been more proactive with shutting down hate speech, and more speedy with shutting down illegal content, but by and large reddit worked. Reddit’s authoritarian approach worked because it was mostly benevolent – right up until the point that it wasn’t.

    So I don’t think Lemmy can technologically make it’s way out of the situation.

    I think what needs to happen is a solution like the Wikipedia foundation; we establish a non-profit designed to create a centralized server which may choose or not choose to incorporate Lemmy instances. It runs on donations, not advertising, and it’s not designed to maximize profit, only to keep the servers running. It would borrow heavily from the Wikipedia model in organization and structure.

    Because I’ll be honest - Lemmy and Mastodon are okay, but there’s really nothing in them improving on the old Newsgroups system of the late 80s and 1990s. Reddit captured the market for forum discussions because it was simply a better solution, there’s nothing in Lemmy that makes it better - for the user - than Reddit.

    Should we then abandon Lemmy and go back to Reddit? No, of course not. Reddit, if anything shows us that eventually all authoritarian systems, no matter how benevolent they start, always eventually turn tyrannical, and can do so on a whim, and once they do so, it is impossible to get back to benevolence.

    But I’ve been a redditor for 15 years - I predated subreddits, if you can believe that. And I’m not finding the things I used to go to Reddit for here on Lemmy - information, expert and informed discussion, and niche topics. Maybe that’s an adoption problem that will be solved with scale (and I hope it is), but right now, I feel like my luxury Bently sedan got totaled and I’m driving a 20 year old Honda Civic with manual transmission. By all means I’m grateful for the tent, but I still miss my Bentley

  • Flickertail@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    A year ago, I viewed the Fediverse as an unnecessary, complicated framework created by a handful of well-intentioned individuals as a solution to a problem that wasn’t really there.

    Today, I view it as a necessity.

    This past year has been a hard lesson for me to stop placing trust in massive, centralized web services like Twitter and Reddit and to start federating more of my online activity. There’s going to be growing pains, but Lemmy has been pretty good so far and it’s definitely going to be worth it in the end.

    • godless@latte.isnot.coffee
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      1 year ago

      Yep, same. For that reason I never really managed to get into mastodon, tried it for a bit and found the signup system too convoluted, then dropped it altogether. Though granted, I also never used Twitter, never understood why people liked it (and still don’t), so I tried mastodon out of curiosity, not actually looking for something.

      With Lemmy it’s all different. I feel like I need to leave reddit and find a new community, so there’s an inherent desire to like it, which makes the adaptation way easier.

      • danielton@outpost.zeuslink.net
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        1 year ago

        I am admittedly still active on Twitter, but during the whole Twitter exodus, I decided to give Mastodon a try, and I abandoned it because I just kept running into people complaining about Elon without seeing much else.

        Until I read somewhere during this whole Reddit fiasco that you can follow hashtags in addition to people on Mastodon. Total game changer!

          • danielton@outpost.zeuslink.net
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            1 year ago

            Valid. Spez is a liar who is angry that he got caught multiple times. I didn’t want to see Reddit die like this, but watching the train wreck sure has been interesting.

            • nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev
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              1 year ago

              Spez has been around since basically the beginning of Reddit, so I think if there were to be an ejection of Spez, it would’ve happened years ago.

              Reddit is too big to fail now, regardless of Spez’s actions.

  • TooMuchDog@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    I’m trying to like it, but it’s hard. It doesn’t quite scratch the doom scrolling itch like Reddit did. I’m using Jerboa and it’s missing a lot of features that I relied heavily on with Relay. Ultimately I’m just going to have to adapt though because it looks like Reddit isn’t backing down and I’m not going to use the official app.

    In good news, I always hated my Reddit username so it’s nice to finally get to change it lol.

    • Glide@lemmy.ca
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      Also using Jerboa, also not feeling it. Also, I keeps randomly logging me out, but treating me like I am logged in until I try to do something and then reminding me I have to log in. So I do, except it doesn’t recognize it right away, and oh look it just did now where did that thread even go?

      It’s just messy and uncomfortable right now. Here’s hoping it improves or a better app comes along.

  • Robotnik99@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    I am nicely surprised over all about the number of comments, it look promising.

    As it is, I will make the definitive switch when Rif die. I am not a power user of Reddit or a mod.

    Something I think is very important for a succesfull migration en masse is the presence of porn.

    It’s here (even some niche fetish I enjoy ) and there is already enough content for me not to go back.

    Also the atmosphere is very friendly , I don’t know the friendlyness of Reddit in its early days but I bet it was kind of similar, I love it here.

    Sure some content is missing but it will come.

  • fwgx@f.fwgx.uk
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    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.

    • SuitedUpDev@feddit.nl
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      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).