Technology

It's shaping up to be a very cool platform and I hope with time it gets bigger than Reddit. I find the UX to be a bit clunky and not visually appealing at the moment and also the way communities work are a little confusing. Because of federation, you can have duplicate community groups and that can make content a bit segregated.

It's interesting but I still think the federated universe still has too many quirks to be understandable by most people. To be honest, I haven't bothered documenting myself so I might say stupid things but I can't understand why identity is tied to a server, it seems like a terrible design mistake when it's obviously the first thing i'd want to decentralise. In short, I'm me, it shouldn't matter that I'm on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server. Huge mistake imho.

Then the content obviously needs a lot more contributors but many of the good reddit contributors where also mostly tech illiterate and I'm still worried that the high complexity to enter the fediverse will put off many people and keep it a fun, but somewhat boring, little niche.

It's hardly been 24 hours, but this is the most engaged I've felt in an online space in years. I've gone on a k.bin/Lemmy/Mastodon tear over the past day, exploring instances and looking for the one that I vibe with the most. So far I've been very happy with Beehaw as my home base, and love that I still have access to the communities on the other instances as well. Sure, it takes a slight bit of effort to find communities and make sure that I'm subscribed to them on this account, but I've actually found some satisfaction in the process.

Sure, there's a low volume of content compared to the old place. But if I wanted a constant barrage of content, I could just go back to RSS readers and have my fill. It's the discussion and sense of connection that has made it worth investing my time here.

This is my first post, so hello everyone! I do like a fresh start every now and again but it's a shame it's happened in these circumstances. As for lemmy, I'm enjoying it so far. I'm just learning about how it all hooks together. I really like the decentralised concept. In a way, Reddit doing what it's done may have been the catalyst to give this new framework what it needs to succeed. The UI is similar but feels cleaner than Reddit (which I found extremely sluggish). So far, so good!

so far it's really nice, it's what I liked in reddit and before that forums, without being what reddit became.

the fediverse is hard though, but it kinda makes sense. I'll see if I get more used to it

I like pretty well. I've been on reddit for over a decade now, and the UI on Lemmy is kinda like a combination of the good parts of old and new reddit to me.

People here are nice (maybe that's because my home instance is Beehaw...); and I like the small community.

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.

As sad as I am by how Reddit turned out, this was the kick I needed to start truly indulging in the fediverse! Everybody's been nice so far, and I hope that it continues to be that way

Still very new here and most problem I have in filtering my main page. If you subscribed to a bunch of feeds it gets quickly very confusing to find things. You can choose top day, which is to long, but not e. G. Active / top last 4h ;(

So far pretty good. I like the idea of the fediverse, but I'm not sure if it will catch on.

Also, I hope some of the UI/UX stuff get ironed and are sharpened. I also miss old reddit.

But overall, it works and I am happy.

Still getting the hang of things. There's definitely a learning curve compared to reddit. Been using reddit for 10+ years and there has been a noticeable decline in the last few years. Things are quite fragmented at the moment and unfortunately the majority of my communities are still only active on reddit.

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?

Anything that takes social media out of the power of greedy corporations is an A+ in my book.

So far I have no problems with 99% of what everyone else seems to have. It's not super intuitive to sign up and figure out all the instances/sites, but it wasn't THAT hard and I'm not planning on signing up too often. Finding new subreddits (for lack of the terminology knowledge) really needs to be improved - it took me well over a day to figure it out (but admittedly I was only using jerboa).

The only things that bug me are some missing quality of life features my 3P Reddit app had, like automatically making as read when scrolling past and being able to quickly hide/dismiss seen content. I'm not used to seeing the same articles over and over. Also, and it's pretty dumb, but being able to double tap for up vote and triple tap for down vote. Don't need it, just drive myself crazy since it's so ingrained.

The only other "complaint" I have is simply the amount of content. I was subscribed to quite a few niche subreddits that fit my interests/humor well, and those obviously haven't migrated over. The YEARS of help in computer subreddits or whatever isn't here. There's no crazy specific subreddit to discover with tons of content.

With all of that being said, I currently have zero plans or desire to go back to Reddit, and it really hasn't been all that hard so far. I swapped out my homescreen shortcut on my phone and I've been enjoying my time so far. I'm desperately hoping that this doesn't die out in a couple days/weeks/months because it's good to have competition, Reddit is effectively dead to what I need it to be, and I have zero desire to give Reddit any money after their views on us came out (to name a few reasons of many).

I also hope the toxicity stays away, but I'm not that naive. And I'm REALLY hoping that people with more time than I have bring over their comments/posts so I can search for them here. Reddit was one of the last places I knew that wasn't stuffed full of ads and bot-generated, search-optimized posts that made little sense and didn't help at all.

I'd like to see more color settings. The default colors do not have enough contrast and are hard to read in some cases like the blue on gray.

I like it so far. However, I do have some questions.

1. How do we handle "dupe" communities?
2. What's the best way to find new communities?
3. How are cross-posts handled across servers?

I personally think that this framework is better than what reddit currently has.

For example, a single instance dedicated to programming with its own various communities within it is a lot easier to manage and moderate than having all those communities (aka, subreddits) on the main reddit page itself. The fact that all these individual instances can interact with other instances (or not, if desired) makes this more robust. The fear a lot of people have right now with reddit is that the reddit staff will just kick out all the mods of the popular subreddits, instill mods that will obey them, and essentially perform a corporate overtake of all those individual communities. That doesn't seem like it would be a problem with lemmy.

I am excited to see how this all plays out long term.

I'm also testing out jerboa atm. And it's a bit rough around the edges, but gets the job done well enough. Still haven't explored too much of the Lemmyverse, but looking forward to digging in a bit deeper.

I love it so much that I started contributing to the project on GitHub

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.

I still don't quite understand how it works, instances and all that.. but I'll figure it out, and I'm here for the cause.

I think its a little rough around the edges, but thats to be expected given that its less than a year old. The big hit for me is the mobile app which just isn’t that good. This will come with time. I’d rather have an half-baked implementation thats showing promise over what Reddit is doing. I like decentralized social media because you can pick and choose what communities you interact with. If lemmy.world decides to go full enshitification (although I can’t figure out how they would monetize), you can just pack up and going to another community.

This honestly reminds me of when I was growing up in the early 00s, I was part of several different community forums that I loved dearly. There were other groups I looked into, but some were just toxic and unappealing, so I left after a while. I feel like Lemmy gives us the same freedom. I really hope to meet some awesome people here. Right now it’s just big enough to still allow meaningful dialogue and create cool relations. I felt like Reddit was too big for its own good even with niche subreddits; it didn’t feel like posting was worth it as it would get buried or just get a low effort response.

What I'm really impressed by is being able to follow Lemmy communities from within Mastodon... e.g. by searching @[email protected] I can see threads and posts without leaving my Mastodon app of choice (Tusky). It's amazing how it just works.

I quite like it so far, though the users of the communities I've been moderating are not necessarily the most tech savvy and may not find their way here. So ultimately I feel like throwing 1.5M people to the wolves (though some other mods might stick around, who knows).

On the other hand, I might also have outgrown some of my communities, and just stuck around due to the familiarity. Joined reddit in my mid 20s, now I'm pushing 40.

The main thing I miss is being able to have things disappear from my front page after I press like or dislike on them.

Lemmy UI is very easy to use, and fast too. Also, I like the concept of federation (though I have no plan in hosting one) and the fact that the community has been very welcoming so far also help with me being able to enjoy browsing Lemmy.

Of course, there's the obvious problem of lack of content but if the subreddits that I usually lurked on have fully switched to Lemmy then I would have 0 issues with fully switching to Lemmy regardless of the lack of content.

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.

I'm loving it. It's like the good old days of smaller forums, except they all link together to become a reddit-like conglomerate, best of both worlds.

I do miss having a high-quality iOS app most, but mlem is certainly off to a good start.

i like the community but

1. this app needs a better ui...i know that comes secondary but it just seems to vague. whats with the weirdly small coloured thread indicators?
2. theres gotta be a better explanation of federation out there. there's gotta be. i didn't understand it for days because i couldnt find any decent sources on lemmy

UX wise its okay, content wise, we are getting there. I am also happy its written in Rust, I am keen to contribute to the project in the future.

I'm still confused by the instance decentralized structure. And my feed seems chaotic. But so far I'm liking it !

The platform is fine and being able to subscribe across Lemmy instances is nice (i.e. I'm not even on Beehaw but here I am anyway) - it just needs more users and content.

The main issue is going to be getting that critical mass of users, especially on a platform that isn't quite as straightforward as a centralized one. Trying to explain how Lemmy works to my wife just left her confused and wondering what the point was. Getting people like her to make the jump to a federated platform is going to take time, effort, and - most importantly - content.