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.
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.
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
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?
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 :)
How do you know something is developed with Rust?
Don’t worry, the devs will tell you.
Check the GitHub! It’s linked at the bottom of the web page (“Code”)
I’ve also found this to be true with Julia devs
Source: am Julia dev
Weirdly enough the fact that it’s written in rust is why I am using it instead of kbin (PHP)
PHP!? They’re writing the shiny new thing in the joke language from r/ProgrammerHumor?
Exactly right?
To the average Redditor I guess its fine, but to me its unacceptable haha.
Repo link: https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
Welp, I guess I chose right after all.
What makes rust so special?
God damn! Okay now I’m fully behind it
Fast because it’s pointer-based like C/C++, but better because it’s memory safe, which means it won’t crash, leak or mysteriously overwrite it’s own data constantly.
I’d say that it’s fast because it’s compiled to machine code and doesn’t use garbage collection. But I see what you mean with “pointer-based”.
Rust is a very good language but is relatively new on the scene so it has to compete against other languages that fit the same niche(primarily C++) that have been around a lot longer.
Rust has been very popular for hobby projects for a while but it’s still pretty rare to see it for larger projects, and you still almost never see it for enterprise projects. So it’s cool seeing an app that uses it blow up.
It should be noted that while Rust is rarely used, some very big players are pushing it. E.g. last year Microsoft Azure’s CEO tweeted that “it’s time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++ and use Rust for those scenarios where a non-GC language is required”, Windows contains some Rust code now and the Linux kernel also supports Rust in addition to C since December.
As others have said, I need it to not act like a Twitter feed and constantly update, pushing stories down the page as new ones come in even while I’m trying to read the existing ones. I suspect that fixing this will also make returning to the page from a followed link not send me back to the top, because that is really annoying. Navigation is also a bit clunky at the moment, and it’s still hard to switch to a new community without going all the way back to the main page. I feel like the negatives are outweighed by the positives however, and I’m really starting to like this place…
I also wonder/hope if specialized Lemmy apps can paper over friction issues like these. For example i know that RedReader prefers viewing the cache of pages if recent
Edit: and oh lord please fix the cross-instance community links 😭
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.
Its pretty much the same as old reddit, so it is fine. I am sure that there will be addons and stuff to bring back any functionality that is missing.
In terms of the community, it is hard to say - the same subs that I spent so much time and enjoyed so much are either not here or nowhere near as big and developed. I used to spend a lot of time on Formula1, Battlebots, but my account was nearly 12 years old and I had many that I used to visit from time to time for fun. Many of those are just not there in any meaningful way.
It is just going to take time to rebuild, I think.
16 year user of reddit here, just create the communities you miss. With the massive influx of users, they will fill up quickly. It only took 1 day after I created lemmy.world/c/psvr for people to start posting content there. It feels to me like it will only take a few weeks before we can have some semblance of parity to reddit content. And it feels much more like pre-digg migration reddit to me, which is very much a good thing. I think the golden years for lemmy will be coming quite soon.
Not everyone has the time or inclination to moderate those communities they make, though. That’s the only thing that’s preventing me from making a bunch of the old communities I miss. I hope some of the big mods move over here and keep doing it. I miss AITA, some DnD and RPG subs, and some other fun story subs. I also prefer my movie and TV communities split up instead of in one mega community like in !moviesandtv@lemmy.film.
Redditor of 11 years here - i feel you.
For what it’s worth, i’m trying to start one of my favorite reading subs (maliciouscompliance) -
/c/maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/c/maliciouscompliance
!maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world
I’m interested in Battlebots too, so if you start one I’ll definitely join!
It’s always going to start off slow, but it seems like there is a decent amount of momentum and Reddit seemed to do a great job at pushing it.
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.
What exactly is the learning curve? There are posts and comments, votes, and links. The icons seem very clear to me. Even the markdown seems to be identical, so far, except for spoiler text. There is hardly any learning curve for me as a long-time redditor and first-time user of Lemmy.
Working between servers.
Just simple stuff like searching, adding, customizing feeds. Clicking an alert to take me to the content will take me to a server I’m not logged into and I need to go back and find the same post via my own server to comment. Not the end of the world for me but likely a big issue for many potential users if the are use to mainstream social media that ‘just works’.
Thankfully the lemmy developers are aware of those issues and are working on improvements.
Looks like soon, viewing content will always be done through your instance and links won’t take you to other instances. The clunky way to search for communities on other instances if your current instance doesn’t know about them yet will get fixed too.
Multireddit style aggregations of communities are also being worked on
Plus these days there is a massive influx of users, once this stabilizes a bit all major instances will be federated and know about communities on each other, so many problems of discovery will get mitigated.
I think the learning curve comes from the instances. People got used to centralized services so when you say Lemmy they expect one website. Here you got to choose the instance first and then if communities are in a different instance you need to account for that with the @instance…
Personally I am getting it pretty quickly but I can see why its confusing.
I’m a bit confoozled indeed. How can we check which other Lemmy instances are linked to this one?
The biggest for most people seem to be the federated aspect of it… That there’s communities on different servers. So now you need two pieces of information to find the correct community you were talking to a friend about. Other than that… it’s virtually the same as the old reddit from 2010.
I didn’t until I found Beehaw. I’m enjoying it now.
I wish you could block servers personally, though. Like some of the stuff that’s blocked here makes this place a lot better to be around. There’s less hate and reactionary fear mongering. Everything is more chill.
I love it so much that I started contributing to the project on GitHub
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.
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.
the search function is fucked.
At least some things never change.
It feels so freaking empty, maybe it’s my lemmy client but I can’t see any post older than two days
I first checked out Lemmy about 2 years ago and was coming around to take a look every now and then. Compared to what is going on since the past couple of days, there were no posts.
I like it - I just want a few Reddit-ish features:
- Hiding reply chains for scrolling cleanliness in comments of a post
- Hiding posts on the main page should be easy to do (buttons unclear)
- 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.
(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.That is a strange place for that to be, but thank you for the tip.
I tried tapping the top area of a comment. It displays a gray bar as click feedback but doesn’t seem to collapse anything. Am I just being a noob?
Edit: updating fixed it :]
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.
