Redditors, how do you like Lemmy?

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.

I am enjoying actual discussions and not just hot takes or rants. I don't care if the platform is "perfect". It's good enough for me. The admins aren't some corporation just looking for pavlovian click labor ('likes' and upvotes) to power their algorithm run ad fest.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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 :)

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?

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.

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. For example, 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 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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

I hate when threads and comments automatically update, scrolling content down my browser.

I hate that when I hit back on my web browser, it doesn't bring me back to where I was previously on the page. I have to scroll down all over again.

Lack of content or small communities don't bother me. It just means more people need to contribute, myself included.

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 feels so freaking empty, maybe it's my lemmy client but I can't see any post older than two days

Ok so far. Only complaint is posts moving when new posts get added while I'm in the middle of scrolling. It's a little clunky.

It's very interesting and I remember wishing for a long time that "two-server" protocols like email would come back into vogue. I already switched from Twitter to Mastodon last fall and don't regret that in the slightest. The community here seems nice so far, and the UI is simple and clean.

I've encountered some glitches like the live-update feature seemingly changing what post I'm viewing and mixing comments from the two posts. The instance I picked has had some performance issues and has gone down a couple times, but I'm chalking that up to a mass influx of users and activity (of which I'm very much a part).

I could use a browser extension that just adds an "open this post/community/user in my home instance" button when I'm browsing another instance so I can interact. Also some ability to put a link to e.g. a community in your post text that automatically sends you to that community via the instance you are viewing the post in.

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

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

He was the best frontman motörhead ever had

I’m loving it.

I was wondering about situations where there are multiple communities about the topic on multiple instances… is it possible to subscribe to all of them easily or maybe have a way that the communities can “share” posts? Like sister communities or something?

Example, I post to dogsinbikinis@whatever.com, users of dogsinbikinis@whateverelse.com would automatically be able to see and comment on it.

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.

I like the concept, and overall experience. On a more technical side getting my own private lemmy instance up and running (I wanted to retain full control of my account) was not easy due to somewhat lacking documentation on the process. Had to dig through posts from other people having similar issues, and do a bit of troubleshooting to fill in the gaps.

Now that I have it working will see if I can find the time to do a writeup on the process if others are looking to do the same.

In general, it works pretty nice, but there are some limitations.

The biggest one for me is discoverability. The federation means that there is more fragmentation and it's harder to find the right community for something.

For example, there are country/city communities for my country/city on multiple instances. And since it's hard to find the "correct" one, it fragments out much harder than Reddit did. Combine that with generally lower attendance numbers and you get really tiny communities.

This is not aided by Jerboa, which doesn't open internal links internally. So if someone posts a link to a community and I press it, it instead tries to open it with my email app.

I’m happy to be a part of growing this community. I like that no one is trying to make money from my engagement.

The apps need some work, but overall it's "okay." The rest of my gripes lie entirely around the lack of content, which can't be helped

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.

It'll take a miracle for Lemmy to get anywhere near Reddit's active user count. Convincing users to migrate to a new platform is one thing, but getting them used to the concept of federation is the tricky part. I remember when I first signed up for Matrix, and being confused when picking the domain, authentication rules, etc. for the first time.

It's cool, but the community needs to grow.

I feel like it's more of a community than Reddit. There is more collective spirit here right now.
I'm concerned about the tankie baggage.

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

Used Reddit for 13 years, tried out Kbin and Lemmy yesterday and settled on Lemmy.

Long story short, I’m going back to Reddit.

• There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto. This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting. Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.

I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.

Deciphering the distributed nature of it took me, a relatively tech-friendly person, almost the entire day and several ‘What the fuck?’ posts. I now understand it more. There are some very low-level guides that have been haphazardly put together, but there absolutely needs to be a MUCH smoother guide/explanation to this whole thing. That learning process will turn people away for sure.

• BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security. If this is going to become a mainstream thing, as it reaches and before it gets to that critical mass of users, there’s going to be SO. MANY. SECURITY ISSUES. There’s no 2fa at all, hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant, and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is. In the ‘Fediverse’ your server instance might be hosted in a US or EU data center with proper digital and physical security, or it could be Joe Blows basement in Iowa running off a NAS. The easy-to-see future here is that Lemmy will fail to attract a critical mass of people because they’ll initially arrive, after a few months their instances will just cease to exist/get shut down/the hosts will decide its no longer a fun hobby to do.

With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them. Beyond that, if there IS a breach, they have the ability to recognize it, understand the legalities and requirements of reporting it, and can be held accountable by regulatory bodies. Joe doesn’t have the resources to really maintain and keep a server running, nor the knowledge of his responsibilities for keeping the data safe digitally or physically.

On top of that, if Joe’s basement loses power/gets hacked/Joe decides he’s moving to San Fransisco and can’t bring his NAS with him and the server goes down, and that’s where my instance is hosted well there goes my entire account/comments/data.

• Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.

• There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me, and I’ve gotten used to having a single place to get it from that floods me with thousands of different articles/memes/posts/etc every minute. Until the user base arrives in one single place and starts generating content, there’s no reason for most people like me to be there as by far the larger number of users never create anything at all and only exist to consume the content generated.

I'm really liking it! Federation is cool and everyone is so chilled. Not missing the cesspool of Reddit infighting

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.

Good enough, lots of things to improve but it's usable, I can see communities migrating from reddit.

I'm using Jerboa right now, i didn't like the web version, too much wasted space.

I appreciate the clean interface and the relatively chill vibe. Regardless of what happens with reddit I think I'll be hanging out and enjoying the communities.

My only issue so far is that it can be difficult to find a particular post if you don't remember which community and instance it was on, afaik there's no search across all posts in all instantiations.

Tbh I have no idea what’s going on.

it needs time and more users, but I think it's alright so far.

I had looked into a couple other decentralized or federated services in the past and they seemed like kind of a pain or they were poorly explained. until now, all of it also seemed too obscure to have any kind of notable traffic. if this isn't temporary and the reddit api controversy actually did something meaningful, then I look forward to seeing how the federated service ecosystem grows and changes.

reddit's dethroning was a long time coming in my eyes. it's just not going to be as smooth as the digg -> reddit pipeline years ago.

I think there may be room for another couple million users spread across a ton of communities. wishful thinking, but maybe that would keeps thing toned down with the bots and other shady shit.

lots of polish and QoL needed both on the main site(s) and the mobile offerings out so far. all in all, pretty good start.

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

Feels a bit broken tbh. I'm currently on dbzer0 instance and I couldn't post in the community I created. Wonder what's happeneing. Did I get shadowbanned?

I'm still really struggling with how much screen real estate it wastes. Honestly that's a hard thing for me to get past.

I'm getting used to the slight UI differences but it has a similar vibe. The biggest difference to me is the server/global federated dynamic. I like that it's owned by individuals running communities rather than a megacorp mining data and engagement for profit. I'm also on mastodon, but I never used twitter so I feel like there's fewer expectations to unlearn.

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. 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.

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

I know it's in its infancy but the great thing about Reddit was I could search any niche topic and guarantee there was a subreddit setup for it.

Obviously this is solved by more and more people using Lemmy but I personally can't see Lemmy appealing to the the masses. Depending how active the communities become I can see me using Lemmy going forward but I don't think it will be the "One site for everything" that Reddit has become but rather 1 of many sites I check going forward instead

I love it. I love how I don't usually have to deal with "right-wing" extremists. They're usually contained to lemmy.grab, but I suppose one or two might break containment every now and then.

Still, a hell of lot better then seeing their bullshit as the first comment on a new post. :|

After a few days messing around with it and trying to get it to work in the ways that I want it to, I'm starting to think it feels like an upgrade. There are some serious barriers to entry that make it tough if you don't know what you're doing, but with Lemmy, my online experience is almost exactly the same as before, just without having a dedicated make-things-worse guy stinking the place up.

Im liking Lemmy so far. It’s an adjustment and clearly the software is in its infancy, but it does not suck once one adjusts.

I actually like it a lot. I think I can stick with it. I hope that this is the moment when the fediverse and the decentralized social networks will have the chance to become mainstream.

First time using the fediverse and I don’t think it was hard at all.

I was using Boost for Reddit but with it's eminent death I came to Jeroba for Lemmy. Pretty close to my boost experience! very easy to adapt and made the whole "servers" thing that I didn't really like a lot easier. Now I'm following a lot of comunities in different servers and can see them all. Perfection

Testing a lemmy instance to see how it might work for the r/blind community. There will be a bunch of accessibility issues fixed in the next release it looks like, so it's a bit early to judge. Also, it's pulled me, personally, into the world of being a sysadmin for other people. Now I get to figure out why email doesn't work and why when you search for a community you need to press search nine times before anything shows and all kinds of other niggles like that before I feel ready to open an instance to the general masses.

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.

Lemmy has bugs and lacks features. Assuming those get ironed out and I expect they will in time, I'll like it a lot better than Reddit. Actually even with its shortcomings I like it better. The issues facing Reddit are of a different nature and for sure those will never get worked out, only worsen.

Otherwise the content on Lemmy is adequate for me. What's interesting is I actually get more rounded information here. Reddit is so big that I can only subscribe to a limited number of subs before I get overloaded. Here I'm subscribed to a healthy set of communities so I see posts on a wider array of topics.

I think people are a bit intimidated by the Fediverse at first. Once you have a basic understanding of what's going on, it becomes pretty transparent. It's just the added step of finding a good instance to log into. Once you've overcome that, it's all downwind sailing.

I'm leaving behind reddit after 10 years of on and off use, in the last 5 years almost constant use. I'm happy because I feel rhus platform seems really great , I really like the layout and stye of it all. I hope to understand it better going forward

The community, particularly Beehaw, is fantastic! I love it.

Lemmy itself needs a lot of work. It's incredibly far behind, but my expectations are staying measured and I'm excited to see how it develops. Right now it's not a case of me enjoying the platform itself, but more so 'putting up' with the limitations of the platform to access the nice community.

Jerboa is the mobile client I'm using currently, and it's off to a good start but needs a lot of fixes to be fully usable. Such as sorting comments and searching. The ability to easily click a button to jump to the next comment thread is my most missed feature as well from clients such as Boost for Reddit.

Additionally, I still have issues signing into the mobile website. I can sign in through Jerboa or the Beehaw website on desktop, but not on mobile (or at least not always). So I'm often navigating content on the mobile website, then using Jerboa to comment on it. Most won't deal with these issues, but I'm still holding out to see what comes from it all.

A couple of last side notes, it's really annoying to need to click on the title, and not being able to click on the text of a post to navigate (mobile site) - and visually it needs some improvements to draw more people in. That last part seems minor, and for a large part of the existing community, myself included, it truly is minor - but for widespread adoption it needs a big revamp.

Day or two of work, looks like home.

To be completely honest I don't like it. It could be the app I'm using (Jerboa) but it's just missing so many features. For example, comments are shown in seemingly random order with no way to sort

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.

I am a bit thrown by the threading. It isn't easy to read or follow who is responding to what, at least for me.

My guess is that redditers will want lemmy to be just like....reddit, but without the public-corp nonsense and with UI that is at minimum on-par with 3rd party apps people gravitate toward on reddit.

I'm totally new to this so I'm also figuring out my way around. The federated organization is confusing for sure, but not so much that people can't get it.

Some work could be done from a user focus... Simplify(including caring for duplicated hosts and communities), educate on lemmy's benefits, make searching for new communities seamless and less of a quest.

I actually just joined today and this is my second ever comment. It wasn't too hard to get setup, given I hadn't been on any fediverse until now. I have to say I like how well the instances link together too, at least from what I have seen so far.

I am using Jerboa at the moment and while it is kind of basic it seems faster compared to Reddit Sync or the official reddit app. This is a very good sign as I have had issues with both offical reddit and sync in the past including a fair amount of crashes. I might have to look for a desktop app soon and at some other fediverse types (don't know the terminology), I know there is one for videos for instance.

I am kind of interested to see an instance like this. I am a member of r/Autism_Pride and some similar subreddits so this seems like somewhere I could spend some time.

p.s. Is there any drug or harm reduction communities I should now about? How about fountain pens or baking bread? Random I know but thought it was worth an ask.

The UI is certainly attractive on Jerboa, and I imagine will improve with time. I'm using mainly on an android phone. I second another comment on enjoying the "real conversations" bit, as this feels much more human, and not a platform abused by bots, marketing, and astroturfing (and also greedy, grifting CEOs). I do have an issue with Jerboa not maintaining my sign in status every time, and the feed not loading every time I open the app, but it's small potatoes. I'm looking forward to the evolution of Lemmy!

I'm easing into it. With more usage, more content, more users, and more updates, it'll be like I never knew Reddit. Growing pains, whatever you want to call it, just makes me happy to be part of a new adventure for sharing and consuming content.

I'm no UX/UI expert, but I hope Lemmy makes it easier to filter content on the main page, collapse comments, and find specific subcommunities and users.

The tankie fucks suck, for sure.

Currently using Jerboa. Unsure if I like it, because currently there's no inline video player and no creepypasta communities to sub to.

I'm still trying to get my head above water, but I've learned enough to start being able to browse and post. I still haven't found the instance I want to use as a home instance, and don't know how to browse instances other than the one i'm on. But these things come in time, and im willing to learn.

Any decent (or established I guess ) iOS mobile clients? I’m messing with mlem but it seems pretty basic and is still using TestFlight. It’s usable but a more full featured client might be nice

So far, I've been a Reddit user for like two to three years now, and a Lemmy user for like 3 days. It's definitely a transition, but so far, it seems to have potential. This instance's mod team is doing a good job, and the content is pretty good so far. I just need to let go of older social media habits, I guess lol.

Having to make a new account because I wanted to see NSFW on another instance was kind of a mood killer. Not sure how that could be done better but I really don't want to be making other accounts.

I like it so far, but my reddit was very well curated, it can't live up to that yet. Lemmy can be a bit confusing at times and the 'all' option seems to be either not moving at all or at a million miles an hour. It will take me a while to get a nice feed, I think.

I wish there was a way to collapse branches of nested comments.

I like the idea of it, but it's janky as hell. For example, when I tried to post a comment here using the mobile page without choosing a language, the UI just sat there spinning forever without telling me what I did wrong. It wasn't until I tried using Jerboa that I got a message saying what I did wrong. It also appears I need to manually set the language in each post!

It took me a few days to adjust, but now I'm feeling pretty comfortable. I'm excited for what's to come as the communities grow.

I only prefer Beehaw. I look into the popular lemmy.ml but the categories were all over the place.

It's okay so far. I'm still getting used to the UI.

I signed up for Mastodon awhile back but never really got into it since I don't really do Twitter much either. I have been reading about lemmy but didn't sign up until today.

It was a little confusing trying to sign up, the first instance I tried to sign up with had a waiting period for account approvals but I finally found one I could sign up with instantly and then I started poking around. I think I am getting the hang of it!

I have also downloaded Mlem to test on my iphone. It's easy and simple to use, not a lot of features yet but it seems promising.

So far outside of a bit of focus time to figure out how to actually get signed up and find communities to subscribe to I'm cautiously optimistic. This seems more like how the older days of the internet were, before the enshittification of social media. Let's see if this trend continues!

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 love the concept of decentralization. Feels more like the internet of old.

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 hope in the near future some of the nuances will be more clearly explained to new users such as how to search for external communities.

I wish the UI was more dense like old.reddit.

these are minor complaints though and I know the contributors weren't building lemmy in anticipation of the API exodus.

I'm very impressed. It just needs more 3rd party apps!

I’m the admin of krabb.org, honestly I’m loving it. There is a learning curve, particularly for non-technical folks, but that will get easier as time goes on.

As an admin, it is far easier to “jump start” an empty Lemmy instance with content from other instances than it is to do with Mastodon and Pixelfed.

Where we need to improve is the mobile apps, documentation and providing ways to make it easier for small instances to get new users. These are all very much in the spotlight and improving every day (especially the apps), so I’m confident we can get there

Tldr: it good, do like

Biggest issue right now is the inability to hide posts you’ve already read. Will this eventually be addressed?

The fediverse? Meh. Beehaw? Loving it

I like that it's more similar to old.reddit.com. Already use mastodon, so federation is not a new concept for me (I'm sure a lot of people are still getting their heads around that).

The community is much smaller, but that's to be expected (and maybe a good thing). I miss the feeling of find super-niche hobby subreddits. But I guess those will come to Lemmy if/when the userbase grows.

PS: also, had no idea what sizz was. Looks cool. Is there a new home for it here?

My overall journey was the GameFAQS message boards -> Digg -> Reddit (via RIF) -> Lemmy

Lemmy has filled my content aggregation desires while boycotting Reddit. Overall, I could see being here to stay

I'm still having minor issues, but they aren't deal breakers. Like, I've had issues with my up votes not saving (press it, turns blue, wait a second, then it changes back), so I need to press it multiple times before it saves. On the whole, these errors will be resolved with time, so it doesn't bother me much

Main issue I'm trying to figure out now is: how to use federated users for other Lemmy instances. If I'm using the website for beehaw, then go to another instance, it appears I need to sign in, but I can't see how to use my beehaw account. I started using Jerboa and it seems to handle it, but the comments I'm making don't show up (when I checked in a browser), so it might be in the UI only, or I'm missing something

I think it's nice so far, though I haven't used it much. There are some communities on Reddit that I miss on Beehaw. I also check Raddle (not fediverse) for trans memes since r/traa users have moved there. ~Cherri

I like it, but to me, it just needs more people, more communities, more life! Hopefully people keep migrating from Reddit to Lemmy.

How beautiful would it be, to have an open source federated system be one of the leading internet communities.

The UI's a little janky, search doesn't always produce clickable links (mostly federated subs).

Finding subs relies on lemmyverse, when it should be integrated into the sites.

Similar subs should federate together, not be siloed. More USENET, less phpbb.

Kbin has a strange division of threads and "magazines", which means clicking thru multiple places to read anything, Lemmy & Beehaw seem simpler.

So far, I'm loving it. I'm using Jerboa (android client for Lemmy), which is working nicely.

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.

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.

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.

not enough videos, too slow and jerboa is not top notch .

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

I was one of the original refugees from digg.com. This feels like R*ddit of old - simple layout, techie userbase, friendly community. Feels like home.

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.

Its great. It has minimalistic ui which is verry readable and its easy to find different options and buttons. I like it much better than reddit.

The relative difficulty to sign up will be a deterrent to most people. Every other social network has you up in seconds. This needs to be streamlined.

I'm missing some o the features, hoping they will come in time.

i like it and can totally abandon reddit for it assuming people continue to show up and like all my tiny little niche communities pop up. I do feel like it's a bit confusing at first as far as finding communities and connecting to them all so some work there would probably go a long way.

basically when there is a community for stock tank pools specifically and has 2,000 subscribers we're in the money lol

In spite of the technical issues and mild learning curve, I am really enjoying Lemmy more and more as I continue using it.

Not a fan of the UI, but I love the community here! It's the best parts of Reddit combined with the best parts of Fedi.

What perhaps will be the final nail in the coffin for Reddit is working here perfectly! Mobile apps! Jerboa is perhaps lacking some features, but works like a charm.

I like it so far. It has some familiar features, but there are some learning curves to it.

First post! I really like it, but the glitches and app issues due to the influx of traffic has made it a bit difficult to really experience and to consider as my new reddit. This is not an attack on Lemmy, but frustration with the current predicament. I'm excited to see what Lemmy can become.

The most difficult part so far has been finding communities and joining them.

1. It's difficult to search for communities that aren't on your home instance.
2. If you go to a big instance and search for communities there, you can't directly join them, but have to go back to your home instance and paste something into a specific field, then click "next" since the community is never the first result, then click on the community to load it up in your home instance and THEN join it.
3. Communities are fractured across instances - I found at least five different serves with a "cat" / "cats" communities, and there's no way to aggregate these, and it's difficult to search out the rest of the cat content without just going to the other instance servers one-by-one and doing it manually

I'm liking it. Seems chill. Some growing pains and there's not quite as much here as I was following on the other site, but, maybe that's a good thing and humans aren't actually meant to have a constant information firehose?

I'm liking it so far, the communities I've federated with are mostly chill and quite a bit of fun. That being said, there's dark parts of the fediverse too. I plan on keeping my instance around for a while, but so far it's just me and a friend or two, but maybe that's a good thing?

It's horrible and I will not be sticking around

As with other things in the fediverse, discoverability is pretty ass. It's a bit easier on Lemmy to find something you're looking for than it is, say, to find interesting people to follow on mastodon, but it's still not great. And often, you'll find multiple communities on the same topic and you have to try to figure out which one looks like it will be better down the road (communities are still pretty dead and empty, so you can't tell now which might be better). In addition to that, the interfaces for interacting with Lemmy are pretty rough at the moment, though that's not surprising.

So do I like it? Enh… I'd say it's a 4/10 right now with promise of getting better. Will it? Who knows?

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.

Uncomfortable. There are two or three users in the instances, and all are silent. "Federalization" is dumb, for the chuckleheads of decentralization. The app and website are crude. Settings are not saved, blocked content hangs in the feed.

I’m still getting things setup but really enjoy it so far! Excited to see so many folks joining the fediverse and putting ActivityPub to work!!!

Honestly it hurts my eyes. I hope someone comes up with a few more themes or CSS-appliable styles for it.

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.

I like it. It's not perfect though. The community signup thing is confusing and stressful because you dont and cant know the core values of the owner of the instance you sign up for. So you could get comfortable in a community and then find that the community is not a good fit and have to abandon it. For some people, who have a ton of alts on reddit, that might not be an issue but I find it stressful when I was trying to sign up for lemmy.ml and then find out their stance on a few political issues that drastically clash with mine.

I also dont like how the moderation passes community to community. I kind of like the idea of a black list but when you have communities with vastly different views resulting in people getting banned from one community for things that wouldnt get them banned from other communities you have a recipe for disaster. Right now, even with increased usage, the amount of moderation required should be low but if/when this blows up there is no way you will be able to sort/sift through the shared moderation logs for every community just to make sure people are not being unfairly banned from your community. That would be like a small sub on reddit banning people from r/pics because they didnt agree with the poster's politics.

I just dont like that. It's far from perfect and I dont have any solutions and it's also possible I completely misunderstand the issues involved... But from what I read... I just dont like that.

Functionality, everything works and I like how it looks. It has a mobile app that works. There is a lot of new content. It seems like it has a shot at being a replacement for reddit.

Reference: https://lemmy.ca/post/591991 https://lemmy.ml/post/1167199 https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/5781

I have been trying to learn the way to do things, as well as getting around the problems.

My first view into the federated world was Mastodon, but I didn't use it much. Recently, I tried looking at lemmy/kbin content in Mastodon, but I find the way it presents it just seemed wrong and unwieldy. (maybe I am just doing it wrong)

I signed up a few days ago to kbin.social, but have been finding that it is just 'broken' with the content from other servers (like beehaw) being out of date - the cloudflare protection due to the growth seemingly to blame. I have now signed up to an area-focused server and have had problems with even finding this community. But now I have come back to it, it seems to be decently up to date and it may be to the small number of users on this server - so I am the first one to subscribe or even search for this.

I find myself finding content on one server but then wanting to interact with it, and there doesn't seem to be a "Take me to this post/comment on my server" button. So to make this post I searched again for the community then had to find this post on there.

Aside from the problems, I miss lists. In reddit I have lists of subreddits. So many subreddits I read I would not subscribe to, but instead add them to a list and so get posts with a certain theme based on what list I was looking at.

Little rough around the edges but I can definitely see its potential 👍🏼

Feels like home, it's been easy to use, albeit with some hiccups in terms of searching and subscribing to communities on different servers.

Add some more of the browsing features RES has, and I'm good to go.

It desperately needs a compact, efficient UI similar to old.reddit's design philosophy. Otherwise its not bad. The auto-refreshing front page is very frustrating to use. I want to click on an article, and between when I move the cursor and click, new articles have refreshed and the link I clicked was the wrong one

I'm curious how well niche communities will work. It seems too niche here, like it's hard to find, hard to grow.

Like I do alternative keyboard layouts. If someone on Reddit wants to find it, it's rather easy and everyone in that community is there (there are dozens of us, dozens!). But on lemmy I think those dozens will be spread out more.