How has ur lemmy experience been so far?

bruhSoulz@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 38 points –

Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to become a member of the community, theres a reasonable amount of subs (or whatever the other word for em is) that fit my interests, enough linux content and shitposting for my liking, and the overall random posts made by people equally fed up with Leddit. (also i admit i used reddit a little cus there was this post on the fedora sub showing how to fix a sound issue i been having after a recent update)

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While not every community is on Lemmy yet that I visit on Reddit, by people migrating from Reddit to here, hopefully that issue will be solved soon. The community here seems way more welcoming than the Reddit community is too

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Much nicer than StackExchange too:

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dude helll yes i also just remembered theres that stupid barried of entry on many subs which ask u to meet really weird requirements to participate.. the other day i prompted gpt to say smt funny and wholesome (it was praise towards the aur(arch user repository)) and tried to post it on some linux/arch sub but the first 3 that came to mind wouldnt allow it, one didnt accept memes, the other had a bot which took it down automatically and the third asked me to comment and participate in the sub before posting.. like come on man.

The barrier for entry for some subreddits is too high but to be fair, ChatGPT "funny responses" are low-quality content and should be removed.

I love it so far,only needs more people

This. We have to spread the word mouth to mouth. There are a lot of people who are sick of reddit and willing to tolerate the growing pains + bugs of Lemmy.

great, i've really liked lemmy so far. its really the first alt big tech platform like this that i've gotten into, was never big on mastodon or any of the others out there.

lemmy is honestly a breath of fresh air. really great platform so far, i think it has very strong potential.

i still use reddit for some things, but overall i'm starting to use lemmy a lot more. great work from the devs, can't wait to see the future!

It really feels like how Reddit started, before all the rage-bait and eye-catching bullshit. I miss the floofs, the memes, the fun reasons I joined. Now 90% is politics that keep popping up even though I don't subscribe to any political subs and keep blocking

Seriously, I'm not from the USA and I'm not supposed to know the names of American senators, MP's, governors or lawyers, or of who shot who, or who had a panic attack in an airplane, or why people are shouting at each others at a mcdonalds drive-in. Does any american ex-redditor know the name of a single european politician besides Merkel?

The news cycle proposed by reddit is filled with american politics ad nauseam and by ragebait. The european subs of reddit are filled with russian shills. When you add up all of this there is no point into opening reddit for the news.

Lol way to put it in perspective, I know maybe 2 politicians in all of Europe. Idk when, Reddit used to be global but it's gotten incredibly America-focused, and maybe that's just with the size but holy crap is it annoying now - and I'm American. I get bombarded with politics daily, can't I just have a place that's just memes?

I am so happy this exists. I wish it continued growth and success. It feels like the good old early internet and that’s a very good thing.

Quite enjoyable and, since seeing the sub.rehab site someone else posted, even better. I've found quite a few subs that have made their way over to Lemmy.

My only gripe is that quite a few have made their way to lemmy.world, and it's buckling under pressure. I can't sign up on that instance, nor can I remotely sub to communities from my own instance. Once that's resolved, I think I'll definitely be happy to call Lemmy my new home.

Can't go back anyway - deleted my Reddit account.

Yes, sub.rehab really helped. And the lemmy link extension for chrome.

Pretty great tbh. The tricky thing with being an early adopter is you kind of have to be the change you want to see, but I'm old enough to feel no shame about just barging into places and starting new threads as needed.

So far started two accounts on two different instances (I like to keep different subjects somewhat separate) and had really cool interactions on both.

Obviously there are a few UX issues, trying to sub to remote communities is kind of a nightmare, but hopefully I've subbed to enough that other people on my instance will find it a bit easier to find them through search.

At least on my instance everything is running fast, snappy. I like the clean interface. Haven't encountered any major bugs yet.

The only downside for me so far is that there is not a lot to see yet. The only active posts and communities are about lemmy itself. Which is understandable of course but I can't wait to actually get to the phase where I actually get to experience real content lmao

I appreciate the fact there is no infinite scroll on the front page.

One of many examples of how profit-driven platforms care about engagement quantity over product quality. A lack of stopping points feeds FOMO and keeps people trapped longer, but I doubt many people actively enjoy it.

I disable it on any platform that lets me - besides, pagination can be cached to return to later. Doomscrolling can be binged but not suspended.

Exactly so. I'm about a third way through Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. It had a section on infinite scrolling which made me realize it didn't have it. The book talks a lot about social media's grip on us.

Sounds like an interesting read; thanks for putting it on my radar.

Great point, lack of infinite scroll is one of the key reasons I always kept going back to old.reddit.com (other than the speed, of course)

I have infinite scroll on Old Reddit with RES. What makes not having infinite scroll such a great thing for you?

For me personally, the quality of content drops off very quickly after page 1 (for example on my personal home feed), but with infinite scroll, I found myself very often just wading through the low quality stuff on autopilot without even realizing what I was doing. It's just a problem that I don't even have to think about when I don't have infinite scroll.

My only confusion or concern so far is duplicate communities amongst diff servers.

Very buggy, but overall a lot more user-friendly than I expected. The fediverse was a bit difficult to grasp as a concept (especially since all the explanations love to say that it's like email, which it's not, and then refuse to clarify further), but I think I got it now. Overall I can see myself moving entirely to lemmy.

I like it ~ I joined mastodon but I think it was way too slow to load images - probably joined some dodgy overloaded server (though I like the Reddit format and community better rather than Twitter)

It's giving me Reddit 15 years ago vibes - smaller tech-savvy and agile community - my Reddit use was on and off through the years; but I like the idea that each community in the Extended Lemmiverse can all have their own vibes and cultures and implementations of the platform and we can all chat and follow topics together 🕊️

I've only been here a short while; but maybe one thing I'd love is not to see reposts in the /all section ; I know the communities are small and growing and can cross post for more stuff , but I'm sure there could be a way for the system to know that the title and url are the same - so only show one , or auto-merge the comments and prioritise posting your comment to your local community instance's post Edit - I might try install an instance on my website and try to make a merge function ~

yea i think one huge advantage is that theres no specific tos for lemmy as a whole and each instance can just do whatever they want which helps loads when it comes to censorship and moderation, and theres no 1 entity that can just skeet yo off the entire platform if u break some rule (great example is how reddit seems to be silencing ppl promoting lemmy and discussions ab it)

Regarding your last paragraph, I agree. I'm subscribed to gaming in lemmy.ml and beehaw so see the same content twice regularly. Duplicate communities raise other concerns for me though:

Which one is the defacto community to join? Using the Gaming community as an example, maybe one leans more to images and the other has more meaty discussion threads just by way of who has joined those communities - nothing to do with the rules. But if you subscribe to both, the majority of the content may be duplicate posts instead? It's not clear from the community title alone.

Is the potential squandered as communities are potentially splintered? Maybe people just stick to one community without joining the other. It'll take time for a certain community to establish itself as the main community with the highest quality posts, but due to the volume of users on the main instances maybe there won't be a main community? Or maybe people won't even be aware of multiple communities for the same topic as the names are different, e.g. football Vs soccer.

All this fragmentation will reduce the adoption for sure. No one wants to write to a sub filled with 5 people while another is filled with 5k people. We should adopt one new fresh instance and make it our main, and point people coming from reddit to this new instance.

That would defeat the point of decentralization. Nothing is stopping you from going to lemmyverse.net searching for a community you want, and only subscribing to the biggest. In time the choice will be more obvious.

People and posts here are better. Tech experience is worse. The web interface is worse (too much broken JS and websocket crap), I can't login from a mobile browser, the federation scheme is confusing, the Android app story is not there yet, Jerboa doesn't support older phones that still work perfectly well with RedReader, yada yada. I have somewhat more retro tastes than probably most of the younguns here, so my thoughts are heading towards writing my own desktop front end. But I don't feel like I want to attempt mobile development.

Hey I'm new here bc fuck spez. There's definitely potential here. Would like it to be easier to find communities (sublemmies?) And the app needs work but I'm ready to go all in. Did I mention fuck spez yet

This feels a lot like Reddit did 15 years ago, when they first introduced subreddits-- like I'm seeing something brand new for the first time, but it's somehow comfortable and innocent.

I'm excited for the possibilities, but daunted by the realities.

It's going to be tough to get enough foot traffic to start populating smaller subs. It seems like the Reddit API drama is the big break needed to hit a critical mass of users, but how many will take the time to figure out something like Lemmy? And are the Lemmy instances ready? It's strange to root for Reddit to go through with the API changes after using Reddit for so long. But if there was ever a time to pay a bit extra for additional hosting resources, June 11th (or now!) should be it. If a large influx of new users crash Lemmy instances, and no one can sign up, a golden opportunity will be lost.

Signing up was not a flawless process. You are asked to make a choice about servers with little guidance on what it all means.

Requiring a 10 character password with additional character conditions is going to turn a lot of possible new users OFF. It should be 6 characters, with no conditions. Yes, it's not secure, but we need sign ups above everything else. Users can choose to get as complex as they want, but simplicity should also be an option. If people later grow to value their Lemmy accounts, they can secure them at a later time. But extremely easy sign up should be the default for now.

Asking people to write an extensive answer as to "why you want to join this particular server" should also be suspended temporarily. Again, it's about ease of signing up. We should try to get as many signups in as quickly as possible, and weed out the problem people later. After the possible Reddit migration boom ends, you can go back to application essays as a requirement for entry.

The web interface is buggy. The site will often "reset" as you are reading a thread, and the whole thread will act if "refreshed". If this causes users to lose a long post they are typing, they might quit Lemmy then and there.

The community structure needs to be more unified across instances. It's confusing that there are local groups as well as "multiverse" groups across federations, often with the exact same name. It's a bummer that the communities can be splintered, and will have people not realize what's really available.

I think we're might see some weaknesses of a distributed system like Lemmy in the next few weeks. It's hard to organize and get everyone rowing in the same direction with no "CEO" or clear leader. It does feel like little fiefdoms doing their own things, and that makes it even harder to hit critical mass.

In terms of content and userbase, so far so good. It obviously leans heavily towards the technically competent. Lemmy sort of screens for the technology inclined since it's only well known to those who are up to date with the latest in tech. So of course it's easy to feel like everyone is like minded and cool for now. But we need to attract casuals if we want vibrant, non-tech groups to exist and flourish too.

I've only been exploring for 2 days though, so I can be very wrong.

I just got approved here, but have been on Mastodon for a couple of months. Mastodon signup was a lot glitzier, and yet I still couldn't convert my friend, who was like "I don't understand, what do you mean it's like email? >_<". I don't have high hope for Lemmy atm...

I think Reddit will backpedal and renegotiate with users/devs down the line, once the initial backlash has died down, and they have lowered everyone's threshold of what they would consider a "victory". Things like Lemmy will act as a sword of Damocles/safe harbour for the next time they screw up, sure, and that's a good thing. But I doubt Lemmy will explode in popularity, even if some 3rd party Reddit clients are discussing adding Lemmy support to sort of rugpull Reddit, and that's for 3 reasons(imo):

  1. The hosting costs will be exorbitant for all those new users, considering
  2. Lemmy will be stuck in the exact same boat as Reddit re:all those unpaying users, except now there's no ads either. Donations are the honourable business model, but a couple thousand well-meaning people with disposable income can't properly finance a popular platform.
  3. Even if the Lemmy community solves the above 2 problems, you still have the deciding moment of the "let's jump ship today" user tidal wave, which will make or break such a migration happening. Closest thing I can think of is the WhatsApp Privacy Policy shenanigans in '21. Melon Husk said "Use Signal" - a fine suggestion, tbh - but Signal wasn't ready for this, and so their servers crashed and burned during the tidal wave, while for-profit Telegram just paid for more servers and thus converted the refugees into users.

The thing that's confusing me most is links, whether to communities or individual posts.

I see links in a format like this:

!communityname@instance.whatever

Sometimes the exclamation mark is part of the link and it works, and sometimes it's there but not part of the link, and my phone thinks the rest is an email address.

Is there a guide anywhere to how to do links properly? TIA.

EDIT - yeah, so in my example above, the exclamation mark is not being treated as part of the link for some reason?

So far it is okay, the thing I'm most annoyed by is that is very hard to just casually browse all posts. It works okay, but after a while there seem to be a sync event or something happening bringing a ton of posts from a server and they are always added to the top of all, no matter what i sort by. If i sort by all - hot for example. A bunch of 1 vote posts suddenly are added to the top making me have to chase the list of the post i previously viewed. Does anyone know of a way to stop this sync from automatically happening?

Seems interesting, UX could be a lot better (Logging in via jerboa app is hidden behind 2 seperate menus for example).

Main issue is lack of content so far but honestly that is probably just me learning how to use it and subscribe to what I want. 3 pages deep into "Hot" and about 2 of those pages consist of posts from one....instance? Sub Instance? whatever we call them :D

Also probably my own limitation for now, but the constant refreshing of pages is annoying, if I stop to read a post and go back, everything scrolls automatically, depending on time spent on post I could completely lose where I was.

Overall, I unfortunately think its not a threat to Reddit in its current state, it takes too much effort to understand what is going on for most people and even if the features I complained about above are avoidable it should not take effort or experience to figure out how, but I will stick around anyway, as it seems fun. I would think a lot of users will migrate back to Reddit after the blackout.

The logging in confused me too. When I'm accidentally not logged in things don't load very well either.

Reddit has such a huge community and so much existing content that it'll take a lot to be a threat to that aspect of it, but I don't think that should be (or needs to be) the goal, short or midterm anyway. It can fill a more niche market for now and grow from there.

I'm enjoying my time on the fediverse, still getting used to it all

I read the Lemmy Documentation before signing up for a server and that has helped me to understand what is going on here. I would say that my experience has been generally positive. I really like this platform.

My biggest issue for now is that it feels kinda empty for now. I hope it will pop just a bit more so that we have good content regularly

Overall it looks promising. Upgrading however from 0.17.y to 0.18.0 went unsuccessful for me. Ended up simply starting over from scratch. Thankfully the instance did not have any noticeable content anyways yet so the only thing lost were two days of headache. I am looking forward to get it more reliable since potential is certainly there.

Cheers

Why could you not keep the instance going from 0.17.x to 0.18.x?

It's worked fine here and now I'm on 0.18.1-rc4 and rc.7 for UI. All gone seamlessly

I assume there was some random regression introduced with 0.18.0 which has been fixed in one of the newer 0.18.1-rc pre-releases but not sure.

I've tried to sign up/login to multiple instances and all of them have issues with logging in.

I'm still dipping my toes in. Got a bit confused early on, so now I have 2 accounts, one on beehaw.org and one on kbin.social, trying both out to see which interface I like best.

I'm pretty inpressed with how much everything is improving in such a short time frame. Feeling optimistic.

Really good, there's so much positive energy and people asking all kinds of questions without being called names, it's very enjoyable overall.

it's nice, but we need more content and more 3rd party mobile apps, i mean Jerboa is nice, but many of us are used to their favorite reddit app

Sadly, Apollo😢.

I'm hoping Christian (the dev of Apollo) takes on making a Lemmy client. :D

I would love if that happens but I don't think it could be worth it for him (appart from being a side project). And I bet that he is exhausted as hell after all the drama.

Exhausted and probably devastated, yeah. Maybe if lemmy takes off in popularity. :) I'd love to support great devs like him.

Any1 know how to search a group for specific posts like reddit? On jerboa for android. Tx

Like others have said I'm going to miss the niche subreddits and the thousand different cat subs lol

Yeah, same. But that's why we're gravitated here. To grow those gardens back.

That only happens when reddit doubles down on the api charges. If they stand back to make it barely usable, the migration will slowly stop imho. I really wish reddit would die, but at the end of the day, I'll be part of the problem when I'll probably stay where the bigger community potential will be.