r/Lemmy Is A Bad Look
r/Lemmy right now is full of posts basically talking about how bad Lemmy is handling right now.
It’s a bad look and will probably hurt the migration.
I know we are moving off of Reddit but the Lemmy subreddit needs some positivity for people looking to migrate
don't be surprised if it gets astroturfed with anti-Lemmy content by the admins. They are not above that level of fuckery. And in fact I would outright expect it.
check the accounts of people posting negative about it- default name_name<number> schemas and account ages of less than 10 days all scream astroturf accounts.
Someone has already been astroturing subs like r/programming with antiblackout AI generated spam. If they did it before they will do it again if migration starts having a major impact on the userbase.
Here are a few tips for spotting bots:
This might be a hot take but I'm okay with having some barriers to entry that demonstrate patience, understanding, and hope.
Yup. What made me decide to leave is the fact that I'm going to a place full of people who don't agree with Reddit's policies, and who are willing to fight a modest learning curve to join a more future-proof community. I'd rather be with people who care about that kind of thing and are kind of nerds about it, even if it doesn't have as much content as Reddit in its early days. It's making me nostalgic for Reddit 12 years ago anyway.
I would updoot that line of thinking, and award you Lemmy Gold.
🍋
I'm pretty stupid and don't like reading big walls of text but I was able to work out the basics lying in bed with one eye open, and had started subbing to communities by the time I was having my first morning coffee.
Sure, I ended up changing my mind on instances a couple of times and now have a few dupe accounts, but I was good to go after about three days of playing around. And again, I'm stupid and easily distracted.
If other ex-redditors can't work it out, they're very welcome to stay where they are.
I agree. If someone can’t even get through the incredibly mild filter of figuring out how to make a Lemmy account and deal with some of the community-finding niggles (or, heaven forbid, download a free third-party app that will streamline the whole process for you), then I seriously wonder what kind of positive contribution they would bring to the Fediverse.
There's nothing elitist or unreasonable about this. Lots of friendly people to help them if they need some direction or getting up to speed.
I haven't seen many barriers to entry except with the first couple of instances I remember being linked to when this whole debacle began. Most of the instances I've joined since have been as simple as making a Reddit account.
I don’t get the migration issues, at all.
I’m literally an idiot and all I did was type ‘Lemmy World’ into Google, clicked the top result, created an account, and selected 50 or so communities to follow. Then I started posting.
I don’t know what the Fediverse is or other instances or how it all works (and I don’t really care).
This was dumb-shit easy to figure out - as easy as Facebook or Twitter or… Reddit.
Source: am dumb shit.
Honestly who cares? We're not on Reddit. This is a different place.
On second thought, let's not go to Reddit. 'Tis a silly place.
In the midst of wading through a sea of people talking about Lemmy admins being tankies and other (mostly untrue) propaganda about the platform, the most legit criticism I've heard about Lemmy has honestly been from my older brother.
We had a conversation about Reddit alternatives given the recent news, and his honest take was "I don't give a fuck about federation. Just give me something that works!"
This is very much one of the biggest problems with Lemmy. Most people don’t want to figure out federation and how it works before they make an account. Part of the reason Lemmy.world is so popular is that it’s presented as the default in a lot of places, and most people don’t want to deviate from the defaults
That's pretty much how I wound up here. In the initial phase of googling, I didn't find a very good breakdown of which instances of communities were good candidates for a new user, so I went with the popular one.
I made a kbin as well, but I can't log into Jerboa with that.
It'd be helpful if there was a flow chart or something directing new users, starting with pointing then toward things like Lemmy vs Mastodon vs Beehaw etc and ending with a specific instance that aligns with that user's interests.
Uh oh. The guides I read said the instance doesn't matter, just pick one! Then you subscribe to communities from any instance you stumble across to build up your "page" of stuff to consume. Is that not what we're doing? I thought I had this worked out haha
Yeah that was the advice I found too, but from what I've seen so far, I don't think I agree with it. My initial fed account was on kbin, and I very quickly ran into the issue that I couldn't use Jerboa because of that, cuz Jerboa is made specifically for Lemmy and requires a Lemmy login.
There was some drama going on with an instance called exploding.heads right when I joined -- apparently they were a bunch of neonazis and Lemmy (or kbin? idr) decided to defederate with them, cuz fuck Nazis. So, definitely glad I didn't just random click over there initially and start my account there.
There's also lemmygrad.ml, which from what I've seen so far are a bunch of Putin apologists. Unsure if they're defederated - feel like I saw them a lot initially and not so much anymore, but they're basically the left wing equivalent to exploding.heads.
There's a NSFW instance, there's a bunch of language-specific instance, ......you get the point.
Where you start your account will 100% influence your experience with the fediverse, and that isn't very well acknowledged on any guides I saw for new user orientation.
for real, for most people in the end all that is going to matter is that it works
Of course it will hurt the migration. Lemmy.world should've halted open registration and directed folks elsewhere until they were able to get their house in order.
Instead, a migrant's experience was as follows:
"I can't create an account, the site won't load".
"Okay, now I have an account, but I browse anything because the site won't load."
"Okay, now I can browse, but I can't make posts or comments because the site won't load".
"The site's been wishy-washy for 5 days, I guess it's always like this".
Most don't understand they should've joined a different instance. But hey, this QoL stuff affects all Lemmings, because the biggest communities are in the affected instances.
So instead of a great Reddit alternative, migrants got a product that didn't work as advertised. And a message board, no less - a technology that's existed since the dawn of the internet.
So, I get it. But I'm not upset because I understand Lemmy is an emerging technology that'll require a little patience. Replacing one of the biggest websites of all time is not going to be easy.
r/Lemmy is going to reflect the layman. We should listen to their feedback, help them out and take criticism seriously. I'm of the camp that Lemmy needs as few barriers to entry as possible - which is why I'm loving the progress of some of these mobile apps. Some (like Memmy) have an onboarding guide for new users. We need more of that.
At least the issues with lemmy.world seem to have been resolved. While I'm sure some folks were put off by the challenges, I don't think that the migration is anywhere close to finished. What's key now is to ensure that Lemmy has good engagement and content for people to interact with. From what I've seen, a lot of users here were lurkers primarily on Reddit, but are contributing more here in order to help get things off to a good start. If we keep that energy and keep improving the experience, then it's entirely possible that Lemmy can be seen at a minimum as a viable alternative to Reddit for folks who don't like what they've got going on over there.
You honestly believe the company that was trying to censor posts about competing services on their platform (illegal in EU by the way) is above using bots to post negative comments and posts about said competing service?
I wouldn't put it past Reddit to be trying to DDoS attack instances like Lemmy.world that keeps returning 502 Bad Gateway errors constantly.
Ooooh can we sue them? I'd love to sue them. Shout it out loud that they are purposely manipulating users and investors into thinking how bad Lemmy is and how many ppl have opinions.
How do you know those posts are by real people? Reddit is incentivized to downplay and damage its competition.
Also, its not like reddit isn't without its glitches. Throughout its entire history, reddit has been plagued with downtimes, random 502/504s, and a myriad of other issues. I'd be hard pressed to believe they had more than two nines of uptime, and would not believe more than three.
I mean...they aren't wrong.
If lemmy is to see long term adoption the server admins and app devs got a long way to go.
Comments refusing to load, constant 502 errors and others. Can't submit half the time.
Weird Weird design choices. Why does gerboa have scroll arrows at the bottom of the screen in comment sections?? Did the devs forget that we use touch screens?
The navigation arrows are something I'm very used to, they were also in various reddit apps and they're one of the reasons I prefer using Jerboa, so YMMV
I honestly didn't notice them until this comment chain, and missed them terribly from Relay. So, uh, thanks, y'all? Lol
Relay was by far my favorite Reddit app. I'm hoping the dev makes a Lemmy version.
I'm surprised I haven't seen that one mentioned more.
I thought they were up/down votes until you pointed it out... I actually think I like it being scroll...
Some design decisions are weird, I agree. But keep in mind most of this usage is people coming from Reddit, heavy migration and Lemmy will now have more development, meaning quality will increase drastically.
It's growing pains from individual instances not being quite ready yet, and from people not understanding the point of decentralized instances. Too many people and subreddits congregated in lemmy.world.
Both of those things will get better in time. The admins need time to upgrade their servers, and the new users need a little bit of discussion to figure lemmy out.
As long as lemmy's user base keeps growing, then we'll get there eventually.
I think the star trek instances understand and maybe the pirate instance but yes this is an issue which should resolve itself through usage. Just need more instances that can cater to a generalisation of niche subs.
Took a gander and it seems it's mostly from people having issues with lemmy.world and not knowing about the others you could join. I made my first account there too so I know their frustration. Made a new one on blahaj and it's been smooth sailing since.
I'm still on world and it's a lot smoother today than it was yesterday (mostly just slow though a few times pages wouldn't load) and especially better than Saturday when it wouldn't load more often than it would.
Today, the only thing I've noticed is the sorting doesn't seem to work and shows a lot of the same posts on each page, though from the post I've seen about sorting, it sounds like this issue might affect all instances when sorting by hot.
Because many of us already here, since some third-party apps can no longer be used
And I rarely access reddit myself, they will find their own way to move to lemmy
I disagree.
Realism is better.
Nothing worse than positivity "switch to Linux - you can do anything you like" gets followed up with "Now I installed it, and I can't make it do anything I want" leading to anger.
Just invite folks to join, and patiently explain how stuff works...
Better still, have a direct link to threads on Lemmy.
I’m loving it. Feels raw, the glitches aren’t too frustrating compared to having content aggregated again without having to go to Reddit, digg, or fark
It really feels good. Somehow I feel like we ended up closer as a United community even across different instances
Be together, not the same
I want to help all these people migrate and I have been doing that all through June, but I've committed to never posting or commenting on my account ever again, so unfortunately the remaining Redditors aren't going to get any more help from me.
I understand, me too. But maybe in this case we should help them for the greater good.
Just took at some of those threads. IMHO, some of them are pretty fair.
The top thread is asking Ruud to pause lemmy.world signups to encourage people to use other instances. That doesn’t sound unreasonable.
r/Lemmy is basically the inverse of the various communities here shitting on Reddit, aka a place for people to get shit off their chest. There's been fuck Linux forums, websites and all sorts of things forever and none of it matters at all.
I'll hazard a guess that posts offering to help get acquainted to Lemmy are not being received well by the admins...
Let’s flood it with memes and show them what they’re missing.
Fill it with BEANS
It's like they say in gambling, "The House always wins"
Trying to force a community on Reddit to be favorable towards one of its primary competitors is a fruitless endeavor. Historically, the admins, including spez himself, have manipulated comments, upvotes, and posts in order to get communities that they disliked quarantined or banned.
I'd recommend having trust that the people we want to have over on Lemmy will look beyond a post on its competitor's website for fair and accurate information.
Yes it may seem a bit bad, but lying about it, or trying to hide it, would be way worse.
IMO it's actually a good look, that we can see they are honest about it, and many people are working on solving it.
If you have little tolerance for hiccups on a new system, maybe you'd rather come back when it has matured a bit.
No-one cares what they have to say. We can not be struck with awe at how nice people are over here and care what the mouth breathers over there think.
Turn your back at it and be happy in the Fediverse. Any kind of engagement with the cum rag of the internet will help it. Do not forget: It lives off of your negative feelings!
I think we need to be critical of it in order to have it improved.
What they need isn't positivity, what they need is a tutorial. Right now, the barriers of entry for lemmy (and kbin and mastodon and other fediverse places) are too high for the common layman. They just want something that they can throw their names in and it just works. They don't want to know about federation and instances and how the fediverse works. They don't want to have to research the differences between instances and pick one that seems best for them, they are just going to pick a random one and expect it to see everything.
I want to share my first experience with the Fediverse. During the Twitter Exodus, I heard about Mastodon and, being curious, decided to give it a go. I installed the Mastodon app and tried to sign up, and I had no idea what the Fediverse is or what these instances are. I was expecting a simple signup process like Twitter. I was confused through the signup process, wondering why do I need to "pick an instance", what's the difference, what am I doing. Even after I picked an instance and got in, I had no clue how to find people to follow, how to see everybody's posts (didn't help that I barely used Twitter in the first place and thus was unfamiliar with this sort of place), why is my feed full of devs and programmers (I accidentally picked a tech industry themed instance randomly). It took too much time and effort to learn (and I wasn't committed or interested enough), so I eventually abandoned it.
Nowadays, I have a much better understanding of all this, lemmy is more comfortable for me, and thus I am having a much better experience. But for many who have no experience with the Fediverse, all of this is a lot, and it may be too much effort for them to dig in and learn how all this works. The general UX of lemmy needs to be streamlined and made, if not easier, then more approchable. Only then will more and more people be willing to join and participate in the Fediverse.
So far the largest challenge I've found is customizing my Lemmy feed. Gotta really put in some work blocking communities until the stuff that's not relevant to me is filtered out.