Reddit Refugees on Lemmy, how are you guys liking lemmy so far?

alphapro784@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 1020 points –
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I’m loving it too- I miss a lot of subreddits and the sheer volume of content from the other site, but it feels quite special here at the moment. Also I am loving how quickly Lemmy and all of the supporting apps are developing! I am using Mlem and am very impressed. I want to like wefwef and agree that it is very similar to Apollo, but I just can’t cope with web apps.

I think the content level has gotten better even in the past few days.

I predict at ~200,000 users, there will be a good enough flow of posts and comments that it won’t feel as empty compared to Reddit.

I feel like I've seen a lot more posts in just the past few days since I've started coming here.

It was slow when I came in last month, but it has gotten to pretty high levels of interaction since.

We just need the niche stuff for us to customize and we will be good to go.

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It takes time to develop custom content. Reposts are easy. Culture takes effort. Beans take effort.

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As soon as I can get a solid app experience instead of going to lemmy.world I'll be happy.

I have no plans on going back

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It's fine for news, tech and memes but none of the niche subs that I loved are here. I really miss the sub for my city.

Why not create it?

Can one simply create an arbitrary community on any lemmy instance? I wonder how lemmy handles multiple communities of the same name, across multiple instances.

yeah, that's kind of an issue. Many communities exist more than once on multiple instances. Then again, this can also be a benefit. Maybe one of them isn't to your liking -> choose another one. Or one of them goes down -> there's a backup.

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I too wish some of the smaller subreddits I was in moved here, but not everyone wants to do that 🫤Think it’s just gonna take time to build up those small communities unfortunately

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Nice overall but still a bit silent here and there.

But I actually have more motivation to interact here than I ever had on Reddit.

With it being a little quieter it’s so much more calmer feeling

GOTTA BRING UP THAT INTENSITY LEVEL! THIS AIN'T NO YOGA CLASS! GO ARGUE WITH SOMEONE! CONTENT GAINZ! 💪😁

Wait: That's Meta Threads. Never mind.

Commenting in Reddit felt very claustrophobic in a way. And saturated. Kind of sad, also, if you were some days late to some nice topic, and get buried under thousands and thousands of comments made prior yours, and have zero interactions at that point from anyone, even if you asked a very relevant question or whatever.

But I suspect Lemmy will get to that point too. Right now, though, it’s light enough to actually warrant wasting energy writing anything as a response to anything.

There will always be new and smaller instances tho. Like it was true for smaller communities in reddit. It's all good and well until they get exceedingly popular and a shitshow.

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From my PoV:

  1. The activity around memes, image sharing, memes, shitposting, memes, memes, and memes have not felt too different from Reddit, but unsurprising as it's very easy to consume content
  2. The typical communities that have coalesced in a grassroots fashion are thriving well as long as one can accept there's a lot of duplicate threads (like the Twitter related stuff in technology communities). Some communities are populated by Reddit content porting bots and these feel so barren because it's a wall of submissions with a small number of comments each and the bot owners have no visible intent to stop.
  3. Niche communities are incredibly quiet. That's understandable but also unfortunate, more so if it is a niche community that did not move over.

Things will hopefully get better with time.

Completely agree.

One thing I’ve noticed I always do, is I’ll play a game, then hop on the subreddit for that game once I can no longer be spoiled. It’s nice to have a community with years of content and information waiting for you.

But the communities are gradually being formed here too, literally before our eyes. Someone just made a dragon’s dogma community like an hour ago for example. I’m happy to give them time to grow, and to help them along myself.

But hopefully communities everywhere will increasingly recognize the importance of having well organized, dedicated wikis, rather than trying to stuff everything into an existing forum community or into a Discord.

Discord is by far the worst place for a community to retreat to because it's resources and discussions are impossible to find through cursory searching and I'm so sick of adding to my list of Discord servers just to get information that belongs on a Pastebin or Github readme.

In many ways though, Lemmy has grown into something that is active much faster than so many other kinds of social media platforms. Does anyone remember Disapora or Google+ being the next Facebook or Facebook replacement? What about Wit social? Most definitely do not.

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So far half the posts are about Reddit. So that part sucks. Lemmy is very complicated compared to Reddit. I don't think large groups will be able to migrate here until a easy-mode app comes along to make it user friendly(er).

Yeah, I would say I'm kind of struggling here. I can't figure out how to block communities I don't want to see. I can't figure out how to find communities I would like to be a part of. Currently my feed is full of stuff like bean memes and foreign languages. Which, said feed doesn't really seem to move at all.

It doesn't have ads though, and I know I'll eventually get stuff figured out. But currently, I don't feel like I'm getting much actual use out of it.

When you click on a community you can click the "block community" button at the top right-ish part of the screen, it's in the same section as "create post" and "subscribe"

Searching is a little more complicated, to keep it simple you can use the built in search. That will show you communities in the instance you're searching on, and any community that anyone else on your instance has accessed.

To search all(not all but majority of) communities across all instances you can use this: https://lemmyverse.net/communities

Each instance is like its own little island. Some islands have a theme, some are general purpose. And the instance you make your account on is where you have your citizenship, but you can view and interact(follow,comment, like, etc) with other islands that allow visitors from your island. If an island(instance) doesn't want to allow visitors another island, or allow their citizens(users) to go another island the mayor of the island(admin) can cut off contact with that particular island(de-federate)

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The servers (instances) aspect and different communities (forums on topics) on different servers and servers blocking others, is a mess if I'm being honest. It's the biggest flaw. I still find it hard to find communities of topics I want..

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For me, I was a longtime lurker, so I’m trying my best to come out of my shell and actually comment and have discussions. Overall, I like it so far, I just miss some communities and don’t want to run anything myself.

Its nice to have you here ☺️ I'm trying to do the same- and reevaluating kinds of stuff I previously didn't bother to post because I didn't wanna fall into needing the validation of strangers

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Pretty nice. I just wish more people were here. The occasional bug is fine it seems to be fixed quickly.

A little dull tbh. I still pop over to reddit when I'm on my desktop to visit my favorite subreddits (especially my bumper group). Hopefully Lemmy gets better, but I think step one is the community needs to stop being so goddamn meta and focus on building active communities.

I agree. Got to start creating communities so that Lemmy becomes more interesting

Well, let's do a pros vs cons

Pros:

  • I wasn't banned for saying Putin should die after he invaded a country
  • It's a decent time killer
  • It's growing
  • Idk I just like it

Cons:

  • /c/NCD and some other instances are too small and not even close to their counterparts levels
  • Jerboa for Lemmy has not been behaving too well for me
  • It's still fairly small and new so communities need to consolidate still

Overall I like it better than reddit tho.

Connect for Lemmy worked better for me. There's also Thunder and Lift off - both good.

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I like it but can't wait until we stop talking about Reddit

Yea, leaving reddit only to immediately be bombarded with posts about other social media is kinda lame. Can't wait for the focuses to shift.

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I'm having an easier time sticking to it and not visiting reddit than I thought I would. The first day was pretty sketchy with 90% of the posts being about Lemmy, reddit, or twitter - but since then it's been giving a more enjoyable experience.

It probably helps that I'm making an effort to post and comment, which I never really did on reddit.

As Lemmy grows I'd like to see more niche communities take off, similar to how there was "a subreddit for everything".

I do have a big wishlist for site functionality changes though. A big sore spot is that youtube videos and text posts can't open in-line on the front page.

My impression of lemmy changed a lot once I've read this updated from the lemmy devs from less than a month ago. TL;DR: Lemmy was developed by just two people and with reddit self-destructing everyone jumped to it, and lemmy wasn't really ready for that.

With that info I'm now all the more impressed that lemmy is working as well as it currently is and not crashing every few minutes!

Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed with Lemmy - it's doing an amazing job handling the migration, its structure makes a lot more sense than I thought it did when I was a newcomer, and its functionality is both adequate and actively evolving. My wishlist is mostly minor usability details and it seems like that's something they're actively working on - even the text posts and youtube videos thing I mentioned in my previous message has already been added as a feature on lemmy.world today alone.

Yeah I think In a year or two this will be just as good as Reddit, maybe better. Personally I prefer Lemmy, it reminds me of Reddit before it gained mass appeal. The important thing is now there is a viable alternative to Reddit. Everytime Reddit does something controversial, this site will gain a wave of new users.

Yes, posting and interacting is essential to help our communities grow. I used to only lurk but have been trying to post more on here.

A big sore spot is that youtube videos and text posts can’t open in-line on the front page.

I see a book icon under posts that does this when browsing through my instance's website. Most of the mobile apps are early in development and may not have this feature yet though.

I just use the desktop site - not really a fan of mobile anything. Didn't even do reddit on mobile. Hopefully what you're describing will roll out to more instances sooner rather than later though.

Edit: I do actually have a button to expand text posts - it's a small square that appears on the right side of titles. Not sure if it's brand new or if I just never noticed it until now. Cool.

Edit again: Youtube videos also can open in-line now, plus some videos from other places. Awesome. Guessing it's related to this update

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Still not enough content. I already feel the slow down in activities. I'm in a weird spot rn. I go back to reddit because there's more interesting stuff to see, but the official apps is so bad, that I come back here. Also People here seems more intelligent on avg.

I like lemmy because there is no ads and no gold and premium stupid stuff like NFTs and 50$ awards. I liked the awards ideas ,but damn paying up to 100$ for digital emojis that everyone will forget in a day?

The big downside is the lack of embedded videos. Of course videos takes a lot of server power compared to text. But I hope we find a way to implement this in the future.

I think we should have a public board that shows the instance hardware spec and the finance. So we can set donations goals to upgrade servers or keep them afloat.

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Not as many things to mindlessly scroll by, but I'm liking the new community vibe so far!

It's a bit of a mixed bag. I do enjoy Lemmy. I think that the conversations that take place here are interesting (though many now revolve around Reddit in one way or another). I don't really find the front page to be as good as Reddit's.

And then, of course, I think the most important difference is that Lemmy draws a specific type of person, even after the Reddit migration, and there aren't as many of us as there are average Internet users. I'm not saying Lemmings are a special breed; rather, I'm saying that we're the sort of people who might have used Usenet at its peak. We're the sort who might be Linux users. Many of us are morally aligned with open source technology and the ethics thereof. This makes the discussions a little less diverse on Lemmy than they are on Reddit (which can be good and bad, depending on the sort of conversation).

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Kinda not liking that the more niche communities are me and another 5 people are best

I think that will grow up over time. May never get to the level of Reddit but hopefully even if it is just a few people talking and keeping things going will give time for others to discover. Baby steps.

I'm new here too and I learned recently that if you're looking at the number of subscribers to a given community it is generally showing only the number subbed on your instance, not all of the instances combined. Often the number of subs are much higher if you look at one of the aggregators (I don't know any off the top of my head).

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For now, not great. It's annoying to have 99% of my feed taken up by posts like this one. I don't care about Lemmy, reddit, or any other related sites. I'd like to just find some actual content thanks.

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As a long time reddit lurker. Loving it here so far.

When I heard about it I was kind of expecting it to be contentless and bare. Oh boy was I wrong and so pleasantly surprised.

The amount and the quality of the posts and comments is very high. The people super friendly and I'm loving the sense of community and respect. Bonding over something new and exciting also enchances this feeling.

I also visit reddit now and then but I noticed my browsing sessions leave me more satisfied here on Lemmy, than on Reddit.

Obviously there are some communities that I miss, but I'm sure with time those will appear.

Lemmy and the community, not only fills the "gap", but for me, it also stands by itself providing something that reddit didn't . Super excited about what is being created here.

There is definitely a sense of ownership almost that comes with being part of a community that is just getting going. I had the same expectation as you going in but I feel part of something here much more than I did at Reddit.

It’s okay. I was optimistic at first, but I don’t think this platform is cohesive enough yet to be worth using consistently, especially with instances defederating from each other off and on. It means you have to have multiple accounts to access certain communities, and then kbin is a whole other thing I guess? Because I can’t log into kbin from wefwef so I can’t even access the stuff posted there.

Honestly the reason I’m even still continuing to even open lemmy other than to check its growth is because of how nice wefwef is.

Also, like other people have said, the jerking each other off about leaving Reddit has gotten unappealing. There’s only so much self congratulation I can take.

same thing happened when Digg was the bigger platform and people moved to Reddit to replace it. It’ll go away soon enough

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Really enjoying it, especially with the wefwef app (apollo refugee :( ). Compared to my experience on Reddit I actually feel the urge to contribute to discussions here and not lurk.

The only downside so far is that I kinda miss my niche subreddits... I've been checking sub.rehab on and off to see if they've migrated to Lemmy.

I'm the opposite. I still haven't really figured out how Lemmy works and I find it harder to participate in conversation because there are so few comments. And I don't know if it's possible to get notifications when someone replies to my comment which makes it even harder to engage. Plenty of people have explained how Lemmy works as a concept but I've yet to see anyone talk about how to effectively use it.

Right now it's just my reddit methadone so I have something to scroll through but I've seen maybe 5 total interesting posts after days of use.

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Ok so far. Missing some subs that i was active on at Reddit, but maybe they will show up eventually.

Only thing i don't realy get is what the point of having it divided in different service is, when it is all going to show up everywhere else anyways. I go to Lemmy and i get kbin and mastodon post, i go to kbin and i get lemmy posts...

Only thing i don’t realy get is what the point of having it divided in different service is

You can think of them like different email clients. Sure, different email clients all send and receive the same messages via IMAP / POP / SMTP, but they offer different user experiences. Some users might prefer Thunderbird, others Outlook, etc.

Same thing with Lemmy, kbin, and Mastodon. They all post content via ActivityPub, but some users might prefer the microblogging experience of Mastodon, or the UI of Lemmy or Kbin. I am sure other projects will come along too if the Fediverse takes off that caters to other users' needs.

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So far it seems like Reddit but with a lot less content. I'm assuming that's primarily a popularity problem.

Reddit had a lot of "zombie" content: old popular content that was scraped and reposted by karma farming bots. If you spent way too much time lurking, you'd start to notice that you'd seen almost every post before (probably 6 months prior). It definitely has more real content than Lemmy currently does, which is why we must nourish and protect our precious little sapling of a content aggregator.

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I kinda miss Reddit, but after browsing it today, it felt kinda weird. Lemmy is starting to feel more and more like home as more people join in and participate. And also the fact that the 0.18 update fixed the numerous issues, it really helps.

The communities are a lot smaller as is to be expected, but it feels really good compared to Reddit. People are active enough and the overall design is so much less cluttered.

Although the bar is pretty low, given that half the Reddit app is just ads.

Honestly I'm kind of struggling with the concept. I'm using the connect android app but it's just not clicking for me.. how do I know if I've found the right community? On Reddit there was only one /r/gaming but when i search on lemmy I get lots of small communities all for the same thing across different instances. Am I misunderstanding how this works? This must be how my parents felt when i first tried explaining Reddit to them 5 years ago

That's a legit issue with these federated social media sites. The whole idea is to avoid one entity having too much power, but it splinters the discussions and the communities in a way that inhibits them.

How do we know a better gaming discussion isn't happening some place else?

How does a company interact with fans and grow its brand without spamming every single gaming community on the fediverse?

Not sure what the solutions are, but maybe that's the point? We're trying to usher in the older days of internet communities. Smaller, closer forums.

So from what I've seen.... Yeah. There are a lot of redundant communities sometimes with the exact same name scattered across the different fediverse instances. I have noticed that many of those are new within the last 2-3 weeks which is probably attributed to the reddit exodus, maybe with some more time these communities will mature and aggregate a little bit to make it easier on new users.

For now I have subscribed to many small and fragmented communities and I view them all at the same time on my "home page" with the wefwef webapp

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It's honestly confusing, seems janky, and I don't understand how the post aggregation works at all (I want my "front page of /r/all" equivalent). However, it's all better than continuing to support Reddit. Digg-->Reddit-->Lemmy-->???.

I'm using the jerboa app and it lets me browse by all.

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There's tons of memes and stuff, but I was never into that, so meh. My thing was specialized nerd groups and they are mostly not here yet. With time, maybe they will come.

Same here. I mostly hung out in smaller, hobby subreddits. And the few I've found here are mostly dead. I really want to nerd-out with other people about shit nobody else cares about

Are you making any sort of posts in those "mostly dead" communities? There might be more people looking to join but had the same thought as you. Even a quick hello post could help a lot.

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I’m using wefwef, so I honestly forget I’m not using reddit through Apollo half the time. The culture migrated really seamlessly for me

Having switched to android recently, it's kind of funny that lemmy is getting me some of the Apollo experience back.

I like the content but I'm struggling to really dive in regularly without better app support. Hoping Boost for Lemmy gets released before long and that will give a more refined experience.

I personally loved boost for Reddit, can't wait for the Lemmy port!

So far really confusing. But honestly I didn't use reddit for 4 years despite having an account because I couldn't figure out how to even begin and I only got it going thanks to boost and my spouse (no one else I know is/was on reddit). So I have hopes that over time it will sort itself out and I will have figured out how this works. Let's see if I can even post this comment.

There's one aspect of it that I didn't expect, and that's its exclusivity. Seems like this is a small, but vibrant, community of geeks, just like the whole internet was in the 90s and 2000s.

I'm not 100% sure it'll be able to replace reddit in the area of getting advice on niche topics, but I do believe I'll enjoy being here.

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It's good. Unironically better in some ways - the transparent up vs. down votes are nice, and the preview button is indispensable. I used to post something broken and then have to ninja edit it.

I like it! Main issue for me is that there is not enough content on my hobbies, and "all" content is mostly filled with reddit-this and lemmy-that (or now threads) stuff, which is annoying because I don't want to talk more about the platform than actually using it. But I hope this will change with some time.

I use only the browser, UX and UI is pretty straight forward, but subscribing to communities of other instances is really weird. I need to copy the "handle" (i.e. !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml), and add it manually to my instance domain (i.e. lemmy.world/c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml), and then I subscribe to it. I don't know if there are other ways (besides finding new communities via "all").

I'm not into the technicals of lemmy or the fediverse, but I guess this is not easily solvable, as an instance doesn't know that I am the user of another instance.

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I really like it generally. I mostly only miss some of the more niche subreddits I belonged to. There are equivalents for some of them here, but it doesn't seem like there's a large enough user base yet to have the active engagement and frequent new content the ones on Reddit have. Other than that I just miss the features of Reddit Enhancement Suite, When I'm browsing on desktop I try to drag-to-zoom some image or another at least three or four times a session, and I really miss continuous scrolling.

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Population is soooo much lower, but that's not necessarily a BAD thing.

I tried searching for a Comic Books group and it doesn't exist. There's one for Comics but it's a ghost town and populated mostly with web comics. :(

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Fucking loving it, bringing back the early internet nostalgia

Never really posted before Lemmy and feel the need to express how much I enjoy this platform

Feeling good. It's early, and I know we need to keep that in mind. That said, more of the communities I used to follow have started setting up shop here and that is a good feeling. Now with Memmy on the App-store I feel at home and don't have much if any real reason to go back to Reddit.

Generally I like it. It has a lot going for it. So for some constructive (uninformed probably, I only signed up today, but I have been lurking for about a month) criticism:

I don't really like how there can be 10 "Official Linux" subs, because 10 self-hosted servers can create it locally. But Okay, I can deal with it, searching for subs I can see where everyone has mostly subscribed to for a particular topic.

Which leads me to, Although its distributed, it should be distributed with common "global subs" which sit on all instances of self-hosted. This would allow me to see that "/g/Official Linux" is the main one (others might exist and that is fine but they are local self-hosted and accessible globally but might be more niche). This would eliminate some small popup Lemmy's self-hosted since they would need a reasonable amount of storage. But I'm not sure this is good or bad, if you want to self-host and not participate in sharing/storing that data, then fine but your local subs are not replicated to the distributed network. I don't know in my own mind if this is all good or bad, but something like this should be explored.

Currently, it appears to me in my limited usage, some sub on some self-hosted (lemmy.cheapdomain.for.fun) could blow up and that self-hoster cannot afford to maintain it, and shuts down. Boom, sub gone? (see previous, note I have not explored self-hosting a Lemmy server yet).

Server blocking/banning: This one concerns me, since its hardest to manage and deal with. Firstly, IMO you are going to get bad actors setting up bad servers with 'nazi love' subs or worse, and they should be filtered from the main distributed service. However currently this is in a terrible state of affairs and needs to be addressed, since free speech is what its about. People may disagree with things and even reddit had dubious subs. But you could choose to ignore it and not subscribe. There needs to be a way to inform users of a selfhosted site, and *why" the decision to block it was. So not just a federated list of "blocked" but with clear reasoning as to why it was blocked by lemmy.world or lemmy.me . Users could then at least identify a site that is blocked and if the reasoning for the block is against their belief they can at least go and check it out for themselves.

While being distributed, perhaps there can still be a self managed tagging system for subs and guidelines for how to tag your local sub, for global acceptance. You dont have to tag as the system says, but not doing so may prevent you from being shared across the federated net.

Everything else is great. Most of the reddit communities I had anything to do with exist here, albeit smaller. The Jerboa app is great (and another that I tried which I forget the name of off the top of my head).

I even like that the fanboys of Apple, Raspberry Pi, Docker etc are here to downvote the crap out of anything remotely negatively said, against their favourite thing... (That one might be a bit facetious, but that is what freedom of expression is).

I’ll tell you one thing, I kinda like that it’s small. and that I’m seeing this thread on front page second day in a row.

It’s cool to have the smaller amount of content so it all moves a little slower.

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Been here for a month, I've noticed that my anxiety levels have dropped significantly. I think it's because I am not an American and on Reddit I didn't realize how much American politics I was consuming just reading comments. Here I just haven't subscribed to American focused subs. It's nice.

Same here. I've had increased exposure to us politics and culture from reddit. Now I'm getting decoupled and this made me realize the scale of that.

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Loving actually having conversations with people, instead of talking into the void where by the time you see a post it's already so old that commenting is useless

I love the concept of a federated network, it definitely feels way more punk than just being another data set for a corporation

I do wish a few of the more niche subreddits had similar communities here, but I'm trying to do my part by making that content

I don't have anything to add but in the spirit of actually engaging, I see your comment and agree!

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It feels like home! I didn't think it would, but I've settled in. I like that it's a smaller community as I feel my comments count for more somehow. I also like that we're all (or at least a large proportion of us) just a little bit clueless about what's going on or how stuff works round here - we're muddling along together as best we can and it's lovely.

It feels a lot like Reddit did back in the early days before it got popular, in fact. And I think the existence of multiple instances as opposed to one site has the potential to keep it that way - if your instance gets too big or too busy for your taste, migrate somewhere quieter or even create your own.

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Lemmy is awesome - I'm really enjoying it. Like the early days of Digg, even Fark, etc. Quality stuff happening!

Performance has improved, but many niche communities need more growth and engagement.

Duplicate communities across Lemmy instances are a bit of a nightmare in some ways - although by design, and also have advantages.

r/all on Reddit looks pretty different now, unless that's just my perception. A lot of subs I'd never seen, more low quality stuff with less engagement.

apparently reddit changed the r/all algorithm a lot tho, it's not just because of a change in userbase as far as I understand it

Ah that's really interesting, it absolutely feels very low quality and different now to me - I wonder why they would make changes that degrade the feel. Maybe I just have bad taste!

I doubt that that was their goal. I don't think your taste is bad, it's probably just different from what they think most people want. I'm not sure whether most people actually want that though

Since I switched to Connect for Lemmy, I'm really liking it. I found Jerboa to be a bit unintuitive, which is a reminder of how much a third-party app can mean for the enjoyment of a platform and why people have so strong feelings about their Reddit app of choice that they're willing to leave the platform if that app doesn't work anymore. I don't know if I'd have kept trying to get into Lemmy if I hadn't found Connect.

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None of the communities I'm interested are here, and a lot of the posts feel like they're coming from cryptobros. I'm fundamentally interested in the format and tech, but I'm only here because I refuse to use Reddit on mobile, for now. Things could get better or worse, hard to say.

The big problem is Lemmy is designed to work against federation in every way. Communities must be forced into existence because you can't just casually post on your instances /r/knitting and expect anyone to see it.

For every community there has to be a "big community" to become established or else it doesn't exist in a practical sense in Lemmy.

And when it does get established, then the"big one" sucks the air out for all others.

This is a major architectural flaw with Lemmy that was inserted in purpose to concentrate discussion control power in the hands of centralized moderators.

End result, if you want to talk knitting, you'll have to go to https://lemmy.world/c/knitting

What you describe is a big problem for generic communities such as YouShouldKnow, NoStupidQuestions etc and even hobbies where most of the people practicing them aren't good with tech.

For more niche stuff Lemmy works better because if you want to talk about, say, communism you can go to lemmygrad.ml and instantly get a front page with communities about communism. If Lemmy continues to grow I expect we'll see more themed instances pop up (e.g. about gaming, technology, fitness) and Lemmy's advantages over Reddit will be seen more clearly.

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The “front page” experience of seeing general news I should be aware of is getting better but it’s harder to find active niche communities as expected, and I wish there was combined or less fracturing with communities, like having to choose whether to follow technology@lemmy.ml or @lemmy.world since I would assume they’re somewhat redundant

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It's probably the closest thing to reddit right now (even down to the shitposting memes unfortunately) but I wouldn't say it has the same feel quite yet. I still find the distributed nature confusing (am I in the lemmy.world's technology community, or lemmy.ml's? How do I get to beehaws instance?) and navigating between instances is a chore. I realize though that situation is very fluid and if users can get over the hump and start investing into their communities and lemmy as a technology it can get better.

Also I rely on mobile apps to navigate the majority of the time. There are some decent ones out there now, like Connect for Android. But it definitely is still buggy, and is not as fluid as my experience with Relay for reddit. But again, nothing that can't be fixed.

Some of my favorite subreddits still hasn't shown up yet as communities in any of the major lemmy instances, and I honestly feel it's going to take a very long time for that to happen for some of the more niche ones. The user base I honestly believe will never reach even close to reddit's numbers.

So in a nutshell, good promise, closest thing to reddit, but still has a long way to go.

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I'm very confused. Trying to figure this whole new decentralized social network thing and I feel like an absolute boomer. I would need a nice iOS app for me to really get into it I guess, something like Apollo.

Well idk about Apollo, but Sync for Reddit is undergoing work to make it into Sync for Lemmy, so maybe that'll get an iOS client in the nearish future.

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It feels like 20 years ago migrating from large chatrooms to bulletin board forums with a smaller more specialized community like setup. Posts and threads don't instantly get buried, and there don't seem to be as many assholes looking to pick a fight.

I see that by scaling down, some of the the more niche forums don't get the traffic, but that will likely change over time. I'm digging the integration with Mastodon so links to people and articles don't have to flow through Twitter. It minimizes having to sift through tons of ads to read what I want.

I also like the region based instances like lemmy.ca and midwest.social having communities and news that is of interest to those regions. It would be cool once more countries have their instances / communities.

Reddit had a good idea with having subs, but many of them got too big to be able to have meaningful discussion for many people. What is the point of trying to comment and engage in a topic that has 5000 posts? Lemmy hopefully can solve that by having the same community in different instances to keep the size where more people can discuss topics in a smaller more engaging setting.

It's reminding me a lot of when I first joined Reddit (nearly 15 years ago). Not too much is happening day-to-day so I'm checking in every couple of days or so.

I think this is a much healthier relationship than checking a site compulsively every couple of hours. I'm liking it so far, also a crazy repercussion is that I'm using the internet like the early days again. I think of a topic and I do a deep dive on my own, researching into it and going down weird rabbit holes.

I feel like Reddit discouraged this behavior by having a non-stop flow of communities that "mostly" interested me enough to not go "browsing the web"

I find that for many niche topics, the communities are pretty empty and inactive, which was the reason I loved Reddit in the first place. Hopefully with more users it will become mainstream.

I'm enjoying the site overall, but I feel like a lot of people are way too die-hard into the philosophy here, to the point where everything seems to come back around to endless circle jerks about how cool and awesome we are for using the superior open platform.

I like it because it's open, but it really isn't THAT big of a thing, and I'm getting pretty burned out only the endless talks about what is and isn't the best pure way to implement the perfect utopia of federation.

I feel you, but at the same time I like it for a weird sense of nostalgia and optimism. I remember seeing that same spark back in the early days of the web on Usenet and random niche forums around the net. Being hopeful isn't bad. I mean, it's a bit naive but it's cute.

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Totally digging in. I'm still trying to find the easiest way to navigate. I don't spend nearly as long in Lemmy as I did Reddit, which is a good time. 10-15 minutes every few hours seems healthy. It satisfies that urge just enough.

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Lemmy reminds me of why I even liked Reddit in the first place. Honestly, it makes me worry how it'll change if it grows. Because the downfall of Reddit for me wasn't really the API changes, or Spez, or the crappy new features, it was just more people flowing in, all desensitised jokers hungry for attention. For now, I'm liking it, though! And now I know there's other places I can go if a billion-dollar corporation kills the Fediverse :)

Lemmy reminds me of why I even liked Reddit in the first place. Honestly, it makes me worry how it’ll change if it grows.

Same here. I was on reddit for 12 years, and without my realizing it, my experience evolved from fun engagement to obsessive and bitter daily ideological battle.

Coming here, I’m reminded of how reddit felt when I first joined.

I’m afraid of that going away with userbase growth (and not just growth but targeted manipulation by anti-communication trolls).

And it’s so refreshing to see straightforward integers that increment as you cast votes, and not reddit’s super sketchy fuzzy scores.

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After the recent performance upgrades its working great and I am finding it to be a great general replacement for my time on Reddit. All I am hoping for now is for the fediverse to become a bit more populated so that niche communities can develop and get a bit more activity.

It might be a tiny bit rough around the edges here and there, but the QoL features more than makes up for those.

I already prefer it to reddit tbh.

Same, plus the community is way more friendly in general than reddit.

I quite like it, I generally like how it looks, and there was less of a learning curve than I expected there to be. Things mostly work without needing you to know HOW they work (though that is fun too). I am sure it will get more active as more people move over, but it's actually the perfect amount of activity for me right now. I can check in and there is usually some new stuff without worrying about things moving so fast that my voice gets lost in the noise.

Big plus is I can be fairly open about my leftist politics, at least around here, and not be downvoted into oblivion. Nor does everything thread even tangentially related to China devolve into racism within five posts.

Are there a couple niche communities I miss? Sure, I might recreate them myself honestly, somebody has to. Otherwise, I don't miss much.

I think I like more than I liked reddit.

But my NSFW needs are not met yet, reddit have way more fap fuel.

I have never heard of the fediverse before the whole exodus. As soon as I did, I was immediately hooked. Fuck corporate interests.

It reminds me of what reddit was like in the early 2010s. Kind of a wild west.

Is missing an active NBA community, which is/was at least half of my reddit traffic along with several other subs I frequented, so I that regard it's a let down.

The interface is already better on jerboa than anything reddit ever made, and I haven't had a ton of issues, just missing the communities.

Yeah, I want to fully commit but without some of the big sport communities it's hard to fully leave Reddit as much as I want to.

When I initially signed up for Reddit 15 years ago it wasn't for sports because everybody had their own team boards but now that Reddit seemed to consume all of that traffic there's not a lot of other great options.

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I like it, but I miss how plentiful yet niche reddit communities could be

Also, I doubt people that don't like the app are more likely to interact with this thread

Here's me, commenting. I can't subscribe to what I want easily. That's a problem for mainstream uptake. Don't get me wrong I can subscribe to stuff... It's the easy part that's missing

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One of the things I greatly disliked about reddit was the hivemind that formed a couple years after it launched, which has only gotten worse as time passed. Anywhere posts and comments are driven by upvote or engagement algorithms is going to create an echo chamber, but I was curious to see if the decentralized aspect of this place might tone that down a bit. It's hard to tell right now because my feed is filled with some of the most indignant, extremist people from other platforms who are here as a form of protest.

Feature-wise, this place is functional and not too hard to navigate, but finding and subscribing to communities was pretty confusing and it's lacking a lot of QoL stuff that reddit has. I don't expect it to be a 1:1 clone but I sure would like notifications when someone responds to one of my posts. Or maybe the notifications just aren't working properly for me? I dunno.

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It's kind of a ghost town so far. But if we can wrestle control of social media away from corporate control, democracy across the world will be stronger for it. Regardless, I'm here for the long haul, making contributions FAR exceeding my efforts on Reddit.

Primarily a mobile user, which I’m assuming most migrants are. I like it so far, but have some minor complaints about the available apps. I was so used to Apollo, and a lot of the apps like wefwef and Mlem are frustratingly close but not quite there yet. Mlem Is missing some things like being able to zoom images, make image posts, (Correct me if I’m wrong, but Mlem doesn’t appear to be able to post anything except links) automatically fetch inbox messages, or view comment replies in threads. Wefwef seems more like Apollo so far, but it has its own quirks since it’s entirely web-based.

That’s something that I expect to improve with time though, as the apps are all still under development. So here’s hoping that things improve.

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I was never a hardcore Reddit user, just a casual scroller, and I have to say, with the Connect android app and after subscribing to a few communities, my experience has largely been the same. It'll be better when/if more people migrate over I feel like, but in terms of the actual experience, it's already slightly improved from Reddit.

Other than the occasional bugs, but anything getting stress tested is going to experience growing pains, and it's kind of charming. Like, new mmo launch charming. :D

It's OK so far but I think I'll be more engaged when Sync for Lemmy launches. The UI isn't streamlined enough and I would like to stumble on communities by accident but I'm not sure if it's possible.

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Well it was confusing to begin with. I'm still not sure how to search efficiently or whatever, and I don't know where you can quickly see the Instance themes. I've settled in though and I'm comfortable now. It really helps that **every **comment isn't replied to with someone outright hostile for whatever reason. Pretty sure that'll change once the bots realize we're worth their time.

I have my icks. I wish thread trees were more distinct. I'm still getting the hang of the interface. But despite them there is a pleasant vibe here where you feel like you're actually talking to people and not screaming to be heard amongst a hostile crowd.

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I like it. As an IT guy I tried to set up my own instance and failed because the guides and READMEs are shit. So I chose the idiot proof way, now here I am. I'm missing the content, but hey, we Redditors just joined. Let's wait a while.

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I'm really enjoying it. I feel way more inclined to post here, I very rarely did over at Reddit. People seem a lot more receptive and willing to participate.

Only downside is that it doesn't have the history Reddit has, so I still find myself using Reddit's history for research. I haven't installed the new app though, and I haven't looked at /r/all since the API changes went into affect.

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I was afraid it would a lot like Mastadon 99% of the content being about how Twitter sucks yet having none of the content Twitter has.

I'm pleasantly surprised. Now that 0.18 made Lemmy actually usable, iI have just about eliminated Reddit from my social media habits. Just need to find some sexy instances now...

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Not enough content yet but I'm contributing what I can and if everyone keeps getting their friends on Lemmy it will be amazing.

It seems fine, with a few concerns.

The federated nature could become confusing, especially for new users. For example, I'm not sure how a new user is supposed to distinguish between: Games@sh.itjust.works and Games@lemmy.world This seems like a potentially worse version of reddit's games vs gaming vs truegaming.

Also the lack of filtering options. Until I build up a reasonable amount of communities I'm subscribed to, I suspect I'll be using All more, which doesn't seem to have a simple way to do things like filter out all memes or just focus on text.

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I like it so far. But I think the large amount of reddit users won't like how separate everything is. Most of my friends and colleagues I've mentioned and shown it to, didn't like it for that one reason. Reddit is a singular easy to access place with communities for everyone that is popular.

Fediverse (Lemmy in particular) needs to simplify I think for people to be able to adapt to it. My girlfriend made an account and is having trouble finding groups for herself, but willing to take the time cause I'm next to her all the time. But not everyones got that.

edit: also, i am using Memmy for Lemmy now on IOS, nice to have when not at my PC. Good app so far.

Agreed... A lot of the complexities don't necessarily need to go, but a way to abstract them away, if you want to, would be much more attractive.

The less hoops people have to jump through the better.

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I've not been back to Reddit for days and I have no plans on returning

I was afraid that there wouldn't be enough content, but there's a LOT.

Loving it. Reminds me of the olden days of Reddit where the communities were smaller but everyone was contributing more.

The bugs and the issues help sell the fact that it's a smaller community so even those don't bother me so much.

It’s buggy and flaky and wonderful. I can’t believe A) how quickly it’s grown over the past two weeks, and B) how great the communities seem to be. I’ve only asked one question so far but I got more and better answers than I would have on Reddit. I was feeling pretty down about the internet during the last week of June, but now I’m feeling hopeful.

I like it a lot. Obviously, content is lacking. But that is up to us to fix. The general fediverse capabilities are fantastic, but still a tad too confusing for newbies (from which communities can I see content, which communities can I see etc.) and take a while to figure out. Apps are already great. General UI is great as well.

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Getting used to it. I've noticed it's been very stable today compared to the last few days. I've been trying to find communities similar to the ones that I was a member of on Reddit. I miss the volume of info that was available on Reddit that I could drown myself in but I refuse to download the official app. After what spez did to Christian and other third party app devs, it's time to go. So, rock on, Lemmy! (this is my first post btw!)

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I'm enjoying the hell out of it. Could be the novelty of everything, but I'm liking it more than Reddit. And like I've seen many here say, I tend to respond and have conversations here more often.

Plus, Connect for Lemmy is very nice on my Android phone. I was waiting for Sync of Lemmy to arrive, but I'm not so sure I'll switch.

I've enjoyed my time here on Lemmy and am fully invested. It's helped me curb my reddit usage completely and I won't be going back.

It really feels like Reddit 10 years ago and I loved that. Rough edges and all.

It's getting better every day and more stable. I'm really grateful for all the effort people are putting in it and very happy here.

I was on Reddit for over 8 years, nearly entirely using Apollo. It was frustrating to arrive “late” to a thread and only see funny jokes, and have any comments buried if you bothered to make one. Here, it is nice to actually have a conversation with posters and maybe you might actually see them again someday.

Maybe the difference between having a conversation at your favorite pub with good friends versus yelling at someone in the stands at a football stadium. It is nice to be seen and heard.

Weird anecdote here. When Reddit went to hell I just joined an instance in my country with I think 20-30 people in that moment so we always watched the same names in post a comments, and we laughed about it.

Next thing I known, somehow I just made my self some new friends, so yeah, its weird felling the slowlynees of here, but its especial, its own thing different to Facebook, Tumblr, or even Mastodon, I like it.

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I like how default sort for comments is active instead of best, which was just top rated comments

that way, I see recent comments where conversation is still happening and I can participate, gives a better feeling

I use wefwef and it works basically like Apollo did. The entire lemmy site is a fairly good replacement for Reddit. There are some sections where there is no one, but hopefully with time that will fix itself.

I’m enjoying it a lot, but I am concerned about it’s staying power. Systems like Lemmy need continual engagement and growth, and I worry about the complexity being a barrier to entry compared to other services like twitter or Reddit.

God yeah, the complexity. Yesterday late at night I decided to "check out this lemmy thing real quick and make an account". Bad idea. I ended up on some lemmy server (?) that asked me to write a whole application to open an account before I figured out that there are different sites (?) where you can register and it somehow doesn't matter anyway? I am not very tech savvy (I still forget/don't get what a server is although I get a weekly explanation) and I've never really heard of lemmy before so somewhen around 1 am I was about to just give up because I was so confused. And this is just the beginning, I still need to figure out how to adjust everything, follow communities etc.

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I miss the niche subs I used to follow

So far so good. The main reason I bailed on Reddit was the loss of RiF. I hardly ever used desktop. I'm using Connect for Lemmy and I'm still getting used to it, but it seems like a decent enough replacement.

It's neat, though I still have mixed feelings about how to choose which communities to follow. There are many duplicates, and I feel like if I don't subscribe to ALL of them, I could be missing out, but then it increases the chance that I'll see many of the same post (e.g., for a news community).

Content discovery is a bit more work. On Reddit, I never really subscribed to things or sought anything out in specific beyond just using All and scrolling, because it had a nice mix of everything. Here, it seems I'll have to do a bit more work and seek out the type of content I want to see, especially if a user on my instance hasn't already discovered something I care about.

It's also more work to choose an instance. Some instances might block what I want to see, so it's possible I will need multiple accounts.

Overall, I think with some more users and more communities, those gripes will largely go away as some communities in certain instances might become more dominant.

I'm mostly just happy to not see ads, and to know there's not some nefarious company running the service.

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I like it so far. I miss some of the communities that are either not yet present, or are not yet active enough on Lemmy, but I'm hopeful that things will fill out over time. I do hope we can get a good solution for video hosting that isn't relying on youtube, but I get that that is a tall order.

I've gone cold turkey from Reddit and I'm loving it. My one complaint about Lemmy, that I haven't figured out if this is setting for, is when logging on you always see the most active posts from your specific instance. I would like to see instead the top post from all instances by default

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It’s great! I’m not banned here so I can participate.

Got banned from reddit last summer because I mocked someone’s plan to solve the housing crisis by vandalizing houses.

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It's better than I expected tbh, the app I use is Jerboa (it's suspiciously similar to boost, I'm waiting for Ruben [the dev] to publish boost for lemmy)

Everything is done right to ensure an open platform and that another redditpocalypse doesn't happens, the only thing that concerns me is that if I choose lemmy.world, I'll miss on other things, I just need all my tech related and videogames (and blender) subreddits to migrate so I fully leave reddit.

Also, I think I got a good username

I wish I knew of a big instance on the NA west coast, so I could be closer to it. If I understand correctly, I’d still be able to access & comment on lemmy.world stuff, as well as other instances that are federated.

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It's really good for tech, news, and memes - but anything related to sports or culture is pretty much non-existent. Sure sport news make it through into the NBA community for example, but no one is actually engaging - pretty much feels like an RSS reader in there.

I'm justs enjoying what we have for a fleeting summer of joy, before zuck, gptbot floods and federation fracturing inevitably ruin everything again :/

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I prefer Lemmy's content/userbase, but there's less of it. Which is fine with me. The bugs could use some ironing tho.

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I like it! More exposure, one or two good apps for Android/ iOS, and I'm sure it can be a better Reddit in a few months.

I miss some nicher subs, but I really appreciate it. It's a lot less janky than I expected, and it doesn't feel empty.

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I've been a lurker.. I believe this is my first comment. I'm enjoying it so far and staying patient as I've seen significant progress over the past week alone. The app im using has improved as well 👍👍

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I like it more than reddit honestly. We've already expanded into a space 3x the size of what we have on reddit, although there are far less people and a lot of those communities will disappear. Honestly an architecture mistake that reddit only allowed one subreddit per topic instead of entire an entire reddit instance dedicated to one thing.

I love it so far. I've been a huge supporter for decentralization for a while now through blockchain tech so it's great to see so many people finally seeing what makes decentralization as a concept so great.

I just hope the apps keep developing at the speed they are because they are the part that is lacking the most right now. The experience is significantly better on PC right now. Even simple things like finding new communities is difficult on the apps I've tried so far.

Everyone's nice and there activity, but I miss some subs. I could make them them all, but creating content for all of them would be too much work... I already do that outside reddit/lemmy. 😣

It’s being ok, specially after I found Wefwef (love it, but needs a better name).

But about content, I still miss a lot of the subs I was subscribed to (Oddly satisfying, TechnicalPrint, and many other specific ones). But I know that it’s only a matter of time.

Voting and posting is a bit annoying because servers are overwhelmed but I totally understand it and can wait, no problem.

It's worth migrating to a smaller Lemmy instance, you'll find that voting and posting is much more responsive. I had a similar experience on lemmy.world.

Also, it looks like all your other post attempts on this thread actually went through, so I can see 4 other duplicate responses from you.

That's the thing when I was using lemmy.world. Everything would look like it's failing and load forever but it would actually go through. It was really annoying. Lemm.ee has been much better.

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The content is really bounded by tech stuff, but I guess that's due to migration being important for tech-savvy users. It is true that appending "reddit" to search queries and following the results is still inevitable (but hey, libreddit and teddit still work). But vibe is completely different, very organic, very active, I like it a lot. I think there is a lot of potential in this feeling of authentic communication. Let's hope it grows.

Lemmy is much better replacement for Reddit than Mastodon is for Twitter.

upvoting things on the main lemmy.ml page spins forever.

I’m liking it! Scratches the same itch that Reddit did. Content doesn’t roll in as quickly from my subscriptions as it did on Reddit but I guess I’m into some niche-ish things and it’ll pick up steam eventually(?).

Honestly, I'm kind of hating it... everything feels like it is in the wrong place, everything has just enough friction in interacting with Lemmy to irritate me as I try and get realigned, and nothing feels like it is at my fingertips. The signup process alone was adamant that it was incredibly straightforward and that instances don't matter... but is also very variable based on the instance you choose... I had to wait until morning because my instance's email verification didn't work and had to be done manually. Then when I look to turn on 2FA, it just doesn't work at all, very unappealing.

Maybe once Boost for Lemmy is out, that will have some quality of life, but currently I am not actively liking anything about Lemmy at all, beside just the basic principle of it.

Same issue with lemmy.world and not getting my email verification. I tried going into the store via pc but couldn't find a way to resend the email. How'd you solve it? I just had to make a new account with another email

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I love the experience so far, but god, do I crave my niche communities.

Just deleted my Reddit account. It's Ok so far but having trouble finding communities. That's just an early adopter problem I bet though.

I feel like I may like it more once Boost for Lemmy is a thing.

I'm excited to be part of the fediverse though.

I like it better so im using it as much as i can and just hoping its not a fad and people actually move over enough to unseat reddit

It's great! Definitely satisfies the urges to scroll through a bunch of silly crap. And the Memmy for Lemmy app on iOS feels a lot like Apollo. Very happy to be part of this community, despite it's intimate size

I still don't know what instance to use or if it matters. But I like it, the community is similar enough to reedits. I'm looking forward to using Sync for lemmy though. I miss sync for reddit lol

Instance matters for:

  • Federated instances (Beehaw and Exploding Heads are defeded from World, for example)
  • Moderation
  • Speed/Server quality

afaik

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I love it tbh. Just wish my niche communities had more people. But that just takes time

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I am opening Lemmy daily... Most of the posts I see are circlejerking beans post and posts that are still celebrating the death of Reddit while Reddit has posts of real quality. I open Reddit in Firefox mobile now... Still way better than Lemmy... Hope that will change but I am sceptical.

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I like it a lot. Feels like early days Reddit. I do miss some of the niche reddit communities, but on the other hand the main lemmy continues seem much more approachable. My biggest complaint is that Lemmy can be pretty slow at times.

It's just a bit too small right now, lots of communities that don't exist yet or are barely active. I do think there's potential here though. I'm not the most techsavvy so I don't really understand the whole fediverse thing, and I think that's the thing keeping a lot of people away. Once you're here though it barely matters.

Leaving that toxic s-hole feels great. Reddits userbase had gone pretty horendous in the recent years and don't even get me started over the mods so I always begged for alternatives to be formed, I jumped ship the moment I found lemmy which is today.

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Been on Reddit since 2010. I'm hoping that Lemmy and other Fediverse apps sort of grow out of the meta-talk and comparisons to their centralized counterparts.

Otherwise, the communities themselves seem pleasant (or swiftly defederated from by the good ones). We don't quite the critical mass to get active niche communities, or hyper-specialized ones yet, which I kind of miss. Stuff like "here's a subreddit for each of these very specific habits that cats can have", or "talk about a particular species of parrot", y'know?

It’s decent, has a lot of room to grow though. I really miss the niche subreddits.

the fediverse has done a great job replacing reddit for my scrolling-though-random-stuff needs! as for more niche stuff, it's still not there yet (as has been pointed out many, many times already), but i'm trying to help! i'm posting and commenting regularly on !kirby@lemmy.world. "be the change you want to see" and all that. i encourage everyone else to do the same with their niche communities!

edit: though at this point i have 4 accounts across different instances (here, lemmy.world, kbin.social, feddit.online), thanks to various things. so it's not entirely smooth sailing for me right now

I like it. Unlike a lot of comments I see, I don't want hordes of people to come here from Reddit - I prefer to keep it smaller. Yes, it sucks that super niche communities are hard to get without tens of millions of people, but the drop in overall quality isn't worth it.

I love that it exists. I don't visit Reddit anymore, although I miss some communities, especially AskHistorians and AskScience. Otherwise, I can tolerate the teething problems of Lemmy (and kbin) in order to support a free internet. The latter is far more important, to me, than "better functionality"

Trying to figure things out. I like it so far, just feels a little different. A little more sparse. Using the Jerboa app, which seems okay. I miss Boost, but I think the dev is working on a Lemmy version.

Relatively little going on so I'm still gonna go back to reddit occasionally because for example on the software development side I've found the reddit communities really useful and they simply don't exist here.

Beyond this I'm determined to stick it out with lemmy. There are cute animal pics. There are memes and jokes. And a few other interests of mine are also reasonably active. It's almost enough to satisfy my desires for "doomscrolling" without being a total time trap. So that's nice.

With apologies for sounding like a McDonald's ad, I'm loving it!

I was very wary when I switched over the day before the app-pocalypse because of my experience trying to replace twitter with Mastodon, but this place has NOT felt like yelling into the void, it's immediately done most of what I used reddit for!

Incidentally (by coincidence) I registered on Mastodon yesterday evening, and I too felt like I had landed into an empty pit... Not sure why, by default everything is empty, and I tried adding interesting stuff to follow but somehow didn't find anything interesting

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I've been on the fediverse before, but never thought to use Lemmy/Kbin until the Reddit exodus. Joined a small community for the domain name and enjoyed it thus far.

That being said, some communities are missing or inactive, definitely gonna help out in that regard.

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A little intimidating at first but after finding a decent mobile app (connect) and following a few communities I think I'm getting it. The whole federation and indexing is really interesting to me and eventually I could see myself hosting a small instance.

I like it a lot, but it has a lot of bugs that drive me crazy. Particularly with the Jerboa app, but also on the web. That's part of the early days for any software, though, especially one undergoing an explosion in its userbase. I'm happy to stick it out, and Lemmy is already a ~90% replacement for what reddit has been to me for the last 10+ years (feels weird to say that).

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Lemmy scratches the Reddit itch for me. It doesn't have all my old niche communities yet, but it's got enough for me to log on and see what's happening in the Internet.

Also, I haven't been pestered to use an app since I got here, which is so nice. Reddit was getting more and more aggressive about that before I quit.

I've been spending more time here than reddit since they killed 3rd party apps. I'm liking it so far

loving it so far aside from comments randomly disappearing after i submit them, but im assuming that bug will eventually be worked out. i miss the big card interface reddit switched to but im currently using a custom css that makes lemmy look like old.reddit.com (modified to be amoled black) and it feels great.

I think it's really cool here. The people have been mostly friendly, the communities I'm following are decently active, and new features are being added every day. I honestly have very few complaints.

It's a lot better than the last time I was here. Last time a week later the top few posts were the same lol

Tbh not sure why I didn't join sooner. I really like the idea of Lemmy. I'm exited to see more communities come in and grow the platform. Would love to see more voices and perspectives, but I also kind of like the tiny bit of barrier to entry. If someone goes through the process of joining an instance and figuring out how all of this works then it means they really want to be here and they have some sense about them to get here. I really hope Lemmy flourishes and it's not a bubble because of Reddit.

Scratches the itch but like others I miss the more niche stuff.

But I'm trying to be the change I want to see

When federation works it is good. The instance I signed up for was missing quite a bit of posts across many of the different communities I had signed for. It seems better now after a recent upgrade, but unless one checks manually there is no way to know for sure if one's instance is federating properly.

The other issue I find is that because anyone can create a topic on any instance, that can cause fragmentation of less popular topics so basically none of the instances has a good representation on that given topic because the few people interested in the topic are scattered.

I'm liking it so far, but a couple of things confuse me about the multiple instances thing.

I've made an account in lemmy.world and for the most part, have found my favorite communities are on the grow here.

However, I know there are other popular instances like lemmy.ml and such. Do our accounts not work cross compatible across the various lemmy instances?

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So far I'm enjoying it! There have been a few hiccups, but things have been coming together, especially since Memmy and wefwef have taken over the void that Apollo left.

I've also got a Squabbles account, which is I guess where the people who got mad at Reddit but insist the Fediverse is too confusing ended up, but Lemmy seems to be advancing faster in features and app functionality. At this point, between Reddit and Twitter's bullshit, I'm trying it all.

It is a little difficult to find communities if they are not on your specific server and the apps are not quite there yet, but it is promising and I am happily getting settled in.

There are less people, but I enjoy it a lot. I more and more seldomly look into Reddit these days. I‘m much more active here, hoping that more and more users step over…

I think I sort of understand in theory how instances and the communities work, but I am confused about how it works in practice. I'll hopefully figure it out in time. I signed up via reddthat, so as long as they stay federated... I should still be able to see everything and do everything and have my comments be seen by everyone? Right?

I signed my mum up for Reddit 6 years ago and she's a daily user of that (lmao I help her with subreddits and try to help her not fall into weird rabbit holes, but over all she just looks at cat pictures and fun things) but I don't think she'd manage Lemmy. Maybe, if there were already more communities and more posts related to her interests, and I set Lemmy up for her, and nothing ever changed about how she would learn to use Lemmy. But I think just the nature of Lemmy - it's too new and the idea of instances and how they are federated is too confusing for now. Or maybe I just need to understand it better myself.

Yeah, I don't think lemmy is ready for very casual users like that yet at least, I've been here for 3 years on different accounts, and the difference in the last month or so has been staggering :)

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I definitely don’t ever have a reason to go back to Reddit, knowing that the subreddits I subscribed to will be here eventually if they’re not already

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I like it a lot. It still needs much more pull, which can only be achieved with more content and more name recognition. To that end I'm thankful for all the active users posting content here.

Another thing I notice is that it's a bit harder to get started with Lemmy for casual users than it is with Reddit - purely due to the federated nature. I think that Lemmy could gain significant ground if there were apps that made using Lemmy stupid simple and hid away the federated, decentralized nature when signing up for the service.

Really glad to be here. I wish there were more people here to contribute to the comments and wish more apps supported the instance I joined. It's growing though. Those things will improve quickly.

I prefer it. The concept of federation has been hard to wrap my mind around, but I think the issue with current-day reddit is that many communities became so large that interactions between users and even interactions with posts that are more than an hour old almost completely dried up (or at least that was my experience) which made the website a lot less interesting as a social platform and more of just a time-wasting doomscrolling link aggregation platform.

I've actually noticed that communities tend to be way more active per post here than on reddit. Also the quality of the content is just so much better. Only thing that sucks rn are all the mobile clients (from a Infinity user, none of them are well laid out ((wefwef is confusing)))

It's good but it doesn't have all fixes for all problems yet like reddit had

Seems OK, hoping Sync for Lemmy client adds a bit more polish, most current clients seem unfinished or a bit janky in some ways.

Ultimately, it'll just take me time to adjust to the new way of things and more users/content.

The only way I'll be going back to reddit is if I can use Sync, and that definitely isn't happening so I'll have to adjust.

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So much potential! All that has to happen, in my opinion, there needs to be 3 instances( at minimum) that will promise to never defederate anything! And I mean keep corporate meta bs included and as long as it's not illegal ( looking at you, r/jailbait) it should be included. This platform will take off!!!

Let everyone have an opinion, a voice. Even if it's offensive. There should be a place for racism, fat phobia and discourse of any kind. And then we can have a place for everything else in between. As long as we have that yin and yang on the Internet lemmy will take off! like nothing else in the world because if you don't want to see something just don't join that community or that a federation.

A truly open source and free place curated just for you based on what you want, what you desire and what you would like to learn, that, that's what this place is all about!

It's the pipe dreams that the internet should have always been.

That's just my 2¢. Let everyone have a place and let it be free!

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I'm liking it a lot. Completely replaced Reddit. Hopefully there will be fewer posts about how Reddit sucks soon as that will start to smell of obsession very quickly.

Kinda like how conservative subreddits were nothing but complaining about progressives, or how r/sino is nothing but trying to shit on America

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I'm really liking it. It's still missing a few of my old reddit communities but feels very much like reddit used to, it at least feels like I'm getting my fix. I'm using Connect to navigate Lemmy and it reminds me a little of my dear old Baconreader.

I've tried a few lemmy apps, but none of them (as far as I can tell) support swiping between posts

As in: you see a list of posts, click one to view, and after viewing: swipe from right to left to see the next post

Hopefully I'm wrong and someone can correct me!

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I've noticed that I come across the same posts more frequently on my front page here than on Reddit. Perhaps it would be solved as the userbase continues to grow. Other than that, I have no complaints. This platform is a perfect substitute for Reddit, if not better.

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I've been lurking for a few weeks now but finally made an account and I'm really liking it here. Less content but higher quality is preferable to tons of content but most of it is garbage like on reddit.

My main complaint is the fediverse isn't big enough to have a lot of activity on the more niche communities so I find myself going to reddit for a few of those subs still but only on my desktop so I can use old reddit and block ads.

Gonna try and contribute more here since it's much less toxic and noisy than reddit is.

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I'm digging it so far. Nothing to complain about. Just being patient with it's growth. Great potential.

It's a bunch of people chopping it up. I'm a fan. Mostly cause it's not apart of any economic system probly.

I prefer the smallish community size over the vast sea of opinion that is reddit.

I'm trying to like Lemmy, but too small of a community, therefore, not enough activities.

A lot of my favorite subs aren't here.

Signing up for non tech savvy ppl is a complete disaster. Took me more than. 30-45 minutes of reading to get to signup. Most of the top Instances are closed for registration. Even if those that are open would take hours to confirm our signup.

Oh, if you go on Google, search Lemmy, it is on the top list. Even the related article is a Wiki. Lemmy needs to be less complicated, as in, everyone go sign in and get on it.

Other than being a bit quiet, I am enjoying it more than I ever did reddit. It's the quiet, the newness, the wait for new communities to pop up, but most importantly, I don't get the feeling of overbearing moderators.

Thank you for taking all of us in.

Doesn't scratch the same itch yet. I have to cheat and go check out reddit every now and then.

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Currently I use Connect Lemmy for Android as with Jerboa there was a login issue when the server version wouldn't match. Not sure if this app is more resilient to this but it wasn't a good start. I couldn't use Lemmy properly for about a week or two. I also don't like that Lemmy is hard to search for new SubLemmy or search for results via Google. Before I just added "Reddit" to get the good results, I wonder how this will evolve if Lemmy gets bigger. Well and the whole kbing/Lemmy/mastodon link of the Fedyverse is really confusing for new people.

I like it a lot, but I do miss the multi-reddit feature, several communties in one feed. But so far, so good!

It's Much faster than reddit, no ads. it makes me think reddit should die at earliest

Growing pains for sure. The power of reddit is it's ubiquity - communities on reddit can be very granular because the critical mass has been reached for it to still function. I dont want the homepage of reddit, the social network black hole of endless scrolling, I want conversations about things I can't discuss anywhere else. Home assistant yaml tips and the best builds in Path of Exile and whatnot. While I like the long-term implication a of lemmy, right now it's specicially the worst part of reddit.

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r/NCD and various firearms related subreddits are all I miss from reddit.

Think it would be cool to start an instance dedicated to firearms where there's a general community and separate smaller communities dedicated to certain popular platforms or topics like r/longrange or r/ak47. If I take it upon myself to start this I'd try to keep it apolitical other than maybe a community dedicated to gun rights/control/policy discussion only.

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Not sure yet. Still getting the hang of it. I'll give a few more days/weeks but I thin the promise is there.

Noticing a lack of communities that cater to specific interests, like ones for specific video games. Most of the content I see is either porn or shitposting/memes. Hoping it continues to grow.

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It definitely was a rough start. Mastodon was already a bit more mature and the app ecosystem was way more vibrant. However I discovered the wefwef PWA and since it’s almost an Apollo clone it feels like home.

It's weird, a little quirky, and can be a unpredictable at times. It all adds to charm though and I love it.

i found it challenging to understand how to subscribe to communities across instances until i discovered the Home icon in the top right of lemmiverse.net. i wish there was a quick 'subscribe' button there that would help you build up your subscriptions fast.

generally, i feel good about it. waiting for a few communities i really enjoyed to pop up- watchexchange and watches are big ones imo.

glad to see two huge F1 communities though!

The biggest issue is discoverability. There's not federated way of linking to posts or comments and it's really hard to find the content that's there.

For example, if you subscribe to one of the bigger meme communities, your feed will be 95% memes and it drowns out everything else. But if you unsubscribe, you get 0% memes. So it's virtually impossible to get like ~20% memes.

The hot and active sortings, which should help you find worthwhile content are far too stable. They only push the same stuff over and over. Good new stuff often gets burried, because it doesn't have enough engagement to make it into hot/active which would provide engagement, while the stuff that's already there stays there.

Search is another big issue. On Reddit, if I read a post before, I could just search for it and find the post quite quickly. On Lemmy this hardly works at all.

Reddit's SEO is also really good, Lemmy's doesn't exist.

Other than that, it's a nice place. Discussions are civilized. I miss a lot of the more niche content, but maybe it will happen in the future.

Missing some of the communities I used to browse. On the other hand I can see porn on my feed again so that's nice.

It's lovely. Haven't looked back. The only thing I've even thought about going to reddit for in the last three weeks has been the occasional technical answer that comes up in a Google search.

I hope that in time the fediverse will become the same sort of resource.

It's fine, but I don't enjoy having to deal with federation stuff. It's doable, but it's not intuitive, and everything is a bit too disorganized.

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I'm getting used to Lemmy, really enjoying my experience so far. I'm using the Jerboa app and it has honestly worked very well. Slowly discovering more communities to join. I think I'm here to stay (and mostly lurk)

It's neat. I see a lot of potential in the platform. I look forward to seeing how it evolves.

Little bit on struggle bus. Looks like work blocks the instance I registered on so tried lemmy.world, but I guess I need a totally separate account to login to that? Seems a little fussy

Definitely a learning curve but WefWef has solved a lot of my initial issues. Definitely seems like a lot less obvious bits and garbage than Reddit, which was getting pretty bad.

But so far I’m glad to be on something decentralized and excited to see what this looks like a year from now.

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Good quality memes so far, content for specific communities such as games or sports is lacking

For the most part, there are maybe one or two subreddits I miss (ukrainianwar and wrexhamafc) and while I have found something for Ukraine, it's the quantity of content that was there. Beyond that, don't miss it at all, loving the vibe of lemmy, and glad I found a place to land. Oh and f$@% spez

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I realy like it, but I miss RIF. I use Jerboa now, but might switch an app. RIF was realy usefull for not looking at stuff (loading it) for seccond time. I saw purple link and just skipoed the post, without needing to open it or to load the image again.

It's a little routh around the edges but I love seeing how instances are developing. Also the vibes seem to be more united here.

Yeah the content isn't quite as niche yet, but I way prefer it

It keeps crashing and not loading stuff correctly and giving me lots of hang time.

A lot like Reddit around the time I left Digg

I'm loving it, here is my slogan. "When life gives you lemons, make Lemmy-ade"

I'm not particularly impressed, to be honest.

Aside from the performance issues (which I'm sure will be sorted out), the UI is awful. Seriously, how the hell am I supposed to join a community on desktop? The "subscribe" button is just a bit of text!

I understand the idea of the fediverse is to be decentralised, but it just doesn't make for a great user-experience. The whole thing doesn't really "click" in the same way reddit does. On top of that, it doesn't really have a big enough userbase yet. On reddit, big subs like gaming and movies a packed full of users, yet their equivalents seem pretty dead here.

I'm never going to install the official reddit app so I'm sure I'll be fine with Lemmy on mobile when the performance issues are sorted out, but I'll probably stick to reddit on desktop.

The “subscribe” button is just a bit of text!

Pretty sure this is just a bug. If you search for the community and then nav to it, it turns into an actual button. I have no idea why, but it's just a bug, not a UI decision...

Yeah, I stumbled upon that after making my post. It's still a pretty huge issue to have, IMO.

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