This seems like the first thing with enough critical mass to get going, what with reddit and twitter sulimultaneously imploding faster than a poorly constructed submersible craft. It's not driven by political outrage so much as the old platforms making themselves unusable and forcing healthy users off their platforms.
Incoming user from reddit! My app got shut down. I was salty about it so I decided that I was going to find an alternative, rather than use the official app, and I found lemmy! I like the community vibe so far. I'm still figuring out how different communities and instances work together with federating. I was always more of a lurker on reddit, but I might try to become a more active commenter (for community engagement!)
I think it would be nice to expect to see user's full addresses in ui. You can tap around and find it in the options but that takes an active input. If someone is trying to spoof a well known user it should be readily apparent by their @instance registration.
This made me spit lmao
It's me! I'm one of the new joiners! I've been enjoying the content and discussion here in the last day since I created my profile here. I have noticed a bit of lag and issues with things loading. I know there was a software update and obviously a sudden influx of new users. As frustrating as it was to have to move apps and communitie and despite the obvious growing pains, I have been happy to find a new community that is friendly and vibrant as this one!
I lurk because I'm afraid of being stupid and annoying when I comment on posts 😬
I agree. The domain is an important part of knowing what to expect. Different instances hold users to different standards. At very least it's a differentiation between two users with the same name on different instances
Lemmy.world got a lot more usable today. Idk if they addressed issues with resources or enough people left and went elsewhere. I definitely experienced some initial frustration I also made an account at lemm.ee but I have been sticking with my first dot-world one for now.
Lemmy user for a couple of days here. I jumped on lemmy.world because it was big and the name suggested it was universal and open, it had open registration and allows nsfw content.
I suffered through the technical issues many of us experienced, but everything seems much better and smoother now (maybe because they were able to fix the issues, or maybe because enough people left because of them, I can't say!)
Does it matter what you use? Yes and no, I guess. Apparently the last few days performance issues were mostly local to dot-world. I did make another profile on lemm.ee and I noticed the different instances seem to show different feeds with some different content, but also many of the same posts from the same communities as well. I'm still trying to figure out how they decide what they show in their feeds. Something to do with federation, I guess, but I'm not pretending to understand the meaning of that concept yet. Given that instances can choose to federated or defederate, it seems like it must matter to some extent what instance you are on even though content can be shared between instances.
Lemmy is the only decent alternative I've seen, besides the other ActivityPub federators. There was literally nothing else besides Mastadon (I had heard of this before and considered it) and kbin (only know about this since I joined lemmy.) Lemmy had the right combination of features, and a cuter name, so it won the most of us (I believe that's a big part of the reason.)
Every other alternative to the big social media is too niche, and often dominated by a particular world view or specific community grievance. Lemmy picked up a broad sample of users that reddit just suddenly and indiscriminately cut off without a moment for second thoughts. We're not a monoculture the only thing we have in common is we used alternative apps for reddit and we were too stubborn to move to the official app. That gives us a lot of diversity in the community and an edge on passionate eccentricity.