I run a few groups, like @fediversenews@venera.social, mostly on Friendica. It’s okay, but Friendica resembles Facebook Groups more than Reddit. I also like the moderation options that Lemmy has.
Currently, I’m testing jerboa, which is an Android client for Lemmy. It’s in alpha, has a few hiccups, but it’s coming along nicely.
Personally, I hope the #RedditMigration spurs adoption of more Fediverse server software. And I hope Mastodon users continue to interact with Lemmy and Kbin.
All that said, as a mod of a Reddit community (r/Sizz) I somewhat regret giving Reddit all that content. They have nerve charging so much for API access!
Hopefully, we can build a better version of social media that focuses on protocols, not platforms.
A year ago, I viewed the Fediverse as an unnecessary, complicated framework created by a handful of well-intentioned individuals as a solution to a problem that wasn’t really there.
Today, I view it as a necessity.
This past year has been a hard lesson for me to stop placing trust in massive, centralized web services like Twitter and Reddit and to start federating more of my online activity. There’s going to be growing pains, but Lemmy has been pretty good so far and it’s definitely going to be worth it in the end.
I hate when threads automatically update, scrolling content down my browser.
I hate that when I hit back on my web browser, it doesn’t bring me back to where I was previously on the page. I have to scroll down all over again.
Lack of content or small communities don’t bother me. It just means more people need to contribute, myself included.
This has been driving me nuts. I’ll be reading and come back to it a few mins later and it’s at the top again.
I signed up for Mastodon awhile back but never really got into it since I don’t really do Twitter much either. I have been reading about lemmy but didn’t sign up until today.
It was a little confusing trying to sign up, the first instance I tried to sign up with had a waiting period for account approvals but I finally found one I could sign up with instantly and then I started poking around. I think I am getting the hang of it!
I have also downloaded Mlem to test on my iphone. It’s easy and simple to use, not a lot of features yet but it seems promising.
So far outside of a bit of focus time to figure out how to actually get signed up and find communities to subscribe to I’m cautiously optimistic. This seems more like how the older days of the internet were, before the enshittification of social media. Let’s see if this trend continues!
I was never much of Twitter user, but I like mastodon due to the community. It’s such a wholesome place. Lemmy seems to be going that way as well.
I tried mastodon very briefly about 6mths ago, and it seemed pretty quiet ala diaspora - has it filled up a bit now?
I was never a big Twitter user. So it’s hard for me to judge, but it requires being a bit more active and following people.
Start searching hashtags and following the people you find interesting. I typically just use it as a way to scream into the void about what’s on my mind and then respond to the responses I get.
Yes - same for me, I love the reddit format compared to twitter, but also I just had bad luck with mastodon being really slow for me, but if all the things are self hosted - it’ll be inconsistent depending on the instance and load ~
Used Reddit for 13 years, tried out Kbin and Lemmy yesterday and settled on Lemmy.
Long story short, I’m going back to Reddit.
- There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto. This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting. Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.
I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.
Deciphering the distributed nature of it took me, a relatively tech-friendly person, almost the entire day and several ‘What the fuck?’ posts. I now understand it more. There are some very low-level guides that have been haphazardly put together, but there absolutely needs to be a MUCH smoother guide/explanation to this whole thing. That learning process will turn people away for sure.
- BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security. If this is going to become a mainstream thing, as it reaches and before it gets to that critical mass of users, there’s going to be SO. MANY. SECURITY ISSUES. There’s no 2fa at all, hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant, and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is. In the ‘Fediverse’ your server instance might be hosted in a US or EU data center with proper digital and physical security, or it could be Joe Blows basement in Iowa running off a NAS. The easy-to-see future here is that Lemmy will fail to attract a critical mass of people because they’ll initially arrive, after a few months their instances will just cease to exist/get shut down/the hosts will decide its no longer a fun hobby to do.
With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them. Beyond that, if there IS a breach, they have the ability to recognize it, understand the legalities and requirements of reporting it, and can be held accountable by regulatory bodies. Joe doesn’t have the resources to really maintain and keep a server running, nor the knowledge of his responsibilities for keeping the data safe digitally or physically.
On top of that, if Joe’s basement loses power/gets hacked/Joe decides he’s moving to San Fransisco and can’t bring his NAS with him and the server goes down, and that’s where my instance is hosted well there goes my entire account/comments/data.
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Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.
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There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me, and I’ve gotten used to having a single place to get it from that floods me with thousands of different articles/memes/posts/etc every minute. Until the user base arrives in one single place and starts generating content, there’s no reason for most people like me to be there as by far the larger number of users never create anything at all and only exist to consume the content generated.
What you’re describing is just another Reddit. Where, eventually, a few select individuals with all the power make the wrong decisions and this entire disaster happens all over again.
Lemmy (and the fediverse) is a chance to change all that. It brings power back to the people, to the community.
I think that’s the exact opposite of what this is. ALL the power on Lemmy is limited to 1 person: The instance host. They set the rules, they decide they don’t like you or the server, your entire account gets deleted because they shut it down. Another instance gets into a flame war or conflict with another, they block THE ENTIRE OTHER SERVER, essentially quarentining them out of existing.
BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security. If this is going to become a mainstream thing, as it reaches and before it gets to that critical mass of users, there’s going to be SO. MANY. SECURITY ISSUES. There’s no 2fa at all, hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant, and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is.
I wonder if IPFS would be better suited for the fediverse for this reason? You’ve brought up some solid points here and if history is anything to go by, it’s likely already seeing some exploitation in the wild. I think there’s likely to be a lot of work needed here. For example: Your cookies store JWTs in base85. Nice!
It’s funny; I know the usual advice is to stick to com/net/org, but I think there’s a certain crowd online that’s all about the wacky TLDs. I’ve definitely seen devs and artists with TLDs like .pizza and .rocks (not a portfolio, but https://stoneclub.rocks as example). I’ve seen enough of these sites that something like https://sh.itjust.works doesn’t make me blink and I trust I’d be able to tell a phishing site from folks playing with TLDs, but I can totally understand how that could be off-putting without that sort of background.
I hope the #RedditMigration sours adoption
I think you meant spurs lol
Anyway yeah I’m liking Lemmy and the fediverse so far. I actually prefer the UI/UX of https://kbin.social more for desktop, but Jerboa is great for mobile. If they stay actively in development it’s going to be hard to beat IMO
I’ve followed from Fark to StumbleUpon to Digg to Reddit, and now many years later, to Lemmy. I think the communities being spread across instances is extremely powerful for overall global community resiliency (if the separation is respected and we don’t end up with a bunch of duplicated “subs” everywhere).
I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of people say this today, but the one thing I feel the most is excitement. The chaos reminds me of the early-ish days (~1996?) of the web when everything was discoverable and not already aggregated to be served up to you inbetween advertisements.
This is how I feel too! “Old internet energy” is what I’ve called it, and it’s great to feel that again
The chaos reminds me of the early-ish days (~1996?) of the internet
The early days of the Web. Te early days of the Internet came much earlier.
Yes, the web.
Yep, I actually caught that typo and edited it, but it’s frustrating that the edit didn’t federate to your server. Oh well, maybe that will improve with time 🤷♂️
Its pretty much the same as old reddit, so it is fine. I am sure that there will be addons and stuff to bring back any functionality that is missing.
In terms of the community, it is hard to say - the same subs that I spent so much time and enjoyed so much are either not here or nowhere near as big and developed. I used to spend a lot of time on Formula1, Battlebots, but my account was nearly 12 years old and I had many that I used to visit from time to time for fun. Many of those are just not there in any meaningful way.
It is just going to take time to rebuild, I think.
16 year user of reddit here, just create the communities you miss. With the massive influx of users, they will fill up quickly. It only took 1 day after I created lemmy.world/c/psvr for people to start posting content there. It feels to me like it will only take a few weeks before we can have some semblance of parity to reddit content. And it feels much more like pre-digg migration reddit to me, which is very much a good thing. I think the golden years for lemmy will be coming quite soon.
Redditor of 11 years here - i feel you.
For what it’s worth, i’m trying to start one of my favorite reading subs (maliciouscompliance) -
/c/maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/c/maliciouscompliance
!maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world
I’m interested in Battlebots too, so if you start one I’ll definitely join!
I’m loving it. It’s like the good old days of smaller forums, except they all link together to become a reddit-like conglomerate, best of both worlds.
I love it it because i don’t feel like my comments on posts just get lost in a landslide of other comments. It’s a smaller community but we have access to so much content through the fediverse. It’s perfect
The community, particularly Beehaw, is fantastic! I love it.
Lemmy itself needs a lot of work. It’s incredibly far behind, but my expectations are staying measured and I’m excited to see how it develops. Right now it’s not a case of me enjoying the platform itself, but more so ‘putting up’ with the limitations of the platform to access the nice community.
Jerboa is the mobile client I’m using currently, and it’s off to a good start but needs a lot of fixes to be fully usable. Such as sorting comments and searching. The ability to easily click a button to jump to the next comment thread is my most missed feature as well from clients such as Boost for Reddit.
Additionally, I still have issues signing into the mobile website. I can sign in through Jerboa or the Beehaw website on desktop, but not on mobile (or at least not always). So I’m often navigating content on the mobile website, then using Jerboa to comment on it. Most won’t deal with these issues, but I’m still holding out to see what comes from it all.
A couple of last side notes, it’s really annoying to need to click on the title, and not being able to click on the text of a post to navigate (mobile site) - and visually it needs some improvements to draw more people in. That last part seems minor, and for a large part of the existing community, myself included, it truly minor - but for widespread adoption it needs a big revamp.
Completely agree. Great start but room for improvement.
I’m hoping that some of the Reddit 3rd party app developers seize the momentum and either port their apps to Lenny or write a purpose built app. The big ones like Apollo and RIF would draw a tonne of users just by supporting Lemmy.
It feels like the start of something new, you know? Sort of exciting because coming from Reddit to Lemmy feels like taking a leap of faith as we are looking for this place to replace what we have lost. At the end of the day, communities are what make or break a platform and we have that going.
In terms of the platform itself, I am still trying to figure my way around here but the UI/UX feels easy to interact with. I guess I would love to have a mobile app for iOS down the line to replace my addiction to Apollo!
I am enjoying actual discussions and not just hot takes or rants. I don’t care if the platform is “perfect”. It’s good enough for me. The admins aren’t some corporation just looking for pavlovian click labor (‘likes’ and upvotes) to power their algorithm run ad fest.
I’m quietly hopeful that more and more people migrate over to lemmy, if it wasn’t for all this api nonsense I’d have never heard of the fediverse. I don’t know how it passed me by but I’m glad to be here now.
As others have said, I need it to not act like a Twitter feed and constantly update, pushing stories down the page as new ones come in even while I’m trying to read the existing ones. I suspect that fixing this will also make returning to the page from a followed link not send me back to the top, because that is really annoying. Navigation is also a bit clunky at the moment, and it’s still hard to switch to a new community without going all the way back to the main page. I feel like the negatives are outweighed by the positives however, and I’m really starting to like this place…
I also wonder/hope if specialized Lemmy apps can paper over friction issues like these. For example i know that RedReader prefers viewing the cache of pages if recent
Edit: and oh lord please fix the cross-instance community links 😭
I like it and was able to adapt easily, but some of the UI is terrible (and I mean this in a constructive way), specifically:
- Page weight is too high, when I use back/forward or switch tabs on mobile my browser has to do a full refresh. Tildes and kbin are very lightweight by comparison, not sure what the JS code of Lemmy/Beehaw are doing to cause this issue.
- Adding new subs is confusing, but mostly because the “Subscribe” button is hidden by default when you visit a community on another instance.
- The process of subscribing is convoluted You 1. visit an instance, 2. find a community, 3. copy the url,4. go back to your community, 5. past it, 6. open the search link in your instance, then 7. click subscribe and wait a little. It feels like that can be streamlined or something.
- Loading “All” is slow, I understand why, but the UI should do something to explain it to me instead of popping in posts.
But, the discussion seems good, the actual UI is reminiscent of old reddit so I’m happy, and I’m surprised how easy it is to discuss things across instances.
Cross-instance discussion is definitely great! I agree with the UI gripes you have, but I’m mainly just excited for someone to make a LES like we had RES
Another really clunky thing I noticed right away is that there’s a huge difference between viewing a sub through your home instance vs its home instance, in that you’re no longer logged in when using the remote instance’s URL, and there’s no obvious way to get back to the corresponding location on your home instance. This means, for example, that when someone posts a link to another thread, it’s always kind of broken for remote users.
I feel like something could be done to ease interoperability using the same techniques ad trackers use.
I’m especially baffled as to why the UI had a dedicated button to view content on its home instance. I can see how that might be useful in some circumstances and it would make sense to have it hidden in a menu, but I think it’s just a confusing distraction for new users who typically have no use for a crippled view of what they’re already looking at.
Enjoying it, but wondering if I’m missing a way to work backwards to find communities.
I’ll give an example - Sleep Token, a band I like, released an album not too long ago. If I Google “reddit sleep token”, I can see a few communities like /r/metalcore and /r/progmetal discussing them, so I can guess I might want to join those communities.
If I Google for “lemmy sleep token”, I get a bunch of random websites with articles about sleep token with links and quotes about motorhead.
Whats the strategy for working backwards like that on Lemmy? Is there one?
I haven’t been able to find a Sleep Token community either, I’m not sure one actually exists. I was thinking of making one.
You could try this page to find communities though, it indexes most of the large instances: https://browse.feddit.de/
I would join, I love them/him
Yeah, I wondered if that was maybe part of the problem - that my Google search strategy would technically work, it’s just that no one is posting about it on lemmy yet.
It reminds me of when I first got into Linux. It’s different and has bit of a learning curve, but it is always what makes it exciting and fun to start using.
