I run a few groups, like @[email protected], 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.
For wide spread adoption there are a lot of issues with the fediverse. The main one is the home pages of fediverse instances or join-X.org sites immediately turn people away with their language, jargon and content. Nobody cares about the open source licence, or how it’s “federated” or what the developers can do, or that you can run your own server or what languages and frameworks it’s built on etc. These all will turn people away. Literally the first sentence on join-lemmy is “Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform”. Nobody wants to self host anything (well I do, but near to 100% of people don’t). Then there are screen shots of code diff’s and actual code, then a list of programming languages, then some Latin with hard to see ‘mod tools’, and then at the end back to self hosting “With Lemmy, you can easily host your own server, and all these servers are federated”. None of this is enticing people in. It’s turning people away.
These entrances to the fediverse should be about community, discussions, engagement etc. That’s what people want to sign up for and start participating. Just get them signed up. Once they’re in they can learn about the other benefits and that they can move the profile to different servers, or whathaveyou. Keep all the other bumf hidden away behind a “benefits” link.
Someone needs to come up with better terminology to fediverse and federated to avoid having to explain it all the time. It’s federated… You know… Like email. Well I’ve used email a long time and nobody has ever called it federated or used that term before when talking about any aspect of email - and I run my own email server.
Tl:dr: just cut the crap and make on-boarding easier. Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.
In theory, I agree with you! A 100%, but the problem is that currently Lemmy doesn’t support migrating your profile to a different server. So that already slightly complicates things. So from the get-go they are forced to make choice. A choice which isn’t clear, what potential consequences are and the fact they currently easily migrate to a different server, obviously doesn’t help.
“Like email” is basically the same description I’ve been using to explain it to non-tech people.
Long story short, onboarding needs to get better. But that also applies for other Fediverse projects (like Mastodon or Friendica).
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 cannot collapse subthreads. I really would.
I was one of the original refugees from digg.com. This feels like R*ddit of old - simple layout, techie userbase, friendly community. Feels like home.
It’s hardly been 24 hours, but this is the most engaged I’ve felt in an online space in years. I’ve gone on a k.bin/Lemmy/Mastodon tear over the past day, exploring instances and looking for the one that I vibe with the most. So far I’ve been very happy with Beehaw as my home base, and love that I still have access to the communities on the other instances as well. Sure, it takes a slight bit of effort to find communities and make sure that I’m subscribed to them on this account, but I’ve actually found some satisfaction in the process.
Sure, there’s a low volume of content compared to the old place. But if I wanted a constant barrage of content, I could just go back to RSS readers and have my fill. It’s the discussion and sense of connection that has made it worth investing my time here.
Hard agree, definitely feels more personable. People are making an effort to understand one another and people are collectively calling out the shitty things. Very nice change of pace
honestly I hope it stays this active. fediverse feels more at home to someone whos been on the internet since before it was so centralised, something like this feels like a good mix. lots of different decentralized sites able to communicate with eachother, rather than just one site holding everyone hostage. mastodon never really took off too big but I hope lemmy can make it happen.
Mastodon, Akkoma, Pleroma, Calckey and Misskey together are somewhere in 15-16M users. There is already so much content it is impossible to catch it all. And it is still growing.
God damn, Linus Torvalds is roasting Nazi trolls in there, it is awesome.
I would definitely say the whole Twitter-like side of Fediverse really took off…
well i cant deny that, but i guess i mean in a sort of day-to-day way. like, if i ask one of my friends what their mastodon is, they would probably look at me sideways or ask if i mean the band. lol
And then again a lot of queer/trans community is very active in there. And same for Rust/NixOS community.
Frankly I’m happy Mastodon didn’t become the leader in the fediverse. My main paint point with twitter was how the character limit really stifled long form discussion. Much more nuanced, complex conversations can be held here since we’re not chained to 250 characters.
Both can peacefully co-exist. There’s a market for folks who like micro blogging and a market for deeper reddit style discussions. Them being able to talk to each other is a bonus.
Yes, I looked at Mastodon a few years ago. Micro-blogging is more person focused and encourages short more or less meaningless posts. I am into more thoughtful content focused on the content not the people. Just does not fit my style. Never really understood the Twitter craze. Must fit a certain kind of personality or maybe it is a business model or something.
If you run Akkoma, you can choose the character limit. My instance has 5000 as the limit. And the same apps work, you can even use the Mastodon frontend with it.
I always thought the original idea of witter was to post a link with a headline. You know, like this:
Pi-hole FTL v5.23, Web v5.20 and Core v5.17 released https://pi-hole.net/blog/2023/05/28/pi-hole-ftl-v5-23-web-v5-20-and-core-v5-17-released/
If you’re trying to have a meaningful conversation about the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, it’s going to feel very awkward trying post your ideas one sentence at a time.
The problem is not all conversations are either sharing an interesting link or deep conversations about life, the universe, and everything. What if I just want to give my opinion on a pie recipe I liked, but want to say more than “damn that shit was good!”. Twitter stifles all forms of conversation, it’s a site dedicated to one liners and quips. Even what I’m saying now is more than 250 characters.
@Hamartiogonic @SenatorBumCuckets
Interesting, I’m actually thinking that the character limit forces the user to put certain thoughts and pieces into paragraphs.
It becomes easier to interact with, e.g. disagreeing with opinions expressed in *one* easily linked to piece of the whole, as having to “disagree with *some unspecified* parts of a monolithic text”.
But I do understand that people don’t like to be… Aggressively encouraged to be brief.
Have you noticed that when children try to explain something mundane, they end up rambling on on using lots and lots of simple words, even though you could have said the same thing in a single sentence? Well, that’s because children aren’t that experienced in concise expression. Adults face the same situation when discussing more complex subjects on Twitter. An experienced writer could be able to squeeze complex ideas into a single tweet, but normal people just can’t without making some serious compromises. You could cut the story short and risk being misunderstood or split the idea it into 42 separate tweets.
Even if you manage to find the most concise expression, it might also be so obscure and antiquated, that the other people just wouldn’t understand it. Seems like the limitations of Twitter make it very difficult to discuss complex topics such as climate change, immigration, religion, ethics, politics etc. without starting WW3 while you’re at it.
Alternatively, you could always include a bunch of disclaimers with all of your comments just to point out that you’re actually only saying about 10% of what you actually believe.
BTW I support solar power (with many caveats), nuclear power has its downsides (even more asterisks here), and I use a paper filter when making coffee (super complicated topic).
Same here, it’s quite interesting. ~Cherri
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s looking great! I joined just 2 days ago and the communities I subscribed to are already looking much more lively today. Thanks, Reddit blackout!
Also written in Rust, btw :)
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?
it is really annoying to subscribe to communities on federated servers – there should be a link that will redirect you to your home server. As of now I seem to have to copy and paste the community address into the URL because the feddit.de community search doesn’t seem to be working for me
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’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 do miss having a high-quality iOS app most, but mlem is certainly off to a good start.
Not a huge fan of the UI (so much wasted space!) but it works for now. I’m subscribed to a few communities but the content is pretty stale. I’ve seen the same posts at the top for a few days now. The “Active” selection keeps the same things over. I tried a few of the other selections (Hot, Top Day, etc) but there is this weird thing where it randomly refreshes the feed and adds one or two new posts at the top and then pushes everything down. Again, UI/UX issues.
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 think its a little rough around the edges, but thats to be expected given that its less than a year old. The big hit for me is the mobile app which just isn’t that good. This will come with time. I’d rather have an half-baked implementation thats showing promise over what Reddit is doing. I like decentralized social media because you can pick and choose what communities you interact with. If lemmy.world decides to go full enshitification (although I can’t figure out how they would monetize), you can just pack up and going to another community.
This honestly reminds me of when I was growing up in the early 00s, I was part of several different community forums that I loved dearly. There were other groups I looked into, but some were just toxic and unappealing, so I left after a while. I feel like Lemmy gives us the same freedom. I really hope to meet some awesome people here. Right now it’s just big enough to still allow meaningful dialogue and create cool relations. I felt like Reddit was too big for its own good even with niche subreddits; it didn’t feel like posting was worth it as it would get buried or just get a low effort response.
