How has ur lemmy experience been so far?

Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to become a member of the community, theres a reasonable amount of subs (or whatever the other word for em is) that fit my interests, enough linux content and shitposting for my liking, and the overall random posts made by people equally fed up with Leddit. (also i admit i used reddit a little cus there was this post on the fedora sub showing how to fix a sound issue i been having after a recent update)

aianarchist,

Subbing to unsynced communities is currently not the best experience. I think instances which know about each other should share the list of users/subs on a regular basis.

Showervagina,

Agree. I was so confused as to why posts and comments were missing.

tmpod,
@tmpod@lemmy.pt avatar

Yeah, that's still a weakspot, but there have been discussions on how to solve it. The next few releases will be pretty important.

Showervagina,

Redditfugee here. Lemmy is like if reddit and IRC had a baby. Some honest feedback:

  • Can lemmy.ml open signups so they don't need to be approved? At least temporarily. 90% of people are going to end up here when checking out lemmy. We want to make it as easy as possible for them to sign up and get started.
  • It's confusing how communities on other servers aren't automatically and easily available. You can add them but they should visible from the start.
  • If you add an external community and are confused as to why it's missing comments and posts, there should be a message to tell the user that it's fine, it's just syncing.
mustyOrange,

undefined> Can lemmy.ml open signups so they don’t need to be approved?

That probably won't happen - any old timers here correct me if any of the following is incorrect, I hope im not being confidently incorrect. The amount of resources that the server needs, and the amount of mods it would take for that, would be quite a bit. Think of it this way - its not like lemmy.ml is meant to be reddit as a whole. Its mean to be one singular small-ish instance of something similar, of which the server is ran on some private place by people largely doing it out of the goodness of their own heart. If one instance gets too big, that requires a lot of resources, and could likely kill the instance. Not only that, but open registration just screams bot abuse

Its better to have things more decentralized, and have people go to new instances so that theres not a huge influx that burns moderators and resources out. Im personally hoping that more instances pop up for more niche things - ie, a server for sports, or for pc building etc

tmpod,
@tmpod@lemmy.pt avatar

First of all, welcome! I hope you have a nice stay :D

Now, to answer your points:

  1. I'm quite positive that won't happen any time soon because registration needing approval was the only measure that realistically stopped bots, and with the new influx of users, it would be a bad idea to turn it off. A solution would be to get more people to approve users, instead of disabling the protection. Either way, the developers are making an effort to push people towards other generic instances, because lemmy.ml is not supposed to be a flagship instance, despite always being seen as one (and understandably so).
  2. Servers can't know what communities exist on servers they do not know, but I agree this should be more robust and easy for the end user. Federating servers should periodically exchange a list of communities to help with discoverability. For now though, there's https://browser.feddit.de.
  3. Definitely. It should be made very clear. If you can, you should try opening an issue on the lemmy-ui repository about it, if there's none already.
Showervagina,
  1. Makes sense. Is mirroring feasible? Happy to help there.
  2. Yeah I get it. Maybe there could be a button of servers to show, and by default it shows everything. Allow users to paste in a server list.
  3. Will do.

Also Lemmy could use a way to easily mirror Lemmy sites to help with overloaded servers. This is actually what I thought lemmy was at first, a giant decentralized IRC-meets-Reddit.

I think from 12-14 june all lemmy servers should have a giant "hello redditors" banner with a how-to of setup. Put instant registration servers at the top of the list. And a quick how to. Simple is best. Relax normal rules and moderation.

I hope I'm not too critical. I see a future in lemmy but what I don't want are redditors coming over, getting frustrated and confused, then leaving. We do well, we could very well end up being the successor to reddit. If things are buggy and difficult, not so.

tmpod,
@tmpod@lemmy.pt avatar
  1. I suppose you could somehow spin up a new instance and attempt to mirror exactly another one, but I don't think it would work very well, since you wouldn't be able to comment/vote as a user of the mirrored instance.
  2. mmm, a "mass" server follow thing could be neat, but also could be an easy point for bad actors to abuse.

I think from 12-14 june all lemmy servers should have a giant “hello redditors” banner with a how-to of setup. Put instant registration servers at the top of the list. And a quick how to. Simple is best. Relax normal rules and moderation.

Yeah, there has been some work towards improving the documentation. A nice banner pointing to it would be nice for new users.

I hope I’m not too critical. Criticism like you're doing it is fine and needed! Lemmy was a very small project until some days ago and any help is highly appreciated, be it suggestions, contributions or donations. Thank you!

polygloton, (edited )

I read the Lemmy Documentation before signing up for a server and that has helped me to understand what is going on here. I would say that my experience has been generally positive. I really like this platform.

tmpod,
@tmpod@lemmy.pt avatar

Nice! The documentation still needs some improvements, but fortunately the new influx of users also meant a new influx of contributors and there's already been work on improving everything in Lemmy, including the docs :)

Stecharan,

It reminds me of old reddit, so I'm pretty happy with it. I hope we aren't going to completely ruin whatever the Lemmy old guard had going on, though.

Nyaa,

As someone who used Lemmy before but made a new account during this migration, this is a very welcome thing. The biggest issue Lemmy has always had was lack of content, and lack of contributors. This burst of new users, even if a large percent don't stay, will be really good for both

averagedrunk,

This will be the second time in my life that I'm the kind of person the old guard complains about. Usually I'm the old guard. This is exciting!

SanityFM,

It's good. Except for the confusion about linking to communities on different servers. That's a real show stopper, if you ask me. Which you did, technically.

Soullioness,

I'm honestly really lost and just stumbling around in the dark. It's been really confusing to learn about federation and what ever makes lemmy so unique.

But I'm really happy to see an open source alternative to reddit which is cool.

aianarchist,

Glad there's a reason for people showing up! I'm all in if people will stay.

falk1856,

I'm still getting used to the whole "instance" thing but I think that a FOSS, decentralized thing has a better chance to stick around a while.

neo,
@neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space avatar

It might be easier to just think of it like email, or newsgroups.

FriendlyFusion,

It’s exciting to think any one of us can learn Rust and contribute code. These are the social media platforms of the future

jonahan,

Just joined and other than the app being kinda slow I can get used to this.

SeeleLowe,

Which app are you using? I don't think there is a official app but many unofficial ones maybe?

jonahan,

https://join-lemmy.org/apps is where I found it.

Herb,

This feels a lot like Reddit did 15 years ago, when they first introduced subreddits-- like I'm seeing something brand new for the first time, but it's somehow comfortable and innocent.

Neptune014, (edited )

Just signed up a few minutes ago. I honestly really like it so far. I was never into Twitter but I did try out mastodon and just couldn't get used to the look of everything. It was also confusing to sign up. So far Lemmy has been great. I am surprised how many active users there are. I was worried it would be super dead.

edit: spelling

a1studmuffin,

Same experience here, I checked out Mastodon and was impressed with the fediverse and open nature of everything, but the style of social media just didn't gel with me. Not surprising as I was exactly the same with Twitter.

I was literally saying "someone needs to make Mastodon for Reddit" before I discovered Lemmy!

I feel like a lot of the discussion on here at the moment is obviously focused on Lemmy itself and Reddit, but that's not surprising given the huge influx of new users.

Looking forward to the various communities and platform itself maturing. The first time I've been optimistic about social media in years, haha.

Neptune014,

Totally agree with everything. Another major complaint I see people making is that smaller communities will form when we should just have one central one for each topic. I think this will naturally sort itself out. I will likely join a community if the content is good and the people are nice. If there is a community with 2k people and everyone is mean but a small one with 10 people and good content, I'll join that one.

Like you I am very excited to see where it goes. I don't think it can become massive. But it would be nice to see communities with 500k people in them. Optimizing server hosting is probably one of the biggest problems right now. I also wonder how the larger instances will make enough money to cover cost of servers.

Tobi,

I don't really like how the front page looks, it reminds me of new reddit and the official reddit app a bit too much. Other than that, I'm still just looking around and haven't done much. I downloaded an app but it's kinda bad and I'd rather just use a browser for now

Neptune014,

I wonder if there is a way to do custom stylesheets. I know this might not be easy for new users. But using a browser plugin to change the style of the website to your liking should be possible.

Diogo,

It's taking me a bit to grasp the practical use of the "federated" thing.

It seems like there aren't a lot of tutorial-type instructions on the web of how to use it. Like a YouTube video.

I would be nice if a good number of redditors would join for activity to flourish.

Barbarian, (edited )
@Barbarian@sh.itjust.works avatar

Be the change you want to see! This is an open source project, not a for-profit company, so that kind of thing is down to us.

If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer. I may be new to Lemmy (5 days old user), but I've been following the fediverse for a while, and I get a lot of what's happening here at a UI & technical level.

In terms of making a youtube video, I've never made one before, maybe somebody reading this can make a decent video covering the basics?

Edit: Thought I might as well answer the first part, practical use of "federated" thing. Spez is an asshole, right? Well, what if you could just block Spez's server and just keep on chugging, and lose absolutely nothing? Maybe you're on Spez's server. Easy, just move to a different Spez-free server and everything just works exactly the same. The federation gives protection against bad-actor admins.

The logical next question is ok, we can protect against greedy power-hungry assholes, but what about bad actors? What if a new instance starts, let's call it nazi.st, and they are arguing with everybody and start fights? Simple. If everybody on an instance is being assholes, egged on by asshole admins, then your instance can just block them. Famously, Truth Social is just another Mastodon instance. They've been blocked by every single other Mastodon server and now they're just shouting at themselves.

Tobi,

So what happens if your instance blocks my instance and we both participate in a thread in a third instance? Are we invisible to each other? Can you reply to me? Can i reply to you? Will we see each other's comments?

Bumblefumble,

Thanks for explaing this, as someone new to this whole thing coming for reddit, it is a bit of an adjustment. Does this not come with the problem of sort of diluting the same topic out in different places. Like say the different servers all have a "technology" instance, and they all have a post about Apollo shutting down right now. Then you will have many different discussions going on in separate places about that. Is that correctly understood?

Barbarian,
@Barbarian@sh.itjust.works avatar

So, there's 2 separate issues colliding here:

  1. Nobody atm knows what the hell they're doing, what their instance will eventually become, what communities will die or survive. Beehaw (your server) is the best situated for this. They tightly control the new communities made, and will only make a new one if absolutely necessary. There's gonna be a lot of single user communities in a week. People simply don't get that you can't just create a super niche community of /c/PeopleWhoPlayMySuperSpecificHouseruleSystemBasedOnGURPSv1987 and summon users from the void.
  2. /r/Tech, /r/Technology, /r/Computing, and /r/TechNews. Which of these is the "real" technology subreddit? Should we close down the other three? Some amount of dispersion is natural and normal. A user can just subscribe to all of them if they really want. Reddit is far more fragmented than you might realize.
Bumblefumble,

Thank you so much for your reply. It makes sense and I agree with you. I guess in the end the community on an arbitrary instance might win out as the main one for each niche hobby, so that most talk will happen there, with others as alternatives. I'm really looking forward to the experience of getting used to this and getting it up and running.

CaptainEffort,

How do you think niche communities will succeed? Will they be more successful in more populated servers? Like should a Monster Hunter community be made in a server dedicated to gaming? Hoping this makes sense, I'm still trying to understand how it all works.

Barbarian, (edited )
@Barbarian@sh.itjust.works avatar

There's no rulebook, it depends on how the community wants to do it.

Take my thinking here with an EXTREME grain of salt. This is just me, and how this place would work in an ideal scenario in my head. I have no control over what people want to do, how they want to structure their own instances, anything like that. With all that pre-amble out of the way:

An instance should contain people that are generally on the same page. Maybe one instance is more techy, another more social activists, another more art & literature, and we've already seen that language-specific regional instances are doing well. They should maintain enough diversity that they don't become echo chambers or cliquey. They all have their own rules, and enforce them on their own users and visitors to their communities.

The communities on a particular instance should play to the strengths of their users. The communities should reflect the general vibe of the users. Users will, naturally, have more interests than their instance provides for and pull in stuff from other instances. In a sense, your instance and the communities in it are your home street, where you know most of the active users, and the others are the big city, where you go to get things you can't on your street.

CaptainEffort,

Thanks for this, it actually helped a lot! I think I'm finally starting to figure things out lol. I do really like this idea though, as I think it'll lead to a lot less friction in various communities than Reddit had, where fighting in the comments was just commonplace. Either way I'm excited to see how things progress!

And thank you again, I really appreciate it!

Barbarian,
@Barbarian@sh.itjust.works avatar

No problem, happy to help. Oh, and just to reinforce the whole instances as home street, I already have some expectations & stereotypes about beehaw users: Goody two-shoes, but great to talk to :P

Feel free to shoot me any more questions. I'm feeling very contemplative, although that might just be the beer talking.

rimlogger,

I'm very impressed with the federation here. Kept thinking each instance was on its own but you can post across different instances. Kind of neat.

Impulse0424,

Absolutely, I actually downloaded a lemmy app then deleted it because I thought I had to create another account for each instance. So glad to see that I was wrong. Happy to be here as a reddit refugee!

FistfulOfBottlecaps,

My instance gets an occasional hiccup but usually reloading the page gets me through. Even if Lemmy doesn't end up with a Reddit-sized userbase I'm excited to see what it becomes. All-in-all feeling pretty positive about it.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • asklemmy@lemmy.ml
  • ethstaker
  • DreamBathrooms
  • normalnudes
  • magazineikmin
  • InstantRegret
  • GTA5RPClips
  • thenastyranch
  • Youngstown
  • rosin
  • slotface
  • osvaldo12
  • ngwrru68w68
  • kavyap
  • everett
  • megavids
  • Durango
  • Leos
  • cubers
  • mdbf
  • khanakhh
  • tester
  • modclub
  • cisconetworking
  • anitta
  • tacticalgear
  • provamag3
  • JUstTest
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •