Redditors, how do you like Lemmy?

I run a few groups, like @fediversenews, 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 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.

boomer,

Too highly moderated. "Can I go owt an pway wif my fwends dad? " for real. You all need to chill out a bit. What was the whole point in federating if you’re just gonna mod the $$&%# out of everything 🤷‍♂️ chill out, for real.

Thelaea,

I like it so far, but my reddit was very well curated, it can’t live up to that yet. Lemmy can be a bit confusing at times and the ‘all’ option seems to be either not moving at all or at a million miles an hour. It will take me a while to get a nice feed, I think.

cuchilloc,

I’m a software dev, early adopter of most techs I find, and I had like more than a week trying stuff out to replace he-who-shall-not-be-nameddit. After some trial and error, and wefwef, I’m confident I found a replacement. But I seriously doubt most people will adopt it. I think the communities will diverge, and I will think of Lemmy as the new reddit and reddit as the new Instagram anyway.

spaghetti_carbanana,

I’m the admin of krabb.org, honestly I’m loving it. There is a learning curve, particularly for non-technical folks, but that will get easier as time goes on.

As an admin, it is far easier to “jump start” an empty Lemmy instance with content from other instances than it is to do with Mastodon and Pixelfed.

Where we need to improve is the mobile apps, documentation and providing ways to make it easier for small instances to get new users. These are all very much in the spotlight and improving every day (especially the apps), so I’m confident we can get there

Tldr: it good, do like

rm_dash_r_star,
@rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee avatar

Lemmy has bugs and lacks features. Assuming those get ironed out and I expect they will in time, I'll like it a lot better than Reddit. Actually even with its shortcomings I like it better. The issues facing Reddit are of a different nature and for sure those will never get worked out, only worsen.

Otherwise the content on Lemmy is adequate for me. What's interesting is I actually get more rounded information here. Reddit is so big that I can only subscribe to a limited number of subs before I get overloaded. Here I'm subscribed to a pretty long list of communities so I see posts on a much wider array of topics.

I think people are bit intimidated by the Fediverse at first. Once you have a basic understanding of what's going on, it becomes pretty transparent. It's just the added step of finding a good instance to log into. Once you've overcome that, it's all downwind sailing.

KerryAnnCoder,

Honestly, I kind of hate it, but since Reddit is unusable, considering all the subs that have gone dark (presumably permanently).

I'll be honest. I don't like the Fediverse concept - the fatal flaw of decentralized systems is that sometimes centralized systems are great. Basically, reddit was ONE BBS style forum for everything, which was the killer convenience. Similarly Twitter was the ONE microblogging platform for everybody, which was the killer convenience.

Because the moment anybody can operate a service, everyone does.

Right now, I need to buy a car, I can't find a good Lemmy community to get advice from. Searching for 'cars' in all federated communities returns:

Fuck Cars@lemmy.ml - 3.41K subscribers
Cars@lemmy.ml - 104 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.ca - 56 subscribers
Self Driving Cars - 19 subscribers
IdiotsInCars@lemmy.world - 11 subscribers
Electric Cars@lemmy.ca - 4 subscribers
RC Cars@lemmy.world - 4 subscribers
Cars@lemmygrad.ml - 3 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.world - 2 subscribers
Cars@lemmy.world - 1 subscriber

Leave aside for a moment that "Fuck Cars" has 34x more subscribers than the biggest Cars community - there are two different "Fuck Cars" communities, and three different "Cars" communities. It's great that you have subscriber numbers, but there's no definitive place to find out information on cars. Reddit's CEO is right that Reddit was organized like a landed-gentry where a first-come-first-serve approach to the most popular forums was done, but that landed-gentry system solved this problem, whatever new problems it may have introduced.

Now, you could look for a technological solution to solve this problem: For example, you could have a centralized server for all federated Lemmies, some sort of "lemmyhub.com"

We'd all have to agree on it. People could set up alternatives, but we'd all have to basically coalesce and say: Yes, this is the thing we want. Maybe it'd use blockchain, I don't know. Point is, it's centralized and easy to find information. It would work "just like Reddit" where you would have ONE authentication/authorization that works seamlessly across all instances (the current system is anything but seamless), and there would be ONE key/value combo for keyword. So, instead of going to Cars@lemmy.ml & Cars@lemmygrad.ml & Cars & lemmy.world, you just go to cars.lemmyhub.com.

If you want to post, you just use your lemmyhub account and your post appears on the "default" community. You can still post on individual lemmies by going to the individual lemmy page as well, or by specifying which of your Lemmy instance accounts you want to post as.

Here's the problem with the merging all the cars communities together, though: There is nothing to prevent someone from creating Cars@NeoNaziHeartsFascism.com and spamming the community with bile or trolling. Lemmyhub could operate a blocklist for troll and hate communities and instances, but once you're doing that, you're making editorial decisions. And forget all the nasty ethics problems around "what's free speech/what's hate speech?" "what's acceptable to view/what's not?", you have legal liability problems if anything slips through the cracks.

Reddit wasn't perfect, and certainly they could have been more proactive with shutting down hate speech, and more speedy with shutting down illegal content, but by and large reddit worked. Reddit's authoritarian approach worked because it was mostly benevolent -- right up until the point that it wasn't.

So I don't think Lemmy can technologically make it's way out of the situation.

I think what needs to happen is a solution like the Wikipedia foundation; we establish a non-profit designed to create a centralized server which may choose or not choose to incorporate Lemmy instances. It runs on donations, not advertising, and it's not designed to maximize profit, only to keep the servers running. It would borrow heavily from the Wikipedia model in organization and structure.

Because I'll be honest - Lemmy and Mastodon are okay, but there's really nothing in them improving on the old Newsgroups system of the late 80s and 1990s. Reddit captured the market for forum discussions because it was simply a better solution, there's nothing in Lemmy that makes it better - for the user - than Reddit.

Should we then abandon Lemmy and go back to Reddit? No, of course not. Reddit, if anything shows us that eventually all authoritarian systems, no matter how benevolent they start, always eventually turn tyrannical, and can do so on a whim, and once they do so, it is impossible to get back to benevolence.

But I've been a redditor for 15 years - I predated subreddits, if you can believe that. And I'm not finding the things I used to go to Reddit for here on Lemmy - information, expert and informed discussion, and niche topics. Maybe that's an adoption problem that will be solved with scale (and I hope it is), but right now, I feel like my luxury Bently sedan got totaled and I'm driving a 20 year old Honda Civic with manual transmission. By all means I'm grateful for the tent, but I still miss my Bentley

Criton,

It's ugly, difficult to understand, And the search function is fucked. All in all, it's pretty crap and I miss reddit a great deal. That said, I'm never going back. I just wish lemmy was better.

jmcs,

the search function is fucked.

At least some things never change.

lolcatnip,

I like the idea of it, but it's janky as hell. For example, when I tried to post a comment here using the mobile page without choosing a language, the UI just sat there spinning forever without telling me what I did wrong. It wasn't until I tried using Jerboa that I got a message saying what I did wrong. It also appears I need to manually set the language in each post!

pfech,

I didn't come here to talk about Reddit all day, but every thread on lemmy is just reddit, reddit, reddit. So I'm mostly lurking until that is gone.

alsciaucat,

The most difficult part so far has been finding communities and joining them.

  1. It's difficult to search for communities that aren't on your home instance.
  2. If you go to a big instance and search for communities there, you can't directly join them, but have to go back to your home instance and paste something into a specific field, then click "next" since the community is never the first result, then click on the community to load it up in your home instance and THEN join it.
  3. Communities are fractured across instances - I found at least five different serves with a "cat" / "cats" communities, and there's no way to aggregate these, and it's difficult to search out the rest of the cat content without just going to the other instance servers one-by-one and doing it manually
newline,

I like it, but to me, it just needs more people, more communities, more life! Hopefully people keep migrating from Reddit to Lemmy.

How beautiful would it be, to have an open source federated system be one of the leading internet communities.

mdhughes,
@mdhughes@lemmy.ml avatar

The UI's a little janky, search doesn't always produce clickable links (mostly federated subs).

Finding subs relies on lemmyverse, when it should be integrated into the sites.

Similar subs should federate together, not be siloed. More USENET, less phpbb.

Kbin has a strange division of threads and "magazines", which means clicking thru multiple places to read anything, Lemmy & Beehaw seem simpler.

xn0r,

Its great. It has minimalistic ui which is verry readable and its easy to find different options and buttons. I like it much better than reddit.

AlataOrange,

I'm still trying to get my head above water, but I've learned enough to start being able to browse and post. I still haven't found the instance I want to use as a home instance, and don't know how to browse instances other than the one i'm on. But these things come in time, and im willing to learn.

Robotnik99,

I am nicely surprised over all about the number of comments, it look promising.

As it is, I will make the definitive switch when Rif die. I am not a power user of Reddit or a mod.

Something I think is very important for a succesfull migration en masse is the presence of porn.

It's here (even some niche fetish I enjoy ) and there is already enough content for me not to go back.

Also the atmosphere is very friendly , I don't know the friendlyness of Reddit in its early days but I bet it was kind of similar, I love it here.

Sure some content is missing but it will come.

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