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)
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While not every community is on Lemmy yet that I visit on Reddit, by people migrating from Reddit to here, hopefully that issue will be solved soon. The community here seems way more welcoming than the Reddit community is too
Much nicer than StackExchange too:
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Oh man it has been unironically great! First day I joined there was basically nothing but a meme sublemmy and a couple of tech subs too, but nowadays there are communities popping up left right and center, and I’m seeing so many familiar subs recreated on here, too
Overall my past week of using Lemmy have been phenomenal, and I’m happy to say that Lemmy has become my mindless scrolling app of choice now
Edit: correct number of weeks
At least on my instance everything is running fast, snappy. I like the clean interface. Haven’t encountered any major bugs yet.
The only downside for me so far is that there is not a lot to see yet. The only active posts and communities are about lemmy itself. Which is understandable of course but I can’t wait to actually get to the phase where I actually get to experience real content lmao
Pretty great tbh. The tricky thing with being an early adopter is you kind of have to be the change you want to see, but I’m old enough to feel no shame about just barging into places and starting new threads as needed.
So far started two accounts on two different instances (I like to keep different subjects somewhat separate) and had really cool interactions on both.
Obviously there are a few UX issues, trying to sub to remote communities is kind of a nightmare, but hopefully I’ve subbed to enough that other people on my instance will find it a bit easier to find them through search.
I love it so far,only needs more people
The thing that’s confusing me most is links, whether to communities or individual posts.
I see links in a format like this:
Sometimes the exclamation mark is part of the link and it works, and sometimes it’s there but not part of the link, and my phone thinks the rest is an email address.
Is there a guide anywhere to how to do links properly? TIA.
EDIT - yeah, so in my example above, the exclamation mark is not being treated as part of the link for some reason?
I’m excited for the possibilities, but daunted by the realities.
It’s going to be tough to get enough foot traffic to start populating smaller subs. It seems like the Reddit API drama is the big break needed to hit a critical mass of users, but how many will take the time to figure out something like Lemmy? And are the Lemmy instances ready? It’s strange to root for Reddit to go through with the API changes after using Reddit for so long. But if there was ever a time to pay a bit extra for additional hosting resources, June 11th (or now!) should be it. If a large influx of new users crash Lemmy instances, and no one can sign up, a golden opportunity will be lost.
Signing up was not a flawless process. You are asked to make a choice about servers with little guidance on what it all means.
Requiring a 10 character password with additional character conditions is going to turn a lot of possible new users OFF. It should be 6 characters, with no conditions. Yes, it’s not secure, but we need sign ups above everything else. Users can choose to get as complex as they want, but simplicity should also be an option. If people later grow to value their Lemmy accounts, they can secure them at a later time. But extremely easy sign up should be the default for now.
Asking people to write an extensive answer as to “why you want to join this particular server” should also be suspended temporarily. Again, it’s about ease of signing up. We should try to get as many signups in as quickly as possible, and weed out the problem people later. After the possible Reddit migration boom ends, you can go back to application essays as a requirement for entry.
The web interface is buggy. The site will often “reset” as you are reading a thread, and the whole thread will act if “refreshed”. If this causes users to lose a long post they are typing, they might quit Lemmy then and there.
The community structure needs to be more unified across instances. It’s confusing that there are local groups as well as “multiverse” groups across federations, often with the exact same name. It’s a bummer that the communities can be splintered, and will have people not realize what’s really available.
I think we’re might see some weaknesses of a distributed system like Lemmy in the next few weeks. It’s hard to organize and get everyone rowing in the same direction with no “CEO” or clear leader. It does feel like little fiefdoms doing their own things, and that makes it even harder to hit critical mass.
In terms of content and userbase, so far so good. It obviously leans heavily towards the technically competent. Lemmy sort of screens for the technology inclined since it’s only well known to those who are up to date with the latest in tech. So of course it’s easy to feel like everyone is like minded and cool for now. But we need to attract casuals if we want vibrant, non-tech groups to exist and flourish too.
I’ve only been exploring for 2 days though, so I can be very wrong.
I just got approved here, but have been on Mastodon for a couple of months. Mastodon signup was a lot glitzier, and yet I still couldn’t convert my friend, who was like “I don’t understand, what do you mean it’s like email? >_<”. I don’t have high hope for Lemmy atm…
I think Reddit will backpedal and renegotiate with users/devs down the line, once the initial backlash has died down, and they have lowered everyone’s threshold of what they would consider a “victory”. Things like Lemmy will act as a sword of Damocles/safe harbour for the next time they screw up, sure, and that’s a good thing. But I doubt Lemmy will explode in popularity, even if some 3rd party Reddit clients are discussing adding Lemmy support to sort of rugpull Reddit, and that’s for 3 reasons(imo):
- The hosting costs will be exorbitant for all those new users, considering
- Lemmy will be stuck in the exact same boat as Reddit re:all those unpaying users, except now there’s no ads either. Donations are the honourable business model, but a couple thousand well-meaning people with disposable income can’t properly finance a popular platform.
- Even if the Lemmy community solves the above 2 problems, you still have the deciding moment of the “let’s jump ship today” user tidal wave, which will make or break such a migration happening. Closest thing I can think of is the WhatsApp Privacy Policy shenanigans in '21. Melon Husk said “Use Signal” - a fine suggestion, tbh - but Signal wasn’t ready for this, and so their servers crashed and burned during the tidal wave, while for-profit Telegram just paid for more servers and thus converted the refugees into users.
I like it ~ I joined mastodon but I think it was way too slow to load images - probably joined some dodgy overloaded server (though I like the Reddit format and community better rather than Twitter)
It’s giving me Reddit 15 years ago vibes - smaller tech-savvy and agile community - my Reddit use was on and off through the years; but I like the idea that each community in the Extended Lemmiverse can all have their own vibes and cultures and implementations of the platform and we can all chat and follow topics together 🕊️
I’ve only been here a short while; but maybe one thing I’d love is not to see reposts in the /all section ; I know the communities are small and growing and can cross post for more stuff , but I’m sure there could be a way for the system to know that the title and url are the same - so only show one , or auto-merge the comments and prioritise posting your comment to your local community instance’s post Edit - I might try install an instance on my website and try to make a merge function ~
Regarding your last paragraph, I agree. I’m subscribed to gaming in lemmy.ml and beehaw so see the same content twice regularly. Duplicate communities raise other concerns for me though:
Which one is the defacto community to join? Using the Gaming community as an example, maybe one leans more to images and the other has more meaty discussion threads just by way of who has joined those communities - nothing to do with the rules. But if you subscribe to both, the majority of the content may be duplicate posts instead? It’s not clear from the community title alone.
Is the potential squandered as communities are potentially splintered? Maybe people just stick to one community without joining the other. It’ll take time for a certain community to establish itself as the main community with the highest quality posts, but due to the volume of users on the main instances maybe there won’t be a main community? Or maybe people won’t even be aware of multiple communities for the same topic as the names are different, e.g. football Vs soccer.
All this fragmentation will reduce the adoption for sure. No one wants to write to a sub filled with 5 people while another is filled with 5k people. We should adopt one new fresh instance and make it our main, and point people coming from reddit to this new instance.
That would defeat the point of decentralization. Nothing is stopping you from going to lemmyverse.net searching for a community you want, and only subscribing to the biggest. In time the choice will be more obvious.
I’m still dipping my toes in. Got a bit confused early on, so now I have 2 accounts, one on beehaw.org and one on kbin.social, trying both out to see which interface I like best.
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.
great, i’ve really liked lemmy so far. its really the first alt big tech platform like this that i’ve gotten into, was never big on mastodon or any of the others out there.
lemmy is honestly a breath of fresh air. really great platform so far, i think it has very strong potential.
i still use reddit for some things, but overall i’m starting to use lemmy a lot more. great work from the devs, can’t wait to see the future!
It really feels like how Reddit started, before all the rage-bait and eye-catching bullshit. I miss the floofs, the memes, the fun reasons I joined. Now 90% is politics that keep popping up even though I don’t subscribe to any political subs and keep blocking
I’m pretty inpressed with how much everything is improving in such a short time frame. Feeling optimistic.
Especially the lemmy.ml part was kind of terrible, I got into some weird argument with Tiananmen Square massacre deniers and the mods started deleting my comments, so the whole discussion was meaningless and left me very worried for the future of this corner of the fediverse.
Yikes. Are there people like that in lemmy.ml? Ill need to keep an eye out then. Still not completely found my footing in all this yet. Might watch a video or read something to better understand all this soon.
The history is that Lemmy was originally created as an independent forum for communists. Later, the devs experimented with ActivityPub federation and created the first federated Reddit alternative. The software itself is neutral and can be used by anyone, but the original communist users of Lemmy before federation was implemented are still around. The politics of Lemmy’s original community scared off a lot of potential users from exploring federated Reddit, but bringing more users and awareness to Lemmy will also attract politically neutral developers who can maintain a good alternative.
An alternative is not even necessary if the devs are able to leave their ideologies out of the software’s design, which I believe they are doing well.
And from what I’ve seen, the core devs have always supported and encouraged more instances to be created so that there’s a diversity of communities … I don’t think want everyone to be just on here (lemmy.ml) and I’d guess they especially don’t want to conflicts to erupt over communism (where in the past some facist or neo-nazi brigading happened and that’s why sign-ups require approval).
The answer is for some people to get to work and put up new instances. That’s what happened at mastodon and it’s what allowed the platform to absorb the twitter migration. We really shouldn’t expect whole new open-source and free platforms to just be waiting for us to get tired of our corporate for-profit big-social-platforms. It takes a little bit of work from us … either understanding a little bit about how things work, helping others, engaging, and if we’re able, putting up instances, starting communities and contributing back to the source code.
Well, that’s just not the case. Lemmy’s devs have always been highly ideological. The case in point here is their handling of the slur filter.
The basic guiding principle of GPL software has always been freedom. Free software has always been explicitly political, but when you put out free code, you have to accept that it might be used by people you don’t like. Adding DRM, such as the slur filter, is against the freedom and openness of the free software, even if the DRM is so half-assed as a slur filter that any half-competent dev could easily remove.
When doing local development, I noticed there was an option in the admin screen to configure the slur filter. Perhaps the slur filter isn’t hardcoded anymore like it was in that old github issue? Could an instance admin confirm/deny this?
