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.
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 :)
How do you know something is developed with Rust?
Don’t worry, the devs will tell you.
Check the GitHub! It’s linked at the bottom of the web page (“Code”)
so far it’s really nice, it’s what I liked in reddit and before that forums, without being what reddit became.
the fediverse is hard though, but it kinda makes sense. I’ll see if I get more used to it
I know it’s in its infancy but the great thing about Reddit was I could search any niche topic and guarantee there was a subreddit setup for it.
Obviously this is solved by more and more people using Lemmy but I personally can’t see Lemmy appealing to the the masses. Depending how active the communities become I can see me using Lemmy going forward but I don’t think it will be the “One site for everything” that Reddit has become but rather 1 of many sites I check going forward instead
Lemmy UI is very easy to use, and fast too. Also, I like the concept of federation (though I have no plan in hosting one) and the fact that the community has been very welcoming so far also help with me being able to enjoy browsing Lemmy.
Of course, there’s the obvious problem of lack of content but if the subreddits that I usually lurked on have fully switched to Lemmy then I would have 0 issues with fully switching to Lemmy regardless of the lack of content.
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.
Yep, same. For that reason I never really managed to get into mastodon, tried it for a bit and found the signup system too convoluted, then dropped it altogether. Though granted, I also never used Twitter, never understood why people liked it (and still don’t), so I tried mastodon out of curiosity, not actually looking for something.
With Lemmy it’s all different. I feel like I need to leave reddit and find a new community, so there’s an inherent desire to like it, which makes the adaptation way easier.
I am admittedly still active on Twitter, but during the whole Twitter exodus, I decided to give Mastodon a try, and I abandoned it because I just kept running into people complaining about Elon without seeing much else.
Until I read somewhere during this whole Reddit fiasco that you can follow hashtags in addition to people on Mastodon. Total game changer!
That sucks, we don’t complain about Elon here.
Instead we just complain about Reddit
Valid. Spez is a liar who is angry that he got caught multiple times. I didn’t want to see Reddit die like this, but watching the train wreck sure has been interesting.
Spez has been around since basically the beginning of Reddit, so I think if there were to be an ejection of Spez, it would’ve happened years ago.
Reddit is too big to fail now, regardless of Spez’s actions.
Sure, but Reddit is nothing without their mods and power users.
Eh, looking at it from supply and demand, I’m sure there are plenty of people lining up to become the next mods and next power users
Biggest issue right now is the inability to hide posts you’ve already read. Will this eventually be addressed?
As sad as I am by how Reddit turned out, this was the kick I needed to start truly indulging in the fediverse! Everybody’s been nice so far, and I hope that it continues to be that way
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.
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 healthy set of communities so I see posts on a wider array of topics.
I think people are a 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.
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.
the search function is fucked.
At least some things never change.
In general, it works pretty nice, but there are some limitations.
The biggest one for me is discoverability. The federation means that there is more fragmentation and it’s harder to find the right community for something.
For example, there are country/city communities for my country/city on multiple instances. And since it’s hard to find the “correct” one, it fragments out much harder than Reddit did. Combine that with generally lower attendance numbers and you get really tiny communities.
This is not aided by Jerboa, which doesn’t open internal links internally. So if someone posts a link to a community and I press it, it instead tries to open it with my email app.
Finding “the right community” is definitely an issue, and I’m sure will continue to be one for a while. But remember Reddit had the same issue, with multiple redundant subreddits when one would have been better.
I’m sure things will consolidate over time, with less popular communities going quiet and their subscribers moving to more active ones.
That is true, that was an issue on Reddit as well. But here it’s even worse, since you can have a community with the same name on different instances. It basically adds another dimension to the discoverability issue.
It’s true, but I guess it’s the price of federation. And Reddit having a single namespace meant a lot of subreddits needed to have “real” or “true” prefixed to their names, which was pretty confusing.
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.
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 is minor - but for widespread adoption it needs a big revamp.
Removed by mod
It desperately needs a compact, efficient UI similar to old.reddit’s design philosophy. Otherwise its not bad. The auto-refreshing front page is very frustrating to use. I want to click on an article, and between when I move the cursor and click, new articles have refreshed and the link I clicked was the wrong one
The auto-refreshing front page is very frustrating to use.
Sounds like that’s being fixed soon.
What I like about Lemmy is how it’s UI and backend are completely separate. I’ve seen others already asking for old.reddit type of an interface, so it is just a matter of time now…
