Technology

I think it's nice so far, though I haven't used it much. There are some communities on Reddit that I miss on Beehaw. I also check Raddle (not fediverse) for trans memes since r/traa users have moved there. ~Cherri

I'm really liking it! Federation is cool and everyone is so chilled. Not missing the cesspool of Reddit infighting

So far, I've been a Reddit user for like two to three years now, and a Lemmy user for like 3 days. It's definitely a transition, but so far, it seems to have potential. This instance's mod team is doing a good job, and the content is pretty good so far. I just need to let go of older social media habits, I guess lol.

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.

Having to make a new account because I wanted to see NSFW on another instance was kind of a mood killer. Not sure how that could be done better but I really don't want to be making other accounts.

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 [email protected] - 3.41K subscribers
[email protected] - 104 subscribers
Fuck [email protected] - 56 subscribers
Self Driving Cars - 19 subscribers
[email protected] - 11 subscribers
Electric [email protected] - 4 subscribers
RC [email protected] - 4 subscribers
[email protected] - 3 subscribers
Fuck [email protected] - 2 subscribers
[email protected] - 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 [email protected] & [email protected] & 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 [email protected] 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

I think having already used Mastodon, albeit mostly as a lurker, helped, but I didn't find it difficult at all to get up and running on Lemmy and subscribe to a bunch of communities.

On the desktop version, thanks to not having loads of useless scripts, ads and other "stuff" on the page like Reddit does, Lemmy's interface loads quicker in my browser than Reddit's and is more responsive. I have had a few hiccups with Jerboa logging me out of my account and images appearing too small to view, but in general, it works well - fast, clean interface, no distractions.

The one downside really is that the content that was (is, but not accessible) on Reddit is not here yet, but that will change with time. Still, the atmosphere is much better, and I feel much more inclined to post here as there aren't the hordes of people waiting to tear someone down who has a different opinion (cough, Reddit...) So overall, pretty good and glad I finally stumbled upon Lemmy.

I'm trying to like it, but it's hard. It doesn't quite scratch the doom scrolling itch like Reddit did. I'm using Jerboa and it's missing a lot of features that I relied heavily on with Relay. Ultimately I'm just going to have to adapt though because it looks like Reddit isn't backing down and I'm not going to use the official app.

In good news, I always hated my Reddit username so it's nice to finally get to change it lol.

To be completely honest I don't like it. It could be the app I'm using (Jerboa) but it's just missing so many features. For example, comments are shown in seemingly random order with no way to sort

I'm getting used to the slight UI differences but it has a similar vibe. The biggest difference to me is the server/global federated dynamic. I like that it's owned by individuals running communities rather than a megacorp mining data and engagement for profit. I'm also on mastodon, but I never used twitter so I feel like there's fewer expectations to unlearn.

I like it so far. It has some familiar features, but there are some learning curves 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

Currently using Jerboa. Unsure if I like it, because currently there's no inline video player and no creepypasta communities to sub to.

not enough videos, too slow and jerboa is not top notch .

The Software lemmy+jerboa does the job. It's basic and misses a lot of features that one would ideally want, but it's good enough.

I'm enjoying the back-to-the-roots vibe of early reddit or early internet that comes with lemmy.

Now, it's ask about content and how the communities will form in the ecosystem. Federation is nice, but wilm people actually find the communities relevant to them.

I wish there was a way to collapse branches of nested comments.

Feels a bit broken tbh. I'm currently on dbzer0 instance and I couldn't post in the community I created. Wonder what's happeneing. Did I get shadowbanned?

The UI is certainly attractive on Jerboa, and I imagine will improve with time. I'm using mainly on an android phone. I second another comment on enjoying the "real conversations" bit, as this feels much more human, and not a platform abused by bots, marketing, and astroturfing (and also greedy, grifting CEOs). I do have an issue with Jerboa not maintaining my sign in status every time, and the feed not loading every time I open the app, but it's small potatoes. I'm looking forward to the evolution of Lemmy!

Compared to old.reddit + RES there's still some space for improvement in terms of UX for lemmy but overall, not too bad :P

It took me a few days to adjust, but now I'm feeling pretty comfortable. I'm excited for what's to come as the communities grow.

Liking it so far. I love that I can spin up my own instance. Only thing I'm missing is a multi-reddit type feature to combine communuties from multiple instances into one feed.

Enjoying it so far but there's a lot of posts about reddit and not much else for the time being.

Jerboa is what I'm using, has a very old school android feel to it or Windows Phone