On the plus side this place feels smaller so instead of just lurking all the time it feels meaningful to participate.

Lemmy isn’t currently usable by “normies” but we, the weird ones are already here, building great communities, fixing bugs, developing features. Give it 6 months, and Lemmy and kbin will be ready for prime time. The world will watch it rise like a giant middle finger shown to /u/spez.

Kbin is much more polished already. While lemmy is more or less a clone of old reddit, kbin is more like modern reddit just without the suck. Also, both are compatible.

As a new kbin user from Reddit, it's... jank to say the least. My biggest gripe is the new comment box being at the BOTTOM of the page.

A Reddit alternative is going to end up like Reddit. Kbin/Lemmy are not like Reddit, and that's a good thing.

Personally I don't need it to be "polished", and too much polish would smack of corporate excess to me. I want lively but friendly discussions on a variety of topics that interest me. And it's fun to watch something grow from early(ish) stages into a more complete package. I hope this will be a good social media home for me.

ETA I upvoted you for good topic and discussion, rather than downvoting in disagreement.

It's going to take time to spin back up the reddit communities. Also, some behavior adjustments will need to be made (though I do miss having notifications I can instantly click to get to the replies. I suspect that's in the works.)

But unless something changes dramatically, it’ll suffer the same fate as Mastodon or Bluesky.

I have no idea what's going on with Bluesky, but mastodon is... fine? It's not twitter and never will be.

This doesn't mean Lemmy doesn't need a bit of work, though, I don't think anyone would deny that. I don't think they've had quite the pressure to triage issues like they do now, so a decent list of priorities is probably emerging.

I'm tempted to try to help, but I'm (generously) a rust novice. I worry I'll waste their time with bad PRs.

I created an account about 24 hours ago and this is actually better than I expected. Of course, I wasn't expecting a complete and polished interface from something so new, but I had read plenty of horror stories about how lemmy/kbin signups were impossibly complex.

I like it. It's already pretty intuitive and I like that it's not a 1:1 Reddit clone. I can easily imagine this expanding and growing into something really interesting

Also, I got the username I wanted.

Majority of the people here are super helpful, much friendlier, and supportive even with all the flaws that we are experiencing. Building a community takes effort. Everyone’s effort is focused here so that we can have the place that we want it to be - a place better than reddit.

Thing is, people looking for a Reddit replacement are going to be in some way disappointed, since part of the idea of developing a new system is to avoid the things that made Reddit turn terrible. The sad truth it Reddit is probably too big for its users to just leave, but maybe they will financially just crash since their efforts to become profitable aren't looking all that effective.

This is better than Mastodon by far. At least that's been my experience. Much easier to find communities here.

His issues are that he misses the cultivated nature of Reddit. Reddit didn't start out cultivated, and took time and effort by volunteers to figure out it's identity. The same thing will happen with the fediverse. It will get cleaned up and streamlined as people put in effort. People look at a lump of carbon and say it's worthless, but with time it becomes a diamond.

Some people only see the value of something in it's present form and miss out on potential. The fediverse has a lot of potential so long as it is active. It's open nature will bring in freelance development help and it could very well become BETTER than what reddit was. Keep the faith

Just gotta give it some time. The Reddit apps have years of development behind them; the Lemmy apps weren't really seeing wide use until the last few weeks. There's now a lot of pressure for better alternatives, and a few other options are already in development (for iOS, at least - I assume for Android, too). Rome wasn't built in a day.

These burgeoning communities are rough around the edges. But as @dan96kid said, there's space for us to speak up, rather than simply lurk. I'm getting a kick out of this disruption.

Unlike Reddit, Lemmy instances are individual servers that come together like an interweb of subreddits.

That is not how it works, like at all. This same thing happens with Mastodon when journalists come on with a negative attitude and don't really want it to work so they don't really try.

You know what I love about kbin/lemmy - no goddamn Nazis. I'll take the growing pains of a burgeoning platform over Nazis on my timeline any day of the week.

I ended up switching to Kbin and like it a lot more in regards to how the main page provides threads. It still has it's issues, but they're for the most part outside of the main loop.

I'm somewhat surprised at how much the dynamic page load really messed with my ability to navigate Lemmy. Basically if I went away for any given time it would go from top threads for the day to random junk that had no activity. It really needs a way to turn that off.

I'm really starting to like this place now! At first I was hesitant, but it's great!

Reddit wasn't all that amazing either when they first started - it took a while for things to get ironed out. Then they had to go and ruin a good thing

Needs to fix the "hot" sorting. Then I'll actually be able to evaluate.

Are you using the jerboa app? I find it to be very close to the old experience.

I actually like kbin more than I did reddit. Reddit has a huge advantage though, over a decade of content. What I like about kbin though is it feels smaller, I see familiar names and interaction feels like I'm talking to a person not a thing.

I think it's important to note that when the Mastodon migrations really picked up, the software was already 4-5 years old with organized development. Lemmy is only around 3-4 years old and kbin is only a couple years old (with very limited public use). That makes a big difference in what you can expect from them. With the influx of interest in these platforms, you're going to see far more help and contribution to the underlying code alongside better third party app support in the months ahead. These are both very young platforms and have a lot of room to grow in the next while.