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I am very happy to see people trying to use federated apps, it's a movement back to the old days of internet, when communities and real people make things, not big corporate companies with ad based model bulding sites to collect massive amounts of data.

I've been using the Jerboa android app today, it works pretty well. It reminds me of reddit mobile apps 10+ years ago, which isn't a bad thing.

I'm excited to see how it turns out though and what fediverse/social platform will end up being the most popular.

Honestly, Jerboa in alpha is already better than the official reddit app for me. It's no TPA reddit app, but the number of contributors (in github) has risen by a lot so I'm expecting/hoping development will pick up and it'll get better fast.

I appreciate the community the most in here. They've been very welcoming and minimal, if any, toxicity.

I think it's missing a few things. Notably, for me at least, an option to block communities directly in the feed instead of having to go in to the community to do it, and the option to hide posts from the feed. Unless i've missed something. It does all remind me of old reddit before it got flooded with users and it started getting filled with memes and joke comments prioritising karma instead of discussion. I'm sure I'm not the only person who noticed that subs on reddit had a critical limit of users, that when reached tarnished the quality of the posts on the sub. I like that all the instances have their own communities which I think will help with that problem. Some instances might not care too much and let the users be joke tellers while others will want to keep quality up. The idea with most instances beeing NSFW-free with a dedicated NSFW instance is a really good one. There's still so much I need to learn about the fediverse, but the decentralised nature of it all will hopefully keep the money out of it. Overall, I'm enjoying it so far.

I like the idea and general functionality, my biggest concern is what happens if the owner of Lemmy.world gets hit by a bus? Eventually you'd lose your account, all your subs, etc. Same goes for any other instance really. It's pretty much my only reservation at this point.

I expect a small boom of loudly announced instances, that will be essentially unmaintained, half of them will silently disappear while taking users identities with them in less than a year, and the rest spliting the federation in half by implementing ideological blacklists, some properly shutting down when the money runs out, or lawsuits and takedown notices starts to flood in.

Let's hope I'm wrong.

I think having your account tied to an instance without an option to move is a huge issue. Now I'm still dependent on the instance owners rules and willingness/ability to keep it up. Just like reddit oranzy other centralized network. Accounts need to be movable including history and linkage to posts. Same goes for communities. We are just hyper fragmenting now. Communities need to.be able to span instances tobincrease performance and uptime as well as resiliency.

Jerboa works fine for me. The overall experience and peoeple are nice enough. We just have technicalities to iron out.

it's nice :)

Lemmy for us was very broken, having many bugs. Kbin works a lot better, even though we had some issues with federation. Overall, the platform itself is quite nice and smaller communities are still fun!

I'm in the same boat as you. Now that I've spent a day on Lemmy & Kbin I feel much better about using both sites and it's been a fun experience learning something new.

I personally am treating them as betas so I'm willing to forgive them not being as smooth experiences to browse as I'm used to on Reddit. Also because of this, I'm hesitant at this stage to suggest them to a lot of my friends until more kinks are sorted out.

need a lot more tooling but it seems livable at least.

kbin looks more modern but I havent tried it yet. biggest sticking point is the discovery workflow. Im not sure I can get most people to do that. Its like asking them to setup a damn crypto wallet.

A lot of the communities only seem to have like 50 subscribers. I know a lot of people are exploring options other than Reddit, so I'm confused where everyone is at.

Or maybe I just have weird taste. I am not so interested in shitposting, memes, politics, news; this may be where where everyone is? I'll give it time to see who trickles in. I like the forum/discussion board style of this as opposed to Mastodon, which is obviously more timeline/feed based, but can feel like a random assortment of things.

On the other hand, since many of the communities are empty, I either do not have interesting topics to yet follow, or am not quite sure where I feel comfortable posting. Somewhat opposite ends of the spectrum, but okay that there is differentiation. Would like to see the fediverse group together (Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, whatever else believes in this approach), as alone there may not be power, but together, maybe something impressive can be made.

Imperial theme looming in the background...

honestly, once I wrapped my head around the idea of federation (which is very easy given I've been active in the P2P torrent field before- federation is but a simple extension of that concept) lemmy has pretty easy to use. It's simple. The interface is clean and has what I want right in front. I search what I want, deal with a couple minor bugs, and then look at what I want to look at.

My only biggest concern with Lemmy longterm is community fragmentation. As more instances spin up with the user influx, and Lemmy being (currently) limited in horizontal scaling of individual instances, we are going to have cases of tens, maybe even hundreds, of instances all ending up with identical, but separate, communities. Federation of a single instance's community can only work so well, if we're expecting users in the millions, and such fragmented communities that may or may not end up federating with one another can artificially make the service feel a lot less active than it really is and/or potentially lead to a lot of content being missed by some users.

I don't care about what instance will last too much. I'm not that active contributor so if my comments/topics will disappear the world will not end. I always can create a new account on another server.

I chose Lemmy for now because Kbin seems to be not mature enough. I don't like some background of Lemmy devs that I was reading about, but I'm still not sure what make of it... Does it matter much? I support freedom of speech, and from my perspective people can have opinions very different from mine and still provide great value for community.

I'm currently exploring available communities and subscribing to stuff that I was subscribed on Reddit. Considering creating some communities too, but not sure how that works yet and how much involvement it will need.

Regarding software - using Jerboa. Overall very usable, but there are some UI issues that are irritating.

It seems to be working well enough. There will be growing pains, but I'm more than willing to live with some bugs & limitations while this all matures and grows. There's a risk of losing all comment history & whole communities if an instance decided to shut down, but that's true of centralized sites today. I'll take the chance on something less centralized that one single asshole corporation can't screw up.

I think its great. Joining remote Communities can be a bit iffy but its okay and the UI is a bit janky but that will improve by time I hope :)

I'd like to see new posts to my subscribed communities, without having to go to each one to check. Maybe it's there and I just haven't found it. I can't stand anything on my phone, so this is only referring to the website.

After finding the right instance (which doesn't block any other instances) I'm really happy. I'm surprised how many communities exist that existed before on reddit

Lots of people here with the opposite opinion of me, which is that I like the website and not the mobile apps, but overall yeah I'm pretty convinced this format is probably the best poised alternative to replace Reddit for a lot of people. Maybe not everybody, but I am willing to "settle" for quality over quantity ;)

I feel like it is heading in the right direction. It is great that users control the feed instead of corporate interests.

I think in general users feel giddy and hopeful like when starting a BBS in pre-internet days and birth of the consumer internet. Possibilities bring hope. Let's hope it continues.

I myself stood up lemmy instance to try things out and feel the same giddy feeling.