this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?

I'm a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It's definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it's great to see something that isn't Reddit growing in popularity!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Comment syncing to my instance is a problem. I get posts but comments, not so much.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm having a great time. Lemmy is a little bit harder than Reddit but I have been on Mastodon for some time now so I know how federation works. The only thing about Lemmy I don't like is that it feels kinda buggy and unpolished as it is very early stage and the same posts often reappear. But I like the community and it actually seems to be working so that's pretty cool!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like the concept
But it feels very much like its been designed by nerdy developers and has had little to no-input on user friendly design.

The federated idea can work but it needs to be more seemless than this.

  1. Communities with the same name should be merged when viewing it from any instance, so you can see all the posts from these communities, they can be moderated seperatley and for advanced users you should be able to select which communities make up the merged community.
  2. By default you should see all of the merged communities in a central place and be able to subscribe to them easily, at the moment its handled different per instance but you have to seek out these communities to subscribe or follow them.
  3. I strongly believe there should be a centralised log-in system, so you can log into any instance with an account from another instance, this means if your instance goes down your account is centralised and is safe.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Regarding point three: I want to be able to migrate my profile to another instance if my current instance has performance issues or admins going rogue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think even better, you should be able to sign into any instance via some type of centralised federated login, though I guess the argument is you can't do that in multiple email clients as email is the most popular federated example.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This may unironically be the first time I've ever suggested this: this may actually be a use case for the block chain.

If the user data from all instances was being saved to a distributed and verified ledger, it would fix the problem of one node going down losing all of those users, and would be a decentralized yet centralized way to go about it.

... I feel dirty, I swear I'm not a cryptobro

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:

  • The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I'm aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that's less than ideal)
  • The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I'm aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it's vital to the success of Lemmy.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The first point is CRUCIAL for setting up your own "scrolling page/account" for, since the instances are only very vague directions, at least while the site is still growing. And in a similiar vein, the second point with B) would be better than manually blocking communities I genuinely have no interest whatsoever in, like fountain pens (unless I don't know how to operate this site yet).

In fact, C) feels unnecessary because of that right now, since I already see many new communities just in my instance alone. Though it WOULD add things to browse since there isn't as much happening here, yet...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Same here. I do feel and see that a LOT of work will be required to get lemmy where it needs to be but something tells me that these are the interesting days for Lemmy!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People are much friendlier here, so far.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It feels like my experience on Mastodon after Twitter imploded. Hopefully it lasts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Once I added a few different instances it became much better! Content will come. But the best users from Reddit will migrate along with us!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Which instances did you add?

I’m finding the lack of comments to be the most jarring thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

For me I'm just worries that it wouldn't reach the critical mass to generate enough content to keep people around 🥲

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Interface is better than "new" Reddit, not as good as old Reddit + RES.

Also: if I click on a link on another instance (for example https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy when I'm signed in on lemmy.world), I'm not signed in to lemmy.ml so I have to manually search for it in lemmy.world to post there - is there a common solution to that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Echoing many things that other users are saying already:

Signing up/choosing a home instance is confusing. I don't think it's very confusing conceptually, but it is confusing from a UX/UI perspective. Subscribing to outside communities was the toughest part, I had to find them through a different instance using a search engine, then manually paste the community-specific URL into my home instance search, wait several seconds, then click into the community home page and finally click "subscribe."

Not something a casual user is going to want or even figure out to do. I trust that many of these growing pains will be fixed in the coming weeks/months. I just hope that it's not all a flash in the pan and then fizzles out totally.

Once using it though, I like the general feel of it. Better themes and some cleaner UI choices and it will be really nice imo. People are friendly so far and that's worth a ton right there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, there is a ton of room for Lemmy to grow. With time, it should get easier for newer people to use it as the apps mature.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Liking it so far. A social network is only as good as its community. The community is small but high quality. I'm excited to see Lemmy grow.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Worried about the future of fediverse, all it takes is a few external bad apples and servers will start defederating. Also even less internal bad apples who decides to make specific desirable features proprietary with the goal to amass the majority to users. Both of these are bad for the fediverse.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I was new to Reddit (3 weeks of activity), and switching to Lemmy is a bit confusing. But one evening is enough to learn the basics, I hope. Let's keep it rolling. :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Joined today and I find Lemmy really cool. Of course there isn't that much content here yet but I'm hoping the June 12 Reddit protests and the upcoming Reddit API restrictions will bring more users in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I love it here and I'll express myself and show love to all with manatees

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

So far, so good. Excited to see more variety in communities as more users discover and migrate to lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Seems pretty reasonable, even the federated stuff works fine - unlike Mastodon, oddly.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Very confused.. I have a direct link to a Linux community and can't figure out how to open it, or join it, or whatever I'm supposed to do with it in Jerboa. Discovery seems severely limited.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m enjoying the concept behind the fediverse, and while communities are small right now, they’re eventually gonna get bigger and be more centralized.

I think the UI/UX does need a little more work, but that’ll come with time.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Let’s not kid ourselves UI/UX needs a lot of work not just a little, but it’s making progress and all done by volunteers and that’s impressive on it’s own.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's not a single middle eastern sub, and I doubt there ever will be😞

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Be the change you wanna see!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

It’s like eating something extremely good, best way to put it. It’s amazing, everything reddit did wrong doesn’t exist here. It’s like a utopia.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It’s welcoming but confusing. I think there’s two reasons for the latter:

1- Many of us forget how basic Reddit was when we first started using it, and the features we all know and love got added over time and repeatedly refined based on use.

2- Most of us here are because we have been users of incredibly well designed apps crafted by developers with a passion for great UI. If I try using the (new) Reddit site or their default app, I find myself equally confused.

There are still so many changes happening in Lemmy functionality, and as we’ve seen with Mastodon, we will hopefully soon be overwhelmed with great apps.

In the meantime there’s the great community already here and growing. I saw a comment that you can estimate that Reddit has 90% lurkers, 9% commenters, 0.9% posters, and 0.1% “community builders” I think it’s those latter groups who are leading the exodus, which is great news for us and terrible news for whoever ends up owning Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm using Jeroba on android and I think it's pretty solid so far, considering how new it is. It has more than I expected it to, it just needs time to get developed more. There's a few features I want to go make github issues to request, but they're nothing critical.

And I agree with your last paragraph completely. I think most people using third party apps were not lurkers. Most of them were probably using a 3pa because they had been for years, from the time when the reddit app was either nonexistent or even worse than tosay, or had found the reddit app too annoying to comment and post with. They're people who use reddit so much on their phone that the official app is too annoying and ugly to tolerate.

And seeing how many mods are ip in arms about the mod tools they use, it seems like reddit is really shooting itself in the foot.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wonder if the Reddit board really appreciate how hard it is going to be to find large numbers of new mods. Being thick-skinned enough to cope with being hated by so many people for so many contradictory reasons while also being flexible and responsive and ready to plough through piles of work for free isn’t a combination of qualities many people have…

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If a lot of mods stopped using reddit, it would get absolutely inundated with actual regulatory attacks because it would get flooded with child porn, explicit harrassment, and nazis.

Any of the top 10 communities having enough mods resign would cause absolute havoc for reddit, yet they consistently screw over mods.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Oof, that’s an aspect I hadn’t even thought of. It may well be a total bin fire.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I like the idea, but to be honest it feels unpleasant to use. Multiple different communities with the same topic are hosted on different servers, so I have to subscribe on them all if I want to keep track on what is happening. Would be nice to have some "mega community" that would have them all there. Also web client is broken, it feels so bad when my feed is moved down when new fresh post is added on top, this is borderline annoying and unusable> chf

upd: have tried kbin, it seems there they fixed all the annoying parts of lemmy. Great usage experience!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

One question I still have is how quickly posts and comments propagate across the Fediverse. How can I be sure the comment I'm writing actually shows up across other instances, and how long after I write it does it take on average to show up other places?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don't really know whats going on the whole instance thing confuses me. Whats it's pros? Why use it

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