I run a few groups, like @[email protected], 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 is really annoying to subscribe to communities on federated servers – there should be a link that will redirect you to your home server. As of now I seem to have to copy and paste the community address into the URL because the feddit.de community search doesn’t seem to be working for me
Not a huge fan of the UI (so much wasted space!) but it works for now. I’m subscribed to a few communities but the content is pretty stale. I’ve seen the same posts at the top for a few days now. The “Active” selection keeps the same things over. I tried a few of the other selections (Hot, Top Day, etc) but there is this weird thing where it randomly refreshes the feed and adds one or two new posts at the top and then pushes everything down. Again, UI/UX issues.
Yeah the stuff popping in while scrolling is weird and can be a bit aggravating.
If you use TamperMonkey or a similar browser extension you can try this.
Makes it abit closer to old reddit and a lot easier to read on desktop imho.
There’s a user style that makes Lemmy a lot like old.reddit and it’s awesome.
Edit: This one: https://userstyles.world/style/10311/old-reddit-ish-lemmy
@CalcProgrammer1 @diemunkiesdie That sounds dope! What’s it called?
I just edited my post, here it is https://userstyles.world/style/10311/old-reddit-ish-lemmy
Here’s another user style https://userstyles.world/style/10301/better-lemmy.
It widens the display, changes bright green buttons to blue ones and improves the indentation of replies.
What kind of space is wasted? Genuinely curious. I only really use it on my iPhone. On desktop is the comments area too narrow?
I like it and was able to adapt easily, but some of the UI is terrible (and I mean this in a constructive way), specifically:
- Page weight is too high, when I use back/forward or switch tabs on mobile my browser has to do a full refresh. Tildes and kbin are very lightweight by comparison, not sure what the JS code of Lemmy/Beehaw are doing to cause this issue.
- Adding new subs is confusing, but mostly because the “Subscribe” button is hidden by default when you visit a community on another instance.
- The process of subscribing is convoluted You 1. visit an instance, 2. find a community, 3. copy the url,4. go back to your community, 5. past it, 6. open the search link in your instance, then 7. click subscribe and wait a little. It feels like that can be streamlined or something.
- Loading “All” is slow, I understand why, but the UI should do something to explain it to me instead of popping in posts.
But, the discussion seems good, the actual UI is reminiscent of old reddit so I’m happy, and I’m surprised how easy it is to discuss things across instances.
Another really clunky thing I noticed right away is that there’s a huge difference between viewing a sub through your home instance vs its home instance, in that you’re no longer logged in when using the remote instance’s URL, and there’s no obvious way to get back to the corresponding location on your home instance. This means, for example, that when someone posts a link to another thread, it’s always kind of broken for remote users.
I feel like something could be done to ease interoperability using the same techniques ad trackers use.
I’m especially baffled as to why the UI had a dedicated button to view content on its home instance. I can see how that might be useful in some circumstances and it would make sense to have it hidden in a menu, but I think it’s just a confusing distraction for new users who typically have no use for a crippled view of what they’re already looking at.
Enjoying it, but wondering if I’m missing a way to work backwards to find communities.
I’ll give an example - Sleep Token, a band I like, released an album not too long ago. If I Google “reddit sleep token”, I can see a few communities like /r/metalcore and /r/progmetal discussing them, so I can guess I might want to join those communities.
If I Google for “lemmy sleep token”, I get a bunch of random websites with articles about sleep token with links and quotes about motorhead.
Whats the strategy for working backwards like that on Lemmy? Is there one?
I haven’t been able to find a Sleep Token community either, I’m not sure one actually exists. I was thinking of making one.
You could try this page to find communities though, it indexes most of the large instances: https://browse.feddit.de/
I would join, I love them/him
Yeah, I wondered if that was maybe part of the problem - that my Google search strategy would technically work, it’s just that no one is posting about it on lemmy yet.
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.
I’ve also found this to be true with Julia devs
Source: am Julia dev
Check the GitHub! It’s linked at the bottom of the web page (“Code”)
Weirdly enough the fact that it’s written in rust is why I am using it instead of kbin (PHP)
PHP!? They’re writing the shiny new thing in the joke language from r/ProgrammerHumor?
Exactly right?
To the average Redditor I guess its fine, but to me its unacceptable haha.
Repo link: https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
Welp, I guess I chose right after all.
There is:
- The right choice
- The other choice (PHP)
- The wrong choice (PHP)
What makes rust so special?
God damn! Okay now I’m fully behind it
Fast because it’s pointer-based like C/C++, but better because it’s memory safe, which means it won’t crash, leak or mysteriously overwrite it’s own data constantly.
I’d say that it’s fast because it’s compiled to machine code and doesn’t use garbage collection. But I see what you mean with “pointer-based”.
Rust is a very good language but is relatively new on the scene so it has to compete against other languages that fit the same niche(primarily C++) that have been around a lot longer.
Rust has been very popular for hobby projects for a while but it’s still pretty rare to see it for larger projects, and you still almost never see it for enterprise projects. So it’s cool seeing an app that uses it blow up.
I like it - I just want a few Reddit-ish features:
- Hiding reply chains for scrolling cleanliness in comments of a post
- Hiding posts on the main page should be easy to do (buttons unclear)
- Dedicated copy link button - so it’s clear I’m copying the link to the page that is being spoken about in a post, rather than a link to the comments of the post itself.
(1.) should already be here, at least - on the web version it’s the
[-]icon next the commenter’s name, and on Jerboa you just tap the top bar of the comment. Agree that there should be a way to hide posts permanently - it’s kind of annoying to always scroll past the same pinned posts at the top of the “Local” view.That is a strange place for that to be, but thank you for the tip.
I tried tapping the top area of a comment. It displays a gray bar as click feedback but doesn’t seem to collapse anything. Am I just being a noob?
Edit: updating fixed it :]
Still very new here and most problem I have in filtering my main page. If you subscribed to a bunch of feeds it gets quickly very confusing to find things. You can choose top day, which is to long, but not e. G. Active / top last 4h ;(
My experience has been that the “Hot” view is most similar to Reddit if you’re looking for new content. You can read about the different sorting here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
What I’ve noticed about the “Active” sort is that older posts that are still getting upvotes and have new comments can remain at/near the top of the list for several days. I think this is good if you want to see where ongoing discussions are happening. On Reddit, I often felt that an interesting post fell off my view very quickly. I know I wasn’t the only one, which is probably why people would post a “remind me” post or “following” post on Reddit so they could come back to it later. Regardless, someone might entirely miss a post that blows up in a community but sees it in the “Active” view and check it out. I like “Hot” because I can see what’s trending up, but I frequently switch between Hot and Active. I’ve noticed that many of the “hot” posts don’t have any comments.
I agree with you regarding quieter communities. Reddit had something in its sauce that allowed posts from less active communities to show up in my feed through all the noise of busier communities. This didn’t happen for all the subreddits that I joined, but rather, the ones I showed an interest in. The downside of that kind of algorithm is it reinforces the echo chamber effect as the algorithm is learning what I like and then showing me more of what I like to get me to stick around longer. This system isn’t (currently) prone to that kind of manipulation.
Active has a 48-hour cut-off, and the ranking function it uses seems to encourage the same few posts to stay at the top for 48 hours. It’s basically the same ranking as “Hot”, but using the timestamp of the last comment instead of the time of posting to decay its ranking over time.
This means any comment activity whatsoever on a popular thread bumps it back up the rankings significantly, and I suspect leads to a kind of snowballing effect that keeps posts higher up. Ideally, it would use some metric based on user interactions over a time period to calculate a score of activity rather than solely the latest comment. In effect, it seems to act more like a “top from last 48 hours”. (Although I would add I’m a newbie to Lemmy, so might not yet have an accurate picture of its behaviour).
Lemmy seemed to get much livelier for me when I switched my default to Hot, but I wish there was a way to disable the auto-updates (I’d rather see new items only on browser refresh). Active sort feels pretty stale to me.
I would like a “rising” option, one that is more a mix between New and Hot bacon reader for reddit does it very well.
What I’m really impressed by is being able to follow Lemmy communities from within Mastodon… e.g. by searching @[email protected] I can see threads and posts without leaving my Mastodon app of choice (Tusky). It’s amazing how it just works.
It’s buggy, but I’m managing. Weird things like having to press the “Subscribe” button twice. I’m assuming most will be solved when traffic stabilizes.
The federation is… strange. Confusing when I click a link to another instance when trying to subscribe to a community, but also kinda cool how it works. I’m not sure federation should really be a concern for users, but time will tell. I’m sure it will only improve.
I’ve moved from Twitter to Mastodon and Reddit to Lemmy and am so far loving both. Even though they’re taking a bit to get used to they’re mostly pretty straight forward and familiar feeling in how they work. I will definitely miss certain subreddits but many of them are already here in some form or in the process of moving over. I really love the distributed model that is not at the behest of a single corporate entity or billionaire.
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.
First impression is very good. But many instances do not allow the creation of new communities. Which brings me to all the little specialized subreddits that I used daily on Reddit are not on Lemmy. :-( Yeah general ones like Movies is there but I need my fix for r/Dune! :D
I love it so much that I started contributing to the project on GitHub
You’re awesome. Thank you
So far so good. This is actually my first comment.
I had a hard time wrapping my head around how the federation worked. But figured out I just search here in communities only with my keywords. If I don’t get a result here and https://browse.feddit.de then it means no community has yet been created anywhere.
I decided to make Beehaw my ‘home’ server after discovering it actually had an ‘interview’ that I jived with and a moderated/structured set of communities. As my first deeper ‘test’ of lemmy I have created my first community at lemmy.world since it seemed like the place for my random community about a grocery store chain: [email protected]
If I was making a specific tech/software related community I likely would have chosen lemmy.ml as that’s where many other tech/software related projects have landed so far. But lemmy.world seemed the better choice for random.
Does this seem relatively close to be how I should handle things in the lemmyverse?
Edit: It would be nice if there was a user setting to open external links in new tabs.
You’re doing perfectly!
For wide spread adoption there are a lot of issues with the fediverse. The main one is the home pages of fediverse instances or join-X.org sites immediately turn people away with their language, jargon and content. Nobody cares about the open source licence, or how it’s “federated” or what the developers can do, or that you can run your own server or what languages and frameworks it’s built on etc. These all will turn people away. Literally the first sentence on join-lemmy is “Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform”. Nobody wants to self host anything (well I do, but near to 100% of people don’t). Then there are screen shots of code diff’s and actual code, then a list of programming languages, then some Latin with hard to see ‘mod tools’, and then at the end back to self hosting “With Lemmy, you can easily host your own server, and all these servers are federated”. None of this is enticing people in. It’s turning people away.
These entrances to the fediverse should be about community, discussions, engagement etc. That’s what people want to sign up for and start participating. Just get them signed up. Once they’re in they can learn about the other benefits and that they can move the profile to different servers, or whathaveyou. Keep all the other bumf hidden away behind a “benefits” link.
Someone needs to come up with better terminology to fediverse and federated to avoid having to explain it all the time. It’s federated… You know… Like email. Well I’ve used email a long time and nobody has ever called it federated or used that term before when talking about any aspect of email - and I run my own email server.
Tl:dr: just cut the crap and make on-boarding easier. Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.
“Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform”
Okay seriously, this was my first issue. Someone on Reddit recommended Lemmy to me and I saw that and immediately went back to them and was like “WTF?”.
I think a lot of developers tend to massively underestimate the value of product management and good copywriting. Granted it’s probably a lot harder to find people with those skills in open source communities but I think that having a clear idea of who your target audience is goes a long way.
I agree for the most part and that the front page should be more focused on what the user will gain or be able to do if they join and in language that understand. However, the first sentence is “Follow communities anywhere in the world” not bad at least. It should elaborate on what that means.
Some people of course really do care about FOSS and letting people know that or even just having them see those words/ideas is important IMHO. It could, however, elaborate by saying “social media that is not corporate controlled” or whatever that may make the point about it more clear.
Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.
I get the sentiment, but who is going to do it? just as the developers are donating their time, there will need to be community minded folks doing the same.
Lemmy doesn’t have a marketing budget to spend on a community manager.
There are a couple issues open on join-lemmy’s github - https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues, but not a lot in the way of contributing to fix it.
I mean, I get for a lot of people it’s not user friendly, but ultimately Lemmy is not some start up that has to grab a market share quick. If no one contributes better documentation, perhaps there won’t be a high enough adoption rate, but that’s ok for Lemmy.
Finding a good analogy is hard. But at the risk of sounding like a snob, a little barrier to entry isn’t always a bad thing…
The thought of trying to explain this to one of our users (helpdesk monke). No thanks…
A barrier to entry might be a life and death issue for Lemmy.
Lemmy was not created last week, man. All you see here today already existed and was running when spez hit the fan.
In that sense, part of what attracts me to this is a bit of the barrier to entry. I find it enticing, it reminds me of the good old days, where you had to earn your way in, in a sense. Of course that’s silly old man talk, because honestly, all you have to do is select any random site and sign up.
Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, it all comes down to the same thing. This “barrier” to entry is almost fictitious, and I feel that’s the ideal type of barrier.
Similar to how the internet culture was before it was popular, only vested people were online
In theory, I agree with you! A 100%, but the problem is that currently Lemmy doesn’t support migrating your profile to a different server. So that already slightly complicates things. So from the get-go they are forced to make choice. A choice which isn’t clear, what potential consequences are and the fact they currently easily migrate to a different server, obviously doesn’t help.
“Like email” is basically the same description I’ve been using to explain it to non-tech people.
Long story short, onboarding needs to get better. But that also applies for other Fediverse projects (like Mastodon or Friendica).
I’m not sure the ‘like email’ thing helps.
Email is confusing and not what most people use to connect with others. I don’t know anyone who met via email.
Trying to get groups of people to connect meaningfully over email didn’t work. Messenger apps did work as they removed user freedom to top-reply and break everything.
I’m vaguely interested in IT, seflhost a little and compile a kernel from time to time but email still seems esoteric and confusing to me.
Join the fediverse! It’s as simple as setting up an email server!
I’m not sure the ‘like email’ thing helps. Email is confusing and not what most people use to connect with others. I don’t know anyone who met via email.
In my experience it at least helps in the sense that, when people ask “why are there more then 1 site?” ? And up to a certain degree you use that to explain the concept of federating.
