Technology

My guess is that redditers will want lemmy to be just like....reddit, but without the public-corp nonsense and with UI that is at minimum on-par with 3rd party apps people gravitate toward on reddit.

I'm totally new to this so I'm also figuring out my way around. The federated organization is confusing for sure, but not so much that people can't get it.

Some work could be done from a user focus... Simplify(including caring for duplicated hosts and communities), educate on lemmy's benefits, make searching for new communities seamless and less of a quest.

It's different, but getting the hang of it, also using the jerboa app currently which isn't bad for such a new app. Considering developing my own app for Android but might end up in the unfinished projects list.

Community discovery is lacking IMO at the moment, even using browse.feddit I'm found communities that aren't on there, through the app so not the easiest to use currently.

Not a fan of the UI, but I love the community here! It's the best parts of Reddit combined with the best parts of Fedi.

The platform is fine and being able to subscribe across Lemmy instances is nice (i.e. I'm not even on Beehaw but here I am anyway) - it just needs more users and content.

The main issue is going to be getting that critical mass of users, especially on a platform that isn't quite as straightforward as a centralized one. Trying to explain how Lemmy works to my wife just left her confused and wondering what the point was. Getting people like her to make the jump to a federated platform is going to take time, effort, and - most importantly - content.

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 Cars@lemmy.ml - 3.41K subscribers
Cars@lemmy.ml - 104 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.ca - 56 subscribers
Self Driving Cars - 19 subscribers
IdiotsInCars@lemmy.world - 11 subscribers
Electric Cars@lemmy.ca - 4 subscribers
RC Cars@lemmy.world - 4 subscribers
Cars@lemmygrad.ml - 3 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.world - 2 subscribers
Cars@lemmy.world - 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 Cars@lemmy.ml & Cars@lemmygrad.ml & 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 Cars@NeoNaziHeartsFascism.com 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

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

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.

I’m loving it.

I was wondering about situations where there are multiple communities about the topic on multiple instances… is it possible to subscribe to all of them easily or maybe have a way that the communities can “share” posts? Like sister communities or something?

Example, I post to dogsinbikinis@whatever.com, users of dogsinbikinis@whateverelse.com would automatically be able to see and comment on it.

I’m happy to be a part of growing this community. I like that no one is trying to make money from my engagement.

It's fine. The content is slightly more sparse but that's unavoidable given current population levels. The basics are there in terms of content though. There are some rough edges with regard to stability and particularly mobile app quality -- especially as someone more used to one of the more polished third party Reddit apps. But it's already improved drastically since last week, and given time I'm sure it'll only improve even more.

It seems fine. Basically like reddit before it got all corprate

I'm curious how well niche communities will work. It seems too niche here, like it's hard to find, hard to grow.

Like I do alternative keyboard layouts. If someone on Reddit wants to find it, it's rather easy and everyone in that community is there (there are dozens of us, dozens!). But on lemmy I think those dozens will be spread out more.

Even though it was twitter that spurred me joining the fediverse nearly a year ago, I was more of a reddit user than I ever was a twitter user, which is why it was one of the first things I came looking for when I joined the fediverse.

We spun up lemmy.blahaj.zone around 6 months ago so that I could scratch that itch, but it always lacked enough traffic to really do the job.

However now? The amazing growth and huge burst of activity? It's honestly shifted my perspective on what the future of the fediverse might be. I find myself really active on lemmy (and kbin before they had to go behind the Cloudflare CDN), even moreso than I was on the microblogging fediverse, because of its topic centric view.

I think the future of the fediverse might be one in which microblogging is "a" fediverse feature instead of the spotlight feature.

Right now it's feeling pretty darn small. Once it hits a million users, it'll feel fine.

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 needs time and more users, but I think it's alright so far.

I had looked into a couple other decentralized or federated services in the past and they seemed like kind of a pain or they were poorly explained. until now, all of it also seemed too obscure to have any kind of notable traffic. if this isn't temporary and the reddit api controversy actually did something meaningful, then I look forward to seeing how the federated service ecosystem grows and changes.

reddit's dethroning was a long time coming in my eyes. it's just not going to be as smooth as the digg -> reddit pipeline years ago.

I think there may be room for another couple million users spread across a ton of communities. wishful thinking, but maybe that would keeps thing toned down with the bots and other shady shit.

lots of polish and QoL needed both on the main site(s) and the mobile offerings out so far. all in all, pretty good start.

I like the concept, and overall experience. On a more technical side getting my own private lemmy instance up and running (I wanted to retain full control of my account) was not easy due to somewhat lacking documentation on the process. Had to dig through posts from other people having similar issues, and do a bit of troubleshooting to fill in the gaps.

Now that I have it working will see if I can find the time to do a writeup on the process if others are looking to do the same.

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.

The fact that it will use activity pub is rather interesting to me, but I don’t have faith in that lasting long term. Eventually they’d defederate I feel or purposefully have features that only work on the Meta client making it worse for everyone else to interact with.

Google Power Delete Suite. Don't leave your content there for them to use.

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.

I like it a lot. Left Reddit on Sunday, tried Tildes, then found Lemmy and have been here since.

Also using Jerboa. I like it well enough. It feels a bit like Reddit but also reminds me of being on the Internet back in the late 90s - not sure why it gives me that feeling though. Maybe because it's new to me and not the most streamlined, and it's still growing.

Anyway it's great here! Enjoying interacting and watching things grow.

Testing a lemmy instance to see how it might work for the r/blind community. There will be a bunch of accessibility issues fixed in the next release it looks like, so it's a bit early to judge. Also, it's pulled me, personally, into the world of being a sysadmin for other people. Now I get to figure out why email doesn't work and why when you search for a community you need to press search nine times before anything shows and all kinds of other niggles like that before I feel ready to open an instance to the general masses.

I actually like it a lot. I think I can stick with it. I hope that this is the moment when the fediverse and the decentralized social networks will have the chance to become mainstream.

I like being here. A bit part of it is my desire to host my own stuff. I've never been much of a contributor on Reddit, but now that my instance is reporting to have some actual users it just feels so rewarding! Love the sense of the earlier decentralized internet.