DrNeurohax

Everyone feels a little lost here at first. You just have to roll with confusion and take everything at your own pace. The best part is that 99.9% of the users are new here (within the last month), so no one's gonna give you shit for not fully understanding.

Welcome!

Don't worry, you'll catch on soon enough. Just canoodle around until something interesting hits you and then follow the "how federation works" rabbit hole until it stops making sense. Rinse and repeat. Remember that things are still in flux, so you'll probably run into bugs at some point. Using the platform gets significantly easier once you can identify what proper operation.

For example, if I let a kbin thread sit in a background tab for too long, it loses sync with the server. Once I reach the tab, and interaction that deals with storage (voting, commenting, etc.) brings me to 1 or 2 error pages. At first I thought this was a problem with which instance I joined or some federation thing I didn't understand. Nope. It's a minor bug. Just needed to refresh the page to get around it.

The fediverse is getting better and more stable every day. There's still a lot to be done, but the devs are doing a solid job. A couple weeks ago there were 300 kbin users. Now there are 235,000. Lemmy went from 50k to 1.5m. That's crazy!

o7

It might be worth noting that the platform is stable, but still growing. Expect little quirks; we're dealing with a big influx of new users.

For example, I joined during the first big wave of signups and the servers were having trouble keeping up with the sudden spike in activity (10 to 1000x+ new posts/users/instances). I would sometimes see federated content, sometimes not. After 12 hours and a massive effort by the devs, everything became MUCH more stable.

There will be bugs, but they are actively being squashed at breakneck speed.

For example, one that I encounter regularly is leaving a thread open in a background tab too long (on Firefox) eventually stops syncing with the server. When I eventually get to that tab, the data is old and attempting to interact (click arrows, reply, subscribe, etc.) send me to an error page. The fix? Refresh the page if was open more that 30 minutes ago. It's a minor bug that will eventually be fixed, so give it time.

I also wanted to throw some advice out there, in case it's useful...

If they're ever confused, there are plenty of support communities/magazines. First, check if others have posted about the same problem. If they haven't, feel free to ask. The NoStupidQuestions community hosts a ton of simple Fediverse-related questions posted by users, and it has some of the highest engagement on the platform. I know the reluctance of posting may have been ground into you by Reddit, but (a) this isn't Reddit, and (b) we're all new here.

There is a slight learning curve, so canoodle around a bit to get a feel for this new Reddit-esque multiverse. Read a few FAQs, skim the support communities, follow a few rabbit holes.

Here's what I suspect is a semi-normal new user experience (because it was mine :) ):

• To start, you'll want to register an account, so you do. You'll click a few stories, try to comment, and find you're not logged in and can't log in. You'll notice you're not on the original server. Do you have to register a million accounts? That makes no sense! The answer is no.

• Next, you'll want to understand why. That post you clicked took you to another instance (think of them as servers). So, how do you post a comment on another instance? Ah, from your home instance. So, did it matter where I registered? Yes and no, but mostly no.

• • Keep going down the account rabbit hole and you'll read about the pros and cons of running your own instance, how federation/defederation works, and other instance-related topics,
• • Or, hop back out and proceed to comment on the post you read. Wait. My comment has no votes. The path forks again.
• • • Is there something like Reddit's karma system? Down the voting/rep rabbit hole!
• • • Is it considered bad form to vote for my own comment/post? (There's no consensus right now, so don't worry.) Down the Lemmy/Kbin etiquette rabbit hole!

You'll eventually go back to hit on those forks in the path you didn't take. Follow whichever path suits you best and expand from there.

LOL I thought the same thing. "Have they considered... not sucking?"

o7

Correct.

Yes, but if I remember correctly, the UBlock Origin devs said that the current restrictions in Chrome prevent some of the performance improvements seen in FFx because the filtering is done after the element is downloaded. So, it still has to transfer, but isn't rendered or executed. I could be mistaken, though.

Yes.

This did not get the traction it should have. It's probably the best of the dozen-ish methods I've seen.

There's also a semi-auto delete user script that doesn't use the API called so-long-reddit-thanks-for-all-the-fish.

You go to your comments page, click a button, and it performs the actions within the browser. Without any further interaction, you'll see the screen scroll to the bottom, click edit on the last comment, enter the text in the script (default is a link to the script, but you can change that to anything), click save, and move on to the next comment (pretty sure it can delete, too). For best results, use a neverending Reddit script and keep scrolling until there are no more pages loaded. Also, re-sort the comments by each option (top, newest, etc.) to check for any stragglers.

You can still use your browser, though I recommend keeping the task in it's own window (in case your browser or an addon unloads pages you haven't accessed in x minutes). If you do something that makes the browser lag a little, it can cause the script to miss a comment, so you might need to run it twice. I used this on one account and it worked flawlessly for several thousand comments and skipped ~10, or so.

If you're using the main repo for PDS then you probably have the one that doesn't pause fro 5 secs between API calls (Reddit's limit). The first fork version has the pause and works correctly, though slowly. Just be aware that there's a bug in PDS that stops adding to the exported file if it hits an error (If you have 100 comments and get an error on comment #15 it will continue to edit/delete, but the exported file will only have 14 comments.)