Redditors, how do you like Lemmy?

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 :)

A year ago, I viewed the Fediverse as an unnecessary, complicated framework created by a handful of well-intentioned individuals as a solution to a problem that wasn't really there.

Today, I view it as a necessity.

This past year has been a hard lesson for me to stop placing trust in massive, centralized web services like Twitter and Reddit and to start federating more of my online activity. There's going to be growing pains, but it's going to be worth it in the end.

In general, it works pretty nice, but there are some limitations.

The biggest one for me is discoverability. The federation means that there is more fragmentation and it's harder to find the right community for something.

For example, there are country/city communities for my country/city on multiple instances. And since it's hard to find the "correct" one, it fragments out much harder than Reddit did. Combine that with generally lower attendance numbers and you get really tiny communities.

This is not aided by Jerboa, which doesn't open internal links internally. So if someone posts a link to a community and I press it, it instead tries to open it with my email app.

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.

The apps need some work, but overall it's "okay." The rest of my gripes lie entirely around the lack of content, which can't be helped

The idea is outstanding. The parts of the UI that work are great. There's much work to be done, especially with regard to subscription and discovery. The whole "copy/paste this into your server's search bar" thing is.... not great.

I love the concept of decentralization. Feels more like the internet of old.

It feels like the start of something new, you know? Sort of exciting because coming from Reddit to Lemmy feels like taking a leap of faith as we are looking for this place to replace what we have lost. At the end of the day, communities are what make or break a platform and we have that going.

In terms of the platform itself, I am still trying to figure my way around here but the UI/UX feels easy to interact with. I guess I would love to have a mobile app for iOS down the line to replace my addiction to Apollo!

For me, 10/10 just as good. It only needs more content.

I think it's important to make sure your instance is federated with all the other big ones, though, since adding a new one is not user-friendly.

The UX is kinda rough around the edges, but it's filling my scroll addiction while reddit takes a steaming dump on everyone.

I hate when threads automatically update, scrolling content down my browser.

I hate that when I hit back on my web browser, it doesn't bring me back to where I was previously on the page. I have to scroll down all over again.

Lack of content or small communities don't bother me. It just means more people need to contribute, myself included.

I'm quietly hopeful that more and more people migrate over to lemmy, if it wasn't for all this api nonsense I'd have never heard of the fediverse. I don't know how it passed me by but I'm glad to be here now.

I hope the #RedditMigration sours adoption

I think you meant spurs lol

Anyway yeah I'm liking Lemmy and the fediverse so far. I actually prefer the UI/UX of https://kbin.social more for desktop, but Jerboa is great for mobile. If they stay actively in development it's going to be hard to beat IMO

I've followed from Fark to StumbleUpon to Digg to Reddit, and now many years later, to Lemmy. I think the communities being spread across instances is extremely powerful for overall global community resiliency (if the separation is respected and we don't end up with a bunch of duplicated "subs" everywhere).

I'm sure you've heard plenty of people say this today, but the one thing I feel the most is excitement. The chaos reminds me of the early-ish days (~1996?) of the internet when everything was discoverable and not already aggregated to be served up to you inbetween advertisements.

I tried the fediverse with Mastodon to replace Twitter, but it didn't work out. On Twitter, I was exclusively following accounts of personalities/organizations. As these accounts did not make the switch from Twitter to Mastodon, there was little use.

I feel like the fediverse works way better with content aggregation. I don't really care who specifically is on Lemmy, as long as there is content and discussion. So far it's been really nice.

I signed up for Mastodon awhile back but never really got into it since I don't really do Twitter much either. I have been reading about lemmy but didn't sign up until today.

It was a little confusing trying to sign up, the first instance I tried to sign up with had a waiting period for account approvals but I finally found one I could sign up with instantly and then I started poking around. I think I am getting the hang of it!

I have also downloaded Mlem to test on my iphone. It's easy and simple to use, not a lot of features yet but it seems promising.

So far outside of a bit of focus time to figure out how to actually get signed up and find communities to subscribe to I'm cautiously optimistic. This seems more like how the older days of the internet were, before the enshittification of social media. Let's see if this trend continues!

I'm enjoying it so far. I like that it's not a direct one-for-one clone of reddit (not that it was intended to be). It feels like a combination of older reddit (> 10 years ago, when it wasn't as active) and old school forums (like how older posts will bump if there's activity). It makes me want to be more active vs being a lurker.

I have no intention of going back to reddit. I've already deleted RIF from my phone. The 3PA thing was the last straw for me, but I felt like reddit had been going downhill for a while and I think I had been looking for an excuse to fuck off but couldn't quit cold turkey. Whatever good intentions that company might've started with, they're just a greedy corporation now. They haven't cared about their users for a while (which is interesting because their users are what create their content. Reddit itself doesn't create anything).

The community, particularly Beehaw, is fantastic! I love it.

Lemmy itself needs a lot of work. It's incredibly far behind, but my expectations are staying measured and I'm excited to see how it develops. Right now it's not a case of me enjoying the platform itself, but more so 'putting up' with the limitations of the platform to access the nice community.

Jerboa is the mobile client I'm using currently, and it's off to a good start but needs a lot of fixes to be fully usable. Such as sorting comments and searching. The ability to easily click a button to jump to the next comment thread is my most missed feature as well from clients such as Boost for Reddit.

Additionally, I still have issues signing into the mobile website. I can sign in through Jerboa or the Beehaw website on desktop, but not on mobile (or at least not always). So I'm often navigating content on the mobile website, then using Jerboa to comment on it. Most won't deal with these issues, but I'm still holding out to see what comes from it all.

A couple of last side notes, it's really annoying to need to click on the title, and not being able to click on the text of a post to navigate (mobile site) - and visually it needs some improvements to draw more people in. That last part seems minor, and for a large part of the existing community, myself included, it truly minor - but for widespread adoption it needs a big revamp.

I'm confused, but I've got the spirit. Reddit was confusing at first too, given I joined before it was mainstream popular. I figured it out, I'll figure this out too. Looking forward to a restart and seeing this grow.

I like it. I can see myself being a long-term user here, in fact I plan to be. However, I'm experiencing a lot of timeouts and lag, I know it's not on my end. I'm not techie enough to know the reason this happens, but Im pretty sure that it won't adopt mainstream users until it runs smoother.

Used Reddit for 13 years, tried out Kbin and Lemmy yesterday and settled on Lemmy.

Long story short, I’m going back to Reddit.

• There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto. This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting. Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.

I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.

Deciphering the distributed nature of it took me, a relatively tech-friendly person, almost the entire day and several ‘What the fuck?’ posts. I now understand it more. There are some very low-level guides that have been haphazardly put together, but there absolutely needs to be a MUCH smoother guide/explanation to this whole thing. That learning process will turn people away for sure.

• BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security. If this is going to become a mainstream thing, as it reaches and before it gets to that critical mass of users, there’s going to be SO. MANY. SECURITY ISSUES. There’s no 2fa at all, hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant, and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is. In the ‘Fediverse’ your server instance might be hosted in a US or EU data center with proper digital and physical security, or it could be Joe Blows basement in Iowa running off a NAS. The easy-to-see future here is that Lemmy will fail to attract a critical mass of people because they’ll initially arrive, after a few months their instances will just cease to exist/get shut down/the hosts will decide its no longer a fun hobby to do.

With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them. Beyond that, if there IS a breach, they have the ability to recognize it, understand the legalities and requirements of reporting it, and can be held accountable by regulatory bodies. Joe doesn’t have the resources to really maintain and keep a server running, nor the knowledge of his responsibilities for keeping the data safe digitally or physically.

On top of that, if Joe’s basement loses power/gets hacked/Joe decides he’s moving to San Fransisco and can’t bring his NAS with him and the server goes down, and that’s where my instance is hosted well there goes my entire account/comments/data.

• Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.

• There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me, and I’ve gotten used to having a single place to get it from that floods me with thousands of different articles/memes/posts/etc every minute. Until the user base arrives in one single place and starts generating content, there’s no reason for most people like me to be there as by far the larger number of users never create anything at all and only exist to consume the content generated.

I was one of the original refugees from digg.com. This feels like R*ddit of old - simple layout, techie userbase, friendly community. Feels like home.

All in all, pretty good. Wish finding and subscribing to communities was easier tho. That’s probably my biggest gripe. I click some URL to join a new community, and it bitches to me that I’m not logged in because it’s an embedded safari page (on Mlem). Really wish it was simpler.

I dig it so far. The vibes are good and the people are cool. My one question, though, is how active things are once people here lose interest in talking about Reddit.

New platforms are always at their hottest when people are talking about what they've left or what the new platform could be. Will be interesting to see how Lemmy is once that dies down a bit.

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

coming along well, will take a while for users to spread out and not just mass on one large server, we need to spread out to keep this working and viable for the future.

To do that however, we need better ways to find communities on other instances, and more easily link to them with links that work on each users instance URLs. at the moment if I do !technology@beehaw.org or !technology@lemmy.ml those will take you off your current instance unless you are already on it, losing your login. The average user wont expect that and might not even notice they are on a totally different website and wonder why their logins don't work.

Apparently all of this as well as aggregated topic subscriptions (so you don't need to find and subscribe to 10 different communities for one topic) are being worked on, that will be very cool.

It's good, but it really needs combining of same name communities across the fediverse to prevent fragmentation.

I want to see all the technology instances if I go to /c/technology on whichever instance I"m on. It's hard enough remembering all the other fediverse names and which instances they have.

I mean, it's kinda already doing that on the front page, i.e. grabbing all the other fediverse posts.

honestly I hope it stays this active. fediverse feels more at home to someone whos been on the internet since before it was so centralised, something like this feels like a good mix. lots of different decentralized sites able to communicate with eachother, rather than just one site holding everyone hostage. mastodon never really took off too big but I hope lemmy can make it happen.

I have been trying to learn the way to do things, as well as getting around the problems.

My first view into the federated world was Mastodon, but I didn't use it much. Recently, I tried looking at lemmy/kbin content in Mastodon, but I find the way it presents it just seemed wrong and unwieldy. (maybe I am just doing it wrong)

I signed up a few days ago to kbin.social, but have been finding that it is just 'broken' with the content from other servers (like beehaw) being out of date - the cloudflare protection due to the growth seemingly to blame. I have now signed up to an area-focused server and have had problems with even finding this community. But now I have come back to it, it seems to be decently up to date and it may be to the small number of users on this server - so I am the first one to subscribe or even search for this.

I find myself finding content on one server but then wanting to interact with it, and there doesn't seem to be a "Take me to this post/comment on my server" button. So to make this post I searched again for the community then had to find this post on there.

Aside from the problems, I miss lists. In reddit I have lists of subreddits. So many subreddits I read I would not subscribe to, but instead add them to a list and so get posts with a certain theme based on what list I was looking at.

I am enjoying actual discussions and not just hot takes or rants. I don't care if the platform is "perfect". It's good enough for me. The admins aren't some corporation just looking for pavlovian click labor ('likes' and upvotes) to power their algorithm run ad fest.

It's certainly fantastic and unprecedented, that different user bases, from very different types of platforms are able to come together and interact from their platforms of choice.

We may be witnessing a disruption right now. I do see more benefits than drawbacks with federated content, but that could just be my very biased point of view.

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'm loving it. It's like the good old days of smaller forums, except they all link together to become a reddit-like conglomerate, best of both worlds.

It reminds me of when I first got into Linux. It's different and has bit of a learning curve, but it is always what makes it exciting and fun to start using.

So far pretty good. I like the idea of the fediverse, but I'm not sure if it will catch on.

Also, I hope some of the UI/UX stuff get ironed and are sharpened. I also miss old reddit.

But overall, it works and I am happy.

It desperately needs a compact, efficient UI similar to old.reddit's design philosophy. Otherwise its not bad. The auto-refreshing front page is very frustrating to use. I want to click on an article, and between when I move the cursor and click, new articles have refreshed and the link I clicked was the wrong one

I'm very impressed. It just needs more 3rd party apps!

Finally taking this as a reason to learn and understand ActivityPub and the Fediverse more. And other than it's discoverability issues, been a blast. Glad to have finally been thrown out the door by Reddit and forced to move into the new wave of the federated FOSS web.

As with other things in the fediverse, discoverability is pretty ass. It's a bit easier on Lemmy to find something you're looking for than it is, say, to find interesting people to follow on mastodon, but it's still not great. And often, you'll find multiple communities on the same topic and you have to try to figure out which one looks like it will be better down the road (communities are still pretty dead and empty, so you can't tell now which might be better). In addition to that, the interfaces for interacting with Lemmy are pretty rough at the moment, though that's not surprising.

So do I like it? Enh… I'd say it's a 4/10 right now with promise of getting better. Will it? Who knows?

It's hardly been 24 hours, but this is the most engaged I've felt in an online space in years. I've gone on a k.bin/Lemmy/Mastodon tear over the past day, exploring instances and looking for the one that I vibe with the most. So far I've been very happy with Beehaw as my home base, and love that I still have access to the communities on the other instances as well. It takes a slight bit of effort to find communities and make sure that I'm subscribed to them on this account, but I've actually found some satisfaction in the process.

Sure, there's a low volume of content compared to the old place, but if I wanted a constant barrage of content I could just go back to RSS readers and have my fill. It's the discussion and sense of connection that has made it worth investing my time here.

Okay, I've found a really annoying problem with Lemmy. I'd heard it mentioned before, but now I understand why it's so bad.

I click on "show context" to a reply that someone made to a post of mine. I didn't realize it, but I was instantly in a different instance and logged out of my account. So I couldn't respond. Clicking "back" didn't return me to my instance or log me back in. I had to re-enter my instance all over again.

That's HUGE. I'm sure it would drive away 4 out of 5 users. Please, someone, tell me it's being addressed!

It's shaping up to be a very cool platform and I hope with time it gets bigger than Reddit. I find the UX to be a bit clunky and not visually appealing at the moment and also the way communities work are a little confusing. Because of federation, you can have duplicate community groups and that can make content a bit segregated.

Its pretty much the same as old reddit, so it is fine. I am sure that there will be addons and stuff to bring back any functionality that is missing.

In terms of the community, it is hard to say - the same subs that I spent so much time and enjoyed so much are either not here or nowhere near as big and developed. I used to spend a lot of time on Formula1, Battlebots, but my account was nearly 12 years old and I had many that I used to visit from time to time for fun. Many of those are just not there in any meaningful way.

It is just going to take time to rebuild, I think.

I still don't quite understand how it works, instances and all that.. but I'll figure it out, and I'm here for the cause.

I like pretty well. I've been on reddit for over a decade now, and the UI on Lemmy is kinda like a combination of the good parts of old and new reddit to me.

People here are nice (maybe that's because my home instance is Beehaw...); and I like the small community.

It's interesting but I still think the federated universe still has too many quirks to be understandable by most people. To be honest, I haven't bothered documenting myself so I might say stupid things but I can't understand why identity is tied to a server, it seems like a terrible design mistake when it's obviously the first thing i'd want to decentralise. In short, I'm me, it shouldn't matter that I'm on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server. Huge mistake imho.

Then the content obviously needs a lot more contributors but many of the good reddit contributors where also mostly tech illiterate and I'm still worried that the high complexity to enter the fediverse will put off many people and keep it a fun, but somewhat boring, little niche.

The main thing I miss is being able to have things disappear from my front page after I press like or dislike on them.

I like it - I just want a few Reddit-ish features:

1. Hiding reply chains for scrolling cleanliness in comments of a post
2. Hiding posts on the main page should be easy to do (buttons unclear)
3. 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.

As sad as I am by how Reddit turned out, this was the kick I needed to start truly indulging in the fediverse! Everybody's been nice so far, and I hope that it continues to be that way

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.

I like it so far. However, I do have some questions.

1. How do we handle "dupe" communities?
2. What's the best way to find new communities?
3. How are cross-posts handled across servers?

Still getting the hang of things. There's definitely a learning curve compared to reddit. Been using reddit for 10+ years and there has been a noticeable decline in the last few years. Things are quite fragmented at the moment and unfortunately the majority of my communities are still only active on reddit.

so far it's really nice, it's what I liked in reddit and before that forums, without being what reddit became.

the fediverse is hard though, but it kinda makes sense. I'll see if I get more used to it

This is my first post, so hello everyone! I do like a fresh start every now and again but it's a shame it's happened in these circumstances. As for lemmy, I'm enjoying it so far. I'm just learning about how it all hooks together. I really like the decentralised concept. In a way, Reddit doing what it's done may have been the catalyst to give this new framework what it needs to succeed. The UI is similar but feels cleaner than Reddit (which I found extremely sluggish). So far, so good!

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.

I'd like to see more color settings. The default colors do not have enough contrast and are hart to read in some cases like the blue on gray.

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.

He was the best frontman motörhead ever had

Overall it's pretty good! With more development on Jerboa and better backend performance and an influx of people, I think it'll be fantastic. I'm pretty pleased thus far!

It's great to see decentralization in action to foster a thriving community, not just to make/gamble money.

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

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.

So far I have no problems with 99% of what everyone else seems to have. It's not super intuitive to sign up and figure out all the instances/sites, but it wasn't THAT hard and I'm not planning on signing up too often. Finding new subreddits (for lack of the terminology knowledge) really needs to be improved - it took me well over a day to figure it out (but admittedly I was only using jerboa).

The only things that bug me are some missing quality of life features my 3P Reddit app had, like automatically making as read when scrolling past and being able to quickly hide/dismiss seen content. I'm not used to seeing the same articles over and over. Also, and it's pretty dumb, but being able to double tap for up vote and triple tap for down vote. Don't need it, just drive myself crazy since it's so ingrained.

The only other "complaint" I have is simply the amount of content. I was subscribed to quite a few niche subreddits that fit my interests/humor well, and those obviously haven't migrated over. The YEARS of help in computer subreddits or whatever isn't here. There's no crazy specific subreddit to discover with tons of content.

With all of that being said, I currently have zero plans or desire to go back to Reddit, and it really hasn't been all that hard so far. I swapped out my homescreen shortcut on my phone and I've been enjoying my time so far. I'm desperately hoping that this doesn't die out in a couple days/weeks/months because it's good to have competition, Reddit is effectively dead to what I need it to be, and I have zero desire to give Reddit any money after their views on us came out (to name a few reasons of many).

I also hope the toxicity stays away, but I'm not that naive. And I'm REALLY hoping that people with more time than I have bring over their comments/posts so I can search for them here. Reddit was one of the last places I knew that wasn't stuffed full of ads and bot-generated, search-optimized posts that made little sense and didn't help at all.

Obviously not enohgh content or communities here, but the bones here seem good and that is what's important starting out.

Anything that takes social media out of the power of greedy corporations is an A+ in my book.

I think its really cool! I will definitely stay here.

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: !traderjoes@lemmy.world

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.

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'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.

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.

What I'm really impressed by is being able to follow Lemmy communities from within Mastodon... e.g. by searching @technology@beehaw.org I can see threads and posts without leaving my Mastodon app of choice (Tusky). It's amazing how it just works.

It’s been great so far. I’ve mostly been using Mlem on IOS. Still early in development but it gets better everyday. Even though I was on Reddit for 8+ years I have no intentions on going back to it. There is potential here and I hope we can tap in to it.

i like the community but

1. this app needs a better ui...i know that comes secondary but it just seems to vague. whats with the weirdly small coloured thread indicators?
2. theres gotta be a better explanation of federation out there. there's gotta be. i didn't understand it for days because i couldnt find any decent sources on lemmy

Lemmy UI is very easy to use, and fast too. Also, I like the concept of federation (though I have no plan in hosting one) and the fact that the community has been very welcoming so far also help with me being able to enjoy browsing Lemmy.

Of course, there's the obvious problem of lack of content but if the subreddits that I usually lurked on have fully switched to Lemmy then I would have 0 issues with fully switching to Lemmy regardless of the lack of content.

I'm really liking it! Federation is cool and everyone is so chilled. Not missing the cesspool of Reddit infighting

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 ;(

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

I didn't until I found Beehaw. I'm enjoying it now.

I wish you could block servers personally, though. Like some of the stuff that's blocked here makes this place a lot better to be around. There's less hate and reactionary fear mongering. Everything is more chill.

I think it will take time to smooth few rough edges but already now it's usable.

However I have big concerns on how this structure can scale, it already suffers with few thousands users. Plus security, privacy and sustainability of the fediverse is still a big question mark to me.

But it's exciting and I hope it will be the future of socials.

I have been enjoying it so far, the software feels quite similar to old reddit in many ways but the community so far is a bit less toxic. If anyone is wishing to use it on iPad I recommend going to your instance and in the share menu adding it to the home page as there isn't yet a good option for iPad.

I am also looking forward to the addition of 2fa in the next update

UX wise its okay, content wise, we are getting there. I am also happy its written in Rust, I am keen to contribute to the project in the future.

I love it. It feels like a more niche community (that's a plus). There's a strong sense of community here. I also like the UI (except for kbin--which I know isn't Lemmy--I can't seem to collapse comments there). Is it a little janky? Yes--and I'd argue that's part of the charm, sometimes.

I'm also testing out jerboa atm. And it's a bit rough around the edges, but gets the job done well enough. Still haven't explored too much of the Lemmyverse, but looking forward to digging in a bit deeper.

It'll take a miracle for Lemmy to get anywhere near Reddit's active user count. Convincing users to migrate to a new platform is one thing, but getting them used to the concept of federation is the tricky part. I remember when I first signed up for Matrix, and being confused when picking the domain, authentication rules, etc. for the first time.

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 know it's in its infancy but the great thing about Reddit was I could search any niche topic and guarantee there was a subreddit setup for it.

Obviously this is solved by more and more people using Lemmy but I personally can't see Lemmy appealing to the the masses. Depending how active the communities become I can see me using Lemmy going forward but I don't think it will be the "One site for everything" that Reddit has become but rather 1 of many sites I check going forward instead

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.

The Software lemmy+jerboa does the job. It's basic and misses a lot of features that one would ideally want, but it's good enough.

I'm enjoying the back-to-the-roots vibe of early reddit or early internet that comes with lemmy.

Now, it's ask about content and how the communities will form in the ecosystem. Federation is nice, but wilm people actually find the communities relevant to them.

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.

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

Currently using Jerboa. Unsure if I like it, because currently there's no inline video player and no creepypasta communities to sub to.

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

Hey Chris. Seeing more and more people from my Mastodon feed here :)

I'm very impressed by Lemmy. Some of the communities like Beehaw have been excellent, even before the recent Reddit API-apocalypse. Self-hosting has been a bit challenging compared to the more mature (I guess) Mastodon but I hope to get it sorted out soon.

I quite like it so far, though the users of the communities I've been moderating are not necessarily the most tech savvy and may not find their way here, despite instructions and plenty of prior announcements.

So ultimately I feel like throwing 1.5M people to the wolves (though some other mods might stick around, who knows).

On the other hand, I might also have outgrown some of my communities, and just stuck around due to the familiarity. Joined reddit in my mid 20s, now I'm pushing 40.

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 personally think that this framework is better than what reddit currently has.

For example, a single instance dedicated to programming with its own various communities within it is a lot easier to manage and moderate than having all those communities (aka, subreddits) on the main reddit page itself. The fact that all these individual instances can interact with other instances (or not, if desired) makes this more robust. For example, the fear a lot of people have right now with reddit is that the reddit staff will just kick out all the mods of the popular subreddits, instill mods that will obey them, and essentially perform a corporate overtake of all those individual communities. That doesn't seem like it would be a problem with lemmy.

I am excited to see how this all plays out long term.

My only issue so far is that it can be difficult to find a particular post if you don't remember which community and instance it was on, afaik there's no search across all posts in all instantiations.

I love it so much that I started contributing to the project on GitHub

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.

I'm still confused by the instance decentralized structure. And my feed seems chaotic. But so far I'm liking it !

What perhaps will be the final nail in the coffin for Reddit is working here perfectly! Mobile apps! Jerboa is perhaps lacking some features, but works like a charm.

I dislike the idea of multiple communities for the same topic spread across multiple instances. Sure, you can subscribe to multiple communities, but that's just extra overhead. I'm hopeful reddit backs down after the protest (as unlikely as it may be), but either way I will probably go back to using it regardless. Social media is about content, and unless there is a dramatic shift away from reddit being the content hub that it currently is, nothing else will be as useful.

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.

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

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.

Ok so far. Only complaint is posts moving when new posts get added while I'm in the middle of scrolling. It's a little clunky.

Lemmy's UI on desktop is... dogshit and really needs some love. Some web designer could volunteer for a better desktop theme? But thanks to the Jerboa app it looks amazing on Android!

Only issue right now with Jerboa is that it allows very long images to occupy a large space on your frontpage, I think it should show them as thumbnails instead.

I like the 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.

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

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.

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.

It feels so freaking empty, maybe it's my lemmy client but I can't see any post older than two days

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.

So far, I've been a Reddit user for like two to three years now, and a Lemmy user for like 3 days. It's definitely a transition, but so far, it seems to have potential. This instance's mod team is doing a good job, and the content is pretty good so far. I just need to let go of older social media habits, I guess lol.

I love it. I love how I don't usually have to deal with "right-wing" extremists. They're usually contained to lemmy.grab, but I suppose one or two might break containment every now and then.

Still, a hell of lot better then seeing their bullshit as the first comment on a new post. :|

I'm trying to like it, but it's hard. It doesn't quite scratch the doom scrolling itch like Reddit did. I'm using Jerboa and it's missing a lot of features that I relied heavily on with Relay. Ultimately I'm just going to have to adapt though because it looks like Reddit isn't backing down and I'm not going to use the official app.

In good news, I always hated my Reddit username so it's nice to finally get to change it lol.

Communities will grow and shape with time, but the only thing I'm really missing is some of the RES features: j and k keyboard navigation, click-and-drag expando resize.

I like it so far. It has some familiar features, but there are some learning curves to it.

It's a bit rough around the edges,but it does the job and so far I haven't missed reddit at all.

I'm still really struggling with how much screen real estate it wastes. Honestly that's a hard thing for me to get past.

My overall journey was the GameFAQS message boards -> Digg -> Reddit (via RIF) -> Lemmy

Lemmy has filled my content aggregation desires while boycotting Reddit. Overall, I could see being here to stay

I'm still having minor issues, but they aren't deal breakers. Like, I've had issues with my up votes not saving (press it, turns blue, wait a second, then it changes back), so I need to press it multiple times before it saves. On the whole, these errors will be resolved with time, so it doesn't bother me much

Main issue I'm trying to figure out now is: how to use federated users for other Lemmy instances. If I'm using the website for beehaw, then go to another instance, it appears I need to sign in, but I can't see how to use my beehaw account. I started using Jerboa and it seems to handle it, but the comments I'm making don't show up (when I checked in a browser), so it might be in the UI only, or I'm missing something

Lemmy is pretty good. Reminds me of old reddit. It's a little confusing at first but easy enough to learn and find communities as you go. I really miss Sync for Reddit though.

I like it so far. The web interface is pretty solid and Jerboa is serviceable, though missing some features that I would call crucial to the experience. I can't fault the developers at all though, as it's like two dude to my knowledge. The reddit API thing convinced me to run my own instance for friends.

I'm hopeful lemmy takes off and sees a larger adoption as well, I think that putting the internet back in the hands of individuals is super important as there has been way too much aggregation of services for like the past decade IMO.

The learning curve is steep but I'm feeling very optimistic and excited to be a part of a new community. Reddit had been going downhill for years ( I joined in 2010).

I plan to stay no matter what reddit does next.

Touch and feel is comfortable (if I can remember to middle-click links so I don't keep closing Lemmy tab), communities are growing, framework looks robust. My only concern is that if I ever move from one server to another (if I decide to self-host), it appears I'll need to manually rebuild all of my subscriptions which sounds painful.

I feel like it's more of a community than Reddit. There is more collective spirit here right now.
I'm concerned about the tankie baggage.

I think it's nice so far, though I haven't used it much. There are some communities on Reddit that I miss on Beehaw. I also check Raddle (not fediverse) for trans memes since r/traa users have moved there. ~Cherri

I love it! I'm looking around the fediverse and the options are impressive.

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.

One thing that I'm looking for is to see where (if?) the moderation teams and content providers of existing subreddits migrate over to Lemmy/Kbin and if the Reddit userbase migrate as well and become the de-facto communities on subjects.

I guess that's part of the community aspect that Reddit harboured with the moderators - that they infer and define the culture and dynamics of their particular subreddit - and if I have the choice of three or four fediverse communities on the same topic, I can maintain some continuity by joining the one maintained by the ex-Reddit mods.

It's like leaving infant school and going to high school - amongst the hundreds of strangers, it'd be good to see a few familiar faces.

ex Redditor, sort of stopped using the site years ago anyways, but I've been following the reddit api stuff because I was a big fan of Apollo when I was a more active user and that's how I ended up finding Lemmy; I like it here so far, the few communities i've seen seem friendly and welcoming; and the content is interesting

Im liking Lemmy so far. It’s an adjustment and clearly the software is in its infancy, but it does not suck once one adjusts.

The UI is certainly attractive on Jerboa, and I imagine will improve with time. I'm using mainly on an android phone. I second another comment on enjoying the "real conversations" bit, as this feels much more human, and not a platform abused by bots, marketing, and astroturfing (and also greedy, grifting CEOs). I do have an issue with Jerboa not maintaining my sign in status every time, and the feed not loading every time I open the app, but it's small potatoes. I'm looking forward to the evolution of Lemmy!

First time using the fediverse and I don’t think it was hard at all.

So far really good! It has some quirks, and there are some bugs and some teething issue with the large influx of people (specifically on lemmy.ml)

It is a mind-set change working with a different system and the whole instance idea is still very new for me

As an Australia, it was very quiet last night (10ish hours ago), but that will improve as more people join

I feel the generation gap for the first time when I see people complaining about the difficulty of selecting a server to sign up and connect to!

Other than that, it does bring a lot of the atmosphere of the wild west times of the web, in a good way. I'm liking it!

Hopefully we retain a healthy amount of users after this wave passes and everyone is back at reddit. :)

Havn't tried Lemmy yet... does my comment show up alright coming from fedia.io? The fediverse is neat.

It's ok so far. It's a lot more fragmented than reddit, which is a good thing in the long term even though it's annoying now.

I'd also like there to be an easier way for me to filter topics I don't want to see, like communities for languages I don't speak or furry porn.

I would love to see a way to block communities from my feed directly from my feed. As it stands, it appears that I have to go to the main community page to do so.

Love the idea of smaller "indie" social media communities without any profit incentive, just purely spaces to socialize and hang out. Also appreciate that there's solid moderation against hate speech etc. Otherwise it's still clear that it's a new and growing thing and perhaps there's some uncertainty about what the day-to-day realities of it will look like, but it's interesting to be exploring it at such an early time.

I got Jerboa right where RIF used to be on my home screen, it's almost like nothing changed.