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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

He was the best frontman motörhead ever had

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. :|

Tbh I have no idea what’s going on.

I’m easing into it. With more usage, more content, more users, and more updates, it’ll be like I never knew Reddit. Growing pains, whatever you want to call it, just makes me happy to be part of a new adventure for sharing and consuming content.

I’m no UX/UI expert, but I hope Lemmy makes it easier to filter content on the main page, collapse comments, and find specific subcommunities and users.

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