I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:
- The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I’m aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that’s less than ideal)
- The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I’m aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it’s vital to the success of Lemmy.
Have you seen the search option, in the top right corner? Is that not enough to you? It works ok for me.
You can’t discover every community throughout the lemmy’s fediverse that way though. Only the communities that other users previously subscribed/searched for. https://browse.feddit.de/ is the thing to use if you’d like to see everything
The first point is CRUCIAL for setting up your own “scrolling page/account” for, since the instances are only very vague directions, at least while the site is still growing. And in a similiar vein, the second point with B) would be better than manually blocking communities I genuinely have no interest whatsoever in, like fountain pens (unless I don’t know how to operate this site yet).
In fact, C) feels unnecessary because of that right now, since I already see many new communities just in my instance alone. Though it WOULD add things to browse since there isn’t as much happening here, yet…
Seems pretty reasonable, even the federated stuff works fine - unlike Mastodon, oddly.
I like the concept
But it feels very much like its been designed by nerdy developers and has had little to no-input on user friendly design.The federated idea can work but it needs to be more seemless than this.
- Communities with the same name should be merged when viewing it from any instance, so you can see all the posts from these communities, they can be moderated seperatley and for advanced users you should be able to select which communities make up the merged community.
- By default you should see all of the merged communities in a central place and be able to subscribe to them easily, at the moment its handled different per instance but you have to seek out these communities to subscribe or follow them.
- I strongly believe there should be a centralised log-in system, so you can log into any instance with an account from another instance, this means if your instance goes down your account is centralised and is safe.
Regarding point three: I want to be able to migrate my profile to another instance if my current instance has performance issues or admins going rogue.
I think even better, you should be able to sign into any instance via some type of centralised federated login, though I guess the argument is you can’t do that in multiple email clients as email is the most popular federated example.
This may unironically be the first time I’ve ever suggested this: this may actually be a use case for the block chain.
If the user data from all instances was being saved to a distributed and verified ledger, it would fix the problem of one node going down losing all of those users, and would be a decentralized yet centralized way to go about it.
… I feel dirty, I swear I’m not a cryptobro
So far, so good. Excited to see more variety in communities as more users discover and migrate to lemmy.
Same here. I do feel and see that a LOT of work will be required to get lemmy where it needs to be but something tells me that these are the interesting days for Lemmy!
I love it here and I’ll express myself and show love to all with manatees
I’m having a great time. Lemmy is a little bit harder than Reddit but I have been on Mastodon for some time now so I know how federation works. The only thing about Lemmy I don’t like is that it feels kinda buggy and unpolished as it is very early stage and the same posts often reappear. But I like the community and it actually seems to be working so that’s pretty cool!
Joined today and I find Lemmy really cool. Of course there isn’t that much content here yet but I’m hoping the June 12 Reddit protests and the upcoming Reddit API restrictions will bring more users in.
Comment syncing to my instance is a problem. I get posts but comments, not so much.
People are much friendlier here, so far.
It feels like my experience on Mastodon after Twitter imploded. Hopefully it lasts.
deleted by creator
I was new to Reddit (3 weeks of activity), and switching to Lemmy is a bit confusing. But one evening is enough to learn the basics, I hope. Let’s keep it rolling. :)
Once I added a few different instances it became much better! Content will come. But the best users from Reddit will migrate along with us!
I’m a bit confused. Like some of the top comments, I’ve run into problems with how links work when interacting with instances other than my home instance on Mastodon before, and while I haven’t been on Lemmy very long, I’ve already come across that problem but worse. At least on Mastodon, I can just copy/paste the Toot URL into my instance’s search box and it comes up. If I get a link to a post on Lemmy I have no idea how to interact with it from my instance.
Some other issues:
At least on my instance, URLs are extremely vague. Reddit makes it easy to glance at the URL to see which subreddit you’re on. On Lemmy I would ideally want to be able to see both the home instance of the post and the community within that instance. Instead I get just a single unique ID.
The way that instances sort seems to be different? Or at least there’s something going on with sorting that confuses me. When viewing this post on my home instance, the second top comment is by @eldrichhydralisk@lemmy.sdf.org, which is the comment I was referencing earlier. But when I click the little colourful connected graph to go to what I presume is the OP’s home instance, that post is way down the list and the second top comment is from “Craving0496”. Which is another confusing point. I’ve noticed both here in this thread, and on the main community of my home instance that I signed up to participate in, some users have an @ at the start of their name, and some don’t. I don’t know why.
Discoverability is definitely also a big issue for me. On Reddit I could just think of a topic I want to explore and go to old.reddit.com/r/<TOPIC>. Or I can try variations of the name of that topic to find more options or if my first search doesn’t work. Here I have to think which instance to try for that topic, and between the general-purpose instances and the specific ones, as well as the various different ways of phrasing the topic name, it’s a huge space to explore. If I want stuff about programming, I might try /r/programming, /r/programmer, /r/programmers, /r/coding, /r/code, etc. on Reddit. On Lemmy I try all 5 of those community names, multiplied by the 10+ major instances, plus programming.dev and maybe other niche instances. If multiple of those are active, then when I’m searching for specific content, or wanting to start a discussion, I might have to do that multiple times across those communities in different instances.
I definitely want this to work. I love the idea of federated instances, and I want a place where I can go to be part of a great community without the bullshit Reddit is currently doing. And I’m going to give Lemmy a really good try. But if I had to guess, I’d say I’m not confident in its ability to provide that.
Interface is better than “new” Reddit, not as good as old Reddit + RES.
Also: if I click on a link on another instance (for example https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy when I’m signed in on lemmy.world), I’m not signed in to lemmy.ml so I have to manually search for it in lemmy.world to post there - is there a common solution to that?
