I really want to like lemmy, but it’s difficult. I’m new to all this fediverse thingy, and I might just have old habits and perceptions how things should work but… I keep seeing the same posts more than once, iOS experience is not that good really, sometimes I see dead posts from 2 years ago for some reason, despite having subscribed to like 30 communities there aren’t that many new posts to read.
Part of it probably that subreddits had millions of people so a lot of posts every minute, but it still feels underwhelming.
It’s not as doomscrolly. Maybe I should find something else to waste my time on haha
What is your experience with lemmy? Maybe I just do things wrong. Let me know
i mean so far, I’m enjoying it. sure, the community isn’t as large, but that’s mostly a good thing. on reddit, if i made a post, it would be like a 25% chance to get hundreds of comments, and a 75% chance to get none. here, I’ve gotten a few, high quality responses on every question post I’ve made. i do miss the “auto hide read posts” feature, but maybe that’ll get added some day
Fediverse currently reminds me of Reddit from 10 years ago in frequency of content. There is something nice about not being in the rat race, less toxicity.
You can hide read posts here! In the web app settings for your profile:
Is there a way to stop the endless loading of posts on the website? Because every time I try to click a post, it moves down because a new post loaded, and this happens every ten seconds, constantly.
It’s a bug that wasnt an issue when the community was smaller. Last I heard they will replace it with a refresh icon that pops up at the top when new posts are available.
Oh thank God is a bug, I really thought it was a feature of the site.
It’s amazing what kinda bugs can be exposed in your system when your user base expands by orders of magnitude overnight
I have a similar experience, but its like a user base of 200k vs idk how many million on reddit. There wont be an infinite amount of posts until lemmy grows more.
I think only 1 percent of all users on lemmy and reddit post. So its 2k active posters vs 60k active reddit posters (assuming reddit has 6m).
The sorting has been bad i also see dead posts but overall im enjoying lemmy more than i had reddit in the later years (joined 2010).
I mean, you’re being realistic, and nobody can fault you for that. The jank is going to be too much for some people, they’ll come here maybe but won’t stick around. Other people will come and think that the positive aspects are more important than the negative ones and they’ll migrate.
I’m a FOSS nerd and advertising makes me physically sick, so I’m more than willing to put up with the frustrating things about Lemmy.
My one advice is, if you want to see more content then post it.
I used web version of lemmy.world on desktop (1080p monitor) yesterday, coming from old.reddit + RES, I really hate:
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The web trend to leave white space on both side of websites, it’s space inefficient and causes thread with longer title to take two lines to display.
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Everything has a thumbnail slot even if it’s just text thread, makes each thread took more height to display, also space inefficient.
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You need to be authorized to even subscribe/join to a community (that is not on lemmy.world).
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Image expand button is hard to spot for me, and I am pretty sure some threads with image didn’t have expand button.
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Honestly man, as much as I 100% agree on the UI difficulties, it’s like a breath of fresh air. There’s good music posted, people posted books and I looked and really wanted to read them. It’s more human. There’s this tiny little handful of content here, but it’s not all same-y and in-joke-y and weird.
I’m not trying to hate on reddit, I still go to reddit for news because of more or less what you’re talking about (the weird sorting in the newsfeed here and the lack of certain content). But what I like about here is that there are nerdy people, there’s real content, there’s not this weird hivemind and endless dopamine content. The great stuff about reddit was always the in-depth storytelling and unique content, to me, not just the gratification aspect of everything working right and new content popping up. I’m happy with Lemmy despite the hiccups because it seems like it’s getting back to that.
What is your experience with lemmy?
Personally I am glad that decentralization is slowly picking up again with things like Lemmy and Mastodon. To me using it does not feel all that different from Reddit actually (UI-wise).
I grew up in the days of the old internet where newgroups and mailing lists were the way to interact with other “netizens” (a term I have not heard being used in years btw). Very little moderation and yet people behaved themselves, though of course the number of non-tech people on the net were far lesser as well so that certainly had something to do with it. Lemmy has that advantage too currently of smaller, ideologically-inclined, and willing-to-jump-a-few-hoops people.
TL;DR: I’ve no issues with using Lemmy and I like it so far, including smaller size of the community.
I had trouble with Mastodon, primarily because I had a very curated list of people I followed and most of them didn’t move to Mastodon. Those that did are clearly using some type of program to just copy posts over from other platforms.
But for Lemmy, it feels different. I’ve been able to find most of the same communities I was a part of over there. The fact that they are smaller and less busy means I can spend less time scrolling, but still feel like I got my “fix” in for the day.
The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example. Lemmy should prevent this, community names should be unique, it should have an index of all the Lemmy Fediverse where instances can lookup if a community exists instead of waiting for a user to import that community to his instance. Something similar to what BTC does with the decentralized ledger.
The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example.
I agree, to an extent. You’re right in that if you were part of the vibrant community of /r/piracy then it’s miserable to see it shatter here on lemmy. That said, this only applies if you’re expecting lemmy to be a 1 for 1 reddit replacement. For this type of community to remain cohesive, /r/piracy would have had to spin up their own instance and in /r/piracy direct everyone to lemmy.piracyinstance.whatever.
You can’t really “fix” this in a central way because even if you did, it would be trivial to create an instance that would allow duplicate community names. Also, I can see a lot of use cases for lemmy which do not intend to be federated.
That said, it’s not necessarily as big a problem as it appears, if you just accept that this is how the fediverse works. There’s no single source of control, so of course people can create 147 different /c/piracy communities if they wish to. Once you accept that, then it’s not really that difficult to subscribe to all the /c/piracy communities you can find.
The problem itself could be diminished by a few new features which I feel certain will emerge in the future:
- linked communities, where one communities content is syndicated to another. So if you post in !selfhosted@lemmy.world then you also post in !selfhosted@lemmy.ml. This would work differently to cross-posting, all comments would be reflected on both instances.
- grouped communities, where you can subscribe to a group of /c/selfhosted communities with one click, so you see them all in your feed.
You make it sound like not doomscrolly is a bad thing
People will rarely say they want to endlessly scroll, but given the options, they’ll always choose the option that let’s them consume more content, aka doom scroll.
The reality is that there was/is no reddit alternative and right now we’re all in this transitory phase where we’re all looking for a new home. We’ll all just have to wait for the dust to settle. Lemmy isn’t perfect but is improving and additionally other alternatives like kbin and tildes are in the works.
To your larger point, much of what you’re feeling is the abrupt break in habits. I’ve been using the gap to develop more positives ones, and it’s been great.
A thought came to my mind when reading your comment.
Instead of finding a new home, let’s make lemmy our new home. Let’s try to populate lemmy more, get its activity up, and post more than we would’ve on reddit (since we have less users, we would need more posts per user), so it can stand a chance at being a reddit competitor.
Yes, make homes! we need so much more hardware, while personal instances may not be a good idea, we are so short on compute that if you are inclined run your own instance, bring your friends!
The experience on smaller faster instances is already comparable, the content flow, really not bad either though it takes about an hour of finding and subbing to the communities you want and a day for your instance to really start grabbing the content for you.
Newbie question, can we just use the standard Mastodon application for IOS?
Nah - each service (Mastodon/ Pixelfed/ Kbin) requires its own app.
You can sign up to Mastodon, then follow the rest from there, but the experience won’t be complete (no downvotes, for example).
@jaykay @kamasupra sorta… like I’m replying via my Mastodon account. Currently there isn’t post creation, though some googling has shown that it’s something they’re working towards.
But you basically copy the Fediverse Logo Link of a post and paste it on search in your mastodon client. It appears as a toot and you can comment; Lemmy will display it natively like this comment.
Favoriting the post on Mastodon counts as an upvote.
Communities appear as group accounts.
