I run a few groups, like @fediversenews@venera.social, mostly on Friendica. It’s okay, but Friendica resembles Facebook Groups more than Reddit. I also like the moderation options that Lemmy has.

Currently, I’m testing jerboa, which is an Android client for Lemmy. It’s in alpha, has a few hiccups, but it’s coming along nicely.

Personally, I hope the #RedditMigration spurs adoption of more Fediverse server software. And I hope Mastodon users continue to interact with Lemmy and Kbin.

All that said, as a mod of a Reddit community (r/Sizz) I somewhat regret giving Reddit all that content. They have nerve charging so much for API access!

Hopefully, we can build a better version of social media that focuses on protocols, not platforms.

  • main_water@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • lolcatnip@lemmyrs.org
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      1 year ago

      Another really clunky thing I noticed right away is that there’s a huge difference between viewing a sub through your home instance vs its home instance, in that you’re no longer logged in when using the remote instance’s URL, and there’s no obvious way to get back to the corresponding location on your home instance. This means, for example, that when someone posts a link to another thread, it’s always kind of broken for remote users.

      I feel like something could be done to ease interoperability using the same techniques ad trackers use.

      I’m especially baffled as to why the UI had a dedicated button to view content on its home instance. I can see how that might be useful in some circumstances and it would make sense to have it hidden in a menu, but I think it’s just a confusing distraction for new users who typically have no use for a crippled view of what they’re already looking at.

  • crshbndct@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • IncidentalIncidence@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    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

  • unique_hemp@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    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 :)

  • diemunkiesdie@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • nowami@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Jonamerica @midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      When I tried that all I get are the comments from all the posts. I’m using the Mastodon website, so maybe it’s your app. Are you see all comments in your feed or just the posts?

      • nowami@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I see the posts with all comments as replies, but it does take some navigation to see everything, like a twitter conversation. It’s less intuitive than the nested comment layout but the content seems to be there.

  • dvlsg@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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?

  • Nonameuser678@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Dymonika@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      What exactly is the learning curve? There are posts and comments, votes, and links. The icons seem very clear to me. Even the markdown seems to be identical, so far, except for spoiler text. There is hardly any learning curve for me as a long-time redditor and first-time user of Lemmy.

      • knowncarbage@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Working between servers.

        Just simple stuff like searching, adding, customizing feeds. Clicking an alert to take me to the content will take me to a server I’m not logged into and I need to go back and find the same post via my own server to comment. Not the end of the world for me but likely a big issue for many potential users if the are use to mainstream social media that ‘just works’.

        • fazo96@lemmy.trippy.pizza
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          1 year ago

          Thankfully the lemmy developers are aware of those issues and are working on improvements.

          Looks like soon, viewing content will always be done through your instance and links won’t take you to other instances. The clunky way to search for communities on other instances if your current instance doesn’t know about them yet will get fixed too.

          Multireddit style aggregations of communities are also being worked on

          Plus these days there is a massive influx of users, once this stabilizes a bit all major instances will be federated and know about communities on each other, so many problems of discovery will get mitigated.

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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        1 year ago

        The biggest for most people seem to be the federated aspect of it… That there’s communities on different servers. So now you need two pieces of information to find the correct community you were talking to a friend about. Other than that… it’s virtually the same as the old reddit from 2010.

      • penguin_in_suit@lemmy.one
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        I think the learning curve comes from the instances. People got used to centralized services so when you say Lemmy they expect one website. Here you got to choose the instance first and then if communities are in a different instance you need to account for that with the @instance…

        Personally I am getting it pretty quickly but I can see why its confusing.

        • Dymonika@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I’m a bit confoozled indeed. How can we check which other Lemmy instances are linked to this one?

  • solarizde@feddit.de
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    Still very new here and most problems I have is with filtering. No matter if Main page or in a post.

    If you subscribed to a bunch of feeds it gets quickly very confusing to find things. You can choose top day or active, which is to long timeframe I would like to see some more customized preferences here like “Active but new 8h” or something.

    Also big downside is that lemmy seems not take into account the strenght of single subs. So if I subscribe a big one like Technology my mainpage in active will 95% now only be this. It would be nice if the Active Filter also takes a bit diverse results into account and not only showing the most active sub.

    • Jonamerica @midwest.social
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      My experience has been that the “Hot” view is most similar to Reddit if you’re looking for new content. You can read about the different sorting here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

      What I’ve noticed about the “Active” sort is that older posts that are still getting upvotes and have new comments can remain at/near the top of the list for several days. I think this is good if you want to see where ongoing discussions are happening. On Reddit, I often felt that an interesting post fell off my view very quickly. I know I wasn’t the only one, which is probably why people would post a “remind me” post or “following” post on Reddit so they could come back to it later. Regardless, someone might entirely miss a post that blows up in a community but sees it in the “Active” view and check it out. I like “Hot” because I can see what’s trending up, but I frequently switch between Hot and Active. I’ve noticed that many of the “hot” posts don’t have any comments.

      I agree with you regarding quieter communities. Reddit had something in its sauce that allowed posts from less active communities to show up in my feed through all the noise of busier communities. This didn’t happen for all the subreddits that I joined, but rather, the ones I showed an interest in. The downside of that kind of algorithm is it reinforces the echo chamber effect as the algorithm is learning what I like and then showing me more of what I like to get me to stick around longer. This system isn’t (currently) prone to that kind of manipulation.

      • zero_iq@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Active has a 48-hour cut-off, and the ranking function it uses seems to encourage the same few posts to stay at the top for 48 hours. It’s basically the same ranking as “Hot”, but using the timestamp of the last comment instead of the time of posting to decay its ranking over time.

        This means any comment activity whatsoever on a popular thread bumps it back up the rankings significantly, and I suspect leads to a kind of snowballing effect that keeps posts higher up. Ideally, it would use some metric based on user interactions over a time period to calculate a score of activity rather than solely the latest comment. In effect, it seems to act more like a “top from last 48 hours”. (Although I would add I’m a newbie to Lemmy, so might not yet have an accurate picture of its behaviour).

        Lemmy seemed to get much livelier for me when I switched my default to Hot, but I wish there was a way to disable the auto-updates (I’d rather see new items only on browser refresh). Active sort feels pretty stale to me.

      • MotionChris@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I would like a “rising” option, one that is more a mix between New and Hot bacon reader for reddit does it very well.

  • boomboxnation@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Criton@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • tusliw@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

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

  • drapermache@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think its a little rough around the edges, but thats to be expected given that its less than a year old. The big hit for me is the mobile app which just isn’t that good. This will come with time. I’d rather have an half-baked implementation thats showing promise over what Reddit is doing. I like decentralized social media because you can pick and choose what communities you interact with. If lemmy.world decides to go full enshitification (although I can’t figure out how they would monetize), you can just pack up and going to another community.

    This honestly reminds me of when I was growing up in the early 00s, I was part of several different community forums that I loved dearly. There were other groups I looked into, but some were just toxic and unappealing, so I left after a while. I feel like Lemmy gives us the same freedom. I really hope to meet some awesome people here. Right now it’s just big enough to still allow meaningful dialogue and create cool relations. I felt like Reddit was too big for its own good even with niche subreddits; it didn’t feel like posting was worth it as it would get buried or just get a low effort response.