Technology

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.

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.

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 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 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

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

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.

After a few days messing around with it and trying to get it to work in the ways that I want it to, I'm starting to think it feels like an upgrade. There are some serious barriers to entry that make it tough if you don't know what you're doing, but with Lemmy, my online experience is almost exactly the same as before, just without having a dedicated make-things-worse guy stinking the place up.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

Having to make a new account because I wanted to see NSFW on another instance was kind of a mood killer. Not sure how that could be done better but I really don't want to be making other accounts.

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