Usualy being a very late adopter (buy stuff last, accept trends last, switch to norms late), I'm very happy I shutdown and deleted everything from my reddit account among the first, when spez bullcrap started, and went elsewhere, I joined squabbles, kbin and lemmy. But I'm here, I like the community, adoption and migration, and seeing the numbers tells me I'm not alone. Which is good.
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Hope this also feeds the growth of Mastodon as well. We need good FOSS alternatives to these corporate controlled social networks.
I might try Mastodon now that I found and fell in love with Lemmy, are there any good clients for Android?
Personally I like Tusky.
@kratoz29 @frozengriever
It's funny to read this from Mastodon. Activity Pub / The Fediverse is weird.
I'm actually just using my browser (Brave) and it's been a fine experience so far.
I’m on iOS so I can’t say 100% but ivory is really well designed, I’m pretty sure that’s what the Apollo dev said he likes to use so I tried it and it’s good. Personally I’ve been using elk as a web app and it’s been my favourite so far. I don’t think there’s an app for it at the moment, just a web app, but I could be wrong
I’d also recommend Ice Cubes on iOS, visually pleasing and pretty functional. And elk you can install as a half app thing where you click install from the url bar
Just checked out Ice Cubes, pretty neat! Between Ivory, Ice Cubes, and Elk, I don’t know which to use! I’m currently paying for Ivory premium (or whatever they call it) but the other two are completely free to use from what I can tell. I don’t use Mastodon nearly as much as Lemmy anyway (I’d rather follow communities than people, plus I don’t know many accounts that I should follow on mastodon anyway)
Fedilab. It costs $2.99 to buy it, but it's the best and most feature complete right now. Elk is a good client, but it's web-based (and can be installed as a web app on mobile). But it still has a lot of soul searching to see if it's trying to be the "Twitter client" of mastadon or not.
I use them both occasionally, and fedilab is my primary mastodon client right now for lots of reasons.
Or you get it for free from f-droid. I encourage you to support the great developer tho.
It's amazing how fast it's growing. According to Lemmy Explorer, there are nearly 900 Instances, encompassing almost 13,000 communities. The forum software could stand some improvement, like having a way to group all your communities in one place, or figuring out whether an instance is federated. I really like the decentralized aspect of it. If a corporation tries to take over and ruin the largest instance (like what's happening to Reddit), then folks can migrate over the the second-most popular instance(s) while the biggest one withers and dies.
Also, Mastodon looks like a great replacement for Twitter.
Love to see the fediverse grow. We don't deserve these devs!
Mastodon numbers are crazy when compared to the rest of the software on that list. Makes me wonder just how many are active users and/or how many search "Mastodon" after Musk bought twitter, made an account on mastodon.social and left it.
@mbryson @maegul
According to the CEO of Mastodon last time I chatted with him, the software tracks log-ins, so people like me, who do not log out and in again, would be invisible. So I would say with a certain level of confidence that those are active users you are seeing. Unless he changed the code of course, but it did not seem to be high on his ToDo list.
... and then went back to twitter, but did not deactivate their #Fediverse account.
Or like me, tried 3 different ones before finding a fourth that worked.
I'm not a Twitter person pes se but it was the only (that I knew about, sadly) decentralized thing on the web that could replace reddit.
I tried Twitter long long ago. I did not enjoy it. I tried Mastodon. And strangely I understand it better than I understand Twitter.
Weird I know. And I can't explain it.
Having recently given Lemmy (via the Jerboa app) & kbin (via just their web app -- since that's all there is) a test drive....
Lemmy is okay, but the app is extremely glitchy right now, throwing constant "unable to convert to JSON" errors. (I'm copying this comment before I hit submit, because I've already lost one lengthy comment due to those errors) FOLLOW-UP EDIT: I was never able to submit this comment via Jerboa, so here I am posting my comment on the website.
And Kbin is mostly just broken on phones.
The interface is completely confusing and cryptic. As far as I can tell, once you navigate off the home page, there are no links back?
And after several minutes of trying to subscribe to a "magazine", I finally figured out that the button is rendered off-screen, and you have to scroll to the right to find it.
Awesome! There's a pretty good dispersion as well.
Some small instances are seeing sudden increases in numbers of registered users (4k to 5k new users) but not an equivalent growth in activity, my guess is someone is creating accounts on instances without captcha enabled for account registration. Most of the top 10 fastest growing instances shown here fit that criteria.
@Odo Interesting. Lemmy is somewhat strict in its definition of "active user". You must post to be "active", so all lurkers aren't counted.
I'm not even sure commenting counts toward being "active", though I'd guess it does.
So user growth without growth in "active users", especially on smaller servers, is plausible.
I guess that's possible. The instances I mentioned look like this:
https://fedidb.org/network/instance/parapheum.com
2 posts, 1 comment overall.
It had 10 users two days ago and 4.6k today, not a single one of them seems to have posted or commented.
So going to that instance, and going to its list of federated communities (https://parapheum.com/communities/listing_type/All/page/1) shows a few sizeable ones. Also note the instance's description (see https://parapheum.com/) which is basically to distribute the server load without any commitment to any particular kind of community.
So, could be full of lurkers, or parallel accounts created to avoid server overload that will be soon dropped. So probably some bloat in these numbers, as there are for other platforms too
I’m surprised Lemmy is currently above kbin to be honest. Only time will tell.
@AskThinkingTim A few days ago, kbin wasn't on that list at all :) It's a huge honor for me, and I'm glad people are enjoying being here. Currently, my main goal is to prepare the infrastructure and sort out the basics. The real fun will start when migratories between platforms are established. This is the fediverse, and a lot can change here ;)
@ernest @fediversenews @AskThinkingTim
Yes! #kbin is super young and an upstart! Bright future!!
Are you teasing us here about migrations between platforms!?
Are you suggesting kbin<->lemmy migrations? Neither even have inter-instance migrations, right?
Or, kbin<>masto, microblogs platforms?!
It's been around much longer.
@AskThinkingTim I don't agree with the opinions of Lemmy devs, and I also find kbin more feature rich. But kbin is more in development than Lemmy (which has been for longer around) and started with more servers already. They basically managed decentralization better so far, and more servers started after the reddit migration.
That's not to say I am not subscribed to Kbin magazines, nor do I think that kbin has no chance. On the contrary. I just tried to explain the current situation 😁
@maegul @fediverse @fediversenews Wow, that's some rapid growth! 🚀 Looks like the #Fediverse is on fire. 🔥 Just shows how much we all crave more control over our digital lives. Kudos to @dessalines and @nutomic and the whole Lemmy team, from underdogs to top dogs in no time! 🐕 #Decentralization #OnlineAutonomy @fediverse @fediversenews
In my opion Lemmy has more potential then mastodon.
Well they're two completely different things, mastadon I am ideal replacement for twitter
Curious why you think that (I’m inclined to agree FWIW).
I was able to figure out what my options were much more quickly. The UI of Kbin seems very sparse. If it offers similar functionality, it is not obvious. Also, I don't like combining "magazines" with "microblog". It seems like it wants to be all things to all people.
@vamp07 Yea, I agree, I think the combination done in kbin will be what some people want while others will prefer the relative focus and simplicity of lemmy.
I'm all for having choices. The thing about Kbin is that when I first land on the page I can't even figure out how to limit what I see to only what I am subscribed to. Maybe I need to spend more time, but that level of filtering or choice seems well hidden.
Not sure if I should just make a post for this, but I will ask here.
Is lemmy searchable? The main appeal of reddit for me was searchability. I see a lot of different instances with different domains names.Maybe there is a meta search or something? Adding reddit to the end of a search was very convenient.
Interesting question!
Lemmy has a search facility (a magnifying glass icon, generally in the top right, or perhaps behind a menu).
And it's not bad, though rough around the edges I'd say.
It will only be specific to what your instance "can see", which is all the activity in all the communities that all its users subscribe to.
So, no "meta search". But it's an interesting idea given how it was part of Reddit's value.
No reason why one couldn't be made on top of the network though
You can use this page, to search for communities (subreddits): https://browse.feddit.de/. You can also use https://sub.rehab/.
You can also just use the search function on your Lemmy instance (sh.itjust.works). It will also show content from other Lemmy instances.
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