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.
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
Easiest way to do it is to type !communityname@instance.tld into the search on your home instance, should pop right up.
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 :)
How do you know something is developed with Rust?
Don’t worry, the devs will tell you.
I’ve also found this to be true with Julia devs
Source: am Julia dev
Check the GitHub! It’s linked at the bottom of the web page (“Code”)
Weirdly enough the fact that it’s written in rust is why I am using it instead of kbin (PHP)
PHP!? They’re writing the shiny new thing in the joke language from r/ProgrammerHumor?
Exactly right?
To the average Redditor I guess its fine, but to me its unacceptable haha.
Repo link: https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
Welp, I guess I chose right after all.
There is:
- The right choice
- The other choice (PHP)
- The wrong choice (PHP)
What makes rust so special?
God damn! Okay now I’m fully behind it
Fast because it’s pointer-based like C/C++, but better because it’s memory safe, which means it won’t crash, leak or mysteriously overwrite it’s own data constantly.
Rust is a very good language but is relatively new on the scene so it has to compete against other languages that fit the same niche(primarily C++) that have been around a lot longer.
Rust has been very popular for hobby projects for a while but it’s still pretty rare to see it for larger projects, and you still almost never see it for enterprise projects. So it’s cool seeing an app that uses it blow up.
It should be noted that while Rust is rarely used, some very big players are pushing it. E.g. last year Microsoft Azure’s CEO tweeted that “it’s time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++ and use Rust for those scenarios where a non-GC language is required”, Windows contains some Rust code now and the Linux kernel also supports Rust in addition to C since December.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
Removed by mod
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.
I’m a bit confoozled indeed. How can we check which other Lemmy instances are linked to this one?
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.
There’s a user style that makes Lemmy a lot like old.reddit and it’s awesome.
@CalcProgrammer1 @diemunkiesdie That sounds dope! What’s it called?
I just edited my post, here it is https://userstyles.world/style/10311/old-reddit-ish-lemmy
Yeah the stuff popping in while scrolling is weird and can be a bit aggravating.
If you use TamperMonkey or a similar browser extension you can try this.
Makes it abit closer to old reddit and a lot easier to read on desktop imho.
What kind of space is wasted? Genuinely curious. I only really use it on my iPhone. On desktop is the comments area too narrow?
Here’s another user style https://userstyles.world/style/10301/better-lemmy.
It widens the display, changes bright green buttons to blue ones and improves the indentation of replies.
I love it so much that I started contributing to the project on GitHub
First impression is very good. But many instances do not allow the creation of new communities. Which brings me to all the little specialized subreddits that I used daily on Reddit are not on Lemmy. :-( Yeah general ones like Movies is there but I need my fix for r/Dune! :D
The great thing about Lemmy though is that a community you interact with or even moderate doesn’t need to be on your instance. If you’re a member of Beehaw, which doesn’t allow community creation, you could start your Dune community on Lemmy.ml or another instance and moderate it with your Beehaw account.
That is true, but for most users that is a bit convoluted. Also you have several communities with the same subject name. What makes Reddit great is how many users are at a single specialized sub.
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.
16 year user of reddit here, just create the communities you miss. With the massive influx of users, they will fill up quickly. It only took 1 day after I created lemmy.world/c/psvr for people to start posting content there. It feels to me like it will only take a few weeks before we can have some semblance of parity to reddit content. And it feels much more like pre-digg migration reddit to me, which is very much a good thing. I think the golden years for lemmy will be coming quite soon.
Not everyone has the time or inclination to moderate those communities they make, though. That’s the only thing that’s preventing me from making a bunch of the old communities I miss. I hope some of the big mods move over here and keep doing it. I miss AITA, some DnD and RPG subs, and some other fun story subs. I also prefer my movie and TV communities split up instead of in one mega community like in !moviesandtv@lemmy.film.
Redditor of 11 years here - i feel you.
For what it’s worth, i’m trying to start one of my favorite reading subs (maliciouscompliance) -
/c/maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/c/maliciouscompliance
!maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world
I’m interested in Battlebots too, so if you start one I’ll definitely join!
It’s always going to start off slow, but it seems like there is a decent amount of momentum and Reddit seemed to do a great job at pushing it.
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 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.
A year ago, I viewed the Fediverse as an unnecessary, complicated framework created by a handful of well-intentioned individuals as a solution to a problem that wasn’t really there.
Today, I view it as a necessity.
This past year has been a hard lesson for me to stop placing trust in massive, centralized web services like Twitter and Reddit and to start federating more of my online activity. There’s going to be growing pains, but Lemmy has been pretty good so far and it’s definitely going to be worth it in the end.
Yep, same. For that reason I never really managed to get into mastodon, tried it for a bit and found the signup system too convoluted, then dropped it altogether. Though granted, I also never used Twitter, never understood why people liked it (and still don’t), so I tried mastodon out of curiosity, not actually looking for something.
With Lemmy it’s all different. I feel like I need to leave reddit and find a new community, so there’s an inherent desire to like it, which makes the adaptation way easier.
I am admittedly still active on Twitter, but during the whole Twitter exodus, I decided to give Mastodon a try, and I abandoned it because I just kept running into people complaining about Elon without seeing much else.
Until I read somewhere during this whole Reddit fiasco that you can follow hashtags in addition to people on Mastodon. Total game changer!
That sucks, we don’t complain about Elon here.
Instead we just complain about Reddit
Valid. Spez is a liar who is angry that he got caught multiple times. I didn’t want to see Reddit die like this, but watching the train wreck sure has been interesting.
Spez has been around since basically the beginning of Reddit, so I think if there were to be an ejection of Spez, it would’ve happened years ago.
Reddit is too big to fail now, regardless of Spez’s actions.
Sure, but Reddit is nothing without their mods and power users.
Eh, looking at it from supply and demand, I’m sure there are plenty of people lining up to become the next mods and next power users
Yeah, I also made a Mastodon account during that big Twitter exodus a few months back, and admittedly haven’t used it that much either for the same reasons. I just never really have that many unprompted/creative things to say, which is kinda the primary use case for the Twitter/Mastodon genre of social media.
Reddit/Lemmy on the other hand is way more about the discussion, which is both way more interesting to consume as media and also way easier for me to get involved in.
I’m really liking it! Federation is cool and everyone is so chilled. Not missing the cesspool of Reddit infighting
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?
I haven’t been able to find a Sleep Token community either, I was thinking of making one.
I would join, I love them/him
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.
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.
I would like a “rising” option, one that is more a mix between New and Hot bacon reader for reddit does it very well.
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.
Thanks for explaining, will have a look into it. At the End I guess it is also just a hughe bit of getting used to the different way.
I’m still confused by the instance decentralized structure. And my feed seems chaotic. But so far I’m liking it !
I am enjoying actual discussions and not just hot takes or rants. I don’t care if the platform is “perfect”. It’s good enough for me. The admins aren’t some corporation just looking for pavlovian click labor (‘likes’ and upvotes) to power their algorithm run ad fest.
