Technology

I have been trying to learn the way to do things, as well as getting around the problems.

My first view into the federated world was Mastodon, but I didn't use it much. Recently, I tried looking at lemmy/kbin content in Mastodon, but I find the way it presents it just seemed wrong and unwieldy. (maybe I am just doing it wrong)

I signed up a few days ago to kbin.social, but have been finding that it is just 'broken' with the content from other servers (like beehaw) being out of date - the cloudflare protection due to the growth seemingly to blame. I have now signed up to an area-focused server and have had problems with even finding this community. But now I have come back to it, it seems to be decently up to date and it may be to the small number of users on this server - so I am the first one to subscribe or even search for this.

I find myself finding content on one server but then wanting to interact with it, and there doesn't seem to be a "Take me to this post/comment on my server" button. So to make this post I searched again for the community then had to find this post on there.

Aside from the problems, I miss lists. In reddit I have lists of subreddits. So many subreddits I read I would not subscribe to, but instead add them to a list and so get posts with a certain theme based on what list I was looking at.

I still don't quite understand how it works, instances and all that.. but I'll figure it out, and I'm here for the cause.

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

I didn't until I found Beehaw. I'm enjoying it now.

I wish you could block servers personally, though. Like some of the stuff that's blocked here makes this place a lot better to be around. There's less hate and reactionary fear mongering. Everything is more chill.

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

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

As sad as I am by how Reddit turned out, this was the kick I needed to start truly indulging in the fediverse! Everybody's been nice so far, and I hope that it continues to be that way

It desperately needs a compact, efficient UI similar to old.reddit's design philosophy. Otherwise its not bad. The auto-refreshing front page is very frustrating to use. I want to click on an article, and between when I move the cursor and click, new articles have refreshed and the link I clicked was the wrong one

I think its really cool! I will definitely stay here.

I like it so far. However, I do have some questions.

1. How do we handle "dupe" communities?
2. What's the best way to find new communities?
3. How are cross-posts handled across servers?

It’s been great so far. I’ve mostly been using Mlem on IOS. Still early in development but it gets better everyday. Even though I was on Reddit for 8+ years I have no intentions on going back to it. There is great potential here and I hope we can tap in to it.

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.

It's interesting but I still think the federated universe still has too many quirks to be understandable by most people. To be honest, I haven't bothered documenting myself so I might say stupid things but I can't understand why identity is tied to a server, it seems like a terrible design mistake when it's obviously the first thing i'd want to decentralise. In short, I'm me, it shouldn't matter that I'm on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server. Huge mistake imho.

Then the content obviously needs a lot more contributors but many of the good reddit contributors where also mostly tech illiterate and I'm still worried that the high complexity to enter the fediverse will put off many people and keep it a fun, but somewhat boring, little niche.

As with other things in the fediverse, discoverability is pretty ass. It's a bit easier on Lemmy to find something you're looking for than it is, say, to find interesting people to follow on mastodon, but it's still not great. And often, you'll find multiple communities on the same topic and you have to try to figure out which one looks like it will be better down the road (communities are still pretty dead and empty, so you can't tell now which might be better). In addition to that, the interfaces for interacting with Lemmy are pretty rough at the moment, though that's not surprising.

So do I like it? Enh… I'd say it's a 4/10 right now with promise of getting better. Will it? Who knows?

The platform is fine and being able to subscribe across Lemmy instances is nice (i.e. I'm not even on Beehaw but here I am anyway) - it just needs more users and content.

The main issue is going to be getting that critical mass of users, especially on a platform that isn't quite as straightforward as a centralized one. Trying to explain how Lemmy works to my wife just left her confused and wondering what the point was. Getting people like her to make the jump to a federated platform is going to take time, effort, and - most importantly - content.

I’m loving it.

I was wondering about situations where there are multiple communities about the topic on multiple instances… is it possible to subscribe to all of them easily or maybe have a way that the communities can “share” posts? Like sister communities or something?

Example, I post to dogsinbikinis@whatever.com, users of dogsinbikinis@whateverelse.com would automatically be able to see and comment on it.

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.

I appreciate the clean interface and the relatively chill vibe. Regardless of what happens with reddit I think I'll be hanging out and enjoying the communities.

My only issue so far is that it can be difficult to find a particular post if you don't remember which community and instance it was on, afaik there's no search across all posts in all instantiations.

It'll take a miracle for Lemmy to get anywhere near Reddit's active user count. Convincing users to migrate to a new platform is one thing, but getting them used to the concept of federation is the tricky part. I remember when I first signed up for Matrix, and being confused when picking the domain, authentication rules, etc. for the first time.

so far it's really nice, it's what I liked in reddit and before that forums, without being what reddit became.

the fediverse is hard though, but it kinda makes sense. I'll see if I get more used to 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.

it needs time and more users, but I think it's alright so far.

I had looked into a couple other decentralized or federated services in the past and they seemed like kind of a pain or they were poorly explained. until now, all of it also seemed too obscure to have any kind of notable traffic. if this isn't temporary and the reddit api controversy actually did something meaningful, then I look forward to seeing how the federated service ecosystem grows and changes.

reddit's dethroning was a long time coming in my eyes. it's just not going to be as smooth as the digg -> reddit pipeline years ago.

I think there may be room for another couple million users spread across a ton of communities. wishful thinking, but maybe that would keeps thing toned down with the bots and other shady shit.

lots of polish and QoL needed both on the main site(s) and the mobile offerings out so far. all in all, pretty good start.

I dislike the idea of multiple communities for the same topic spread across multiple instances. Sure, you can subscribe to multiple communities, but that's just extra overhead. I'm hopeful reddit backs down after the protest (as unlikely as it may be), but either way I will probably go back to using it regardless. Social media is about content, and unless there is a dramatic shift away from reddit being the content hub that it currently is, nothing else will be as useful.

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 actually like it a lot. I think I can stick with it. I hope that this is the moment when the fediverse and the decentralized social networks will have the chance to become mainstream.

honestly I hope it stays this active. fediverse feels more at home to someone whos been on the internet since before it was so centralised, something like this feels like a good mix. lots of different decentralized sites able to communicate with eachother, rather than just one site holding everyone hostage. mastodon never really took off too big but I hope lemmy can make it happen.