Technology

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.

Tbh I have no idea what’s going on.

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

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

He was the best frontman motörhead ever had

Liking it so far. I love that I can spin up my own instance. Only thing I'm missing is a multi-reddit type feature to combine communuties from multiple instances into one feed.

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.

I feel the generation gap for the first time when I see people complaining about the difficulty of selecting a server to sign up and connect to!

Other than that, it does bring a lot of the atmosphere of the wild west times of the web, in a good way. I'm liking it!

Hopefully we retain a healthy amount of users after this wave passes and everyone is back at reddit. :)

I'm trying to like it, but it's hard. It doesn't quite scratch the doom scrolling itch like Reddit did. I'm using Jerboa and it's missing a lot of features that I relied heavily on with Relay. Ultimately I'm just going to have to adapt though because it looks like Reddit isn't backing down and I'm not going to use the official app.

In good news, I always hated my Reddit username so it's nice to finally get to change it lol.

I like the concept, and overall experience. On a more technical side getting my own private lemmy instance up and running (I wanted to retain full control of my account) was not easy due to somewhat lacking documentation on the process. Had to dig through posts from other people having similar issues, and do a bit of troubleshooting to fill in the gaps.

Now that I have it working will see if I can find the time to do a writeup on the process if others are looking to do the same.

I'm curious how well niche communities will work. It seems too niche here, like it's hard to find, hard to grow.

Like I do alternative keyboard layouts. If someone on Reddit wants to find it, it's rather easy and everyone in that community is there (there are dozens of us, dozens!). But on lemmy I think those dozens will be spread out more.

Obviously not enohgh content or communities here, but the bones here seem good and that is what's important starting out.

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

So far, I'm loving it. I'm using Jerboa (android client for Lemmy), which is working nicely.

I've moved from Twitter to Mastodon and Reddit to Lemmy and am so far loving both. Even though they're taking a bit to get used to they're mostly pretty straight forward and familiar feeling in how they work. I will definitely miss certain subreddits but many of them are already here in some form or in the process of moving over. I really love the distributed model that is not at the behest of a single corporate entity or billionaire.

I feel like it's more of a community than Reddit. There is more collective spirit here right now.
I'm concerned about the tankie baggage.

Overall it's pretty good! With more development on Jerboa and better backend performance and an influx of people, I think it'll be fantastic. I'm pretty pleased thus far!

The main thing I miss is being able to have things disappear from my front page after I press like or dislike on them.

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.

I'm also testing out jerboa atm. And it's a bit rough around the edges, but gets the job done well enough. Still haven't explored too much of the Lemmyverse, but looking forward to digging in a bit deeper.

ex Redditor, sort of stopped using the site years ago anyways, but I've been following the reddit api stuff because I was a big fan of Apollo when I was a more active user and that's how I ended up finding Lemmy; I like it here so far, the few communities i've seen seem friendly and welcoming; and the content is interesting

i like it and can totally abandon reddit for it assuming people continue to show up and like all my tiny little niche communities pop up. I do feel like it's a bit confusing at first as far as finding communities and connecting to them all so some work there would probably go a long way.

basically when there is a community for stock tank pools specifically and has 2,000 subscribers we're in the money lol