I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
Liking it so far. A social network is only as good as its community. The community is small but high quality. I’m excited to see Lemmy grow.
Joined today and I find Lemmy really cool. Of course there isn’t that much content here yet but I’m hoping the June 12 Reddit protests and the upcoming Reddit API restrictions will bring more users in.
I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:
- The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I’m aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that’s less than ideal)
- The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I’m aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it’s vital to the success of Lemmy.
Have you seen the search option, in the top right corner? Is that not enough to you? It works ok for me.
You can’t discover every community throughout the lemmy’s fediverse that way though. Only the communities that other users previously subscribed/searched for. https://browse.feddit.de/ is the thing to use if you’d like to see everything
The first point is CRUCIAL for setting up your own “scrolling page/account” for, since the instances are only very vague directions, at least while the site is still growing. And in a similiar vein, the second point with B) would be better than manually blocking communities I genuinely have no interest whatsoever in, like fountain pens (unless I don’t know how to operate this site yet).
In fact, C) feels unnecessary because of that right now, since I already see many new communities just in my instance alone. Though it WOULD add things to browse since there isn’t as much happening here, yet…
Echoing many things that other users are saying already:
Signing up/choosing a home instance is confusing. I don’t think it’s very confusing conceptually, but it is confusing from a UX/UI perspective. Subscribing to outside communities was the toughest part, I had to find them through a different instance using a search engine, then manually paste the community-specific URL into my home instance search, wait several seconds, then click into the community home page and finally click “subscribe.”
Not something a casual user is going to want or even figure out to do. I trust that many of these growing pains will be fixed in the coming weeks/months. I just hope that it’s not all a flash in the pan and then fizzles out totally.
Once using it though, I like the general feel of it. Better themes and some cleaner UI choices and it will be really nice imo. People are friendly so far and that’s worth a ton right there.
Yeah, there is a ton of room for Lemmy to grow. With time, it should get easier for newer people to use it as the apps mature.
Worried about the future of fediverse, all it takes is a few external bad apples and servers will start defederating. Also even less internal bad apples who decides to make specific desirable features proprietary with the goal to amass the majority to users. Both of these are bad for the fediverse.
Interface is better than “new” Reddit, not as good as old Reddit + RES.
Also: if I click on a link on another instance (for example https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy when I’m signed in on lemmy.world), I’m not signed in to lemmy.ml so I have to manually search for it in lemmy.world to post there - is there a common solution to that?
I was new to Reddit (3 weeks of activity), and switching to Lemmy is a bit confusing. But one evening is enough to learn the basics, I hope. Let’s keep it rolling. :)
There’s not a single middle eastern sub, and I doubt there ever will be😞
Be the change you wanna see!
People are much friendlier here, so far.
It feels like my experience on Mastodon after Twitter imploded. Hopefully it lasts.
I love it here and I’ll express myself and show love to all with manatees
Same here. I do feel and see that a LOT of work will be required to get lemmy where it needs to be but something tells me that these are the interesting days for Lemmy!
It’s welcoming but confusing. I think there’s two reasons for the latter:
1- Many of us forget how basic Reddit was when we first started using it, and the features we all know and love got added over time and repeatedly refined based on use.
2- Most of us here are because we have been users of incredibly well designed apps crafted by developers with a passion for great UI. If I try using the (new) Reddit site or their default app, I find myself equally confused.
There are still so many changes happening in Lemmy functionality, and as we’ve seen with Mastodon, we will hopefully soon be overwhelmed with great apps.
In the meantime there’s the great community already here and growing. I saw a comment that you can estimate that Reddit has 90% lurkers, 9% commenters, 0.9% posters, and 0.1% “community builders” I think it’s those latter groups who are leading the exodus, which is great news for us and terrible news for whoever ends up owning Reddit.
I’m using Jeroba on android and I think it’s pretty solid so far, considering how new it is. It has more than I expected it to, it just needs time to get developed more. There’s a few features I want to go make github issues to request, but they’re nothing critical.
And I agree with your last paragraph completely. I think most people using third party apps were not lurkers. Most of them were probably using a 3pa because they had been for years, from the time when the reddit app was either nonexistent or even worse than tosay, or had found the reddit app too annoying to comment and post with. They’re people who use reddit so much on their phone that the official app is too annoying and ugly to tolerate.
And seeing how many mods are ip in arms about the mod tools they use, it seems like reddit is really shooting itself in the foot.
I wonder if the Reddit board really appreciate how hard it is going to be to find large numbers of new mods. Being thick-skinned enough to cope with being hated by so many people for so many contradictory reasons while also being flexible and responsive and ready to plough through piles of work for free isn’t a combination of qualities many people have…
If a lot of mods stopped using reddit, it would get absolutely inundated with actual regulatory attacks because it would get flooded with child porn, explicit harrassment, and nazis.
Any of the top 10 communities having enough mods resign would cause absolute havoc for reddit, yet they consistently screw over mods.
Oof, that’s an aspect I hadn’t even thought of. It may well be a total bin fire.
I like the concept
But it feels very much like its been designed by nerdy developers and has had little to no-input on user friendly design.The federated idea can work but it needs to be more seemless than this.
- Communities with the same name should be merged when viewing it from any instance, so you can see all the posts from these communities, they can be moderated seperatley and for advanced users you should be able to select which communities make up the merged community.
- By default you should see all of the merged communities in a central place and be able to subscribe to them easily, at the moment its handled different per instance but you have to seek out these communities to subscribe or follow them.
- I strongly believe there should be a centralised log-in system, so you can log into any instance with an account from another instance, this means if your instance goes down your account is centralised and is safe.
Regarding point three: I want to be able to migrate my profile to another instance if my current instance has performance issues or admins going rogue.
I think even better, you should be able to sign into any instance via some type of centralised federated login, though I guess the argument is you can’t do that in multiple email clients as email is the most popular federated example.
This may unironically be the first time I’ve ever suggested this: this may actually be a use case for the block chain.
If the user data from all instances was being saved to a distributed and verified ledger, it would fix the problem of one node going down losing all of those users, and would be a decentralized yet centralized way to go about it.
… I feel dirty, I swear I’m not a cryptobro
It’s not bad, but there are a couple of issues that concern me. One is that communities are fractured - that is, that communities about the same topics exist on different instances and don’t connect with each other.
So I’m subscribed to a Books community on one instance, but that doesn’t mean I’ll see any of the posts on the same topic on other instances unless I subscribe to each of them. The total community of users on Lemmy who are interested in books are split up into small groups on different instances.
That’s very limiting.
Of course there’s also the issue of the relatively small user base overall. For some purposes a small community may be preferable, but for many others you really need a large user base. Looking for gamers for a face to face tabletop RPG, for example. Without a large user base, the odds of finding people within a reasonable real world distance of you is virtually nil.
I’m new and could be wildly wrong, but it seems like an improved UI could consolidate multiple communities into one “this is my feed” so you can participate in all of them. If one dies, you don’t lose everything.
Yeah, if a community is a “magazine” on here it’d be really nice to collate a number of magazines I’m interested in into a “rack” similar to a multireddit.
@StrictMachine Dunno if it would even be possible, but it would be cool to be able to somehow be able to categorize each instance/magazine with a limited amount of tags - like each book- or literature-related instance could have a “Book” or “Literature” tag that would basically add it to a view of every single instance with the tag in it, so users could look up tags versus looking up specific instances.
I don’t really know whats going on the whole instance thing confuses me. Whats it’s pros? Why use it
Basically 4 things:
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Pick your own admin. I’m sure the kbin admin is awesome (can’t be worse than spez, lol) but it’s nice to have the option
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Have more control over what your server federates with. Hate interacting with people from a specific server? Move to one that blocks it. Want to interact with people from a blocked instance? Move to one that doesn’t block them. Basically more options.
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Don’t like the rules on your server? Go to one where you like the rules better.
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Your server is down? That’s fine, go to a different one temporarily. You’re gonna feel this hard on Monday. Kbin’s gonna get crushed by the Reddit hug of death. You might wanna join up to a small Lemmy instance that the horde won’t notice if that happens and you still wanna be on.
If you like kbin’s admin, federation settings and rules? Then cool! You’re missing absolutely nothing from being there (except when it’s down). It’s nice to have options though.
Secret number 5:
If you know how to host a server, you can host your own Lemmy instance and have all the powa!
@Barbarian So I have a few questions, being new to all this:
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Seemingly I am responding to you when you’re on a different instance. I’m on kbin and you’re on… sh.itjust.works? Am I understanding this right?
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My kbin account is restricted to just kbin, correct? I cannot use my kbin credentials to log on to another instance like sh.itjust.works.
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How do I make an original comment (this is a bit dumb lol). I see the option to reply to others but no “comment” button for me to comment on my own.
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On kbin specifically… what is a microblog?
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(Last one promise), what is up with the @stuff. I see this post link is kbin.social/m/asklemmy@lemmy.mt… I figured the /m is like reddit’s /r, but what is the asklemmy@lemmy.mt meaning that this is the magazine/community from lemmy.mt when shown on the kbin /m/ instance version? Not sure if this question makes any sense lol I’m just trying to understand how this all works
Your username in the fediverse is not honorfaz, but @honorfaz@kbin.social, just as an email. It’s the same for communities (or sublemmy, or whatever we decide to call it). It’s not c/something, but c/something@instance.com. This is why everyone still has a unique handle, but no unique admin.
I’m on my own instance for example, running in my living room, and yet here we are, talking. Internet as it was intented.
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