I really want to like lemmy, but it’s difficult. I’m new to all this fediverse thingy, and I might just have old habits and perceptions how things should work but… I keep seeing the same posts more than once, iOS experience is not that good really, sometimes I see dead posts from 2 years ago for some reason, despite having subscribed to like 30 communities there aren’t that many new posts to read.
Part of it probably that subreddits had millions of people so a lot of posts every minute, but it still feels underwhelming.
It’s not as doomscrolly. Maybe I should find something else to waste my time on haha
What is your experience with lemmy? Maybe I just do things wrong. Let me know
i mean so far, I’m enjoying it. sure, the community isn’t as large, but that’s mostly a good thing. on reddit, if i made a post, it would be like a 25% chance to get hundreds of comments, and a 75% chance to get none. here, I’ve gotten a few, high quality responses on every question post I’ve made. i do miss the “auto hide read posts” feature, but maybe that’ll get added some day
You can hide read posts here! In the web app settings for your profile:
Is there a way to stop the endless loading of posts on the website? Because every time I try to click a post, it moves down because a new post loaded, and this happens every ten seconds, constantly.
It’s a bug that wasnt an issue when the community was smaller. Last I heard they will replace it with a refresh icon that pops up at the top when new posts are available.
Oh thank God is a bug, I really thought it was a feature of the site.
Thank jeebus. I was getting all fussy thinking it was a me/my phone/my browser problem.
It’s amazing what kinda bugs can be exposed in your system when your user base expands by orders of magnitude overnight
I’ve heard that one is just a bug. Hopefully they’re working on it. Mlem (the iOS app) seems to have it handled, but it does crash a lot, and it’s frustrating to lose your scroll progress. I think we just have to wait it out in these early days 😵💫
This is incredibly helpful! Thank you so much!
😊
Incredible
What is considered “read”? Something you scroll past or a post that you open?
Ok, I just tested it out. It’s any post that you upvote, downvote, or open the comments for. Expanding an image is not enough.
Edit: Seems like opening a post’s comments in Mlem (iOS app) doesn’t seem to flag something as “read”. But open a post in the web app and it disappears from both on next reload. Up/downvoting work on both.
Edit 2: If you upvote a post and then remove your upvote, that seems to count as “read” as well. In case you’re like me and can’t commit to an upvote or downvote for every post 😅
Fediverse currently reminds me of Reddit from 10 years ago in frequency of content. There is something nice about not being in the rat race, less toxicity.
yeah it’s nice knowing that someone is gonna see my comment instead of it getting lost amongst hundreds. feels a lot more like a community that way
The reality is that there was/is no reddit alternative and right now we’re all in this transitory phase where we’re all looking for a new home. We’ll all just have to wait for the dust to settle. Lemmy isn’t perfect but is improving and additionally other alternatives like kbin and tildes are in the works.
To your larger point, much of what you’re feeling is the abrupt break in habits. I’ve been using the gap to develop more positives ones, and it’s been great.
A thought came to my mind when reading your comment.
Instead of finding a new home, let’s make lemmy our new home. Let’s try to populate lemmy more, get its activity up, and post more than we would’ve on reddit (since we have less users, we would need more posts per user), so it can stand a chance at being a reddit competitor.
Yes, make homes! we need so much more hardware, while personal instances may not be a good idea, we are so short on compute that if you are inclined run your own instance, bring your friends!
The experience on smaller faster instances is already comparable, the content flow, really not bad either though it takes about an hour of finding and subbing to the communities you want and a day for your instance to really start grabbing the content for you.
Can you point out an explanation for how this works? Like, if I run my own “instance” of Lemmy in a Docker container, what all is it doing if I and a few friends subscribe to communities on other instances (eg BeeHaw, lemmy.ml, etc). Is my little instance mirroring all of that data constantly? Just when one of us requests it? I need to know what I’m getting myself into basically.
I think you might find that answer through lemmy’s github and using their guides which I’ll send it here in case anyone else is interested.
Yeah I agree and am working on it in terms of engagement. Usability is going to be key for whichever platform eventually takes over. It could absolutely be Lemmy, but I’m watching for other possibilities as well.
This is the sentiment I’ve been rolling with. I normally don’t post often, but since the move I’ve created an instance and posted more than ever.
We have to make what we want. once we have enough content for people to be interested, the users and community will come.
I’m home :)
I’ve been told my handle should work on all the lemmys but so far it only works on lemmy.one. I tried logging in with this at lemmy.world and beehaw and it didn’t work. I tried creating a new login on both of those and it also didn’t work. I want to like it but I’m confused and frustrated. I’ll give it some time and see where the dust settles as you said. Call me old fashioned though but I just don’t think shitposting on a forum should be so damn complicated.
You should never have to go to the actual websites for the other instances. Just like email, you wouldn’t expect to be able to use your Gmail account to log into Yahoo, right? Use lemmy.one as your homepage and browse everything from there. From there, you can use the Communities section to search/browse communities hosted on any instance, including Beehaw and lemmy.world.
Can you tell me how to make a new comment? So far, it’s just allowing me to reply to others but no option to make one new…
Agree that it shouldn’t be so complicated. I see that as a major flaw of the platform that will curtail adoption, but who knows, maybe one will win out over the others?
In any case, my understanding is that you can’t log into the other instances with your username from lemmy.one, but you can read posts and interact with communities on different lemmy sites. For instance, I’m commenting from lemmy.world on a post you made using lemmy.one at a community hosted on lemmy.ml, but we can both read each other’s comments, and so can people that signed up on other instances like beehaw.org.
It will get better quickly—there are people working around the clock on apps and improvements right now. This isn’t like your normal social media site where they can use seed money and advertising to buy the best infrastructure right off the bat. This is a grassroots effort to make something that can evolve into a unique and independent service.
If we all stick it out with alternative options like this right now, we will be looking at a much freer future for online communication later. If we get annoyed and go crawling back to the capitalist overlords at FB/Twitter/Reddit, then we give them everything they wanted in the first place, and the internet will take one more step towards being a walled garden casino of ideas.
Im talking to you from a lemmy.world account right now. Whatever instance you chose to create your account with is the website you need to go to each time you login. From there, you will still have access to search comment etc with any other community through your current instance.
Your handle does work for all of the various Lemmy servers. But to access them it’s like your email, you wouldn’t log in to your Gmail account from Yahoo. Yahoo has no idea what your Gmail username and password is. So how can it let you in? And like email because both servers speak the same protocol you can interact with other users on other servers just like if you had their email address.
In your case lemmy.one is your email server so to speak. You can access any other Lemmy community or set of communities on another lemmy server by searching directly for their address on your home server or if someone else has interacted with another server already that server’s communities will show up in your home server’s All list and you can see those posts there and interact with them as if they were local to your home server.
You don’t need to create multiple Lemmy accounts. You can search for and find and join subs from lemmy.world on your Lemmy.one account. it’s not instantly intuitive coming from Reddit, but once you make the connection to the other subs on different instances its established for you
Yeah, I try to share this to help people get it…
GUIDE:
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don’t go to a community on the server that it’s on (e.g.
https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy) [NO login] -
do go to a community on the server you’re on (e.g.
https://lemmy.one/c/[email protected]) [YES login!]
everything else works the same using the instance-to-instance federation, but only as long as you use YOUR lemmy instance, NOT the one that the Community lives on.
When linking to a community from within a lemmy post or comment, use this format:
[Winnipeg Jets](/c/winnipegjets@lemmy.world)>>begets>> Winnipeg Jets
(Note: this works really well on the website, but currently my app (Jerboa) crashes for these links. I think this is a bug that will be fixed.)
Thank you, it makes so much more sense to me now.
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You’re successfully doing it right now, commenting on a post from Lemmy.ml. You don’t need to log in to other instances, like Beehaw, to comment.
You make it sound like not doomscrolly is a bad thing
People will rarely say they want to endlessly scroll, but given the options, they’ll always choose the option that let’s them consume more content, aka doom scroll.
I would say to breathe deep and take your time. Lemmy is not a clone of Reddit, and it shouldn’t be viewed as, say you would compare functionality between 2 third-party Reddit apps.
Think of it as coming in to a new MMO after having played the old one for many years. Some things will be familiar, and some things will be different. Some mechanics may feel like a “step backwards” while others are cool additions.
Lemmy isn’t new, but it’s getting fresh eyes on its user experience and that is a good thing. And unlike Reddit, each community/server/whathaveyou can be far more responsive to their users feedback. That said, not every response will be a “yes” but you don’t have requests filtering through various levels of technological red tape, which I understand has been a challenge for the Reddit moderators, who still do not have the necessary tools to effectively moderate their subreddits.
When I first joined Beehaw, and saw, originally, a “lack” of diverse subreddits (including my mainstays) I was a bit disappointed, but then I thought to myself: “damn the torpedoes, I’m just gonna wing it” and subscribed to a bunch of communities that looked promising.
I’ve been on Lemmy since the disastrous AMA and have not looked back. I’ve even engaged more in these last 5 days on Lemmy/Beehaw than in the last year on Reddit. And while I still miss my 250+ subreddits (including r/superbowl and the subreddits I collected as part of a Reddit gestalt (r/inthesoulstone, the subreddit for Purple button pushers, r/buddhistasfuck (created as a lark, someone posted it wouldn’t last a day and I stayed to prove them wrong, and while it was a quiet subreddit, every once in a while someone would post something they thought was “extremely” buddhist)) the Lemmy communities have provided more meaningful interactions. Plus, Lemmy will create its own gestalts, and I’ll have new ways to experience the never-ending stream of random data tidbits I have grown to crave.
Honestly man, as much as I 100% agree on the UI difficulties, it’s like a breath of fresh air. There’s good music posted, people posted books and I looked and really wanted to read them. It’s more human. There’s this tiny little handful of content here, but it’s not all same-y and in-joke-y and weird.
I’m not trying to hate on reddit, I still go to reddit for news because of more or less what you’re talking about (the weird sorting in the newsfeed here and the lack of certain content). But what I like about here is that there are nerdy people, there’s real content, there’s not this weird hivemind and endless dopamine content. The great stuff about reddit was always the in-depth storytelling and unique content, to me, not just the gratification aspect of everything working right and new content popping up. I’m happy with Lemmy despite the hiccups because it seems like it’s getting back to that.
Feels like an older reddit, which I enjoy(ed). I also appreciate the genuine interactions and that upvotes are a 1:1 with users. No smoke and mirrors.
What do you mean with smoke and mirrors?
IIRC, the upvotes used to be a 1:1, so 1 upvote meant one person liked it. Later they added some ‘fuzzing’ which caused the number you see on a post to be inflated. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
Votecount on Reddit is fuzzed (obfuscated) and does not show individual upvote and downvote numbers.
There are definitely a few bugs or perhaps performance issues that are annoying, but the experience seems already 1000 times better than just 2 days ago. I have also checked on lemmy every few months for about 2 years now, it’s day and night. It already feels kinda like 2012 reddit to me, and that’s a good thing in my view.
I find it exciting. Very reminiscent of the Digg exodus. Sure, it can be a little frustrating at times. But reddit was going downhill for me long before the API stupidity. Lemmy feels like returning home in a way.
I had the same problem of seeing posts more than once or consistently when viewing the site.
I had to dig under the Menu, click onto my profile name, select Settings, and make some changes.
Under that page I changed “Type” to “Subscribed” (Default was Local) and “Sort Type” to “Top Day” rather than “Hot”. Then make sure to click “Save”
This seems to have improved for me a bit.
Thank you! This was very helpful, I didn’t even know you could change the default experience.
I know the feeling, but the way I’m dealing with it is twofold.
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Create content. If the commuity you like has few posts, then start something. If the community doesn’t exist, create it. I’m doing my part by creating maliciouscompliance (quick shoutout: /c/[email protected] , https://lemmy.world/c/maliciouscompliance , [email protected] ).
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Recognise that I used to spend too much time on Reddit and I should spend less time on social media in general. “Not as doomscrolly” is a feature for me, although I recognise this isn’t for everyone.
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It’s not going to replace Reddit overnight. Those communities have to be built here. If people stick around, it will happen.
The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example. Lemmy should prevent this, community names should be unique, it should have an index of all the Lemmy Fediverse where instances can lookup if a community exists instead of waiting for a user to import that community to his instance. Something similar to what BTC does with the decentralized ledger.
The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example.
I agree, to an extent. You’re right in that if you were part of the vibrant community of /r/piracy then it’s miserable to see it shatter here on lemmy. That said, this only applies if you’re expecting lemmy to be a 1 for 1 reddit replacement. For this type of community to remain cohesive, /r/piracy would have had to spin up their own instance and in /r/piracy direct everyone to lemmy.piracyinstance.whatever.
You can’t really “fix” this in a central way because even if you did, it would be trivial to create an instance that would allow duplicate community names. Also, I can see a lot of use cases for lemmy which do not intend to be federated.
That said, it’s not necessarily as big a problem as it appears, if you just accept that this is how the fediverse works. There’s no single source of control, so of course people can create 147 different /c/piracy communities if they wish to. Once you accept that, then it’s not really that difficult to subscribe to all the /c/piracy communities you can find.
The problem itself could be diminished by a few new features which I feel certain will emerge in the future:
- linked communities, where one communities content is syndicated to another. So if you post in [email protected] then you also post in [email protected]. This would work differently to cross-posting, all comments would be reflected on both instances.
- grouped communities, where you can subscribe to a group of /c/selfhosted communities with one click, so you see them all in your feed.
Having ‘no single source of truth’ is part of the joy.
If you’re not happy with /r/cars moderators banning everyone who drives a Skoda, then you’re out of luck. Here in federation land, you can just go to a different lemmy.something/c/cars place.
Of course you can still follow and interact with all the /c/cars communities from any Lemmy instance (and interact a little from Mastodon).
@CleanDefinition @Ghast so true!
I got banned from Subs for asking questions, I couldn’t make my own without the original shadowing me on every search.
But theoretically on Lemmy every community can have a voice, if the rest of Fediverse believes it in, it can flourish. Other servers can’t report you or shadow ban beyond the confines of their server.
If a group tries to bully you they might get their entire server banned so the mod’s would likely terminate the user first
Part of the issue is that we hardly have enough people to sustain one random community, let alone several semi-independent ones. That barrier alone will turn others away and the cycle of not having enough souls will repeat itself
I think what they really need is an autosubscribe, so you can autosubscribe to /c/Piracy on all federated servers. (Then of course be able to block certain instances if they’re horrible)
I love this idea, but you would need a list of communities for a given topic, and some way to curate it.
The community and the app is still relatively new. To be honest, I prefer smaller communities where I can leave for a few hours without half the posts sliding to page 5 and beyond. Instead of uncritically consuming digital content, try to contribute to smaller communities, post a couple of cool links, or even (Gasp! Horror!) do something else for a while.
If I’m spending less time staring at my phone and more time picking up a book or something, all the better for me. I’ve found myself engaging more and doomscrolling less though, so the time feels more well spent even though I’m spending less time then I would have on reddit.
This is my biggest motivation right now. Its been a blessing in disguise as I am concentrating more and less mindlessly browsing reddit, both at work and in personal life.
You aren’t doing anything wrong! This site/app (lemmy) and the concept (fediverse) are still super early days so there are going to be many problems. The site has some layout issues and there isn’t nearly as much content as Reddit but that’s just because it is new.
The most important bit, to me at least, is that the fundamental idea of the fediverse is good. We have had to many instances where social sites like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter can just decide what people can and can’t say, they can remove our content and they can monetize it all without doing any real work of their own as far as creating content. The idea of the fediverse ensures that no one server, person or company has all the content and thus the control.
I really hope people stick with something fediverse whether it be lemmy, kbin or any of the other projects out there. Post content there, cross post it from Reddit if you really have to post to Reddit too for whatever reason. Please don’t give these companies all the control anymore.
