Open Street Map is legitimate. In bicycling communities, Strava is the gold standard app for tracking rides, and it uses Open Street Maps on the backend. It’s always super accurate for me, even for fairly obscure bike trails off the beaten path.

That’s why it has to be done today. At the moment, Jerboa instantly crashes when trying to access Lemmy, which will definitely scare away new users. My understanding is that this is because Lemmy.World is on version 17, but Jerboa requires instances to be on version 18 or higher. If successful, I believe this would fix the instant crash issue, so we’ll at least have an Android app working again.

Hopefully, these are just growing pains symptomatic of a site trying to deal with rapid growth and rapid improvements.

Side downloading .apk files from something other than the Google Play store is shady as hell. It’s way too easy to sneak malicious code into the app that way. Even if the project is open source, I don’t have the time or the skillset to review the code to confirm it’s not malicious. No offense to the developers, but there’s no chance in hell I’m doing that for an upstart app I knew nothing about a month ago.

As a result, I’m using Lemmy via Firefox’s mobile browser right now, with Jerboa completely useless crashing the second I open it.

Hopefully they fix it soon (i.e., within the next 24 hours). First impressions matter a ton. For the masses migrating tomorrow once RIF and others shut down, Lemmy and the different apps for it will appear to be dead on arrival. If we expect any actual content on Lemmy beyond complaints about Reddit and questions about Lemmy, we need those people to migrate over.

The idea that different fediverse instances can all be on different incompatible versions is mind bogglingly dumb. The federation/decentralization design choice overcomplicates things to a huge degree. There are far more downsides than upsides to this approach. I want to like Lemmy/Jerboa, but at this point, the official Reddit app is looking more and more appealing.

Before they killed Reddit, I frequently made new accounts for privacy reasons, as recently as maybe a month or two ago. Email was not required.

I’ll be honest: that’s a shitty way of handling this. Making 20 accounts to view content from 20 different instances that don’t want to cooperate with one another defeats the purpose of all of this. If that’s the plan, the Lemmyverse or whatever it’s called is dead on arrival.

Top Day is probably the best sort option so far, but I wouldn’t mind something that updates a little more frequently (e.g., Top for the past 4 hours). Additionally, I wouldn’t mind adding a decay mechanism that gradually pulls posts lower as time passes. As things stand now, if a post is immediately popular within the same hour it gets posted, it’ll remain as the #1 post on Top Day for the next 23 hours before immediately falling off the page altogether the second the post becomes 24 hours old. That leads to stale pages, and if people see the same posts every time they check this place, they’ll assume it’s a dead community and never come back. By implementing something that more gradually cycles content, if I check the site once at lunch and again a few hours later on my train ride home, I should get different content.

The problem with subscribing to communities at this point is the lack of content. I subscribed to a few different baseball communities, but none of them have anything other than maybe a welcome post or a few gameday posts without any comments. Communities are duplicated on a bunch of different instances too, which makes things a million times harder than it needs to be. I have no idea if one of the half dozen baseball communities I’m in now will make it big, if a new one entirely will make it big, or if they’re all doomed to never have content.

Define “intentionally inflammatory.” Reddit was always very left-leaning politically, so I assume the userbase here is similar. I suspect conservative memes/links/etc. would be considered intentionally inflammatory here in a way that leftist memes/links/etc. would not. It’s not really possible to define a one-size-fits-all definition: One person’s inflammatory is another person’s ideal content.

Additionally, define “spamming links.” The biggest problem with Lemmy so far is lack of content. If I go to the baseball subreddit, for instance, I see a bunch of highlights from the games that took place last night, a bunch of discussions on World Series odds, a bunch of questions about stats, etc. Over here, none of that exists yet. A few people have tried to build individual communities by posting similar content over here. It probably looks like spamming a bunch of links to MLB’s website for highlight videos. However, without someone spamming those links, the community is basically dead with nothing to comment on. We probably need a little spamming at the outset to grow the community to be large enough to sustain itself organically.

The idea of Shreddit takes me back to when I first joined Reddit in 2011. At the time, I was in my mid 20s going to rock/metal concerts pretty often. A friend of mine encouraged me to sign up for Reddit and to check out the Shreddit community. It took me ages to figure out she was talking about /r/metal.

I bring that up to make the point that community discovery in my early days of Reddit was pretty difficult, but I eventually figured it out. In time, I’m sure the same thing will happen with Lemmy.

Looks like a huge drop in user counts a few minutes ago too: Down to 75K as of the time I made this comment despite the chart showing a much higher number immediately before that. I’m guessing there’s something off when it comes to counting the different instances.

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.

Honestly, the Reddit approach is pretty similar. Reddit had /r/gaming and /r/games, for instance, with the two communities offering pretty much the same content. Same thing with /r/baseball as the large baseball subreddit and /r/MLB as a mostly empty subreddit filled with people who figured baseball would use the same naming convention as /r/NBA or /r/NFL. Eventually, one of the ones wins out. We just have to remember that Lemmy communities have two names before and after the period, so while the initial name can be duplicated, the initial name plus the instance cannot.

It’s similar to the early internet where site.com was different from site.org.

From June 14 to June 30, the RIF Android app will mostly work as normal providing access to most of the same subreddits I’ve been visiting for the past decade+. A few will shut down permanently, but other than that, it’ll mostly be the same as before, so I’ll probably use Reddit during that period.

However, effective July 1, that option disappears completely. If I want to continue using Reddit, I’ll have to download an entirely different app and get used to an entirely different user interface providing an experience much worse than RIF. If I have to learn something brand new anyway, I may as well try an entirely different platform like Lemmy. No idea if I’ll stick here long term or not, but the power of Reddit was the community. If the community migrates over here, I’m all for staying here. I suspect one of the Redsit alternatives will attract a critical mass of people at some point.

As every internet platform has shown, the enshittification is inevitable. Eventually, Lemmy too will become an unusable mess of ads and feature creep if/when enough money starts flowing in. However, I’m perfectly fine using the site for the next few years until that happens.