Technology

It's looking great! I joined just 2 days ago and the communities I subscribed to are already looking much more lively today. Thanks, Reddit blackout!

Also written in Rust, btw :)

A year ago, I viewed the Fediverse as an unnecessary, complicated framework created by a handful of well-intentioned individuals as a solution to a problem that wasn't really there.

Today, I view it as a necessity.

This past year has been a hard lesson for me to stop placing trust in massive, centralized web services like Twitter and Reddit and to start federating more of my online activity. There's going to be growing pains, but Lemmy has been pretty good so far and it's definitely going to be worth it in the end.

In general, it works pretty nice, but there are some limitations.

The biggest one for me is discoverability. The federation means that there is more fragmentation and it's harder to find the right community for something.

For example, there are country/city communities for my country/city on multiple instances. And since it's hard to find the "correct" one, it fragments out much harder than Reddit did. Combine that with generally lower attendance numbers and you get really tiny communities.

This is not aided by Jerboa, which doesn't open internal links internally. So if someone posts a link to a community and I press it, it instead tries to open it with my email app.

For wide spread adoption there are a lot of issues with the fediverse. The main one is the home pages of fediverse instances or join-X.org sites immediately turn people away with their language, jargon and content. Nobody cares about the open source licence, or how it's "federated" or what the developers can do, or that you can run your own server or what languages and frameworks it's built on etc. These all will turn people away. Literally the first sentence on join-lemmy is "Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform". Nobody wants to self host anything (well I do, but near to 100% of people don't). Then there are screen shots of code diff's and actual code, then a list of programming languages, then some Latin with hard to see 'mod tools', and then at the end back to self hosting "With Lemmy, you can easily host your own server, and all these servers are federated". None of this is enticing people in. It's turning people away.

These entrances to the fediverse should be about community, discussions, engagement etc. That's what people want to sign up for and start participating. Just get them signed up. Once they're in they can learn about the other benefits and that they can move the profile to different servers, or whathaveyou. Keep all the other bumf hidden away behind a "benefits" link.

Someone needs to come up with better terminology to fediverse and federated to avoid having to explain it all the time. It's federated... You know... Like email. Well I've used email a long time and nobody has ever called it federated or used that term before when talking about any aspect of email - and I run my own email server.

Tl:dr: just cut the crap and make on-boarding easier. Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.

The apps need some work, but overall it's "okay." The rest of my gripes lie entirely around the lack of content, which can't be helped

The idea is outstanding. The parts of the UI that work are great. There's much work to be done, especially with regard to subscription and discovery. The whole "copy/paste this into your server's search bar" thing is.... not great.

The UX is kinda rough around the edges, but it's filling my scroll addiction while reddit takes a steaming dump on everyone.

I love the concept of decentralization. Feels more like the internet of old.

It feels like the start of something new, you know? Sort of exciting because coming from Reddit to Lemmy feels like taking a leap of faith as we are looking for this place to replace what we have lost. At the end of the day, communities are what make or break a platform and we have that going.

In terms of the platform itself, I am still trying to figure my way around here but the UI/UX feels easy to interact with. I guess I would love to have a mobile app for iOS down the line to replace my addiction to Apollo!

I hate when threads and comments automatically update, scrolling content down my browser.

I hate that when I hit back on my web browser, it doesn't bring me back to where I was previously on the page. I have to scroll down all over again.

Lack of content or small communities don't bother me. It just means more people need to contribute, myself included.

I'm confused, but I've got the spirit. Reddit was confusing at first too, given I joined before it was mainstream popular. I figured it out, I'll figure this out too. Looking forward to a restart and seeing this grow.

I tried the fediverse with Mastodon to replace Twitter, but it didn't work out. On Twitter, I was exclusively following accounts of personalities/organizations. As these accounts did not make the switch from Twitter to Mastodon, there was little use.

I feel like the fediverse works way better with content aggregation. I don't really care who specifically is on Lemmy, as long as there is content and discussion. So far it's been really nice.

I signed up for Mastodon awhile back but never really got into it since I don't really do Twitter much either. I have been reading about lemmy but didn't sign up until today.

It was a little confusing trying to sign up, the first instance I tried to sign up with had a waiting period for account approvals but I finally found one I could sign up with instantly and then I started poking around. I think I am getting the hang of it!

I have also downloaded Mlem to test on my iphone. It's easy and simple to use, not a lot of features yet but it seems promising.

So far outside of a bit of focus time to figure out how to actually get signed up and find communities to subscribe to I'm cautiously optimistic. This seems more like how the older days of the internet were, before the enshittification of social media. Let's see if this trend continues!

I hope the #RedditMigration sours adoption

I think you meant spurs lol

Anyway yeah I'm liking Lemmy and the fediverse so far. I actually prefer the UI/UX of https://kbin.social more for desktop, but Jerboa is great for mobile. If they stay actively in development it's going to be hard to beat IMO

I've followed from Fark to StumbleUpon to Digg to Reddit, and now many years later, to Lemmy. I think the communities being spread across instances is extremely powerful for overall global community resiliency (if the separation is respected and we don't end up with a bunch of duplicated "subs" everywhere).

I'm sure you've heard plenty of people say this today, but the one thing I feel the most is excitement. The chaos reminds me of the early-ish days (~1996?) of the internet when everything was discoverable and not already aggregated to be served up to you inbetween advertisements.

The community, particularly Beehaw, is fantastic! I love it.

Lemmy itself needs a lot of work. It's incredibly far behind, but my expectations are staying measured and I'm excited to see how it develops. Right now it's not a case of me enjoying the platform itself, but more so 'putting up' with the limitations of the platform to access the nice community.

Jerboa is the mobile client I'm using currently, and it's off to a good start but needs a lot of fixes to be fully usable. Such as sorting comments and searching. The ability to easily click a button to jump to the next comment thread is my most missed feature as well from clients such as Boost for Reddit.

Additionally, I still have issues signing into the mobile website. I can sign in through Jerboa or the Beehaw website on desktop, but not on mobile (or at least not always). So I'm often navigating content on the mobile website, then using Jerboa to comment on it. Most won't deal with these issues, but I'm still holding out to see what comes from it all.

A couple of last side notes, it's really annoying to need to click on the title, and not being able to click on the text of a post to navigate (mobile site) - and visually it needs some improvements to draw more people in. That last part seems minor, and for a large part of the existing community, myself included, it truly minor - but for widespread adoption it needs a big revamp.

It's good, but it really needs combining of same name communities across the fediverse to prevent fragmentation.

I want to see all the technology instances if I go to /c/technology on whichever instance I"m on. It's hard enough remembering all the other fediverse names and which instances they have.

I mean, it's kinda already doing that on the front page, i.e. grabbing all the other fediverse posts.

I'm enjoying it so far. I like that it's not a direct one-for-one clone of reddit (not that it was intended to be). It feels like a combination of older reddit (> 10 years ago, when it wasn't as active) and old school forums (like how older posts will bump if there's activity). It makes me want to be more active vs being a lurker.

I have no intention of going back to reddit. I've already deleted RIF from my phone. The 3PA thing was the last straw for me, but I felt like reddit had been going downhill for a while and I think I had been looking for an excuse to fuck off but couldn't quit cold turkey. Whatever good intentions that company might've started with, they're just a greedy corporation now. They haven't cared about their users for a while (which is interesting because their users are what create their content. Reddit itself doesn't create anything).

I am enjoying actual discussions and not just hot takes or rants. I don't care if the platform is "perfect". It's good enough for me. The admins aren't some corporation just looking for pavlovian click labor ('likes' and upvotes) to power their algorithm run ad fest.

I'm quietly hopeful that more and more people migrate over to lemmy, if it wasn't for all this api nonsense I'd have never heard of the fediverse. I don't know how it passed me by but I'm glad to be here now.

For me, 10/10 just as good. It only needs more content.

I think it's important to make sure your instance is federated with all the other big ones, though, since adding a new one is not user-friendly.

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.

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.

Used Reddit for 13 years, tried out Kbin and Lemmy yesterday and settled on Lemmy.

Long story short, I’m going back to Reddit.

• There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto. This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting. Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.

I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.

Deciphering the distributed nature of it took me, a relatively tech-friendly person, almost the entire day and several ‘What the fuck?’ posts. I now understand it more. There are some very low-level guides that have been haphazardly put together, but there absolutely needs to be a MUCH smoother guide/explanation to this whole thing. That learning process will turn people away for sure.

• BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security. If this is going to become a mainstream thing, as it reaches and before it gets to that critical mass of users, there’s going to be SO. MANY. SECURITY ISSUES. There’s no 2fa at all, hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant, and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is. In the ‘Fediverse’ your server instance might be hosted in a US or EU data center with proper digital and physical security, or it could be Joe Blows basement in Iowa running off a NAS. The easy-to-see future here is that Lemmy will fail to attract a critical mass of people because they’ll initially arrive, after a few months their instances will just cease to exist/get shut down/the hosts will decide its no longer a fun hobby to do.

With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them. Beyond that, if there IS a breach, they have the ability to recognize it, understand the legalities and requirements of reporting it, and can be held accountable by regulatory bodies. Joe doesn’t have the resources to really maintain and keep a server running, nor the knowledge of his responsibilities for keeping the data safe digitally or physically.

On top of that, if Joe’s basement loses power/gets hacked/Joe decides he’s moving to San Fransisco and can’t bring his NAS with him and the server goes down, and that’s where my instance is hosted well there goes my entire account/comments/data.

• Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.

• There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me, and I’ve gotten used to having a single place to get it from that floods me with thousands of different articles/memes/posts/etc every minute. Until the user base arrives in one single place and starts generating content, there’s no reason for most people like me to be there as by far the larger number of users never create anything at all and only exist to consume the content generated.

All in all, pretty good. Wish finding and subscribing to communities was easier tho. That’s probably my biggest gripe. I click some URL to join a new community, and it bitches to me that I’m not logged in because it’s an embedded safari page (on Mlem). Really wish it was simpler.

It's certainly fantastic and unprecedented, that different user bases, from very different types of platforms are able to come together and interact from their platforms of choice.

We may be witnessing a disruption right now. I do see more benefits than drawbacks with federated content, but that could just be my very biased point of view.

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.

It reminds me of when I first got into Linux. It's different and has bit of a learning curve, but it is always what makes it exciting and fun to start using.

I dig it so far. The vibes are good and the people are cool. My one question, though, is how active things are once people here lose interest in talking about Reddit.

New platforms are always at their hottest when people are talking about what they've left or what the new platform could be. Will be interesting to see how Lemmy is once that dies down a bit.

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

Enjoying it, but wondering if I'm missing a way to work backwards to find communities.

I'll give an example - Sleep Token, a band I like, released an album not too long ago. If I Google "reddit sleep token", I can see a few communities like /r/metalcore and /r/progmetal discussing them, so I can guess I might want to join those communities.

If I Google for "lemmy sleep token", I get a bunch of random websites with articles about sleep token with links and quotes about motorhead.

Whats the strategy for working backwards like that on Lemmy? Is there one?

Finally taking this as a reason to learn and understand ActivityPub and the Fediverse more. And other than it's discoverability issues, been a blast. Glad to have finally been thrown out the door by Reddit and forced to move into the new wave of the federated FOSS web.

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?

coming along well, will take a while for users to spread out and not just mass on one large server, we need to spread out to keep this working and viable for the future.

To do that however, we need better ways to find communities on other instances, and more easily link to them with links that work on each users instance URLs. at the moment if I do !technology@beehaw.org or !technology@lemmy.ml those will take you off your current instance unless you are already on it, losing your login. The average user wont expect that and might not even notice they are on a totally different website and wonder why their logins don't work.

Apparently all of this as well as aggregated topic subscriptions (so you don't need to find and subscribe to 10 different communities for one topic) are being worked on, that will be very cool.

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

Its pretty much the same as old reddit, so it is fine. I am sure that there will be addons and stuff to bring back any functionality that is missing.

In terms of the community, it is hard to say - the same subs that I spent so much time and enjoyed so much are either not here or nowhere near as big and developed. I used to spend a lot of time on Formula1, Battlebots, but my account was nearly 12 years old and I had many that I used to visit from time to time for fun. Many of those are just not there in any meaningful way.

It is just going to take time to rebuild, I think.

I like it. I can see myself being a long-term user here, in fact I plan to be. However, I'm experiencing a lot of timeouts and lag, I know it's not on my end. I'm not techie enough to know the reason this happens, but Im pretty sure that it won't adopt mainstream users until it runs smoother.

Okay, I've found a really annoying problem with Lemmy. I'd heard it mentioned before, but now I understand why it's so bad.

I click on "show context" to a reply that someone made to a post of mine. I didn't realize it, but I was instantly in a different instance and logged out of my account. So I couldn't respond. Clicking "back" didn't return me to my instance or log me back in. I had to re-enter my instance all over again.

That's HUGE. I'm sure it would drive away 4 out of 5 users. Please, someone, tell me it's being addressed!

Not a huge fan of the UI (so much wasted space!) but it works for now. I'm subscribed to a few communities but the content is pretty stale. I've seen the same posts at the top for a few days now. The "Active" selection keeps the same things over. I tried a few of the other selections (Hot, Top Day, etc) but there is this weird thing where it randomly refreshes the feed and adds one or two new posts at the top and then pushes everything down. Again, UI/UX issues.

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.