Technology

The most difficult part so far has been finding communities and joining them.

1. It's difficult to search for communities that aren't on your home instance.
2. If you go to a big instance and search for communities there, you can't directly join them, but have to go back to your home instance and paste something into a specific field, then click "next" since the community is never the first result, then click on the community to load it up in your home instance and THEN join it.
3. Communities are fractured across instances - I found at least five different serves with a "cat" / "cats" communities, and there's no way to aggregate these, and it's difficult to search out the rest of the cat content without just going to the other instance servers one-by-one and doing it manually

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

One thing that I'm looking for is to see where (if?) the moderation teams and content providers of existing subreddits migrate over to Lemmy/Kbin and if the Reddit userbase migrate as well and become the de-facto communities on subjects.

I guess that's part of the community aspect that Reddit harboured with the moderators - that they infer and define the culture and dynamics of their particular subreddit - and if I have the choice of three or four fediverse communities on the same topic, I can maintain some continuity by joining the one maintained by the ex-Reddit mods.

It's like leaving infant school and going to high school - amongst the hundreds of strangers, it'd be good to see a few familiar faces.

Feels a bit broken tbh. I'm currently on dbzer0 instance and I couldn't post in the community I created. Wonder what's happeneing. Did I get shadowbanned?

I was using Boost for Reddit but with it's eminent death I came to Jeroba for Lemmy. Pretty close to my boost experience! very easy to adapt and made the whole "servers" thing that I didn't really like a lot easier. Now I'm following a lot of comunities in different servers and can see them all. Perfection

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'm easing into it. With more usage, more content, more users, and more updates, it'll be like I never knew Reddit. Growing pains, whatever you want to call it, just makes me happy to be part of a new adventure for sharing and consuming content.

I'm no UX/UI expert, but I hope Lemmy makes it easier to filter content on the main page, collapse comments, and find specific subcommunities and users.

Havn't tried Lemmy yet... does my comment show up alright coming from fedia.io? The fediverse is neat.

It's a bit rough around the edges,but it does the job and so far I haven't missed reddit at all.

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

I'm also a recent transplant. I too find the (current) lack of activity in certain niche areas disappointing, but I'm hoping that's temporary. I hope discussions of some of those topics can survive the inevitable fragmentation among instances.

On the other hand, I've installed Jerboa on my phone, and it's working very well. Now I've just got to get busy participating in those niche communities--could be tricky, 'coz the ones I often liked best were the ones I knew the least about. I enjoyed learning from people who already knew the ropes.

I got Jerboa right where RIF used to be on my home screen, it's almost like nothing changed.

What perhaps will be the final nail in the coffin for Reddit is working here perfectly! Mobile apps! Jerboa is perhaps lacking some features, but works like a charm.

It's fine. The content is slightly more sparse but that's unavoidable given current population levels. The basics are there in terms of content though. There are some rough edges with regard to stability and particularly mobile app quality -- especially as someone more used to one of the more polished third party Reddit apps. But it's already improved drastically since last week, and given time I'm sure it'll only improve even more.

I love it! I'm looking around the fediverse and the options are impressive.

Testing a lemmy instance to see how it might work for the r/blind community. There will be a bunch of accessibility issues fixed in the next release it looks like, so it's a bit early to judge. Also, it's pulled me, personally, into the world of being a sysadmin for other people. Now I get to figure out why email doesn't work and why when you search for a community you need to press search nine times before anything shows and all kinds of other niggles like that before I feel ready to open an instance to the general masses.

I'm enjoying the process of figuring it out. I think I have a basic understanding, but I'm still having a bit of difficulty finding slightly more niche things I'm interested in. I have no regrets deleting my Reddit account, but I will miss certain subreddits.

So far it's not too bad. I'm still not sure I really understand the whole fediverse thing, but it'll make sense with a bit more usage I'm sure.

I very much like the oldschool feel, and the fact that we have more control over our communities without having some admins with ultimate power.

It's ok so far. It's a lot more fragmented than reddit, which is a good thing in the long term even though it's annoying now.

I'd also like there to be an easier way for me to filter topics I don't want to see, like communities for languages I don't speak or furry porn.

I quite like it so far, though the users of the communities I've been moderating are not necessarily the most tech savvy and may not find their way here. So ultimately I feel like throwing 1.5M people to the wolves (though some other mods might stick around, who knows).

On the other hand, I might also have outgrown some of my communities, and just stuck around due to the familiarity. Joined reddit in my mid 20s, now I'm pushing 40.

Im liking Lemmy so far. It’s an adjustment and clearly the software is in its infancy, but it does not suck once one adjusts.

Uncomfortable. There are two or three users in the instances, and all are silent. "Federalization" is dumb, for the chuckleheads of decentralization. The app and website are crude. Settings are not saved, blocked content hangs in the feed.

Hey Chris. Seeing more and more people from my Mastodon feed here :)

I'm very impressed by Lemmy. Some of the communities like Beehaw have been excellent, even before the recent Reddit API-apocalypse. Self-hosting has been a bit challenging compared to the more mature (I guess) Mastodon but I hope to get it sorted out soon.