Asklemmy

Overall it's going well, and experience from both browser and Jerboa is great, especially considering the lack of maturity and large influx. It's been amazing to see how quickly communities have shown up. A couple of weeks ago when I first heard about Lemmy and plans for Reddit subs going dark, I looked at Lemmy and walked away with a meh because of lack of content, and what was here was not my thing. However, throughout the day today I watched the number of communities grow like crazy, with new topical communities popping up every time I checked.

I do think lack of a centralized /c/ namespace makes things confusing for a lot of people, and will result in a lot of topical duplication between servers - even with federated access and searching. I get why lack of a centralized namespace is also a design feature, but it comes at a price, in my opinion, and it'll be interesting to see how it works itself out over time. Just an observation/opinion on my part.

Still a bit early to call it, but it's looking good!

So, honestly, the only thing that concerns me is duplication of various "subreddits", for a lack of better term.

I searched for Technology, and I found two different ones. I know that's how the Fediverse works, but it may cause confusion and drive down user engagement

Excited to be here. Waiting to see how this week things pan out with the subreddits I follow and hope they will move here eventually, so I can get cozy. Also Long Live Jerboa , I reckon my experience wouldn't be the same without it. See you around Lemmy, peps.

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.

Comment syncing to my instance is a problem. I get posts but comments, not so much.

I'm having a great time. Lemmy is a little bit harder than Reddit but I have been on Mastodon for some time now so I know how federation works. The only thing about Lemmy I don't like is that it feels kinda buggy and unpolished as it is very early stage and the same posts often reappear. But I like the community and it actually seems to be working so that's pretty cool!

So far, so good. Excited to see more variety in communities as more users discover and migrate to lemmy.

Seems pretty reasonable, even the federated stuff works fine - unlike Mastodon, oddly.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

I'm a bit confused. Like some of the top comments, I've run into problems with how links work when interacting with instances other than my home instance on Mastodon before, and while I haven't been on Lemmy very long, I've already come across that problem but worse. At least on Mastodon, I can just copy/paste the Toot URL into my instance's search box and it comes up. If I get a link to a post on Lemmy I have no idea how to interact with it from my instance.

Some other issues:

At least on my instance, URLs are extremely vague. Reddit makes it easy to glance at the URL to see which subreddit you're on. On Lemmy I would ideally want to be able to see both the home instance of the post and the community within that instance. Instead I get just a single unique ID.

The way that instances sort seems to be different? Or at least there's something going on with sorting that confuses me. When viewing this post on my home instance, the second top comment is by @eldrichhydralisk@lemmy.sdf.org, which is the comment I was referencing earlier. But when I click the little colourful connected graph to go to what I presume is the OP's home instance, that post is way down the list and the second top comment is from "Craving0496". Which is another confusing point. I've noticed both here in this thread, and on the main community of my home instance that I signed up to participate in, some users have an @ at the start of their name, and some don't. I don't know why.

Discoverability is definitely also a big issue for me. On Reddit I could just think of a topic I want to explore and go to old.reddit.com/r/. Or I can try variations of the name of that topic to find more options or if my first search doesn't work. Here I have to think which instance to try for that topic, and between the general-purpose instances and the specific ones, as well as the various different ways of phrasing the topic name, it's a huge space to explore. If I want stuff about programming, I might try /r/programming, /r/programmer, /r/programmers, /r/coding, /r/code, etc. on Reddit. On Lemmy I try all 5 of those community names, multiplied by the 10+ major instances, plus programming.dev and maybe other niche instances. If multiple of those are active, then when I'm searching for specific content, or wanting to start a discussion, I might have to do that multiple times across those communities in different instances.

I definitely want this to work. I love the idea of federated instances, and I want a place where I can go to be part of a great community without the bullshit Reddit is currently doing. And I'm going to give Lemmy a really good try. But if I had to guess, I'd say I'm not confident in its ability to provide that.

I like it here.

The content isn't here yet, the UI needs a review, but its funcional and cool.

We just need to get everyone here and endure the growing pains as lemmy matures.

Once I added a few different instances it became much better! Content will come. But the best users from Reddit will migrate along with us!

Confusing. There are communities I can't subscribe to because I can't access them from my instance, and I have no idea why that is. The experience has been interesting so far, and growing the network is going to be something I'll be keeping an eye on. For now, though, I'll have to wait until someone creates the communities I was a part of on Reddit.

Edit: It seems a community won't show up on your instance's community list unless someone in that instance is subscribed to it.

I like the idea, but to be honest it feels unpleasant to use. Multiple different communities with the same topic are hosted on different servers, so I have to subscribe on them all if I want to keep track on what is happening. Would be nice to have some "mega community" that would have them all there. Also web client is broken, it feels so bad when my feed is moved down when new fresh post is added on top, this is borderline annoying and unusable> chf

upd: have tried kbin, it seems there they fixed all the annoying parts of lemmy. Great usage experience!

Its somewhat confusing, but I guess thats to be expected on a new site.

Decent experience, still new and getting used to it. Let's see how it goes! I wish for the best for lemmy!

Long time Reddit user and I find Lemmy easier to navigate. I’m used to Mastodon so maybe that’s a factor.

Times out quite a lot.

I love the idea of Lemmy and I haven't found it too hard to create an account and get the gist of things.

BUT, the novelty will wear off and I'm not interested in general channels. I used Reddit for UX design, menslib, indieheads, OCD support, and lots of niche stuff that doesn't seem to exist here.

I know the answer is for me to get involved, but I work long hours and am a single dad to 2 .. I could set something up, but I don't have time to find quality OC and nurture multiple communities. I'd honestly be a poor mod.

I half expect Reddit to announce major changes to their official app, which may be enough to win a proportion of people back.

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.

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.