To follow-up on the Reddit thread yesterday, here are a few elements that can be interesting to discuss.
Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy
Just quoting "Lemmy" or pointing to join-lemmy.org can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance. Recent post by a new joiner 9 days ago, they had to change server 2 times to get a satisfying experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536.
Using something like
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions"
Can already point them in one direction, and avoid them getting lost in the too many options.
If people want to debate the choice of those two instances, I'll add my thought process in the comments.
The Lemmy feed looks as depressing as Reddit's All, and how to mitigate that
Some feedback I received when promoting Lemmy the way above
Just checked out lemmy to see if it’s different from reddit. Im very disappointed lmao.
First post I see is a comic about cultural appropriation with an ifunny watermark. Next are several posts about the proton vpn ceo “going full maga.” And finally a post I saw on Reddit days ago that is ragebait making fun of the cybertruck.
Yikes. It’s the same exact thing.
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Lemmy still has a pretty obnoxious tankie problem. Even if you block the .ml instance, pretty much every thread about US politics or world news on any major instance gets hijacked by the same handful of trolls and their associated vote bots. Hopefully this will become less of a problem as more sane people join, but just as a word of caution, be aware that you will be called western imperialist scum by a bunch of 14 year olds.
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Lemmy is utter rubbish, it's as if their entire userbase consists of the top layer of scum carefully siphoned off from the Reddit cesspool. It got the worst of the annoying political echo chamber and "very smart" argumentative users from Reddit.
I just clicked on half a dozen random Lemmy servers, and all of them had at least one link about Trump in the top 5 posts. Even ones that seem like they're supposed to be about tech.
Normal humans want the Reddit of 10+ years ago back. We don't want to use a different site colonized by the same modern day Redditors we loathe interacting with.
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To be fair, you can't say they're wrong. Open https://discuss.online , by default you'll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.
What I try to do in such instances is to give something like
"While politics are important, you can still very much block them. Here are an example of some communities that can interest you:
- https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
- https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
- https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
- https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
- https://discuss.online/post/15026558 for 20 non-political communities"
I also wrote a long post about that issue that you can read here https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/
As a side note, I recently started a discussion on [email protected] about a potential political-free instance for new joiners, feel free to have a look: https://feddit.org/post/6819084
Lemmy is too small, 42k monthly active users is nothing
Discuit, the centralized alternative to Reddit, currently counts 181 weekly active commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/NlAdOWAp
You can also mention that NodeBB is now federating with Lemmy:
- https://feddit.org/post/7035166?scrollToComments=true
- https://community.nodebb.org/topic/71fe3f89-361c-4716-a79e-de02f94b3113/test-from-lemmy-to-nodebb
That's all for now, happy to discuss in the comments.
Note: if you're not interested in promoting Lemmy, feel free to hide this post, you are able to do this on specific posts if your instance is running 0.19.4 and newer
Thought process about discuss.online and sopuli as recommendations
There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/)
I ended up with discuss.online and sopuli.xyz as they have
If people have other suggestions, feel free
join-lemmy needs to have a better interactive flow to select a server. What they have is difficult and slow to maintain and doesn't take into account server stability or newness (new servers are more likely to stop working once the admin discovers they don't like hosting, or they have a terrible mod experience). But the lemmy devs are not interested in either doing things like allowing servers to tag themselves, nor utilize sites like the fediseer which already does that. So we end up with a bad "join" frontpage which people like you end up just avoiding which goes to show how bad things are.
There used to be a very nice interactive lemmy server selection site at one point which guided you based on interest/subinterest as self-tagged in fediseer, but I can't remember the domain anymore :(
Yes, it rings a bell too but don't remember it either :(
Indeed, that's probably a whole topic altogether. If people want to try working on a better join-lemmy website, that would be great, but it seems like people are already spread too thin.
Ah found it: https://pangora.social/
Sadly it's gone offline. sigh
@[email protected] how come you took it down?
Nobody reported it as down to me, I can bring it back up
Been working on some other projects recently so havent really looked at that site much
Ah, well it's down 😅 maybe it could be useful in onboarding users.
@[email protected] its's up again. What do you think about using that to advertise lemmy?
Do you need to make it refresh or something? it still reports lemmy.dbzer0.com as being on 0.19.5
Ah yeah I need to refresh the data, ill do that later
Thanks!
As you stated in the other comment, let's refresh data before using it, and check if all the recommended instances are still around
Ah yes!
How's Lemmy.cafe? I believe they defederate the Big 3 Tankie instances. Dunno what their downtime or admins are like.
I have my main alt there. It's pretty good, but there was an issue with the thumbnails that got resolved a few days ago. Also, the instance is much smaller than the two others (64 users per month), so I sometimes have to subscribe to some medium-size communities before nobody did before. Federation can get a bit clunky at times too, and I have to pull myself some posts or comments to "unclog the pipes".
Discuss.online has 140 users per month, sopuli 496
It probably depends on what audience you are talking to. Privacy advocates, Anarchists, AI-Imagegen-Fans and digital pirates are probably a good fit for dbzer0, even with hexbear federated, and a LGBT-positive audience would feel at home on blahaj. So while promoting generalist instances per default is a good move, if the subreddit has a well-defined audience, a recommendation for a "specialized" instance might work better.
Indeed, but usually I promote on /r/RedditAlternatives, and don't have any way to know what the user's interests are.
Good reasoning all 'round! Although Lemmy.ca doesn't require you to be Canadian, so would be a decent recommendation for any NA user. As long as they don't mind some more Canada posting in the Local feed.
...I'm curious, what is your definition of "generalist"? Because I suspect it involves "not punching nazis".
Something that is not linked to a country, a theme or a demographic
Non-generalist:
Generalist:
Not sure what you meant with "not punching nazis"
I think they're calling you a liberal because you used federation with HB and grad as a negative criterion for your list.
We could do a poll to see how people feel about those two instances, but the vast majority of posts on [email protected] involving them show some clear power tripping
Note that LW can be sujected to the same criticism
I don't disagree
I am not entirely sure how appropriate my reply is since you name lemmy specifically, but since one can subscribe to particular topics in piefed, I am leaning towards it more than lemmy as an alternative to reddit.
As the developer himself states, and me as someone who uses it as my primary daily driver concurs, it is not quite ready yet. e.g. a good fraction of the Notifications I receive end up being dead links to posts that don't exist anymore, or to users that I have blocked, etc. Also user tagging is not implemented yet and searching often does not retrieve things that you can find much more easily using Lemmy, plus tools for moderation of remote communities remain very primitive.
Soon now, it will be user-friendly enough to recommend to people, but for now it's primarily for beta testing the software and those of us prepared to use an early adopter mindset when using it - e.g. switch to a Lemmy alt to do things that PieFed cannot yet.
Though more features get added seemingly weekly or at least monthly, it's so exciting to see! I love the new inline comment feature, though inconsistently applied e.g. not yet available for edits. But it's coming!
Once Piefed will get Thunder as well as an iOS app, it will become an alternative. That's the main blocker I have now recommending it. Besides that, it's a quite good Lemmy alternative.
@[email protected] Thunder is written using Flutter / Dart - meaning that it's cross-platform. I've compiled the version for PieFed for windows, linux and macos, so as long as I'm able to get it working for Android, it should also work for iOS. I'll need to be someone else who does though, 'cos my mac is too old, and I don't have an iphone.
Bonus screenshot:
Amazing! So what, the Piefed API is already there? I thought that was still ongoing
Still ongoing, but basic functionality is working.
I'll mention my experience with a server from that list (that I won't name)...
The server worked most of the time but federation kept breaking. The server was rather small. Since you use Lemmy from your home instance, this meant that only a few local communities showed any activity and this was a very low amount of activity. This would go on for days or even well over a week before things got better for a while and then everything started to break again.
It is one thing for a server to just go away. You then clearly know that something is wrong and you can migrate over to another server. It is another thing for the server to generally be online all the time with it just messing up in such a way as to make the whole Lemmy ecosystem seem rather dead.
Things would have been easier if most of the communities I want to interact with were on the same server as my account. The other server, with federation issues, was only home to 5 % of the communities I was following which left 95 % of the communities I wanted to follow as not updated due to federation issues.
There isn't a clear indication of which servers are working great with a proven track record of working great as opposed to "zombie instances" not federating correctly or other instances which are moments away from randomly shutting down. The point is that I feel like my account anywhere will be able to receive and send information throughout the whole Lemmy network or sites. This reduces the concept of federation a bit down towards needing to have an account on a well known working server simply because account migration is such a headache. I can then interact with communities without issues (hosted on well working servers) but I can easily change my community subscriptions as I want to.
One thing that may help for someone is to try and see what communities they want to participate in. If the communities they primarily find interesting are in Lemmy.world then they likely should have an account there to ease any federation issues. The number of communities I follow here are 3 times larger than communities I follow with any other specific instance. This community subscription list is one I figured out when I was on "that other server" so it guided me here.
There is just an absolute ton of nuances involved.
SOME types of Federation issues is due not to the local instance but rather Lemmy.World and overall lack of distribution of users and communities across the Fediverse (some of which is better now than the past, but not nearly enough).
Other types involve the instance, and in turn its hardware and even more so its number and skill of admin support. Like if you have to wait several days for a manual sign-up procedure (people say quokk.au was this way, at least sometimes) then you may have already moved on elsewhere.
Some of the issues have greatly improved - like I switched from Kbin.social to Star Trek.Website and for super frustrated with how often I would try to do something - like vote or comment - and so switched to discuss.online, which I have been exceedingly happy with. The thing is, Star Trek.Website's technical issues got WAY better (still not perfect) in the past year, and also I still have had issues with discuss.online - again, most often I would guess that Lemmy.World's lack of updates to the latest Lemmy software was to blame for that (even though I understand that there are a whole bunch of reasons for the delay).
Yet people also report that Lemmy.World itself can be quite slow to access from some parts in the world like Australia and the USA. I don't know how much that has to do with method of access like an app vs. the web UI, and even then, would an alternate front end app like https://photon.lemmy.world/ further affect the speed?
A simple score isn't going to come close to describing any of this. But if it would, uptime % might come the closest? Especially in conjunction with other factors like avoiding recommendation of an instance that has only a single admin.
Discuss.online is tried and true, and I unreservedly recommend it. Anyone who likes can make an alt or two and see tor themselves how good the experience is in comparison between them. Also the admin is quite responsive, both in reacting to requests and remaining on the ball proactively before even being asked - see e.g. the pinned post on that instance.
To give a counterpoint, the experience on LW in summer 2023 was horrible, due to the constant DDoS attacks on the infrastructure.
Discuss.online has a status page: https://status.discuss.online/
Sopuli.xyz is very stable, and transparent about how they operate: https://sopuli.xyz/post/13531
A few other instances have status pages:
Thanks for the information!
I'm not sure if the status pages accurately show federation issues though (not federating or well behind). I'm not sure if they can easily show that information either.
Lemm.ee definitely does:
If people want to have a better overview, they can use this dashboard: https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=programming.dev&var-remote_instance=lemmy.zip
That second link is helpful. For instance, it shows an server which I thought was ran well ( startrek.website ) being about 1 million activities behind in content from Lemmy.world
https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=startrek.website&var-remote_instance=lemmy.world&from=now-32d&to=now
This means that the technology community here looks much different there. Here there are comments to our submissions. Shown there, the submissions seem to have no comments.
https://lemmy.world/c/technology
https://startrek.website/c/[email protected]
If a person there didn't know better, they may think that Lemmy doesn't have as much activity as it actually does.
Indeed. There's also the issue of LW being so large that other instances can have issues to keep with its activities. That has been fixed in 0.19.6, but LW hasn't updated yet.