I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:

• The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I'm aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that's less than ideal)
• The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I'm aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it's vital to the success of Lemmy.

People are much friendlier here, so far.

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.

There’s a learning curve with “how do I know which instance to join?” and then “how do I find communities from other instances?” But I’m getting the hang of it.

What it needs most is a UI overhaul. If Apollo came to the fediverse it would be a game changer.

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 am enjoying it so far. I usually tend to lurk but the community is, as many have said, very welcoming and it creates an atmosphere where it encourages you to contribute (not just with up/downvotes but also comments).

Not a fan of Jerboa, but I realize that it's early days. Hopefully we can get some of the UI people from the 3rd party reddit apps on here to develop a better client.

Feels like this might be the fediverse flavor that sticks with me. I tried mastodon and diaspora, but they didn't stick. Didn't help that I hated Twitter and Facebook.

This feels chill so far. I like it

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 will make this my first ever Lemmy post:

Overall, this definitely feels like a promising alternative with some growing pains. The bigger communities are decently active but the decentralized nature of Lemmy carries the risk of some communities becoming too fragmented where communities are duplicated in different instances. As some other users have suggested, This could be remedied by creating "Super communities" spanning the Fediverse which could help with growing to a scale large enough to rival Reddit and incentivise even more Redditors to make the switch.

It's giving me some early reddit days vibes. I remember searching for communities that fit my interests, it felt less based on recommendations and more 'pick your content yourself'. never felt the urge to post much myself on reddit, this feels like a place I would though.

Biggest downside I see right now is user base size and UI of mobile apps. Have only tested Jerboa right now, which feels like a very basic app (still working fine though!). once I get some customization capabilities back on mobile I'll be happy!

And the user base will grow, the fediverse approach feels kinda nice.

I love it here and I'll express myself and show love to all with manatees

I’m enjoying the concept behind the fediverse, and while communities are small right now, they’re eventually gonna get bigger and be more centralized.

I think the UI/UX does need a little more work, but that’ll come with time.

It's pretty nice. I do hope it picks up more activity of course, but it's just been a chill and low key sorta thing for me so far. Way less toxic than most other sites I've used.

Search is brutal. I dont want to open a new link, i just want to type what im searching for and then search for it.

The app I'm using (Jerboa) is a bit lacking, but I'm sure it'll improve. I'm unsure about how accounts work with the servers, can I migrate my account if the server I am using shuts down? Communities are tiny and a lot are missing, but I'm sure those will grow and fill in as more people join.

Sorry if this has been asked before. But my front page seems to dynamically add new posts as I'm scrolling. It makes me lose my place during the scroll. How can I have it just load once at start, and then allow me to scroll through?

I'll be honest. While I like the idea of decentralized social stiff, its also a huge issue. First you have to choose an instance, which isn't too bad, but you can't move. I hear Lemmy.ml being under pressure and I want to move somewhere else to help.with that. My account is 4 years old though and I can take nothing with me. Additionally this means all my content is on one instance. If that ever goes down, the network as a whole my keep existing, but my user and all I've put into Lemmy will be gone. And while I trust Lemmy instances more than reddit in terms of privacy, I'm not so sure when it comes to uptime and longevity. Finally, the whole concept of decentralized is hard to wrap my head around. My instance being separate from others but still being subscribed to communities of other instances feels unintuitive. Its the she issue I have with mastodon. I keep loosing track of instances, communities, apps etc. All with different names and logins etc.

For now, I'm trying to get used to Lemmy and just search for communities I'm subscribed to on reddit and see how it goes. It definitely works well enough. Just some conceptual issues I might have to get used to.

It seems a pretty solid Reddit alternative 👍

It needs a mobile app though (like Apollo). Something simple, modern and easy to use. Hopefully at some point we can get something similar.

I'm so confused!! Still trying to figure out how to tell jerboa to show me communities that aren't local (and aren't showing in all - I did find memes and other juicy numbers there!)...

I might have made the mistake of trying to pick a server that wasn't struggling under the load of the Reddit refugees, but I still don't think it was a bad idea...

Quite a learning curve though. Some cheat sheets or heaven forbid, starter packs would be snazzy :)

I'm still a little confused but it's sinking in. The difference between an instance and a "sub", as well as how to join or interact with other "subs" without having to join each individual instance, was the part that was toughest to adapt to. I love it, though. Lemmy is giving me the feeling Reddit did when I first joined it a long, long time ago on my first ever account. It feels organic.

So far so good - sh.itjust.works was showing off a solid looking infrastructure (which is so far seamless), so I joined there.

It feels a lot like 2010 era reddit in terms of content, with a whole bunch of people trying to resurrect memes and communities that grew up organically on reddit. I'm not sure if it'll work that way, because there's a natural difference in userbase, but best of luck to them. I worry that the difficulty of getting NSFW content online is going to give reddit a perpetual competitive edge, but totally appreciate the legal/moral difficulties wherein.

It took a bit to figure out how to sub to new communities, and along with a lot of other newbs, I'm hoping that that's something that can be tightened up. Like, a browser extension or something that could recognise you're logged into some instance, and then create a subscribe link on the page rather than the weird copy-paste-into-searchbar dance that seems to be the standard at the moment.

Overall, great to see that this works and grows. My thanks to the instance hosts and mods.

I think my experience can be best summed up by:

404: FetchError: invalid json response body at http://lemmy:8536/api/v3/site

Jokes aside, the web portal is pretty great. Jerboa seems... like it needs some polish.

I must have taken the wrong turn somewhere, I came here because I'm a Motörhead fan.

cool that it's written in Rust also decentralization (not the blockchain kind) is the future, but...
lemmy ui feels kinda unpolished, and sometimes community join requests just hang forever.

It's not bad, but there are a couple of issues that concern me. One is that communities are fractured - that is, that communities about the same topics exist on different instances and don't connect with each other.

So I'm subscribed to a Books community on one instance, but that doesn't mean I'll see any of the posts on the same topic on other instances unless I subscribe to each of them. The total community of users on Lemmy who are interested in books are split up into small groups on different instances.

That's very limiting.

Of course there's also the issue of the relatively small user base overall. For some purposes a small community may be preferable, but for many others you really need a large user base. Looking for gamers for a face to face tabletop RPG, for example. Without a large user base, the odds of finding people within a reasonable real world distance of you is virtually nil.

I think I'm getting the hang of it, I'm just concerned it won't ever get to the point of having as many in depth communities as Reddit, because that's what I like most about Reddit

It's just something to get the hang of. Currently somewhat confusing, but not insurmountable. It does feel a lot like Reddit did some thirteen years ago. This is a nice blend of modern and easy to use, and has a whiff of my early days on the internet (bb's, forums, etc) without measuring internet speeds in kbps, which is nice.

Just got the account approved and checking things out. It feels comfortably reddity with a hint of newness that invites for exploration. I am curious how the community will shape this site and if and how it will establish itself in the greater vacuum I foresee will be left in reddit's once great tracks.

I'm brand spanking new to Lemmy ( like under 30 minutes) and I do feel that navigating isn't as intuitive as it is on Reddit, though I suspect as I learn to use it more, I will get better.

What I would like to know is if there is a mobile app I can use to access Lemmy since I really dislike using a mobile browser

Too confusing for the average user.

I dislike many things about the UI and UX.

Nevertheless, it's useable, and interesting enough to keep using for now and see how it goes.

Interface is better than "new" Reddit, not as good as old Reddit + RES.

Also: if I click on a link on another instance (for example https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy when I'm signed in on lemmy.world), I'm not signed in to lemmy.ml so I have to manually search for it in lemmy.world to post there - is there a common solution to that?

I love how it feels like a smaller but friendlier reddit. I hope more people can join

It's gone quite smoothly so far - found an instance local to me and joined, subscribed to a bunch of communities, installed Jerboa and set it up - didn't hit any roadblocks.

The cross-server subscription thing is a bit counter-intuitive, but this seems to be an issue that people are already aware of. The Fediverse lengthy signup ritual of choosing an instance is there, but that's just a feature of how the medium works and I'm already familiar with the issues from Mastodon, so it didn't bother me.

This is way too confusing for an average reddit user. Too much undefined jargon like 'fediverse'. And jargon based on other jargon, like an average user is going to know what 'federated' means, to be able to suss out any words based on it.

And finding communities with '!something@community' is not going to work for that average user longterm. If every search requires an exclamation point, just add it on the backend. And if it requires two pieces of data separated by an @ symbol, just have 2 inputs.

It’s welcoming but confusing. I think there’s two reasons for the latter:

1- Many of us forget how basic Reddit was when we first started using it, and the features we all know and love got added over time and repeatedly refined based on use.

2- Most of us here are because we have been users of incredibly well designed apps crafted by developers with a passion for great UI. If I try using the (new) Reddit site or their default app, I find myself equally confused.

There are still so many changes happening in Lemmy functionality, and as we’ve seen with Mastodon, we will hopefully soon be overwhelmed with great apps.

In the meantime there’s the great community already here and growing. I saw a comment that you can estimate that Reddit has 90% lurkers, 9% commenters, 0.9% posters, and 0.1% “community builders” I think it’s those latter groups who are leading the exodus, which is great news for us and terrible news for whoever ends up owning Reddit.

The web is okay, kind of, but the mobile apps (what I mainly use to browse this stuff) are sorely lacking, especially on iOS.

I decided to write my own client (mostly for myself) and so far the API seems very straightforward. Might eventually publish it to the stores, if its mature enough.

It's heavily based on Apollo (in case it wasn't obvious). One might even call it a rip-off 😅

What I'd really like to work on after the basic navigation is done is discoverability. I think the platform really needs some improvement there.

I just signed up a few hours ago. So far it seems to be entirely dominated by posts about the recent reddit drama which makes it hard to judge if there is much regular content here that I would enjoy.

Very similar to how Reddit used to be. I expect higher quality content here, and so far, I've found it. Just waiting on a few niche communities to be created, but I expect they will pop up in time. Good riddance to Reddit.

And the less said about other social media sites the better.