this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
462 points (98.7% liked)

Asklemmy

44249 readers
715 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy πŸ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?

I'm a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It's definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it's great to see something that isn't Reddit growing in popularity!

(page 3) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

The website is super clean, the Mlem app is kinda not as great yet (presumably cuz it's in beta) but it runs really well! only worry is how easy it will be to find communities I want to join, I haven't been here long yet. That and moderation with how many people will be coming in.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

The instance system definitely makes it a bit confusing. I'm a programmer and I've played around with some Mastodon stuff during my study. Still, as a user, it's quite chaotic sometimes.

I'm kinda wondering what this will converge towards. Is everyone going to join the same instance? Are different communities be kinda randomly spread over instances, where for every community in the end one instance dominates? Or will there just be chaos?

There's also some buggy behavior every now and then, but that's easily forgiven imo.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

I'm definitely not utilising all the features of being in the wider Fediverse yet, but I'm starting to get the hang of the Lemmy-verse. This federation stuff is really cool and definitely the future of social media in some form or another. Ironically this is closer to a real metaverse than Meta has ever got.

There are definitely rough edges everywhere, the joining process could do with being streamlined significantly and I have some issues with accounts being tied entirely to a single instance. Generally though this is perfectly usable and the main issue is the lack of content. It's annoying coming back to my front page after several hours and everything is 16 hours to 2 days old, hopefully this will improve quickly as the migration gains steam.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Lots of problems here... I'm an experienced Mastodon user, and I have to say that I correctly predicted my experience with Lemmy.

It's not optimized for mobile, it's a lot of work to find what you want, and whereas Mastodon seems like an improvement on Twitter, this seems like a step back from Reddit.

Reddit also has an issue with finding subreddits, but Google indexes it and you can pretty easily find and subscribe to things just using keywords.

We need better app UIs ASAP, that make basic functions obvious and easy. It's a platform that probably does great on PC but I'm stuck with Jerboa, and it's really killing my enjoyment.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

It’s really growing on me. I love the idea of being able to browse and participate in communities outside of my β€œhome instance”. Where to actually set up as a β€œhome instance” was a bit confusing, but once I picked one I kinda just forget about it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Getting signed up was a bit hairy. I tried going through the lemmy.one server and still hasn't gone through, so I went back and signed up through lemmy.ml and that got approved pretty quickly.

Aside from that still getting a hang of things. Not sure how to search for communities for specific interests, not sure how many of those exist yet.

I downloaded the Jerboa app on Android and the UI is pretty familiar coming from the Boost reddit app.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I find the multiple instances very confusing and also have concerns about how this will split up communities. Like right now there aren't many "niche" communities, but if there were, say I would want to browse something like /r/eu4, but there are like 4 different ones, even if i am subscribed to all of them, how would I like... browse them all at the same time to get "all eu4 content". Like it seems very problematic to do something like that.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Confusing. The apparent 'segregation' of instances is difficult to get my head around. The Jerboa app is (understandably) in early days and not that intuitive to use. The layout of the website isn't much better (it wasn't at all obvious how you're suppose to even post stuff, for example). I get that we're all coming in on the 'ground level' here, but the whole set up feels very rough-and-ready. I'll keep an eye on Lemmy to see how things progress but at the moment, honestly, if feels like I'm working against Lemmy/the Fediverse rather than with it.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Really liking it! I just want some simple tweaks here and there to this instance’s ui.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

A bit confused but I'm getting there. Getting an account going was the most confusing part but it seems like overnight my account got approved, so thats done with!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Joined kbin and checking out Lemmy through feddit.it I have a questin though: I wanted to subscribe to a medicine community in a different server but I can't find it when I search through "all" communities in feddit.it. How do I go about finding and subscribing to it?

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

I personally think that Aaron Schwartz would be happy to know we are here today.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The interface is nice and friendly, but the way the fediverse and the different instances works is kind of confusing. Still not sure what that's all about

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

One question I still have is how quickly posts and comments propagate across the Fediverse. How can I be sure the comment I'm writing actually shows up across other instances, and how long after I write it does it take on average to show up other places?

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

The UI's a little bit sticky, possibly due to how busy lemmy.ml is right now. The set of communities is pretty thin as well, but that will probably change as time goes on.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Quick answer, it rocks πŸ‘. Things work differently obviously, but nothing's especially confusing or awkward. Everything I've done in the short time I've been here has worked fine. The speed and UI polish show minor problems in places, but it's to be expected. As far as I can tell it's 100% usable right away as a realistic reddit replacement, which is pretty outstanding IMO.

[–] pattmayne 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I barely just started but it feels almost as natural as normal reddit.

Lemmy federates Reddit better than Mastodon federates Twitter. Mastodon is confusing. But on Lemmy I can clearly see the relationship between instances, and I can use it all as one big system.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

its just reddit tbh

much better experience than mastodon imo

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

It's pretty good. Looks like early days but hopefully more users will bring more content and we can all do our part to contribute and help it to grow in the mean time!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Enjoying it a lot. We just need more content over here. But I assume that is a problem that will solve itself very soon.

[–] Lund3 6 points 2 years ago

Other that all of the sign up feature being very confusing, I kinda feel afraid of selecting a less popular space to create my account on, as its not really documented what happens if the space your account is created on dies.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

I find the experience to be fine. It will be great watching as the community grows

[–] hllywluis 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Something that I will call out is that I really appreciate the live changes in the thread on the website itself. Makes interacting with comments and everyone a lot easier.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I’m really glad that browse.feddit.de exists because it’s near impossible to find instances otherwise. However, I wish the β€œcopy” button on the search results copied !communityName@instanceName rather than a simple URL to make it easier to sub to that community from any instance.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

I'm pretty tech savvy so not a problem for me but I question how viable this is as a reddit replacement just due to how unintuitive the fediverse is. Like the whole having to choose a server but still having access to all the other servers bit. If lemmy.ml could handle being the "official" server it would probably be viable

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

I had been lurking on a few Lemmy instances for years (more or less since mid-2020 when I started getting more interested in FOSS) and with the Reddit shitshow I finally decided it was time to join, so I was already quite familiar with the concept of instances and how the Fediverse works on principle.

I'm slowly exploring more to find interesting communities to interact with, and hopefully there'll be more incoming users from Reddit creating more niche spaces.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm using Jerboa and I can't figure out how to see the list of my subscribed groups.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Honestly, pretty good.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Once I have already made an account, it turned out to be less confusing than. One of the things I like is the all tab which does not show 'random crap' like reddit's main page, but actually somewhat interesting content.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

For the most part it hasn't been too confusing for me. I'm new to modern federated social media, but not new to the idea of federation due to experience with the IRC model. I really enjoy the idea of instances and having your own sort of smaller space while being able to contribute to larger spaces still... though there's definitely still some user experience hurdles that need overcome on that front.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I'm a bit torn. I really like the Lemmy project, but kbin being able to interact directly with microblogging fedi sites as well is pretty appealing to me. That is my primary social media usage, and it basically seems like a 2-in-1 which is great. To be clear, I know I can tag Mastodon users from Lemmy, and see Lemmy posts from Mastodon. But after looking at the way kbin handles it, it seems more 'native'. Not sure how I'm going to proceed.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments
view more: β€Ή prev next β€Ί