Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to become a member of the community, theres a reasonable amount of subs (or whatever the other word for em is) that fit my interests, enough linux content and shitposting for my liking, and the overall random posts made by people equally fed up with Leddit. (also i admit i used reddit a little cus there was this post on the fedora sub showing how to fix a sound issue i been having after a recent update)
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Now I’ve got my head around how the instances work and how everything is connected but not connected at the same time I’m growing to like it. Once more communities pop up I think it’s going to be good
I like it a lot too, the fact that I can roam around servers from my home server is really cool
I really don’t like the cringe tankie culture here, hope that gets diluted as more people come in
I’m rapidly coming to appreciate it.
Maybe it’s the demographic of users (young vs old, tech savvy vs casual, w/e) but threads here have far more activity in ratio to the number of subscribers and members.
Reddit just feels like a popularity context. Tell your ‘I also choose this guy’s dead wife’ joke, get your karma, and for god’s sake DON’T USE EMOJIS! Subs rapidly became echo chambers, or lose identity as they get larger.
Lemmy however… while not all threads have activity (it’s small after all), the activity is legitimately interactive. People actually discussing ideas. We’re talking like thinking adults, and I’m enjoying it.
I think that’s inevitable of all such social media type sites eventually though - as they grow, the ‘popularity contest’ feel grows with them, initially as a way to be heard in the every-growing crowd, and later as an end in itself.
It’ll probably happen to Lemmy too at some point - but if it does at least it will mean that Lemmy has managed to survive and grow. And people here in the early days will have the pleasure of being able to say “Lemmy wasn’t like this at the start, I’m leaving for Flangscrawchler” (or whatever)
Bonus for Lemmy being federated, though - if lemmy.world or lemmy.ml no longer gives users want they’re looking for, you can start your own flangscrawchl.er and choose whether or not you want to federate with them.
Corporations will have their own draw; shittification is a thing they do after they have majority market share and their users are entrenched. A new social network service could rise (even one made by Google for Facebook) that is easy to use, has QoL features that network it with its corporate siblings, etc. It sees increased traffic, it gets big… then it shittifies again.
As long as users are following corporate interests, this cycle continues. It’s a slow-burn likeness of competing ISP sign-up contracts throwing in Xboxes. (Though I hear the US has service deserts, so that mightn’t happen there.)
Lemmy probably won’t shittify to the same degree; while larger servers like Lemmy.ml can house a huge percentage of Lemmy users, it can’t ‘go rogue’ in a way that means anything to Lemmy as a whole.
It also can’t offer the same QoL features a corporatized service can, because those can afford to operate at a loss while building market share. A subsidiary can be used as a ‘loss leader’, ie: it doesn’t matter if it costs more to run than it earns directly, because it gets users into the door for things that do profit.
What you describe can, and mostly likely will happen. But Lemmy’s nature makes it more responsive to user interests.
so far it’s pretty ok and i’m quite hopeful for its future. the layout reminds me of reddit so it’s not particularly confusing to use… like someone else said, i hope the customisation improves (especially profile customisation, i can’t seem to upload an avatar). i’m a bit confused about the different servers though (what’s the difference between beehaw/lemmy/shitjustworks/etc? will i be able to access all of them if i signed up at beehaw?…) i’m not very tech savvy so perhaps somebody could eli5. i’m hopeful though!
As a fellow noob, take what I’ll say with a grain of salt, but my understanding of the servers is that think of them like this:
- Servers (i.e., Beehaw, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world etc) are “continents”
- Communities (i.e., AskLemmy) are “countries”
Every “country” is located in a “continent”. So AskLemmy “country” is located on the lemmy.ml “continent”. Users also have a home “continent”, that is where you sign up. So for example, you signed up for Beehaw, therefore you “live” in the Beehaw “continent”. I signed up here in lemmy.ml, so I live in the lemmy.ml “continent”.
Now if you sign up at Beehaw or in any other server, you can “travel” to the other “continents” (servers) and visit the “countries” (communities) that have their home base there and participate there too. So you, for example, can participate here in AskLemmy, which is located on the lemmy.ml “continent”. Sometimes your home “continent” issues a “travel ban” on particular “continents”, therefore you cannot visit that “continent” or the “countries” in them.
Now what the hell is kbin? Think of Kbin as another “planet”. They are fundamentally different from our “planet” (which is Lemmy), but residents from that “planet” can visit our planet and participate as well via a spaceship infrastructure known as ActivityPub.
Sorry if I used geography terms to illustrate my point. There’s a lot of nuance removed, but I think I got it nailed down based on my understanding. Take it with a grain of salt though.
Thank you, I appreciate the geography analogies. I understand it more now!
Glad I could help!
Yes, you’ll be able to communicate with almost all of the servers, a very select few are blocked for reasons that pre-date me. When you look at a username, you’ll see an extra @ after their name indicating where they’re posting from. The Communities (subreddits) that you subscribe to can be more or less anywhere.
Hey I’m new here bc fuck spez. There’s definitely potential here. Would like it to be easier to find communities (sublemmies?) And the app needs work but I’m ready to go all in. Did I mention fuck spez yet
https://browse.feddit.de/ cam help to find communities
A bit rough initially as you might expect with a new platform but I’ve now got an account on a (geographically) local instance and subscribed to some communities in general interest areas on other instances. Looks promising. Now I just gotta find some niche communities.
this app I’m using is pretty bad (no offense to the dev) but once there’s better ones on the market I’m sure the experience will be more enjoyable
I’m not a fan of the whole wordnews ppl banning anti-CCP/anti-russian content tho
/r/china is migrating over at least for a week, as long you’re respectful anti-CCP is fine (same rules as the subreddit)
/c/china on latte.isnot.coffee, we could do with some seeding before we close the sub on Reddit.
For those homed on other instances, search !china@latte.isnot.coffee to view the c/ from your home portal.
Still learning how to use this but I think I will be good
The thing that’s confusing me most is links, whether to communities or individual posts.
I see links in a format like this:
!communityname@instance.whatever
Sometimes the exclamation mark is part of the link and it works, and sometimes it’s there but not part of the link, and my phone thinks the rest is an email address.
Is there a guide anywhere to how to do links properly? TIA.
EDIT - yeah, so in my example above, the exclamation mark is not being treated as part of the link for some reason?
This is definitely the biggest barrier of entry. I love the idea, the execution not so much.
I think it’s a little confusing for everyone right now. I’ll try to explain the easy bits at least.
You can do relative links for communities like this: [text](/c/community@instance)
But these will only work if your instance has already discovered the communities. I think that’s where a lot of the confusion behind all of this first becomes an issue. Some links only work if your instance already “knows” it exists.
To get your or any instance to learn about a specific community, you first have to search for it. The most reliable way to do it is to just put the full url of the community into the search box.
And then wait. It sometimes takes a moment to actually find the community. Once it’s found the rest should work.
For comments, posts, and threads it’s different. Since those will have different unique identifiers on a per instance basis, my understanding is that it’s much more complicated for relative links to work. I haven’t seen a simple solution yet, unfortunately.
Thanks, this is really useful, and greatly appreciated.
Feels like if someone can come up with a working solution for all this it could really help tip the balance towards mass acceptance.
I know nothing about programming, and I do realise Lemmy is all about being federated, but it feels like it needs some central system - not for ownership or anything, but simply to do the job of linking instances more easily. Perhaps even multiple ‘central’ systems, all doing the same job as each other, all consistent with each other, but not controlled by any one group/person, so as to avoid disputes and the risk of any single actor dominating the whole.
I dunno, I’m just kind of spitballing here. It’ll need someone smarter than me to untangle it!
Somehow, it never came to mind to use relative links for communities…
A reasonable solution for those could be to auto-detect community links in their various forms (/c/community, !community@instance.example, https://instance.example/c/community) and auto convert those into a local link for the user’s current instance.
I’d contribute to the codebase if I had time, since community links has been the biggest issue for me so far, having to copy, paste, search etc. for each new community on other instances that I’m interested in, depending on how they’ve been shared
great, i’ve really liked lemmy so far. its really the first alt big tech platform like this that i’ve gotten into, was never big on mastodon or any of the others out there.
lemmy is honestly a breath of fresh air. really great platform so far, i think it has very strong potential.
i still use reddit for some things, but overall i’m starting to use lemmy a lot more. great work from the devs, can’t wait to see the future!
It really feels like how Reddit started, before all the rage-bait and eye-catching bullshit. I miss the floofs, the memes, the fun reasons I joined. Now 90% is politics that keep popping up even though I don’t subscribe to any political subs and keep blocking
Seriously, I’m not from the USA and I’m not supposed to know the names of American senators, MP’s, governors or lawyers, or of who shot who, or who had a panic attack in an airplane, or why people are shouting at each others at a mcdonalds drive-in. Does any american ex-redditor know the name of a single european politician besides Merkel?
The news cycle proposed by reddit is filled with american politics ad nauseam and by ragebait. The european subs of reddit are filled with russian shills. When you add up all of this there is no point into opening reddit for the news.
Lol way to put it in perspective, I know maybe 2 politicians in all of Europe. Idk when, Reddit used to be global but it’s gotten incredibly America-focused, and maybe that’s just with the size but holy crap is it annoying now - and I’m American. I get bombarded with politics daily, can’t I just have a place that’s just memes?
Mastodon is so much like a Twitter/Facebook replacement that I’m not even interested in it. Reddit/Lemmy’s focus is not on broadcasting yourself but rather link aggregating and conversations about those links in the comments. It’s always been so much better of a forum type of experience than Twitter/Mastodon/Facebook.
I always tried to get into Twitter whenever I heard people say they love it so much but I could never find the same enjoyment from it. the same is happening with me and Mastodon, but lemmy doesn’t really have that issue for me because I loved browsing reddit and they’re similar to each other
I heard someone else put the issue with mastadon/twitter into words in a way that explained why I never jived with it. With mastadon/twitter you follow people and personalities while reddit and message boards were more about following a subject or interest. The twitter algorithm and sharing I guess spreads a lot of stuff around and it’s cool that twitter has so many famous and inside industry people running stuff, but that community based on specific personalities makes it harder to follow.
I’d like an optimization for Jerboa as well as more customization for our accounts. Jerboa is fine as it is functional, but sometimes text boxes just extend all the way to the edge of the screen and makes it not visually appealing. I’m still learning though as I’m currently figuring out how to visit the communities in the other servers.
As for communities, I just hope that a mass migration of even 10% of Reddit’s disappointed users would help boost the growth of Lemmy communities and help make niche communities thrive. I personally am a subscriber to the writing and anime subreddits, so I hope there’ll be similar communities here.
There is a writing community here on Beehaw. Someone posted a link to a list of Fediverse communities and I saw a couple more listed. They exist, and I’m sure there’ll be more soon!
I’m excited for the possibilities, but daunted by the realities.
It’s going to be tough to get enough foot traffic to start populating smaller subs. It seems like the Reddit API drama is the big break needed to hit a critical mass of users, but how many will take the time to figure out something like Lemmy? And are the Lemmy instances ready? It’s strange to root for Reddit to go through with the API changes after using Reddit for so long. But if there was ever a time to pay a bit extra for additional hosting resources, June 11th (or now!) should be it. If a large influx of new users crash Lemmy instances, and no one can sign up, a golden opportunity will be lost.
Signing up was not a flawless process. You are asked to make a choice about servers with little guidance on what it all means.
Requiring a 10 character password with additional character conditions is going to turn a lot of possible new users OFF. It should be 6 characters, with no conditions. Yes, it’s not secure, but we need sign ups above everything else. Users can choose to get as complex as they want, but simplicity should also be an option. If people later grow to value their Lemmy accounts, they can secure them at a later time. But extremely easy sign up should be the default for now.
Asking people to write an extensive answer as to “why you want to join this particular server” should also be suspended temporarily. Again, it’s about ease of signing up. We should try to get as many signups in as quickly as possible, and weed out the problem people later. After the possible Reddit migration boom ends, you can go back to application essays as a requirement for entry.
The web interface is buggy. The site will often “reset” as you are reading a thread, and the whole thread will act if “refreshed”. If this causes users to lose a long post they are typing, they might quit Lemmy then and there.
The community structure needs to be more unified across instances. It’s confusing that there are local groups as well as “multiverse” groups across federations, often with the exact same name. It’s a bummer that the communities can be splintered, and will have people not realize what’s really available.
I think we’re might see some weaknesses of a distributed system like Lemmy in the next few weeks. It’s hard to organize and get everyone rowing in the same direction with no “CEO” or clear leader. It does feel like little fiefdoms doing their own things, and that makes it even harder to hit critical mass.
In terms of content and userbase, so far so good. It obviously leans heavily towards the technically competent. Lemmy sort of screens for the technology inclined since it’s only well known to those who are up to date with the latest in tech. So of course it’s easy to feel like everyone is like minded and cool for now. But we need to attract casuals if we want vibrant, non-tech groups to exist and flourish too.
I’ve only been exploring for 2 days though, so I can be very wrong.
I just got approved here, but have been on Mastodon for a couple of months. Mastodon signup was a lot glitzier, and yet I still couldn’t convert my friend, who was like “I don’t understand, what do you mean it’s like email? >_<”. I don’t have high hope for Lemmy atm…
I think Reddit will backpedal and renegotiate with users/devs down the line, once the initial backlash has died down, and they have lowered everyone’s threshold of what they would consider a “victory”. Things like Lemmy will act as a sword of Damocles/safe harbour for the next time they screw up, sure, and that’s a good thing. But I doubt Lemmy will explode in popularity, even if some 3rd party Reddit clients are discussing adding Lemmy support to sort of rugpull Reddit, and that’s for 3 reasons(imo):
- The hosting costs will be exorbitant for all those new users, considering
- Lemmy will be stuck in the exact same boat as Reddit re:all those unpaying users, except now there’s no ads either. Donations are the honourable business model, but a couple thousand well-meaning people with disposable income can’t properly finance a popular platform.
- Even if the Lemmy community solves the above 2 problems, you still have the deciding moment of the “let’s jump ship today” user tidal wave, which will make or break such a migration happening. Closest thing I can think of is the WhatsApp Privacy Policy shenanigans in '21. Melon Husk said “Use Signal” - a fine suggestion, tbh - but Signal wasn’t ready for this, and so their servers crashed and burned during the tidal wave, while for-profit Telegram just paid for more servers and thus converted the refugees into users.
Requiring a 10 character password with additional character conditions is going to turn a lot of possible new users OFF. It should be 6 characters, with no conditions.
I gather that is not your case and I see what you mean if I think about my parents for instance, but objectively I can only think that a 6 characters password with no restrictions (e.g. 123456) might have been “okeish” and yet still object of jokes 20 years ago, but now it shouldn’t absolutely be passed as a norm anyway close to “adeguate”, users need to be correctly educated on their own security awareness in general, but also especially here because the it is very likely that the instance where the user account is registered to will not have any paid customer service around to solve their users issues with account security breaches because of their weak passwords.
So regarding passwords for the casual as for the expert user once and for all the xkcd comics stripe on passwords:
https://xkcd.com/936/and here is a couple of handy online and downloadable generators inspired from that comics stripe:
https://xkpasswd.ethanify.me/
https://xkpasswd.net/s/But also learn to use password managers! Which also come often with their own handy password generators btw. The gist of it is that you need to remember only one password for the manger, and in turn it is going to remember and service for you your credentials for all your accounts. .
For instance for the average casual user Bitwarden should more than suffice, it is free, has a freely managed remote service, apps for mobile and extensions for the browsers, it is open source and has been audited: https://bitwarden.com/
I perfectly know that is a an uphill process, I can see that with my parents, but I also like to think that maybe if something I tell them about how to manage their passwords is able to stick in their mind then one day it might save them from being robbed online for always using the same few charters password everywhere for every effing website.
So regarding passwords for the casual as for the expert user once and for all the xkcd comics stripe on passwords: https://xkcd.com/936/
And when I use a passphrase that my password manager generated, the sign up form called it “weak”.
A much shorter password (about half as many characters) that is arguably weaker and has less entropy was considered “strong”. Just because it had punctuation.
And when I use a passphrase that my password manager generated, the sign up form called it “weak”.
Then respectfully it might be your fault, but I don’t know the metrics for which Lemmy rate the passwords, you can also use this other estimator, download the local version of course:
https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbnI for instance used a simple setting:
and got:
;;75.cupcake.manly.argument.53%%testing it on https://lowe.github.io/tryzxcvbn/
Lemmy although gives it a “medium” quality rating to the password, so I guess it must estimate it differently
I appreciate the fact there is no infinite scroll on the front page.
Great point, lack of infinite scroll is one of the key reasons I always kept going back to old.reddit.com (other than the speed, of course)
I have infinite scroll on Old Reddit with RES. What makes not having infinite scroll such a great thing for you?
For me personally, the quality of content drops off very quickly after page 1 (for example on my personal home feed), but with infinite scroll, I found myself very often just wading through the low quality stuff on autopilot without even realizing what I was doing. It’s just a problem that I don’t even have to think about when I don’t have infinite scroll.
One of many examples of how profit-driven platforms care about engagement quantity over product quality. A lack of stopping points feeds FOMO and keeps people trapped longer, but I doubt many people actively enjoy it.
I disable it on any platform that lets me - besides, pagination can be cached to return to later. Doomscrolling can be binged but not suspended.
Exactly so. I’m about a third way through Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. It had a section on infinite scrolling which made me realize it didn’t have it. The book talks a lot about social media’s grip on us.
Sounds like an interesting read; thanks for putting it on my radar.
it’s nice, but we need more content and more 3rd party mobile apps, i mean Jerboa is nice, but many of us are used to their favorite reddit app
Sadly, Apollo😢.
I’m hoping Christian (the dev of Apollo) takes on making a Lemmy client. :D
I would love if that happens but I don’t think it could be worth it for him (appart from being a side project). And I bet that he is exhausted as hell after all the drama.
Exhausted and probably devastated, yeah. Maybe if lemmy takes off in popularity. :) I’d love to support great devs like him.
I used Slide, not Apollo, but the amount of reverence that app seems to get here makes me wonder if he did port it over how much that would expedite/improve migration from reddit. If I were in his position, I’d do it out of spite.
Indeed, he would be the poster child of Lemmy and thousands would follow!
I was just thinking the same, except with Sync for Android, would love to see all that work kept alive as a Lemmy client now that Reddit has screwed everything up.
for me it’s Relay, sad days are coming
Relay here too. Cheers to u/dbrady
yup, i dream of Relay for Lemmy port, would be rad AF
I haven’t tried it myself yet, but I would expect that a platform without an app to push will have a usable mobile-friendly site at least. (Most users are mobile, so it would be strange if they didn’t.)
At least on my instance everything is running fast, snappy. I like the clean interface. Haven’t encountered any major bugs yet.
The only downside for me so far is that there is not a lot to see yet. The only active posts and communities are about lemmy itself. Which is understandable of course but I can’t wait to actually get to the phase where I actually get to experience real content lmao
