this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
1215 points (97.6% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35393 readers
5 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

What the title says. I think there is still a long way for that to happen but i've been hopeful. What do you think?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That and the servers are under such stress that it makes for a stuttery beginning for any new usrrs. Even just trying to upvote you and comment was a process. First this page wouldn't load properly, then then the upvote didn't show, then the screen jumped around when I tried to reply.

This site and any other will only replace Reddit etc if it's got people. It only gets people if new users can use the platform. We're not quite there yet. The people here now are willing to put up with growing pains but if it doesn't improve soon people will move on

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The problem is that everyone has consolidated on one gargantuan server. The whole point of the fediverse is to spread out so no one server is carrying the entire load. I'm currently using lemm.ee and have experienced none of the issues being discussed here.

But yes, I agree that it could be a potential turn off for newcomers.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

At the time of this writing, I have accounts on two servers. One on the big server, and one on a tiny server.

Obviously, the gargantuan server's biggest issue is performance. That will probably improve with time, but with its size comes some noticeable benefits, which I will touch on shortly.

The tiny server, which I actually joined first, is blazing fast, but I've run into constant issues trying to find communities and posts that the bigger server can find no problem. Initiating a federation request is not intuitive at all, and your average user is going to wonder why the hell so much stuff isn't showing up when they click All on a smaller server.

I tried manually copying my subscription list from the gargantuan server to the tiny one. It was quite a chore, even though it got better in 0.18. Most of the communities returned a "not found" error. Having to retry a search several times or manually input the URL and reload the page several times until the server can find the community on the remote server is not something the average user is going to want to deal with, so they'll end up on the huge servers that already know about the communities on the other large servers, if they don't give up.

Hopefully this gets better, but that's my best guess as to why everybody ended up on the gargantuan servers.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Spreading out would help the performance of the servers but would still expose inefficiencies in the backend systems that they use to talk to each other. The page might load, but the content will be all kinds of fucked.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago

It's a huge turn off. And federation itself adds to the problem when the servers don't match up properly.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Create an account off of lemmy.world and see if you have the same issues. A smaller instance can handle things easier. It have 2 but use the one that was most up-to-date and responsive.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

See that's part of the problem. You shouldnt need to have to create a bunch of accounts just to use a site. People aren't going to stick around to find time their social media. They want it to just work.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don’t disagree that it’s a weakness. But that just is how it is for now. I’d guess that it will settle down to a few dozen “strong” instances that are all federated together, with hundreds more smaller instances available, but right now there are like 5 super-packed instances (lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, kbin.social, etc) which are getting killed with a double-whammy: all the users and all the communities are on them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We’re still very early on. It’s not going to be a digg to Reddit style thing. But Reddit will keep making bad decisions and people will trickle over here over time and with each influx, things will have improved. I’ve been here a couple weeks and it seems like every day it gets better.

Also, the technical barriers aren’t as scary to people make it out to be. Yeah we won’t get all the boomers, which is very sad. But I’ve got some very tech illiterate friends who have started using memmy with no problems.

And do we even want to get as big as Reddit? Reddit was great 15 years ago. Then teenagers got smart phones and the olds spread out past Facebook and it’s been on decline ever since. I’d be perfectly happy if it got to like 20% the size of Reddit. Maybe not even that big.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah we won’t get all the boomers, which is very sad.

I hope boomer is a state of mind, because otherwise you might be disappointed to learn how old some of us are.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I fundamentally disagree with the idea we will see a continuous trickle of users here as reddit makes more bad decisions. It will be waves, not a constant trickle. And each decision after the API changes will be incrementally smaller, driving fewer users away.

Right now we will also have a retention problem. People came here as an alternative to reddit, a d if the site is too slow, too hard to use because it is slow, then they won't stay. Theyll fall back into old habits and go back to reddit, because it's easier and familiar.

Edit: case and point: I'm using Jerboa. I just posted this comment, but when I did it took about 30 seconds, then I got a network error, and it didn't seem to post but it had, in fact, posted. This is pretty normal on this app right now. I understand stuff like this will get ironed out, but for new users who aren't fully committed it's a BIG turnoff.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I've only been on lemmy.one and I'm reading through this thread thinking what technical problems? Seriously people need to try a different instance because apparently they run much better.

[–] astraeus 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m testing out Mlem on iOS and so far it is a much cleaner experience than even the desktop version of Lemmy’s webapp. Lots of nice QoL features.

https://testflight.apple.com/join/MelFP11Y

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, the apps have been spotty for me, but at least the layout is cleaner.

Not a good sign when you need an app to properly use your website though.

[–] astraeus 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We've been using reddit for years...

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And? I don't remember Reddit being difficult to use when I signed up a decade ago

[–] astraeus 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I imagine reddit felt little different than this at launch in 2005. New services are never going to be perfect from the start and it's obvious there is a community of devoted devs working on this project.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

Lemmy has been in use for 4 years. It's not a new service anymore.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

Why are you even here?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The mobile site for Lemmy is at least usable, without a huge banner telling you to download the app. That's more than I can say for Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

As long as people don’t sign up to lemmy.world for a while we should be fine