Technology

As of right now, I really like how Lemmy and the rest of the Fediverse operates! Scrolling here seems to be much more lightweight on my low end computer than using Reddit.

I'm liking it so far, the communities I've federated with are mostly chill and quite a bit of fun. That being said, there's dark parts of the fediverse too. I plan on keeping my instance around for a while, but so far it's just me and a friend or two, but maybe that's a good thing?

I really like it, but I'm concerned for rough times ahead.

Running instances is hard, thankless but necessary work. A for-profit company like Reddit can afford to pay engineers to do it. A lot of open-source / free software things survive because people are generous and donate their time, creativity, expertise and often even money to keeping them running. But when it's a hobby not a job, it gets to a point where people often have to think of their own sanity and step away.

The fediverse design seems well suited to handle that without major disruption, but there will definitely be some disruption.

I'm also hoping that people are tolerant of design quirks. Design by committee is often seen as one of the worst ways to do things, and FOSS is nothing but committees. Reddit's design obviously influenced Lemmy (as Slashdot influenced Reddit, and so-on). But, while I wasn't a fan of the new Reddit design, at least it was a unified view. I'm incredibly impressed at how smooth Lemmy has been so far, but again, I expect it's just a matter of time before there are some controversial choices in what new features to add, how to expose them, what defaults to choose, and so on. I hope people are tolerant of the churn that that might cause.

Basically, I just really hope that whatever controversies and rough periods are ahead, that the communities I care about choose to weather the storm and stick around. If we can survive that, social media that isn't owned by any company, and that isn't part of the "surveillance capitalism" world is very promising.

I like it! Sure, some rough edges, and a bit of technical difficulties due to the influx of Reddit refugees like me, but this seems like a much friendlier, more real community.

It took me a few days to adjust, but now I'm feeling pretty comfortable. I'm excited for what's to come as the communities grow.

Currently using Jerboa. Unsure if I like it, because currently there's no inline video player and no creepypasta communities to sub to.

Any decent (or established I guess ) iOS mobile clients? I’m messing with mlem but it seems pretty basic and is still using TestFlight. It’s usable but a more full featured client might be nice

I can’t get mlem to work, so I’m forced to use the web mobile interface, which isn’t ideal. But that’s a problem of having habits and expectations ingrained for a decade of using specific apps.

Uptime of different servers I’ve tried has been spotty. Pair that with the natural growing pains of my more niche subreddits being my more active ones and I’m struggling to find them here…

It’s been a rough day. I want to believe in the potential, but just like with mastodon - federated solutions need to really work on onboarding. It’s helpful that we’re getting large populations due to the lack of ability to access reddit, which Mastodon struggled with. But things still feel chaotic and I don’t know that getting things drilled down to a well curated list of communities will feel as well put together as it did on reddit.

It's horrible and I will not be sticking around

One problem is there is no dark mode button in user settings. I'm sure there is something you can download and apply or something, just would like a little slider in settings before I go snowblind.