this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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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!

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The community has been way more friendly than any other social media I've been on. Th UI/UX is confusing and at times bad, but it makes do. It has been a nice experience.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's pretty cool so far. Takes some getting used to, little buggy here and there, but nothing intolerable. People are more respectful on here. On reddit and most all other platforms, I just lurked for the most part to avoid getting "aKsHuAlLy'D" by some angry poster. It's chill here and it's got potential ^-^

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So far im still confused, but I’ve learned a lot in the time I’ve been here, so i think I’ll come around. I feel like the main issue I personally have is population of communities and actually finding communities. Ive found a couple ill look at in an asklemmy thread and im sure itll grow over time, but I personally dont have much I can contribute yet, so im not sure how much I can do personally.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

The webapp Is only fine on desktop. On Android I'm having to use Jerboa which works and does its job but still has an extremely outdated and unpolished user experience

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

New user and reddit refugee here! The instance system isn't as straightforward as something like reddit where all of the content exists in the same place, but once I understood how the system works (via the first few posts I saw after opening the Jerboa mobile app for the first time) I got signed up on an instance that ISN'T lemmy.ml and I've just began surfing in earnest! Thanks to the community that's made this possible!

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The app is good considering its in the early version. Have only been testing out for a few hours. The whole instance and server thing is still bit confusing regarding how it handles the post and comments in one server over to a user coming from snother instance. Any place to search for communities?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I think it's got all the potential, and I really mean it. I want to be here and I will try to contribute wherever I can. The onboarding of the platform is confusing, but everyone already knows that. I can see the growing pains, but that's totally fine.

I enjoy the format, and I very much like what Lemmy is meant to become.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

the UX can be a bit clunky, such as opening links to other communities and not being able to subscribe, but overall it's been quite fun so far. a lot more fun than mastodon as its quite serious (as any twitter substitute would be)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

its just reddit tbh

much better experience than mastodon imo

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year 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). 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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I have a terrible experience on mobile. I'm literally only on desktop because I was ready to delete my account. It's extremely unintuitive, Lemur doesn't work for lemmy.world and the other app is confusing to use. :/

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The one thing I'm struggling with is how do I find a subreddit equivalent? For example r/formula 1 or r/UKpolitics on Reddit might be.... What?

Also is it possible to find these communities using Jerboa or so I need to login on my desktop?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I love it. I am genuinely excited to be on here, and it is literally the only social media I use at the moment.

The single feature I that I think would improve the site tremendously is some kind of indicator to know if I have posted in a thread before. It is silly, but sometimes discussions blow up and I cannot remember everything I write.

Like, just a colored dot next to the title in topics I have posted in would make the experience so much better.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

There's a learning curve for sure, but I think I could get used to it. I'm hoping this boom during the Reddit black out helps pick up steam and we see a lot of cool features roll out in the mobile app/mornptions for fedoverse clients.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year 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.

[–] gamma 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It does remind me of Reddit when I first joined. I like federated services like Matrix and Mastodon, but Reddit was exactly how I liked interacting online. I'm really missing RES keybindings (in particular a/z voting, j/k navigation, x expandos, <Return> thread collapse) but the UX fits my needs very well otherwise.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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> chf

upd: have tried kbin, it seems there they fixed all the annoying parts of lemmy. Great usage experience!

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year 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] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I love the idea of Lemmy and I haven't found it too hard to create an account and get the gist of things.

BUT, the novelty will wear off and I'm not interested in general channels. I used Reddit for UX design, menslib, indieheads, OCD support, and lots of niche stuff that doesn't seem to exist here.

I know the answer is for me to get involved, but I work long hours and am a single dad to 2 .. I could set something up, but I don't have time to find quality OC and nurture multiple communities. I'd honestly be a poor mod.

I half expect Reddit to announce major changes to their official app, which may be enough to win a proportion of people back.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I've been here for a while and i still don't like it for a number of reasons, many which have already been mentioned here. The UI/UX isn't as nice as old reddit and there a lot of complexities due to the fediverse that are just not easy to overcome. Why i think reddit will ultimately win out in this because most users will go back to it after a few weeks.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year 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] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I find it easier than using mastodon for the first time tbh

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I think Lemmy seems like a good idea and generally like it so far, but i do think that users that aren't that tech savvy may have issues. It's also nice that the servers are customizable in a way, but at the same time if you pick certain servers you can't see down votes, or creating communities might be disabled which will seem inconsistent to newcomers that think of Lemmy as a more traditional platform like Reddit that only has one instance. The community search is also pretty clunky, a lot of users will probably have trouble understanding why they can't just find all available communities instead of writing an obscure email-like string that still says "no results", but then magically after searching again it will be there. I would say some areas are unpolished and even a bit buggy at times too. I figured these things out pretty fast, but being a software dev myself, i know that an end-user may struggle a lot more with these things, to the point where they may just abandon the platform out of frustration. I hope some of the rough edges can be smoothed out because the idea of this platform is definitely interesting, but if average people can't use it it's less likely to really succeed. I must admit that even i am a bit skeptical, and i may have to return to Reddit if not enough users/content migrate to this platform, even though i don't really like many of the decisions Reddit make. I'm giving it a fair shot though and i definitely like it so far.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I've been here for about a day and I've been very impressed! I happened to pick a pretty decent seeming instance to start from and I've not had too much difficulty figuring out this whole fediverse thing

I've also had a very good experience in Firefox on Android for browsing

I do think Lemmy is going to need to implement more load balancing and I'd love to be able to spin up a server to donate some cycles and bandwidth to help load balance an existing Lemmy instance

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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 everything 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 πŸ˜…

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Very happy and reminds me of the old pre-digg Reddit days! My main concerns are

  • If I pick a popular server it will go down due to performance issues, but if I get a smaller one it may go offline because it's just a small hobby project. I don't want to lose my account.

  • I'm worried about communities duplicating on other instances and me not being able to ask questions to the same pool of people with xposting

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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

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