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] 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* (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] 6 points 1 year 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 1 year ago

Long live federation! For me it’s just nice to see centralized social networks are losing popularity.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I like it so far, it has a low key relaxed energy. I mostly used reddit for the smaller communities so this kinda works for me.

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

Yeah, I feel the same way.. Everyone is like.. nice? Or at the very least friendly yeah, and you get a better reach not in the same way that a post on Reddit can just be buried under other ones.. Sorry for all the comparisons to Reddit lol I just don't know what else to compare something like Lemmy to.

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

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

I've been a Redditor for more than 16 years, and it's a little complicated understanding how this works. But I'm sure I'll get the hang of it.

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

I'm kinda hoping someone will point out this feature already exists, but I wish there was a way to subscribe to a topic. Right now it feels like multiple instances are forming their own, say, gaming community, and it feels like this is splintering the community rather than growing it?

Other than that, I actually really like the decentralised nature -- and, while this is likely due to the very early nature of things, man is it nicer here. Weirdly feels like early Slashdot days...

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

I was new to Reddit (3 weeks of activity), and switching to Lemmy is a bit confusing. But one evening is enough to learn the basics, I hope. Let's keep it rolling. :)

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

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

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

Joined last night and I'm already really enjoying it. I'm still learning, but that's just part of the fun right now! I really appreciate the smaller size, so if it really does take off in Reddit's wake, I hope that doesn't change too much.

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

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

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

Joined today and I find Lemmy really cool. Of course there isn't that much content here yet but I'm hoping the June 12 Reddit protests and the upcoming Reddit API restrictions will bring more users in.

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

So far, I find it's pretty good. I couldn't find a client for Emacs so I may create one.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year 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 1 year ago

First comment. Still getting used to the whole fediverse concept. Super cool so far though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year 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] 5 points 1 year ago

I'm loving a the idea and finding a bunch of nice people in communities :) The only thing I'm finding is that things seem to be creaking a lot, as I'm getting a lot of timeouts and such when I'm using Jerboa to upvote and search.

All in all though, it's great :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year 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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Hello World! It's cool.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 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.

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

I posted a comment, one of my first, about something I think would vastly improve the user experience. I stand by it 100%, what I describe there was by far the most confusing part for me. I think the new user guide in general could use a pass-over by people who aren't tech savvy and are going to be more "casual" users, right now it's quite long and IMO a bit too technical for most people. It's too much all at once.

Now that I'm past that, I'm finding it quite similar to reddit. The biggest "problem" so far is that it's so small, so a lot of the small reddit communities I was in are non existant. I'm not comfortable moderating (I don't really have the time), so I won't make them myself, but I will miss them. Tbh for some things I'll probably still use reddit on desktop (until they kill old reddit) but lemmy on mobile.

My biggest concern from the beginning, and the reason I joined a big and established instance, is what will happen to people's accounts if their instance gets taken down by the creators. To me that seems like a kinda fundamental flaw here. I'm really not sure how or if it could be fixed, either.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It was meh the first ~week that I've mostly been using it anonymously via Jerboa. There just wasn't all that much stuff to read. But once I've spun up my own instance and federated with a few dozen communities - man, it's looking amazing! It's still so much better in a browser to manage everything, but simply lurking is now perfectly viable via the Android app.

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