I recently switched to sorting by New, which sounds insane coming from Reddit, but Lemmy is much smaller right now, and New is actually viable and interesting.
I'm sure with more growth that will change, but it's definitely kept my feed fresher and more interesting than either Active or Hot.
(This does of course assume that you're subscribed to a reasonable number of communities you're interested in.)
Ah yeah, this makes sense.
I have seen other services include an explicit SSO link under the user/pass form, which IMO is clearer what's actually going on, but I'm sure that structure hopelessly confuses lots of less technical users, too.
Yeah, I see this one happen occasionally, and it makes me marginally less grouchy.
Following hashtags was a game-changer for me, for sure.
I'm one of the newer transplants from Reddit, but for the last several years I've only been a lurker there, because I haven't felt like I really fit in with those communities and that culture well enough to fully engage.
Lemmy feels different, in similar fashion to how Mastodon felt so different from Twitter when I switched over there a year so back. I haven't looked back on Twitter, and I doubt I'll look back on Reddit. The water's way nicer over here, for me.
I do think it'll take a while for most of the disruptive newcomers to fully bounce off the Lemmy/Fediverse culture, but I also do think they will eventually bounce off it, as long as we all stick to our guns in terms of the culture we want to build, the rules with which we want to govern our communities and servers, and the social norms we want to tolerate.
There are just going to be 1973629092 tedious arguments about defederation between here and there. 🙄
I'm also finding it really effective. I only hate that backing out from a post is a crapshoot on whether it preserves my scroll position, resets to the top, or reloads the entire feed.
For three years now, I've put in real low scores and real critical comments on these things, and literally everyone I know at work says they've done the same (we are all so stressed) but then next quarter comes along and the execs share the survey results and wouldn't you know it, engagement is great, the best it's ever been, no problems here!
Amazing how that happens.
I'd like to be able to easily keep in touch with friends and family members. Because many of them are less technical, they haven't adopted federated technologies like Mastodon; they either tried it and bounced off, or are so confused/intimidated by the new thing that they refuse to try it at all.
As a result, I either have to make a Facebook account to connect with them, or else be okay with only talking to them in person, SMS, or phone calls. This is not so different from a future world in which Meta is federated, and everyone else blocks them: in that world, I'd still have to make an account on the Meta instance, or else only talk to those folks offline.
So our choices then are either to a) federate and risk the rest of the network, b) defederate but make secondary accounts on their instance to talk to those less tech savvy folks in our lives, or c) cut ourselves off both technically and socially (at least as far as the internet is concerned)... and none of those feel like great choices.
I feel like the only real answer is that we need to get higher quality, more accessible, better polished Fediverse tools into the hands of those people who today only understand Facebook, and that's a really high bar. How do we make it easier for our less techy parents, friends, etc. to join smaller, more privacy-focused instances, or even have their own instances, without having to think about, frankly, much of anything at all? Because that's the proposition of Facebook for them right now: it's easy, it just works, it has all the features they need, and they don't have to think about it or put any work into it at all.
For instance: Mastodon is a good start, but so many people trip over the "pick a server" bit. One suggestion I've seen is to be able to send server invites, so I could click a button on my instance and send an email to my mom with a link inside that takes her straight to account setup on my instance and all she has to do is pick a username and password and install the app. That could still be even simpler (e.g. could there be an app install link that somehow pre-configures the app with a target instance, and sign up takes place within the appln first launch?) but at least it gets past one of the big apparent stumbling blocks of federation right up front.
I was frustrated by certain aspects of how my team was run, so when that position became available, I applied for and moved into it, thinking I could make some changes that would make the team function better.
I did make some of those changes and they have helped, but I've also found it really challenging to carry responsibility for delivering things that I can't work on directly. I used to solve problems by writing code; it's much different to solve problems by coaching people.
I do have stronger relationships with my colleagues now, since I spend more time communicating with them vs. being head-down in code all the time, and that's kind of nice, but I'm definitely missing the hands-on work
I find this perspective fascinating. It took me ten minutes to find two dozen Lemmy communities of interest, about 2/3 of which were on other servers than my home server. On Mastodon, it similarly took me ten minutes to follow a bunch of hashtags that sounded interesting, and it's trivial to follow new people from those hashtags too.
I get that "it works on my machine" is never a very good excuse for dismissing someone else's perspective, but I struggle to see what's so much harder about the Fediverse vs Twitter or Reddit. I guess there's the thing with Lemmy/Kbin about opening posts from your own instance so you can properly interact with them, which is weird, sure, but there are also like half a dozen solutions for it already, and they're only going to keep getting better with time.
I feel like the Fediverse got a reputation for being difficult because somebody freaked out about picking a home server once, and now that reputation has become a self-justifying argument that "Fediverse is too hard" that gets parroted by people who haven't even looked at it yet.