How do you feel about the massive influx of users?
It makes me hopeful for the future. Enthusiasts priming the pump for people embracing a more sustainable and less exploitative business model to organize the Internet. Instead of putting all the information on a big centralized locked down platform we share the load and costs between instances.
I love what is happening now, it is pretty much the biggest display of resistance against big tech I’ve ever seen in my life by a long shot. I’ve seen most of the internet gradually decay to a shadow of its former self so this is a return to form and a switch to a better model in the long run.
People are finally adopting the Fediverse and if the adoption rates keep up we might start going mainstream with all the advantages and disadvantages, but it will be alright since Lemmy is both federated and FLOSS. Lemmy is a Rust-based, AGPLv3 platform and that means it will be protected against corruption in the foreseable future, I hope.
EDIT: Over 30% of Reddit already went dark!
It’s close to 50 % now. You can watch the realtime stream here - https://reddark.untone.uk/
Is it of all Reddit or just of the subs listed as participating?
Subs listed I believe
That’s what I thought too
That tracker only covers the ones that go private though! There’s a bunch that are going restricted so they can automate posts that will still show in r/all and other feeds. That way reddit’s algorithm doesn’t just pull up other subs and effectively hide that a protest is occurring.
12 years Reddit refugee here:
So far the concept is VERY promising but it still does all feel a bit wonky. Signing up was a headache and took me hours, sign in still sometimes work sometimes not… A huge of development will be required to get lemmy where it needs to be to really compete with Reddit, but so far, I’m very hopeful and happy!
It is also very hard to subscribe to other server’s community (or subreddit equivalent).
E.g.: i had account from beehaw, if i want to subscribe a channel from lemmy.world i need to see the list of community from lemmy.world comminity list, but I cannot subscribe from there because i dont have lemmy.worlda account. So i need to back to beehaw and search it again in community search bar.
In jerboa android, I didnt even see a way to search new community
Would be nice if there is a way to subscribe other server easily
I went through https://browse.feddit.de and subscribed to a bunch of communities that matched what I had on Reddit.
Yeah, just found that out the hard way myself. I got to lemmy.world and suddenly was no longer logged in etc… That is something that def needs improvement.
Agreed. There’s a similar issue on Mastodon that’s been confusing people for years and still hasn’t been addressed, let’s hope Lemmy prioritizes it a bit more!
From the community page https://beehaw.org/communities you can click all, and search for communities everywhere. Except for instances beehaw blocks.
It’s a bit wonky but so was reddit. I expect it to improve quickly with it’s sudden interest.
At least for me downloading their app jeroba makes the experience much nicer. Haven’t had the issues I had on the website though it’s a bit taxed because of the influx of users. Expected.
Is Jerboa android only? Didn’t see in the app store
Yes, there’s an apple one but not sure if it’s official. Mlem or something.
Yeah, android only. For iOS, there’s Mlem.
Afaik Mlem is iphone’s lemmy client
Yes. For iOS there’s Mlem currently in Testflight but it’s very early stages. I’m just using the mobile browser for now.
I just moved to a different instance and logged in there, browsing ml subs.
Right? I can’t wait to see how it improves as time on. I didn’t have any real problems with joining on my end, though. When you signed up, was it the approval process on your instance, or just confusing? If it was the approval process, that’s probably specific to lemmy.ca.
I first tried signing up on lemmy.ml, that was impossible. Various hours of trying just got me the “click the signup button and it starts rotating and… nothing”
Then I went to lemmy.ca, there signup worked, but sign in at times gives the same “button rotating” thing and then nothing. Try again, and it works.
Its a minor issue, but a very visible one that I would say should be fixed ASAP because its the first thing new people see and you don’t want the first experience to be tiresome.
The infinitely rotating button happens if their email settings are invalid- just discovered that on my instance. I have mine set to open but require email validation and everything seems to happen instantly, but if they require admin verification it may be bugging out and not telling you.
It’s because there is some approval process involved I think to avoid bot/troll accounts. I join lemmy.ca cause I live in Canada. :D
Same here!
That’s fine that they have an approval process, but then the user interaction should be different. IT should immediately say that my request is under review and they’ll get back to me asap or something, instead of a “this process is frozen” indication
Think of it like moving to a new house rather than picking up your house and moving it to a new neighborhood. The excitement comes from the differences even if you miss the other place.
May I ask why signing up took hours? I didn’t even need to confirm anything via email, so I took me like 10 seconds.
I used sh.itjust.works though, I think it’s meant to, well, just work. Maybe the process on other instances is more complicated?
I signed up via beehaw and the sign up page said the request has to be manually approved.
Ah yeah, lemmy.ml is already overloaded, they’ve requested no new sign-ups for now since they can’t handle the load. I recommend sh.itjust.works
I felt the same at first too. The longer sign-up issue makes joining a pain, but I think it’s worth it.
Part of what I’m coming to love about the lemmy side of things is how free of filler and bots it is. By making a tiny barrier to entry, that’s going to prevent that kind of thing to a degree.
I’m a new user but I’d love to see this place explode in popularity!
I just joined Lemmy because someone on reddit mentioned in it a comment on a thread regarding the blackout. It’s kind of cool getting into a community while it’s still relatively small. I’m excited to see how things grow.
I hopped over here permanently tonight. Uninstalled boost on my phone, and I made Lemmy.ml my homepage. Reddit is just too depressing right now to keep it as my default.
When on a Lemmy site on mobile, in Firefox you can go to the three-dots menu and select “install”. You get a shortcut on your phone that will take you to an app like version of Lemmy.
Im using the Jerboa, official Lemmy mobile app on Android
Is Jeroba official? I thought it was third-party
I think it’s supposed to feel that way, since it’s not on the official LemmyNet github org, and located on one of the developers’ accounts instead afaik
AFAIK you are correct. I don’t think lemmy has an official app and the only 3rd party app that exists of any substance is jerboa so I suppose right now it is kind of the official Android app while mlem is the iOS counterpart. But only because there’s nothing else atm
Reddit is just too depressing right now to keep it as my default.
It really seems like the front page is just a list of politicians, companies, and people doing terrible things.
Hope people have patience and stick with it. I have no interest in going back to reddit.
Tried Lemmy a couple months ago and tbh it felt dead, love this new influx just hope new communities keep popping up
Same here !
I like it, but I am part of the massive influx of users so I am admittedly biased.
Me too… But it’s great TBH!
I’ve been hoping for a shift to decentralized social platforms for ages, so I really hope that’s the direction things are heading.
As cool as this decentralized approach to social platforms is, I have a hard time really seeing it going mainstream. There’s too many barriers to entry (both physical and conceptual) for the average user
As (another) reddit refugee, in order to compete with reddit, Lemmy needs to invest in its mobile apps, and make other servers easier to access.
Well unlike reddit the official app is great for lemmy.
There’s an official app?
I only know of Jerboa (for Android), but I don’t think that’s an “official” app
There’s a git repo for something called remmel(?) which I think is an iPhone client. But without someone publishing it to the App Store, no one will use it.
It kinda is. It’s made by one of the devs
One of the devs of the protocol? (forgot what its name was)
I use jeroba but it’s android. There’s also lemmur but it won’t load for me on that and jeroba is the"official"one.
You mean the Android app? Unfortunately I can’t even login with Mlem on iOS.
mlem is under heavy development. Chances are the issue you encountered has been fixed in an update
I’m finding the mobile experience in the browser pretty reasonable.
Agreed. Website needs some improvement as well
the reddit blackout is for like two days i expect that 90% of them will stick to the two days and business as usual afterwards. their bottom line is to continue running mods of their communities, even if they acknowledge that was is going on with reddit is bad. they shouldnt have announced a scheduled, limited blackout.
i expect some fringe communities to come here and stay but it will always be business as usual on reddit
therefore Lemmy needs to have a reason for people to stick around, communities offering something that isnt otherwise available, even just a refreshing change of community culture
Honestly it’ll probably be closer to 99.999% of users will stick around Reddit. The largest Lemmy instance is smaller than the smallest subreddit I follow and I suspect that’s probably the case for most people.
Here’s what will happen… Reddit blackout starts, people come to Lemmy, 8 out of 10 are confused by the way things work and bail instantly. 2 out of 10 might stick around, try to sign up, but everyone hammers the top 3-4 instances and they have a bad first impression. A few days later everyone is back at Reddit and Lemmy is right back where it was a month ago.
I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt I will be.
I think that there will be people who remain on Lemmy permanently. This group will remain small, and insignificant. But hopefully there will be enough people to prop the instances up with content. At which point Lemmy will begin to grow slowly; this slow growth imo is the most important. But yeah alot of people will go back to Reddit and forget all about Lemmy. And that’s ok.
Small
Insignificant
I see you’ve been talking to my ex
this is the most redditish comment I’ve seen so far.
remains to be seen if that’s a good thing or not, but I did chuckle over the familiar joke
I was about to say the exact same thing! I checked and sure enough that commenter joined in the last few hours.
I’ve purged my account… and passed the Rubicon. I’m on Lemmy now or just reading news sites.
You’re exaggerating, I can definitely see how Twitter users changed the general atmosphere of the Fediverse, at least on the instances that I have used in the past. As for Reddit, I think it will be something similar to that, not everyone is going to migrate but Lemmy is going to be significantly bigger, better and THE place to go if you want to ditch Reddit. Also, it’s not like having a big portion here of social media audience is going to do a lot of good. I have serious doubts about people being able to give value to the community if they can’t even figure out how to register on an instance other than the main one
Yeah Reddit’s core users are pretty technical. At least the ones who joined before the big popularity boom in the last 5 years. The old school redditors will probably end up on lemmy.
lemmy feels more like reddit once did than reddit does now.
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Was originally introduced to reddit by a calculus professor who set up a sub for the class to collaborate - it was a different time.
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Definitely.
You’re talking about ~70% of reddit and you’re probably right. Let’s see. If lemmy gets an app with a better UI, it’s going to be that way for sure. An embeddes image and video viewer is missing, for example
As a reddit refugee the image and video viewer has been the only speedbump for me. That is other than not being hooked up to a firehose of content, but i feel that will come in time.
It has been fixed in the last build
yep. it’s about quality, not quantity - we’ll reach critical mass easily enough, and that’s all that matters for the short term.
You still need a minimum of people for things to work. And a lot of subreddit equivalent are still completely empty.
of course. but Lemmy really does have potential - it’s a more accessible platform than Mastodon and reddit users are more aligned with the strategy of decentralizing via the fediverse. this fits.
we gotta start somewhere.
I personally don’t understand wanting to go back… reddit is so unpleasant as it is. All that made it tolerable was 3rd party. I’d rather go back to imgur than reddit.
I hope that lemmy makes it but I don’t think that it will be easy because:
- registering is far from straight forward. Before figuring out how to do it and which is the name of the app you need, lots of users will give up
- I don’t think that lemmy can scale well
I agree with the scalability issues. Instance owners are going to run up against whatever they can afford to pay. If a given instance grows to a point where the hardware required to run it would be too expensive, then the admin has a choice: Donations, payment, and/or sponsorship.
All have their pros and cons.
Assuming “Lemmy” becomes popular (there’s a ton of barriers preventing this so far). there’s inevitably going to be consolidation between whoever can afford to support the largest instances.
Also, I think the most confusing part about the whole “fediverse” is that each instance is the entire “platform” of whatever it’s trying to be.
This IMO creates massive fragmentation and a ton of confusion. Which one is the “authoritative” instance? Oh there’s none? Oh…well…Hmm.
I’m sort of starting to think of it like this:
Reddit (or whatever fediverse whatever) is like a single shopping mall and the stores are subreddits. Each store needs a unique name.
Lemmy is like a bunch of shopping malls with each shopping mall having its own set of stores.
Stores within a single shopping mall must have a unique name, but can use the same name as a store in another mall. For example, you’d be hard-pressed to find two Foot Lockers in the same mall, but you’re likely to find them in pretty much every mall you visit in the USA at least.
That’s a good analogy.
I think the Redditors joining Lemmy will certainly change the culture, both for the better and for the worse. Comments got pretty toxic on Reddit while I feel like the toxic comments on Lemmy were rare.
BUT, that could be a sample size thing. I’m curious to see if the ratio of toxic comments per active user would have been the same.
More people = more problems I am certain but this is a social network and without people it will fail. We must all make an effort to be the change that we want to see in the world.
I don’t foresee a problem in the immediate future aside from higher server load, but in terms of culture, only people who believe in a new social network will be willing to join.
In 5 years however when this is a great place to be, a large number of people will join who don’t respect the legacy. The departure from Digg to Reddit felt like this too, I hope that the federation aspect will ensure this is longer lived.
remember… federation is your friend. federation gives you the freedeom to change house (instance) and/or look for better communities on any other federated instance from your own instance.
Are you actually able to migrate accounts between instances?
currently, no - but it is on the roadmap. moving house atm means creating a new account on another instance.
not yet on Lemmy, although you can on Mastodon, so it’s doable.
Unfortunately Mastodon does not migrate your toots so… it’s pretty useless.
The most important thing, your history, is not being moved. It’s nice that subscribers get migrated but that’s like 20% of the job.
well, yeah, I wouldn’t disagree but it’s not like they aren’t trying. I think with Mastodon the followers are a lot more important than the toots though. I would agree that posting history here is probably a bigger deal.
I haven’t looked at the back end to understand what might be involved, but just configuring the instance has given me an appreciation for the complexities and challenges involved in getting a federated app running at scale.
I am one of those influx.
I’m realllllly just hoping we don’t choke the “main” instances completely to death before the lemmy backend can have some developer hours dumped into it to support better per-instance horizontal scaling.
Yeah. It’s gonna be a rough first couple months. App development needs to catch up. Server support needs to catch up. Many subs need to figure out how to move over their communities. I’m tempted to start making communities and just copy-pasting the side bars and pinned threads, but Im not a mod for anything, so it feels like it’d be plagiarism.
It desperately needs lower friction remote community subscribing and a user migration workflow between instances.
Yeah, currently I too frequently end up viewing communities from outside the context of my login, it’s a pain that I hope gets remediated soon
Every time I hear ding, I start laughing. 😁
I honestly can’t say about the influx. Since I’m part of it.
But man…
This does feel like home.
I was already loving Mastodon.
Honestly, the real question is:
What took us soo long…
I was lurking on Lemmy for a long time now read only mode, not signed up, but never had the urge to actually making an account.
I try not to have so many feeds where I’m active at once, to try and better manage the time I spend on this feeds.
Twitter and Reddit were the ones I engaged the most
Twitter became Mastodon and Reddit became Lemmy on that matter, so that I can focus on being active and helpful whenever possible.
So, what took me so long…?
Definitely something I will be asking myself for a while, since so far the experience here have something that reddit just don’t. The quality over quantity aspect.
Finally…
Thanks for having me here, I hope I can contribute the best I can to maintain Lemmy awesome as it is. I don’t post or reply like a madman, but I like to participate on constructive discussion every now and then.
Hey man, I’ve felt mostly the same than you migrating to lemmy. A while ago I tried mastodon but it really didn’t click with me, how do you do to find people to follow and so? I was only getting recommended the same like 10 guys. I like gaming and programming if it helps.
For Mastodon?
I use it the same as my Twitter, mainly googling mastodon lists of know profiles there, the I copy/paste in the search and follow them.
On Lemmy it’s easier, just do a search for the communities you’d like to join, for example:
Gaming at beehaw.org is amazing. Subscribe to that if you didn’t already.
Sometimes understanding how to cross instances can still be a bit cumbersome though.
There is pretty cool support for relative links though! As long as your instance knows of a community, they’ll work.
- [gaming@beehaw.org](/c/gaming@beehaw.org)
- gaming@beehaw.org
And if your instance doesn’t know a certain instance exists, you just have to paste the url into your search bar to get it working: https://beehaw.org/c/gaming
what took us so long
“Inertia is a property of matter” -Bill Nye the Science guy
What I mean by that is that it takes a force to move a large mass. People behave in much the same way. It takes a push to get people to move in large numbers from one place to another. I personally have been philosophically very pro-fediverse ever since I heard about it, but I was waiting for it to reach a critical mass before really switching over.
That, and for Lemmy specifically, its history of being a tankie forum. Without the Reddit refugee migration, if you joined Lemmy as a single user, you would be alone among communists and eventually get bullied into leaving. Already in 2020-2021, Fediverse users knew about Lemmy, but they avoided promoting it because of its userbase. This Reddit situation provided the push to get many normal users over to Lemmy at once to drown out the communist users.
That’s a good point. Personally I like when there’s a diversity of political opinions that are able to have reasonable discourse. My favourite political subreddit for a while has been /r/stupidpol. It has lots of Marxists, but lots of internal variety in terms of viewpoints, and respectful debate has always been allowed there while also maintaining a lighter atmosphere.
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For me definitely laziness.
