Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to become a member of the community, theres a reasonable amount of subs (or whatever the other word for em is) that fit my interests, enough linux content and shitposting for my liking, and the overall random posts made by people equally fed up with Leddit. (also i admit i used reddit a little cus there was this post on the fedora sub showing how to fix a sound issue i been having after a recent update)
Now I’ve got my head around how the instances work and how everything is connected but not connected at the same time I’m growing to like it. Once more communities pop up I think it’s going to be good
I like it a lot too, the fact that I can roam around servers from my home server is really cool
I really don’t like the cringe tankie culture here, hope that gets diluted as more people come in
I’m rapidly coming to appreciate it.
Maybe it’s the demographic of users (young vs old, tech savvy vs casual, w/e) but threads here have far more activity in ratio to the number of subscribers and members.
Reddit just feels like a popularity context. Tell your ‘I also choose this guy’s dead wife’ joke, get your karma, and for god’s sake DON’T USE EMOJIS! Subs rapidly became echo chambers, or lose identity as they get larger.
Lemmy however… while not all threads have activity (it’s small after all), the activity is legitimately interactive. People actually discussing ideas. We’re talking like thinking adults, and I’m enjoying it.
I think that’s inevitable of all such social media type sites eventually though - as they grow, the ‘popularity contest’ feel grows with them, initially as a way to be heard in the every-growing crowd, and later as an end in itself.
It’ll probably happen to Lemmy too at some point - but if it does at least it will mean that Lemmy has managed to survive and grow. And people here in the early days will have the pleasure of being able to say “Lemmy wasn’t like this at the start, I’m leaving for Flangscrawchler” (or whatever)
Bonus for Lemmy being federated, though - if lemmy.world or lemmy.ml no longer gives users want they’re looking for, you can start your own flangscrawchl.er and choose whether or not you want to federate with them.
Corporations will have their own draw; shittification is a thing they do after they have majority market share and their users are entrenched. A new social network service could rise (even one made by Google for Facebook) that is easy to use, has QoL features that network it with its corporate siblings, etc. It sees increased traffic, it gets big… then it shittifies again.
As long as users are following corporate interests, this cycle continues. It’s a slow-burn likeness of competing ISP sign-up contracts throwing in Xboxes. (Though I hear the US has service deserts, so that mightn’t happen there.)
Lemmy probably won’t shittify to the same degree; while larger servers like Lemmy.ml can house a huge percentage of Lemmy users, it can’t ‘go rogue’ in a way that means anything to Lemmy as a whole.
It also can’t offer the same QoL features a corporatized service can, because those can afford to operate at a loss while building market share. A subsidiary can be used as a ‘loss leader’, ie: it doesn’t matter if it costs more to run than it earns directly, because it gets users into the door for things that do profit.
What you describe can, and mostly likely will happen. But Lemmy’s nature makes it more responsive to user interests.
We should implement the no emoji rule here though…
😎🤏 🤨🕶🤏
No, thanks. Emojis can still communicate in ways pure text doesn’t, or provide humour, or imply tone on text that is otherwise ambiguous. That last point in particular would probably defuse a lot of misunderstandings.
Reddit’s obsession with emoji being universally bad feels like a kneejerk reaction to me: they associate excessive emoji with young people, tiktok, or insta; and therefore emojis are bad because being associated with young/tiktok/insta people makes them feel yucky.
But then Reddit does things like 👉😎👉 ZOOP and now its acceptable because that’s a Reddit thing so we can make an exception. The emojis themselves aren’t the issue, the other online cultures Reddit is trying to segregate itself from are.
Banning entire dialects of online communication out of a superiority complex - no, not here on Lemmy thank you. There’s no reason we can’t use both together, so long as your intent is communicated who cares if you put emojis in it. 👍
Hey I’m new here bc fuck spez. There’s definitely potential here. Would like it to be easier to find communities (sublemmies?) And the app needs work but I’m ready to go all in. Did I mention fuck spez yet
https://browse.feddit.de/ cam help to find communities
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As a fellow noob, take what I’ll say with a grain of salt, but my understanding of the servers is that think of them like this:
- Servers (i.e., Beehaw, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world etc) are “continents”
- Communities (i.e., AskLemmy) are “countries”
Every “country” is located in a “continent”. So AskLemmy “country” is located on the lemmy.ml “continent”. Users also have a home “continent”, that is where you sign up. So for example, you signed up for Beehaw, therefore you “live” in the Beehaw “continent”. I signed up here in lemmy.ml, so I live in the lemmy.ml “continent”.
Now if you sign up at Beehaw or in any other server, you can “travel” to the other “continents” (servers) and visit the “countries” (communities) that have their home base there and participate there too. So you, for example, can participate here in AskLemmy, which is located on the lemmy.ml “continent”. Sometimes your home “continent” issues a “travel ban” on particular “continents”, therefore you cannot visit that “continent” or the “countries” in them.
Now what the hell is kbin? Think of Kbin as another “planet”. They are fundamentally different from our “planet” (which is Lemmy), but residents from that “planet” can visit our planet and participate as well via a spaceship infrastructure known as ActivityPub.
Sorry if I used geography terms to illustrate my point. There’s a lot of nuance removed, but I think I got it nailed down based on my understanding. Take it with a grain of salt though.
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Glad I could help!
Yes, you’ll be able to communicate with almost all of the servers, a very select few are blocked for reasons that pre-date me. When you look at a username, you’ll see an extra @ after their name indicating where they’re posting from. The Communities (subreddits) that you subscribe to can be more or less anywhere.
I appreciate the fact there is no infinite scroll on the front page.
One of many examples of how profit-driven platforms care about engagement quantity over product quality. A lack of stopping points feeds FOMO and keeps people trapped longer, but I doubt many people actively enjoy it.
I disable it on any platform that lets me - besides, pagination can be cached to return to later. Doomscrolling can be binged but not suspended.
Exactly so. I’m about a third way through Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. It had a section on infinite scrolling which made me realize it didn’t have it. The book talks a lot about social media’s grip on us.
Sounds like an interesting read; thanks for putting it on my radar.
Great point, lack of infinite scroll is one of the key reasons I always kept going back to old.reddit.com (other than the speed, of course)
I have infinite scroll on Old Reddit with RES. What makes not having infinite scroll such a great thing for you?
For me personally, the quality of content drops off very quickly after page 1 (for example on my personal home feed), but with infinite scroll, I found myself very often just wading through the low quality stuff on autopilot without even realizing what I was doing. It’s just a problem that I don’t even have to think about when I don’t have infinite scroll.
The thing that’s confusing me most is links, whether to communities or individual posts.
I see links in a format like this:
!communityname@instance.whatever
Sometimes the exclamation mark is part of the link and it works, and sometimes it’s there but not part of the link, and my phone thinks the rest is an email address.
Is there a guide anywhere to how to do links properly? TIA.
EDIT - yeah, so in my example above, the exclamation mark is not being treated as part of the link for some reason?
This is definitely the biggest barrier of entry. I love the idea, the execution not so much.
I think it’s a little confusing for everyone right now. I’ll try to explain the easy bits at least.
You can do relative links for communities like this: [text](/c/community@instance)
But these will only work if your instance has already discovered the communities. I think that’s where a lot of the confusion behind all of this first becomes an issue. Some links only work if your instance already “knows” it exists.
To get your or any instance to learn about a specific community, you first have to search for it. The most reliable way to do it is to just put the full url of the community into the search box.
And then wait. It sometimes takes a moment to actually find the community. Once it’s found the rest should work.
For comments, posts, and threads it’s different. Since those will have different unique identifiers on a per instance basis, my understanding is that it’s much more complicated for relative links to work. I haven’t seen a simple solution yet, unfortunately.
Thanks, this is really useful, and greatly appreciated.
Feels like if someone can come up with a working solution for all this it could really help tip the balance towards mass acceptance.
I know nothing about programming, and I do realise Lemmy is all about being federated, but it feels like it needs some central system - not for ownership or anything, but simply to do the job of linking instances more easily. Perhaps even multiple ‘central’ systems, all doing the same job as each other, all consistent with each other, but not controlled by any one group/person, so as to avoid disputes and the risk of any single actor dominating the whole.
I dunno, I’m just kind of spitballing here. It’ll need someone smarter than me to untangle it!
Somehow, it never came to mind to use relative links for communities…
A reasonable solution for those could be to auto-detect community links in their various forms (/c/community, !community@instance.example, https://instance.example/c/community) and auto convert those into a local link for the user’s current instance.
I’d contribute to the codebase if I had time, since community links has been the biggest issue for me so far, having to copy, paste, search etc. for each new community on other instances that I’m interested in, depending on how they’ve been shared
At least on my instance everything is running fast, snappy. I like the clean interface. Haven’t encountered any major bugs yet.
The only downside for me so far is that there is not a lot to see yet. The only active posts and communities are about lemmy itself. Which is understandable of course but I can’t wait to actually get to the phase where I actually get to experience real content lmao
I’d like an optimization for Jerboa as well as more customization for our accounts. Jerboa is fine as it is functional, but sometimes text boxes just extend all the way to the edge of the screen and makes it not visually appealing. I’m still learning though as I’m currently figuring out how to visit the communities in the other servers.
As for communities, I just hope that a mass migration of even 10% of Reddit’s disappointed users would help boost the growth of Lemmy communities and help make niche communities thrive. I personally am a subscriber to the writing and anime subreddits, so I hope there’ll be similar communities here.
There is a writing community here on Beehaw. Someone posted a link to a list of Fediverse communities and I saw a couple more listed. They exist, and I’m sure there’ll be more soon!
great, i’ve really liked lemmy so far. its really the first alt big tech platform like this that i’ve gotten into, was never big on mastodon or any of the others out there.
lemmy is honestly a breath of fresh air. really great platform so far, i think it has very strong potential.
i still use reddit for some things, but overall i’m starting to use lemmy a lot more. great work from the devs, can’t wait to see the future!
It really feels like how Reddit started, before all the rage-bait and eye-catching bullshit. I miss the floofs, the memes, the fun reasons I joined. Now 90% is politics that keep popping up even though I don’t subscribe to any political subs and keep blocking
Seriously, I’m not from the USA and I’m not supposed to know the names of American senators, MP’s, governors or lawyers, or of who shot who, or who had a panic attack in an airplane, or why people are shouting at each others at a mcdonalds drive-in. Does any american ex-redditor know the name of a single european politician besides Merkel?
The news cycle proposed by reddit is filled with american politics ad nauseam and by ragebait. The european subs of reddit are filled with russian shills. When you add up all of this there is no point into opening reddit for the news.
I at least know
- Macron
- Boris
- Orban
- Jezza
Lol way to put it in perspective, I know maybe 2 politicians in all of Europe. Idk when, Reddit used to be global but it’s gotten incredibly America-focused, and maybe that’s just with the size but holy crap is it annoying now - and I’m American. I get bombarded with politics daily, can’t I just have a place that’s just memes?
this app I’m using is pretty bad (no offense to the dev) but once there’s better ones on the market I’m sure the experience will be more enjoyable
I’m not a fan of the whole wordnews ppl banning anti-CCP/anti-russian content tho
/r/china is migrating over at least for a week, as long you’re respectful anti-CCP is fine (same rules as the subreddit)
/c/china on latte.isnot.coffee, we could do with some seeding before we close the sub on Reddit.
For those homed on other instances, search !china@latte.isnot.coffee to view the c/ from your home portal.
My biggest gripe is that there isn’t a working Lemmy iOS app in my region, yet.
I have spotty metered mobile internet connection, and while the web app is lightweight enough, it requires the downloading of page structures each time and it adds up after a while.
I do hope we’ll eventually get high-quality apps to interface with the fediverse, much like Apollo with Reddit.
Mlem, on iOS, is on testflight, can you use that? https://testflight.apple.com/join/xQfmkJhc
My word! This is a godsend. Thank you!
I mostly lurk on communities. But that’s another matter entirely.
Anyway, enjoying being away from the depressing mess that reddit has become. Verrrry slowly getting the hang of things. Signed up in beehaw.org and Lemmy.ml mainly because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing!
Main confusion for me is communities. Searched and found a few that are mostly on Lemmy.ml. But I can subscribe to and see from beehaw.org. But some just do not show up until I log into Lemmy.ml
I use jerboa which is a little clunky but I kinda like that. It’s a learning curve I guess. How the internet used to be in a way. I’m 53 so remember the day of 33.3 modems and tweaking windows configs (get off my lawn)
While not every community is on Lemmy yet that I visit on Reddit, by people migrating from Reddit to here, hopefully that issue will be solved soon. The community here seems way more welcoming than the Reddit community is too
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LMAOOOO
dude helll yes i also just remembered theres that stupid barried of entry on many subs which ask u to meet really weird requirements to participate… the other day i prompted gpt to say smt funny and wholesome (it was praise towards the aur(arch user repository)) and tried to post it on some linux/arch sub but the first 3 that came to mind wouldnt allow it, one didnt accept memes, the other had a bot which took it down automatically and the third asked me to comment and participate in the sub before posting… like come on man.
The barrier for entry for some subreddits is too high but to be fair, ChatGPT “funny responses” are low-quality content and should be removed.
Much nicer than StackExchange too:
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Greatly improved after I found out about https://mlmym.org/ (old Reddit UI for Lemmy)
yep i can hardly tell the difference on this interface.