I'm giving Lemmy a go, as I was an avid Apollo user. Have people on here noticed a noticeable uptick in engagement in here and across Lemmy in general?

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

We seem to get bursts, then some really active users we never hear from again. That's expected though, people are trying stuff out. Reddit starts charging unreasable amounts for their API tomorrow which will kill most 3rd party apps, so I'm expecting another uptick (which may have already started).

Lemmy.nz has a group of core active users and others come and go, I've noticed a lot of new users in the past few days, especially new users posting and participating which is great to see!

As others have said, to get the proper experience you need to interact with communities on other instances. Just going to Communities->All and browsing the ones with the highest active user count can give you a good selection. Or even just browsing the main All feed, look for posts you like, and see what community they are posted to. Lemmy.nz has a slow trickle of content but if you look at All there is plenty of content to interact with.

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

Haha, hopefully I stick around :) Yeah, that's what brought me along to finally give it a go, as I was using Apollo.

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

I hope you do stick around!

I'm very fussy about apps so I'm still mostly using the website on my phone, but there is a list of android apps here from the [email protected] community.

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

I've been using WefWef today as it's based off of the Apollo app UI, and apart from a couple of bugs/wants, its been great so far 👍

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

I've seen that but it seems to be struggling with it's popularity! It's self-hostable, I wonder if it's the sort of thing you could run a version of for the instance. E.g. wefwef.lemmy.nz could be a wefwef frontend that prioritises the lemmy.nz page for logged out users, but otherwise works the same.

Edit: I went and did it, you can now access wefwef.lemmy.nz

No warranties express or implied

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

This is awesome but FYI it’s recently been updated to 0.6.0.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Haha wow, I thought "I only did it an hour ago, how could it not be the most recent!" But then I see 0.6.0 was released 15 mins ago. I'll update it :)

(done BTW)

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

That's pretty cool! Total noob is this regard so I probably wouldn't have even been able to do it myself haha

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The basics of self-hosting stuff is pretty simple once you get used to it. But it is one of those things that you need a high tolerance for frustration because you will spend hours banging your head against the wall wondering why something isn't working, then either you realise you made a silly mistake, or it suddenly starts working and you have no idea what changed to make it work.

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

In this instance, what are the benefits of having if self hosted like this?

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

You're talking about wefwef still?

The main reason is that this afternoon I wasn't able to access wefwef.app half the time, it was giving me errors. I presume because the server couldn't handle a sudden surge in popularity.

Other than getting ourselves a version we host ourselves so has a lower server load, I don't think there's any other benefit.

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

@NoRamyunForYou @sortofblue I have found engagement across the whole fediverse to be better quality.

The number of comments I get is higher than Twitter or reddit, despite the number of likes being lower.

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

Yeah, really enjoying the community type vibe going on around here. Feels more like you're having a conversation with a group of people. Excited to see how it all goes

[–] Albatr0ss 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I've been using it for a few weeks now and it seems to be growing steadily. I joined on lemmy.world at random because I didn't really understand how it all works at the start. But that instance and the NZ one seem pretty good, there's some good discussion and few dickheads.

It's not as big as The Other Place of course, but it's gaining popularity slowly. And tbh, I wouldn't really want it to be massive - I like the slower pace, and it seems more welcoming being a smaller community.

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

If you like Apollo, https://www.wefwef.app has a similar UI

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

As that site is struggling at times, we are now also running our own instance of wefwef at wefwef.lemmy.nz

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

Oh interesting. It's a progressive web app, so you can install it on your phone which removes the need to worry about the performance of whatever site was originally hosting it.

I suspect a lot of people are just browsing it via their web browser?

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

My understanding is that progressive web apps still rely on the site's server, it's basically a way to show the website as fullscreen like it was a native app, though there are a few things that PWAs are allowed to do that a normal website doesn't.

The nornal Lemmy site is a PWA as well, so that can be installed the same as wefwef.

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

Only for the initial download depending on their service worker (annoyingly it's super site dependent). I'd need to see dev tools to be sure but I'm pretty confident all the JS assets and stuff are being served locally from my phone.

There's a distinction between being able to install a site to your homescreen, adding a shortcut to the site (which opens in full screen), and installing a site to your homescreen which uses their service worker to effectively be a full local server for the site.

Setting up the service worker for my note taking app was very painful haha

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

Interesting! I guess it depends on the site as to whether anything needs to be processed on the server.

I'd think typically most JS and images are cached in the browser for any site though, right?

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

In general yes, although the root HTML document might not be.

Service workers can do more than caching though, it's effectively a full web server just for that web app that runs on your device. If it's installed I'm pretty sure the data they have will never be cleared by the OS unless you uninstall the app too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Oh thats interesting, I wonder why the wefwef.app server was struggling so much if it doesn't do any processing just serving static content that gets stored on the client. I guess just wasn't prepared for the rush of people checking it out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeap, currently using wefwef.lemmy.nz that is hosted? by Dave here.

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

I've only been on lemmy for a few weeks so I'm really not sure but I think next week is going to see a decent jump in numbers.

How are you finding it so far?

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

Obviously overall engagement and the number of communities? (Equivalent of subreddits) is a lot lower, but hopefully there's a bit of an increase in the coming weeks? Got quite a small community vibe to it at the moment, which is seeing me want to engage more in my "local" communities. Might be a bit of a Goldilocks zone in the coming weeks/months where there's enough engagement, but not full on Reddit levels.