Asklemmy

I find it easier than using mastodon for the first time tbh

Been here 6 days and here are some of my thoughts:

Pros:

• the community is great. I've been more active here than on reddit and I noticed people answer your posts/comments more to discuss than criticize your POV.
• it's nice to have a lot of options in terms of instances
• the app is surprisingly good. It's no Apollo/Joey, but for something that's in its initial stages is surprisingly useable
• on browser, kbin.social is nice (I don't use lemmy on pc)
• many of the subs I follow on reddit have their own communities here

Cons:

• it can still be confusing, specially for new members or people who aren't used to how the Fediverse is set up
• I still miss the niche subs I follow on reddit. i know I can start my own but I don't have time nor the experience to effectively moderate communities
• there is, of course, a big difference in terms of activity (again compared to reddit) due to the massive difference in the number of users

Is it a reddit replacement? No. Reddit is too big and established (and mainstream) to be replaced in such a short period. But imho lemmy is a great alternative. Like I've mentioned before, just participating here has drastically lessened my reddit usage. It can get better. I'm excited to see there it goes.

Edit: sorry for all the typos. I'm new at using flosiboard and it doesntl't have spell check yet lol.

cool that it's written in Rust also decentralization (not the blockchain kind) is the future, but...
lemmy ui feels kinda unpolished, and sometimes community join requests just hang forever.

Too confusing for the average user.

I dislike many things about the UI and UX.

Nevertheless, it's useable, and interesting enough to keep using for now and see how it goes.

Very happy and reminds me of the old pre-digg Reddit days! My main concerns are

• If I pick a popular server it will go down due to performance issues, but if I get a smaller one it may go offline because it's just a small hobby project. I don't want to lose my account.

• I'm worried about communities duplicating on other instances and me not being able to ask questions to the same pool of people with xposting

This is way too confusing for an average reddit user. Too much undefined jargon like 'fediverse'. And jargon based on other jargon, like an average user is going to know what 'federated' means, to be able to suss out any words based on it.

And finding communities with '!something@community' is not going to work for that average user longterm. If every search requires an exclamation point, just add it on the backend. And if it requires two pieces of data separated by an @ symbol, just have 2 inputs.

I barely just started but it feels almost as natural as normal reddit.

Lemmy federates Reddit better than Mastodon federates Twitter. Mastodon is confusing. But on Lemmy I can clearly see the relationship between instances, and I can use it all as one big system.

Much like when I went from Twitter to Mastodon, finding "my people" is a lot more work. It's unpleasantly easy for links to a community to take me directly to that instance instead of leaving my on my instance where I'd be able to subscribe and interact. But also like Mastodon, the experience is much nicer once things start getting set up. Really nice not getting pestered to use the app constantly!

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...

It’s welcoming but confusing. I think there’s two reasons for the latter:

1- Many of us forget how basic Reddit was when we first started using it, and the features we all know and love got added over time and repeatedly refined based on use.

2- Most of us here are because we have been users of incredibly well designed apps crafted by developers with a passion for great UI. If I try using the (new) Reddit site or their default app, I find myself equally confused.

There are still so many changes happening in Lemmy functionality, and as we’ve seen with Mastodon, we will hopefully soon be overwhelmed with great apps.

In the meantime there’s the great community already here and growing. I saw a comment that you can estimate that Reddit has 90% lurkers, 9% commenters, 0.9% posters, and 0.1% “community builders” I think it’s those latter groups who are leading the exodus, which is great news for us and terrible news for whoever ends up owning Reddit.

It's pretty good. Looks like early days but hopefully more users will bring more content and we can all do our part to contribute and help it to grow in the mean time!

It's weird, a little confusing, and a little janky. Love it so far. It's not a novel observation on my part but it definitely feels new and exciting the way Reddit and Tumblr did back in the day.

Liking it so far. A social network is only as good as its community. The community is small but high quality. I'm excited to see Lemmy grow.

I think it's got all the potential, and I really mean it. I want to be here and I will try to contribute wherever I can. The onboarding of the platform is confusing, but everyone already knows that. I can see the growing pains, but that's totally fine.

I enjoy the format, and I very much like what Lemmy is meant to become.

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

It does remind me of Reddit when I first joined. I like federated services like Matrix and Mastodon, but Reddit was exactly how I liked interacting online. I'm really missing RES keybindings (in particular a/z voting, j/k navigation, x expandos, <Return> thread collapse) but the UX fits my needs very well otherwise.

The web is okay, kind of, but the mobile apps (what I mainly use to browse this stuff) are sorely lacking, especially on iOS.

I decided to write my own client (mostly for myself) and so far the API seems very straightforward. Might eventually publish it to the stores, if its mature enough.

It's heavily based on Apollo (in case it wasn't obvious). One might even call it a rip-off 😅

What I'd really like to work on after the basic navigation is done is discoverability. I think the platform really needs some improvement there.

Feels very early. The site design needs quite a bit of work.

• The usual confusion on fediverse domain boundaries and usage. Seems very easy to accidentally route to another server rather than viewing that content within the current server (community/user links).
• Doesn't retain sort/filter options on the home feed. I get that the default is local to promote some growth, but when I switch to subscribed I want it to stay that way.
• Excess visual space, cluttered design with avatars and community icons and excess padding. It falls into some of the traps that make me despise the reddit redesign.
• Strange prioritization of elements; visual emphasis on features that seem pretty niche or obvious (crosspost, tooltip text post preview, comment language, usernames), while more important elements get dwarfed or lost in the noise (timestamps, comment delineation + nesting).
• Live reloads are confusing and would be nice to be able to disable.
• There's a real lack of dom class tagging that would make it easier for me to remedy some of those issues with custom css and the number of !important definitions doesn't inspire confidence.
• Ultimately the above are all things that can be worked out. If the core systems work well enough then the design is something that can be augmented. I've had some navigation issues (including a page that wouldn't load because it received a malformed json response from internal service), but the core functionality seems to be mostly there. Whether it'll hold up to more load we'll have to see.

The instance system definitely makes it a bit confusing. I'm a programmer and I've played around with some Mastodon stuff during my study. Still, as a user, it's quite chaotic sometimes.

I'm kinda wondering what this will converge towards. Is everyone going to join the same instance? Are different communities be kinda randomly spread over instances, where for every community in the end one instance dominates? Or will there just be chaos?

There's also some buggy behavior every now and then, but that's easily forgiven imo.

Very similar to how Reddit used to be. I expect higher quality content here, and so far, I've found it. Just waiting on a few niche communities to be created, but I expect they will pop up in time. Good riddance to Reddit.

And the less said about other social media sites the better.

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.

Other that all of the sign up feature being very confusing, I kinda feel afraid of selecting a less popular space to create my account on, as its not really documented what happens if the space your account is created on dies.

It's an exciting re-imagining of a few ideas (usenet, digg) seemingly mashed together.

I'm finding a lot of content that I've voted on, and I'm maybe done-with. I'd love to know (where to find) an option to hide content I've seen and voted around, so I can just count on regular in-mail to chase the conversation. I'm sure that nit will go away once I find some menu-option I'm just not seeing!

I'm really enjoying Lemmy so far, it's a lot different from Reddit but at the same time feels familiar. I understand and like the concept of a bunch of small hosted servers federated together. I feel like if user logins were also federated that would solve a ton of the onboarding issues for new people. I really miss default subreddits too.

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.

So far im still confused, but I’ve learned a lot in the time I’ve been here, so i think I’ll come around. I feel like the main issue I personally have is population of communities and actually finding communities. Ive found a couple ill look at in an asklemmy thread and im sure itll grow over time, but I personally dont have much I can contribute yet, so im not sure how much I can do personally.

I'm new to this. I've always been a lurker and never really had the urge to connect to Reddit or other social platforms like twitter. But this feels better. It's daunting at first but after being on the platform for a very short time I see something good and its interesting. Some new but very familiar. So I connected and I want to contribute. That's how it makes me feel.

The community has been way more friendly than any other social media I've been on. Th UI/UX is confusing and at times bad, but it makes do. It has been a nice experience.

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.

its just reddit tbh

much better experience than mastodon imo

I love it. I am genuinely excited to be on here, and it is literally the only social media I use at the moment.

The single feature I that I think would improve the site tremendously is some kind of indicator to know if I have posted in a thread before. It is silly, but sometimes discussions blow up and I cannot remember everything I write.

Like, just a colored dot next to the title in topics I have posted in would make the experience so much better.