I honestly do not mind it one but. I quite like the interface. It’s minimal but there are some bugs to it which is to be expected. I really do like the overall design of it though. There isn’t too much going on. It’s like old Reddit which I am a big fan of
Involve more work but this kind of change is for the best. Freedom from the tyranny of corporate greed!
Is this the part where we seize the means of production and eat the rich? Because I’m here for it.
Nah, we’re just seizing a little corner where the bosses mostly leave us alone.
Okay but if we eat the rich, I’m here for it
Just so we’re clear, we’re definitely eating the rich, right? Don’t just tell me we have the rich at home.
In case anyone was wondering, I’m pro eating the rich btw.
I think having friction to use it can end up as a good thing. Works as a good first filter for bad/low effort users.
I’m still getting used to this and there’s not much activity yet, but I’ll stick with it. Reddit isn’t worth it, so I’m happy there’s a chance for an alternative.
Concept is great, but there’s a big usability issue (BE: 0.17.4) that quickly needs fixing. When you browse the main index, new posts just pop up and it messes up whatever you were reading and also closes images.
Signed up today, liking it a lot. Looking forward to learning more about it, seems like a viable reddit alternative.
I’m starting to think the splintering caused by instances blocking each other is going to cause users to abandon Lemmy entirely. At the moment instances can suddenly decide to block other instances, and that is going to hurt both users on the instance that put a block into place, as well as users on the blocked instance.
The blocking is awful for an average Lemmy user, because you can get cut off from communities you already subscribed to, without any notification! So you might post and comment without realizing that your content is not getting published, even though you and your local instance still see it.
The user experience would be improved by getting a warning if you try to contribute to a community in this case. And also your subscriptions should show warnings about not working anymore, and those should come up as notifications on the account.
I’m quite lost, and don’t think I fully understand the distributed nature of the various Lemmy instances (if I’m even using those words properly).
I’ll do it like Reddit 10 years ago… wander in, poke around, make a snarky comment or 4 and see where it goes.
I was a bit confused about the place at first too. Here’s a comment I copy-pasted from a previous post of mine:
My friend gave me a great explanation:
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Lemmy the platform is planet Earth
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“Instances” like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth
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When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country
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If you register at lemmy.world, that means your home instance/ “home country” is lemmy.world, but you can “travel” to lemmy.ml, another instance / “country”, to check out and subscribe to their community
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When you subscribe to a different instance that’s not your home instance, you can still participate in their content, and other people will be able to see which instance / “country” you’re from
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Each instance can have its own version of the same “subreddit”, so you can have a c/Memes in your home instance that is different from a c/Memes in another instance. But you can subscribe to both separately
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c/[community name] is the naming convention used here I think like r/[subreddit name] on Reddit. If talking about a community in a different instance, it’s c/[community name]@[instance name] so like c/memes@lemmy.ml
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Donations will help with the cost of running lemmy.world only and not lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.
Someone please correct any of this if any of it is wrong, I’ll happily edit
Hope it helps even a little
Very helpful. I had a longer response typed out but lost it by clicking “next” instead of reply so I’ll try to paraphrase. Is there a way to see a listing of instances and their size?
Not sure I get having communities spread across instances, seems like it would be rife for duplication and too spread apart but perhaps that’s just the whole “fediverse” concept if I’m understanding that properly.
I created https://lemmy.world/c/paramore but I’m going to hold off on any other community creation until I understand things better and I’m confident I’ve found my home “country.”
This is the only one I know of at the moment, though I’m still relatively new as well so there might be a better link for a list of instances and their sizes. Based on some posts I’ve read here, lemmy.ml has the most users, with lemmy.world at about half of lemmy.ml’s and beehaw.org at about a third.
Also, yeah, I think we’re on the same boat when it comes to why different communities are spread out. From what I’ve observed, “duplicate” communities in separate instances seem to all have their own “flavor” of that particular community. Taking the meme communities as an example, sh.itjust.works’ memes have a bit of a French-Canadian flare to them, lemmygrad.ml’s memes are made with a hammer and sickle, lemmy.world has more of that “general everyday memes” feel, etc.
On Reddit, it used to be r/memes -> r/<specific theme here>memes, but here it seems like it’s the opposite, like c/<instance-specific theme here> -> c/memes. It’s like having pizza in New York vs Italy – they’re both pizza but each country has its own twist to it.
I subbed to your community btw as I love me some Paramore myself. Hope to see everything work out easily for your community!
Thanks my dude! More helpful info.
As for the communities, makes me think like more back to message board driven web times, where yeah you could have a dozen Star Wars fan forums but each with their own flavor and eventually you’d find the one that’s your own vibe. I did that and dove head first into a few specific places for retro video games (8/16 bit) and some other niche interests like a specific car model, etc.
There’s an upside to it. I hope this approach gains traction, certainly has seen an injection of life from people jumping ship. But I imagine Reddit will keep plodding along in a week or two as there were a staggering amount of people who had a hard time even understanding why people would leave. Hope the blackout helps.
If the Fediverse is planet earth. Lemmy is 1 country, each server instance is like a village town or city. Other countries where you can talk to follow users etc are Mastodon, Pixelfed, Misskey/Calckey, Peertube, Friendica, etc Like following Twitter users replying etc from inside Reddit.
I thought of it this way too and I think as long as people can get the gist we should be all good, though for me personally I prefer using the planet analogy considering all of these platforms are on the Fedi-universe, and trying out different platforms like Mastodon feels like it’s “on a whole other planet” as a less tech-savvy person
A quick overview of some of the larger platforms in the #Fediverse
i have a question: i’ve made accounts on multiple instances thinking i won’t be able to post on them otherwise, is that okay?
You can make an account on each instance. That’s OK, too!
but then i am a bit confused, if i can use an account on every instance, why is there an option to make accounts per instance in the first place?
Why isn’t there a centralised account log in, and then you select what instances you want to browse?
Also what happens if say, two people have the same username, but are on different instances?
sorry for the myriad of questions i am still new to this whole thing
Instances do not care about users on other instances like that.
A user is not unique by username alone. A user is unique by username AND instance. There may exists another skye on another instance, created by someone else. But only you can be skye@lemmy.world
Think of it like email addresses.
You grab the name abc on gmail, giving you the user abc@gmail.com
Some other person can grab the same name on another mail provider (ie. instance), say abc@outlook.com
You don’t need to have an account on every email provider to be able to send mail accross providers. But nothing is stopping you from making an account on every provider, it’s just that it’s redundant
Another caveat with instances is that some instances block each other. If you made your account in Instance1 that for some reason blocked Instance2, you can not interact with or even see any content from Instance2.
So that also fragments the world here. It may well be that if you actually like some communities in both Instance1 and Instance2, you are forced to have a separate account on each (happened to me already)
The username thing is the one lingering question I have not seen answered as well. I suspect there’s just going to be duplicate people.
Then there is a central authority that encompasses the Fediverse/Lemmy. That also means one single point of failure, eg Login system goes down. Right now if one instance goes down then all of the others are unaffected.
that makes sense, i didn’t think of that.
I dont understand this part either. Should just be a single login across the whole fediverse
using the email address analogy - every server maintains its users. You can’t log in to Gmail with your yahoo email either, but you can still email a yahoo user.
Having multiple servers that you can sign up for helps keep things decentralised. If all the logins are centralised, then either one of two things need to happen:
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One single entity controls all the logins. And if that entity decides to go on a power trip (say… a completely fictitious example where he decides to start charging all servers a ridiculous monthly fee to use the login, then gaslights people who call him out, and doubles down when presented with call logs that show otherwise), the fediverse is dead.
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Everyone has to keep a copy of the same userbase. When 1 person signs up on 1 server, every server needs to acknowledge that signup. This is going to create massive problems if/when the fediverse becomes huge - imagine thousands of people trying to sign up across thousands of servers.
Makes sense, thanks
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If you don’t mind me asking: what’s the importance of choosing a “home country”? Like what consequences does it bring signing up for lemmy.world in comparison to lemmy.ml? As a new user (refugee), how do I know where I belong?
Other than that, and the questions underneath your comment, this makes a lot of sense and helps getting started here. I can see myself wasting hours in this place
Not OP but from what I understand, the instances (home countries) you sign up with don’t really matter on the whole. It’s just that those are different servers. When a server gets too big it can kinda bog down the system and can cause things to get buggy and slow. So it’s better if we all spread out to alleviate so much pressure on one server.
With the reddit migration there’s a lot of us coming in suddenly. So some servers Are having a difficult time keeping up. Luckily with Lemmy.world Ruud is hosting our server and he has a pretty strong background with hosting other federated servers on mastodon. He has already upgraded Lemmy.World to its own designated server with more bells and whistles.
Some servers do have limitations on what they want and expect out of their people, but our server doesn’t have anything like that which I like, I feel like our community (lemmings?) are quite chill.
With big companies like Amazon, they have a plethora of servers, some that are on big tankers out in the middle of the ocean. So with a federated community we are kinda socialist in the way that we have volunteers that are giving up their time an space in order to host our servers. It’s much easier for us to spread it out to host as many people as we can. Speaking of hosting our servers, I know Ruud has set up a patreon so that we can donate to help keep the servers running smoothly. That way it isn’t coming out of his pocket only
Thanks for your reply. This seems like a logical and solid solution to the centralization other social medias end up with, and all the problems this brings with it (looking at you u/spez). I am brand new here, so need to find my way around, but when (if?) I do I sure will send some dineros over Patreon in order to help with the costs
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Yeah, same. I’m using Jerboa and it’s a pretty good user experience, and the app scratches the same itch that Reddit does. We just need to keep posting content and comments!
Jerboa – we’re just adding more made-up words! I think that’s the Android app. I’m on iOS. And honestly, maybe it’s good I take a break from the Reddit itch, I’m getting so many projects done around the house.
me too. but more because of the app (jerboa ae the moment) and having to get used to new ways and interface.
not really happy with it.
yeah it’s janky and timing out / crashing often. But hopefully things will improve quickly!
Yeah, I don’t think I get how communities are spread across all the instances. I understand you can view them if you go looking, but it seems weird to make it so things can be spread too thin or duplicated.
Heck yea brother. Feel like I’m in a random room with three doors that lead to other rooms, with more doors that lead to more rooms…
Sometimes there’s people there, sometimes there’s a rotting body in the corner, hard to say what you’ll find.
It’s tricky and a learning process for sure
Yeah… and the odd site/UI bug happens and I don’t know if it’s me or the site – that’s the only bad part so far!
username checks out
Liking the clean interface reminiscent of old reddit
Seems solid, I was really excited for Mastodon and loved the idea but…I didn’t really use Twitter much so I didn’t have a need for it still.
Reddit has always been my go to social media so I’m glad a fedi version of it exists with lemmy!
Yeah, I’m enjoying it outside of the small bugs. They’re not breaking the platform so I can live with them until they’re smoothed out. But the smaller communities are kind of a nice change of pace to be honest, it’s definitely like old Reddit before it got a case of the capitalisms. Terminal case, unfortunately.
But with the decentralized nature of it, we don’t have to worry about that happening again!
Guys, it’s wild. Let’s go.
I feel like the algorithm is weighted too strongly towards upvoted posts. I know there are new ones out there, but I opened my app this morning to see everything is from 17 hours ago.
This is a bug that is being worked on that will be fixed in the next release
It took a solid couple days to wrap my head around how things work, where posts are coming from and how to find communities I’m interested in. I’m nervous that’s going to be just enough of a barrier that folks will say forget it when trying it out.
Otherwise it’s a refreshing take. Really wish there was an iOS app you could find in the App Store. All I find is mastodon apps.
I like it. I prefer the UI plus it’s really refreshing to browse some similar communities i also browse on reddit and not seeing that many memes.
I signed up yesterday. It is close enough to something like old.reddit where I feel comfortable navigating around. I dont know how else to describe it, but it really feels like the site is populated by people creating content organically, and not just a bunch of bots or marketing accounts instigating engagement. Its refreshing that way
