I really want to like lemmy, but it’s difficult. I’m new to all this fediverse thingy, and I might just have old habits and perceptions how things should work but… I keep seeing the same posts more than once, iOS experience is not that good really, sometimes I see dead posts from 2 years ago for some reason, despite having subscribed to like 30 communities there aren’t that many new posts to read.
Part of it probably that subreddits had millions of people so a lot of posts every minute, but it still feels underwhelming.
It’s not as doomscrolly. Maybe I should find something else to waste my time on haha
What is your experience with lemmy? Maybe I just do things wrong. Let me know
i mean so far, I’m enjoying it. sure, the community isn’t as large, but that’s mostly a good thing. on reddit, if i made a post, it would be like a 25% chance to get hundreds of comments, and a 75% chance to get none. here, I’ve gotten a few, high quality responses on every question post I’ve made. i do miss the “auto hide read posts” feature, but maybe that’ll get added some day
You can hide read posts here! In the web app settings for your profile:
Is there a way to stop the endless loading of posts on the website? Because every time I try to click a post, it moves down because a new post loaded, and this happens every ten seconds, constantly.
It’s a bug that wasnt an issue when the community was smaller. Last I heard they will replace it with a refresh icon that pops up at the top when new posts are available.
Oh thank God is a bug, I really thought it was a feature of the site.
Thank jeebus. I was getting all fussy thinking it was a me/my phone/my browser problem.
It’s amazing what kinda bugs can be exposed in your system when your user base expands by orders of magnitude overnight
I’ve heard that one is just a bug. Hopefully they’re working on it. Mlem (the iOS app) seems to have it handled, but it does crash a lot, and it’s frustrating to lose your scroll progress. I think we just have to wait it out in these early days 😵💫
I also don’t seem to have that problem with Jerboa.
This is incredibly helpful! Thank you so much!
Incredible
What is considered “read”? Something you scroll past or a post that you open?
Ok, I just tested it out. It’s any post that you upvote, downvote, or open the comments for. Expanding an image is not enough.
Edit: Seems like opening a post’s comments in Mlem (iOS app) doesn’t seem to flag something as “read”. But open a post in the web app and it disappears from both on next reload. Up/downvoting work on both.
Edit 2: If you upvote a post and then remove your upvote, that seems to count as “read” as well. In case you’re like me and can’t commit to an upvote or downvote for every post 😅
Fediverse currently reminds me of Reddit from 10 years ago in frequency of content. There is something nice about not being in the rat race, less toxicity.
yeah it’s nice knowing that someone is gonna see my comment instead of it getting lost amongst hundreds. feels a lot more like a community that way
The reality is that there was/is no reddit alternative and right now we’re all in this transitory phase where we’re all looking for a new home. We’ll all just have to wait for the dust to settle. Lemmy isn’t perfect but is improving and additionally other alternatives like kbin and tildes are in the works.
To your larger point, much of what you’re feeling is the abrupt break in habits. I’ve been using the gap to develop more positives ones, and it’s been great.
A thought came to my mind when reading your comment.
Instead of finding a new home, let’s make lemmy our new home. Let’s try to populate lemmy more, get its activity up, and post more than we would’ve on reddit (since we have less users, we would need more posts per user), so it can stand a chance at being a reddit competitor.
Yeah I agree and am working on it in terms of engagement. Usability is going to be key for whichever platform eventually takes over. It could absolutely be Lemmy, but I’m watching for other possibilities as well.
I’m home :)
I’ve been told my handle should work on all the lemmys but so far it only works on lemmy.one. I tried logging in with this at lemmy.world and beehaw and it didn’t work. I tried creating a new login on both of those and it also didn’t work. I want to like it but I’m confused and frustrated. I’ll give it some time and see where the dust settles as you said. Call me old fashioned though but I just don’t think shitposting on a forum should be so damn complicated.
You should never have to go to the actual websites for the other instances. Just like email, you wouldn’t expect to be able to use your Gmail account to log into Yahoo, right? Use lemmy.one as your homepage and browse everything from there. From there, you can use the Communities section to search/browse communities hosted on any instance, including Beehaw and lemmy.world.
Can you tell me how to make a new comment? So far, it’s just allowing me to reply to others but no option to make one new…
Agree that it shouldn’t be so complicated. I see that as a major flaw of the platform that will curtail adoption, but who knows, maybe one will win out over the others?
In any case, my understanding is that you can’t log into the other instances with your username from lemmy.one, but you can read posts and interact with communities on different lemmy sites. For instance, I’m commenting from lemmy.world on a post you made using lemmy.one at a community hosted on lemmy.ml, but we can both read each other’s comments, and so can people that signed up on other instances like beehaw.org.
It will get better quickly—there are people working around the clock on apps and improvements right now. This isn’t like your normal social media site where they can use seed money and advertising to buy the best infrastructure right off the bat. This is a grassroots effort to make something that can evolve into a unique and independent service.
If we all stick it out with alternative options like this right now, we will be looking at a much freer future for online communication later. If we get annoyed and go crawling back to the capitalist overlords at FB/Twitter/Reddit, then we give them everything they wanted in the first place, and the internet will take one more step towards being a walled garden casino of ideas.
You don’t need to create multiple Lemmy accounts. You can search for and find and join subs from lemmy.world on your Lemmy.one account. it’s not instantly intuitive coming from Reddit, but once you make the connection to the other subs on different instances its established for you
Yeah, I try to share this to help people get it…
GUIDE:
-
don’t go to a community on the server that it’s on (e.g.
https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy) [NO login] -
do go to a community on the server you’re on (e.g.
https://lemmy.one/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml) [YES login!]
everything else works the same using the instance-to-instance federation, but only as long as you use YOUR lemmy instance, not the one that the Community lives on.
Thank you, it makes so much more sense to me now.
-
Im talking to you from a lemmy.world account right now. Whatever instance you chose to create your account with is the website you need to go to each time you login. From there, you will still have access to search comment etc with any other community through your current instance.
Are you on mobile or are you using desktop? The mobile app is definitely still in development so it’s missing a lot of those QOL things that you are missing.
For me it’s been helpful to use that fediverse search tool, and copy and paste it into the search. Seems to work better on desktop. I’ve got a decent feed going today, but it’s definitely a work in progress.
You’re successfully doing it right now, commenting on a post from Lemmy.ml. You don’t need to log in to other instances, like Beehaw, to comment.
Your handle does work for all of the various Lemmy servers. But to access them it’s like your email, you wouldn’t log in to your Gmail account from Yahoo. Yahoo has no idea what your Gmail username and password is. So how can it let you in? And like email because both servers speak the same protocol you can interact with other users on other servers just like if you had their email address.
In your case lemmy.one is your email server so to speak. You can access any other Lemmy community or set of communities on another lemmy server by searching directly for their address on your home server or if someone else has interacted with another server already that server’s communities will show up in your home server’s All list and you can see those posts there and interact with them as if they were local to your home server.
Honestly man, as much as I 100% agree on the UI difficulties, it’s like a breath of fresh air. There’s good music posted, people posted books and I looked and really wanted to read them. It’s more human. There’s this tiny little handful of content here, but it’s not all same-y and in-joke-y and weird.
I’m not trying to hate on reddit, I still go to reddit for news because of more or less what you’re talking about (the weird sorting in the newsfeed here and the lack of certain content). But what I like about here is that there are nerdy people, there’s real content, there’s not this weird hivemind and endless dopamine content. The great stuff about reddit was always the in-depth storytelling and unique content, to me, not just the gratification aspect of everything working right and new content popping up. I’m happy with Lemmy despite the hiccups because it seems like it’s getting back to that.
You aren’t doing anything wrong! This site/app (lemmy) and the concept (fediverse) are still super early days so there are going to be many problems. The site has some layout issues and there isn’t nearly as much content as Reddit but that’s just because it is new.
The most important bit, to me at least, is that the fundamental idea of the fediverse is good. We have had to many instances where social sites like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter can just decide what people can and can’t say, they can remove our content and they can monetize it all without doing any real work of their own as far as creating content. The idea of the fediverse ensures that no one server, person or company has all the content and thus the control.
I really hope people stick with something fediverse whether it be lemmy, kbin or any of the other projects out there. Post content there, cross post it from Reddit if you really have to post to Reddit too for whatever reason. Please don’t give these companies all the control anymore.
It’s very new. Very valid concerns, but most of them are growing pains. If people just stick with this for a while it will improve by leaps and bounds.
Personally I’ve focused more on the community aspect than the software for now, since the latter is actively being worked on by a lot of people, so that’s just a waiting game. The community has been fantastic, though. Already a nice feel in a lot of discussions.
You make it sound like not doomscrolly is a bad thing
People will rarely say they want to endlessly scroll, but given the options, they’ll always choose the option that let’s them consume more content, aka doom scroll.
I am also new here and I am a long time lurker, 2008, from the place that shall not be named.
My initial feel is that Lemmy is very much like pre Digg days and a kin to the traditional style forum boards where discussions aren’t old news when the post is only 12 hrs old.
This is a breath of fresh air even with the growing pains I expect may come with the sudden influx of refugees.
If I’m spending less time staring at my phone and more time picking up a book or something, all the better for me. I’ve found myself engaging more and doomscrolling less though, so the time feels more well spent even though I’m spending less time then I would have on reddit.
I find it exciting. Very reminiscent of the Digg exodus. Sure, it can be a little frustrating at times. But reddit was going downhill for me long before the API stupidity. Lemmy feels like returning home in a way.
The mobile browser version is pretty much unusable for me. I select view All, then organize by either Hot or Active, and what I get is an endless stream of posts, but newly made and from two years ago (so, neither Hot not Active). And the page becomes unresponsive because of the endless stream.
The app works better but kept timing out when trying to upvoted stuff. Just updated to see if that fixes it.
So far, I gotta say squabbles is working better for me as a reddit alternative.
I hope they disable the live-update stuff soon.
The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example. Lemmy should prevent this, community names should be unique, it should have an index of all the Lemmy Fediverse where instances can lookup if a community exists instead of waiting for a user to import that community to his instance. Something similar to what BTC does with the decentralized ledger.
The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example.
I agree, to an extent. You’re right in that if you were part of the vibrant community of /r/piracy then it’s miserable to see it shatter here on lemmy. That said, this only applies if you’re expecting lemmy to be a 1 for 1 reddit replacement. For this type of community to remain cohesive, /r/piracy would have had to spin up their own instance and in /r/piracy direct everyone to lemmy.piracyinstance.whatever.
You can’t really “fix” this in a central way because even if you did, it would be trivial to create an instance that would allow duplicate community names. Also, I can see a lot of use cases for lemmy which do not intend to be federated.
That said, it’s not necessarily as big a problem as it appears, if you just accept that this is how the fediverse works. There’s no single source of control, so of course people can create 147 different /c/piracy communities if they wish to. Once you accept that, then it’s not really that difficult to subscribe to all the /c/piracy communities you can find.
The problem itself could be diminished by a few new features which I feel certain will emerge in the future:
- linked communities, where one communities content is syndicated to another. So if you post in !selfhosted@lemmy.world then you also post in !selfhosted@lemmy.ml. This would work differently to cross-posting, all comments would be reflected on both instances.
- grouped communities, where you can subscribe to a group of /c/selfhosted communities with one click, so you see them all in your feed.
I think that makes a lot of sense. Reddit was also like that, I moderate /r/me_irl, rival of /r/meirl. But now you can also use the same names if you want.
What about usernames though? Are they universal throughout Lemmy?
Usernames are only universal in the same way an email address is. Any instance can have an @citizenpremier but only you can be @citizenpremier@lemmy.ml.
I don’t mean to be a douche about it but you’re still thinking about it in a very corporate-social kind of way. For something to be universal it requires a central point of control, which doesn’t exist in the fediverse.
I think what they really need is an autosubscribe, so you can autosubscribe to /c/Piracy on all federated servers. (Then of course be able to block certain instances if they’re horrible)
I mean the user base is less than 1% of reddits. So of course you’re going to have less posts. You’re relying on people for browsing, you either can chose to be content with how much people are posting, or get to posting yourself.
It’s tricky at times, but I’m really liking it after a few days. It’s a bit chaotic but in a fun way I think.
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out https://browse.feddit.de for a way to search for more communities
Hope you start to enjoy it more :-)
I really just want a good r/all functionality.
If you filter to All and sort by Active does that not more or less do the job? I never really used /r/All so I’m maybe not the best judge.
As someone who used /r/all before, what you say is exactly the same as I’m used to. Maybe sort by “Hot” though. Reddits algorithm is somewhere between “Hot” and “Active” here. Active is too slow, hot is too fast.
Is there a way to stop everything from constantly updating/moving around once I’ve loaded the page? It’s like it adds new posts to the top (even when sorting by active/hot) and bumps everything down.
I don’t think so, seen a lot of people talking about that. I tend to stay in Subscribed/New, so it’s not a thing I see often, but I know what you mean.
I think maybe developers are working on it, but not sure tbh.
Oh well, thanks for your response. I’m sure it will get sorted eventually.
Yeah, hope so.
Give it some time, you’ll start to see more and a bigger variety of posts. Additionally, change your sort of posts once in awhile, and enable the “all” selection and you’ll see a bigger variety of posts
I’m confused to be honest, but I admit I just started. But like, where do I look at pictures of houseplants and post mine? Do I find a server devoted to houseplants? Or maybe I should just finally figure out Instagram for that.
There’s a houseplants sub on mander.xyz. I’ll see if I can figure out how to link it…
!houseplants@mander.xyz … Nope…
https://mander.xyz/c/houseplants … Jumps to the browser at least in Jerboa.
No idea if there is an equivalent of typing r/subreddit…
Here’s a link: /c/houseplants@mander.xyz
Linking is a bit clunky and a lot of people post direct links to a community with its home instance URL, which causes problems when you’re browsing around. That’s an issue I hope improves over time as the software matures.
Edit: I don’t know if that link will work in apps. I’m using the TestFlight of Mlem on iOS and it just crashes the app 😂. But in the browser it’ll take you to the community in your home instance instead of the community’s home instance.
