I like it a lot. I come here often, it’s a good addition to my reddit use, it has some nice people and some interesting content.
I love that it is decentralized, which means that there will always be a server without ads, tracking or bad governance.
Also it feels like being part of Lemmy is being part of something new and novel. The idea of decentralizing services online, away from corporate silos, should be resurrected.
Platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, and other are precisely the way social media should work in my opinion. The internet was always intended to be a decentralized system that’s not controlled by commercial entities.
We have mountains of evidence that commercial social media platforms are manipulated to serve the interests of the companies that own them, and this manipulation is harmful to the users of these platforms. There is a conflict of interest at play on commercial social media platforms between the interests of the companies that own them and those of the users of the platforms.
I was going to write something but this commet resumes it all. Compleatly agree.
Not enough people, or not enough participation by current members. Basically not enough activity/liveliness. This will probably solve itself given enough time.
It seems like a lot of Lemmy users are still active reddit users which IMO weakens the platform. People need to stop participating in corporate controlled social media. I know this is sometimes not possible for whatever reasons but if you can break away then you really should, and just submit content to the fediverse.
I think Lemmy would flourish if there were more topical instances with general-ish shared communities, like how mastodon is. However that kinda goes against the whole shared sublemmy type of platform where topical discussion is shared between every federatedinstances. I guess that may be the whole reddit type of platform being inherently centralized by design. I guess we will just have to see what the future brings and try to guide it in the right direction.
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Hmm idk it hasn’t changed fast.
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The influx of people from /r/genzedong is a serious problem that is damaging to the Lemmyverse as they are flooding many communities with low quality comments and the main federated feed with really questionable and historically revisionist memes etc.
For existing users it isn’t so bad as you mostly only see the communities that you have subscribed to, but it gives off a seriously bad first impression to new users that are not coming from these banned subreddits.
I would never send new users to lemmy.ml, but a few other servers have lemmygrad.ml blocked, which helps a lot!
It reminds me of when Reddit was first starting to kick off before the digg exodus. The fact that it brings those feelings leads me to be hopeful that things will go well.
Lemmy is working great on the web (desktop + mobile) but it should be noted that some people are still complaining about the app. Furthermore, genzedong might turn away some new people and repost are frequent on some lemmunities (lemmy communities). But discussions are different (in a good sense) from the one on reddit. I think the lemmy is great and I hope it will have a bright future
I don’t use it with an app but I totally think that lemmy deserves a really well made app. Who has the time though ;)
I agree, I don’t use neither the app but I might to help debug it
I use Lemmy almost exclusively with Jerboa, and I quite like it!
I would genuinely like to work on jerboa more than I do lemmy-ui, not only because kotlin is a much language than javascript, but also to get away from web-bloat, and back to native apps. Android is currently ( and trending more to be )the most popular OS worldwide.
Problem is, I’m not much of an android dev, and could really use some help with it.
I think it would benefit from specific communities or content creators adopting it. As long as it’s only general topics (technology, Linux, …) it has basically the same info as Reddit/Hackernews/… but less up to date and less commented. It is useless if you already use those other platforms and probably can’t get ahead this way.
I could see Godot/Blender/… adopt it though. Blender already uses PeerTube. That would help kickstart this place.
The software is great but the people aren’t there.
I like some parts of it (showing how many upvotes and downvotes you got beside just a sum is good).
But it’s mostly less good version reddit (It does not have it’s ecosystem, Like the excellent RES that makes it possible to incrementally read a post , no multireddits , and of course no big communities with good content like on reddit) .
I feel like improving the platform is the way to make it a more worthwhile use of most people time (As it should among other things will bring more people).
What features is lemmy missing that RES has?
I can click on a comment to mark it as read and then just display read comments (and set this as the default, by default it marks as read just comments you “looked at” which does not seem to work as well).
I can also tag a certain user, so stuff like “lemmy developer” will appear next to his name.
I also shows the sum of upvotes and downvotes i made to a guy, so if he has “-4” that means his judgement is probably not very good and i should avoid engaging in conversation with him, if it’s high it might be especially “useful” to start talking to him.
Another advantage of reddit (at least old reddit) that given the front page has a few default subscriptions i can remove some i am not interested in, on Lemmy “all” stream it looks like basically just communism propaganda/advocacy (So you are not going to start looking for regular stuff there, which makes people post less regular stuff and the circle continues), having the ability on the client side to block a specific instance or community could be useful (not to mention some people know people who lived on communist countries and heard some pretty bad stories, even if you think it was not “true communism” or something like that it can still give a pretty bad impression). There is the “remove” button but it is not clear what it does (It should have a pop up when hovering over him).
Could you add some of these as issues to the github, they seem pretty useful.
Maybe one day people will develop browser addons to enhance lemmy ^^
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But it’s mostly less good version reddit (It does not have it’s ecosystem, Like the excellent RES that makes it possible to incrementally read a post , no multireddits , and of course no big communities with good content like on reddit) .
what’s RES?
what’s RES?
I think the software, even though we’ve been adding and working on it a lot, is in a really good place. As others said below, we just need more users, and non-tech-oriented communities.
The only large growth that the lemmy federated network experiences, is when reddit messes up, and there’s a large exodus of users to a new instance. We really have to do a better job of bringing over reddit communities, or encouraging them to start their own instances, as they can fully control their content.
reddit largely owes its success to digg’s failings, nothing wrong with that user acquisition approach imo 🤷♀️
mostly i like the sense of community here. people are actually interacting with me lol
Yeah I like that as well :)
Or are we all bots?
if you’re bots then you’re a very polite and friendly bunch so i don’t mind much
We’re all here for you. You’re actually the only human here, we exist for you, Duchess :)
aww, i have a cute little circle of online imaginary friends!
Are we?
It’s pretty great. There’s a lot more content than when I first joined. Plus, the software itself is very fast and usable.
yeah I really love the feeling of a browser not being slowed down by useless telemetry and advertising.
Lemmy could be compared to the comment section on news sites or YouTube, with the added advantage of allowing for more interaction between users in threads that are more structured
I think the software is great!
If we could follow people, post to our own profile, and host/play videos, then it would be the only fediverse website anyone needs!
post to our own profile
Mastodon is perfect fine for that purposes.
and host/play videos
eh. PeerTube should be used for videos.
A link aggregator can then link to PeerTube videos rather than waste time on adding video support.
yeah, but, I need 3 accounts across 3 websites to participate in the fediverse. those features would make lemmy the one-stop-shop.
If lemmy would support videos it would be a much more difficult software to host. I like that it’s very lightweight.
I completely agree, but I think video hosting would be great as an optional addon
As always, nice discussion and interesting info on a variety of subjects from sorting by new, especially coming from lemmy.ml, plus a small dose of lemmygrad for my political needs (although genzedong is sometimes too based even for myself…).
too much tech ppl
I think the issue is not the presence of tech ppl, but a combination of the world view they bring and their unwillingness to recognize their bias.
Examples of ways this can get annoying:
- insisting to people who say ‘it’s too difficult’ or ‘I’m not interested in doing that’ that it is, in fact, very easy to do.
- outsized importance to tech/security issues, often ignoring/downplaying other issues
- primarily cis white hetero male viewpoint, problems with privilege
- so many links about tech shit, like please share what you like but goddamn where are my news articles on something not tech related
in b4 ‘not all techies’, if this doesn’t apply to you fuck yea keep being awesome
insisting to people who say ‘it’s too difficult’ or ‘I’m not interested in doing that’ that it is, in fact, very easy to do.
I agree with your assessment, but on the other hand sometimes people don’t know or forget about the hard work by volunteers to even make things work in the state they are. Aggressively claiming that this project isn’t user friendly and that’s why people can’t use it and it should have a nicer UI and whatnot sometimes is very unfair. There isn’t a behavioral scientist and a shitload of UI designers in every open-source software project ^^
Yea I’m thinking more about when someone posts an article about security issues and a layperson entering and being absolutely overwhelmed by what they need to do to become “secure” and lamenting that it’s difficult to do the things they wish to do, to be more secure. Or when someone talks about how linux gaming is great and then a layperson says I don’t want to learn linux and a tech person tells them how easy it is to install gentoo.
To be clear I don’t think this is specifically a tech person issue - most people are shaped and biased by their own experiences and the younger you are the less likely you are for this knowledge to have truly sunk in. It just so happens, like you mentioned, that the tech people are the people most inclined to start alternative tech websites such as lemmy and thus are proliferated all over this website.
The key to solving this problem is to take a more humanistic approach. Always assume the person on the other side of the screen is a human with thoughts and feelings and that they are legitimately trying their best. If they say something is too difficult and you’re having trouble understanding how it could be, ask them why it’s difficult for them. Allow space for differing viewpoints and be respectful of others. Of course, if someone takes advantage of the space you offer them to insult you or derail a topic or otherwise clearly troll then you can ignore them, but we need to flip the script of all the internalized values we’ve taken in from other social media platforms - the protective skills we’ve learned to not waste our time on platforms which don’t take trolling or bad behavior seriously are skills which don’t promote a very welcoming and healthy community.
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Oh I can totally see how someone would feel that way. Sorry but unfortunately it’s like that on many smaller alternatives to the big social networks. I guess it’s because it’s mostly tech people that think about the problems and implications that the big social media brings. Tech people then can then find an alternative.
I guess this won’t change in the near future.
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well, yes, among my interests technology also has a place
because lemmy is more technology-focused, the technology-related communities happen to be more active and therefore worth to post to, whereas other communities that align with my interests are rather empty…
i try to post different content to lemmy, and it happens that some of it is technology-related :)
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be the change you want to see :)
(i’ll also try to be the change i want to see)
Yeah, I think it’s cool. It has filled the niche that Reddit filled for me before, and I don’t need to deal with all the Reddit drama.
But there’s also no shortage of Lemmy drama. People talk about defederation, Nazi/tankie mods/communities/instances, etc. Hopefully this is all excitement over a new platform and not a sign of how this platform will continue.
I just want a link aggregator where people discuss articles, and having a place for other discussion is nice too. But it seems that even the most technical communities discuss irrelevant drama.
But on the whole, I’m enjoying it. I sub to the communities that interest me and ignore most of the stuff I don’t like. I’ve even contributed to some lemmy-adjacent projects, and I’ll probably contribute to Lemmy itself eventually.
