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I’m loving it too- I miss a lot of subreddits and the sheer volume of content from the other site, but it feels quite special here at the moment. Also I am loving how quickly Lemmy and all of the supporting apps are developing! I am using Mlem and am very impressed. I want to like wefwef and agree that it is very similar to Apollo, but I just can’t cope with web apps.
I think the content level has gotten better even in the past few days.
I predict at ~200,000 users, there will be a good enough flow of posts and comments that it won’t feel as empty compared to Reddit.
I feel like I’ve seen a lot more posts in just the past few days since I’ve started coming here.
It was slow when I came in last month, but it has gotten to pretty high levels of interaction since.
We just need the niche stuff for us to customize and we will be good to go.
Lemmy.world server was getting hammered on July 3rd. I was part of the wave on the 3rd. But since then things have been much smoother and I see a lot more activity.
It takes time to develop custom content. Reposts are easy. Culture takes effort. Beans take effort.
Beans take a lot.
That’s a fair assessment. Communities like !selfhosted@lemmy.world are slowly but certainly getting better.
If you are on iOS try Mlem (if you can get on the TestFligh). It’s a much better, native experience.
Another one worth a shot is Memmy, which I’ve settled of personally, as a prior Apollo user.
I’d describe it as being halfway the two, but to me, it just feels best to use.
As far as these beta apps go, I’m pretty surprised it’s this smooth to explore and use Lemmy today!
For mastodon, I just found an incredible FOSS app for iOS too; Ice Cubes. It’s mind blowing, really, how far fediverse has got in these past years since I last actively used it!
Trying Memmy now and it feels great! +1 for Ice Cubes.
Memmy just went live on iOS public AppStore for anyone finding TestFlight full.
Maybe I’m just close minded but I hate the tongue on the Mlem app logo. Remove the tongue and its a cute mascot. Leave the tongue and it looks like an app for furries. It’s just kind of off putting to me.
You can actually change the icon from settings, and if I’m not wrong, some of them don’t display a prominent tongue or one at all.
But, then again, the app’s name is literally “mlem” which is the cutest and goofiest thing that animals do, which I think you should definitely search on internet if the concept isn’t familiar to you! 🥹 the tongue could make more sense after knowing the context, and probably won’t give those vibes
The tongue was the main reason I wanted to use Mlem!
As soon as I can get a solid app experience instead of going to lemmy.world I’ll be happy.
I have no plans on going back
I completely understand where you’re coming from with web apps. Wefwef is very impressive, but it is not as smooth as a native app would be.
I dunno, it seems really impressive to me.
It is, but I still encounter weird bugs and choppiness all over the place. I am thankful that it is more than just some website without the navigation controls, and I’m sure it will get better.
Hijacking top comment: This is totally unnecessary and I love it.
Memmy is another good option if you’re on iOS.
It’s fine but way too much talk about reddit.
Who?
Ronnie Pickering!
I mean naturally.
We’re all still processing what happened to us over there.
Give it a few weeks. Most people on here probably come from Reddit. A bit like finding out your wife cheated and getting used to new environments and situations, just on a much smaller scale.
Nice overall but still a bit silent here and there.
But I actually have more motivation to interact here than I ever had on Reddit.
With it being a little quieter it’s so much more calmer feeling
GOTTA BRING UP THAT INTENSITY LEVEL! THIS AIN’T NO YOGA CLASS! GO ARGUE WITH SOMEONE! CONTENT GAINZ! 💪😁
Wait: That’s Meta Threads. Never mind.
Commenting in Reddit felt very claustrophobic in a way. And saturated. Kind of sad, also, if you were some days late to some nice topic, and get buried under thousands and thousands of comments made prior yours, and have zero interactions at that point from anyone, even if you asked a very relevant question or whatever.
But I suspect Lemmy will get to that point too. Right now, though, it’s light enough to actually warrant wasting energy writing anything as a response to anything.
Part of the reason you got no interaction is half your comments were shadowbanned by automod because it contained a random word and you had no idea. Most mods keep their automod config private so you don’t know which benign words are banned. For example, I found out the word “snowflake” was banned in a specific subreddit where literal snow was frequently part of the discussion. I had a browser plugin called reveddit-realtime that would tell you when comments got shadow banned.
Reddit is a farce.
There will always be new and smaller instances tho. Like it was true for smaller communities in reddit. It’s all good and well until they get exceedingly popular and a shitshow.
I get more responses here than I ever did at Reddit. Like you can engaged in a conversation, not just try to figure out the stupidest thing to say to get the most votes and making sure you post at like, 4am for maximum exposure
From my PoV:
Things will hopefully get better with time.
Completely agree.
One thing I’ve noticed I always do, is I’ll play a game, then hop on the subreddit for that game once I can no longer be spoiled. It’s nice to have a community with years of content and information waiting for you.
But the communities are gradually being formed here too, literally before our eyes. Someone just made a dragon’s dogma community like an hour ago for example. I’m happy to give them time to grow, and to help them along myself.
But hopefully communities everywhere will increasingly recognize the importance of having well organized, dedicated wikis, rather than trying to stuff everything into an existing forum community or into a Discord.
Discord is by far the worst place for a community to retreat to because it’s resources and discussions are impossible to find through cursory searching and I’m so sick of adding to my list of Discord servers just to get information that belongs on a Pastebin or Github readme.
In many ways though, Lemmy has grown into something that is active much faster than so many other kinds of social media platforms. Does anyone remember Disapora or Google+ being the next Facebook or Facebook replacement? What about Wit social? Most definitely do not.
Right? It’s more like being in a room with a handful of people instead of a crowded hall where you can barely hear yourself think.
It’s fine for news, tech and memes but none of the niche subs that I loved are here. I really miss the sub for my city.
Why not create it?
Can one simply create an arbitrary community on any lemmy instance? I wonder how lemmy handles multiple communities of the same name, across multiple instances.
yeah, that’s kind of an issue. Many communities exist more than once on multiple instances. Then again, this can also be a benefit. Maybe one of them isn’t to your liking -> choose another one. Or one of them goes down -> there’s a backup.
They’re separate but you can connect to communities across instances. I would recommend posting to !newcommunities@lemmy.world to give it some attention so others are aware it exists.
What does connecting them do?
Sorry, connecting might be a bad way to explaining it. You can access communities on other Lemmy instances (as long as they’re federated together, which they probably are).
lemmy handles it like email does. The full community name (like your username) has the domain included.
So you can have showerthoughts@lemmy.world and showerthoughts@lemm.ee, and those are totally separate communities.
The same way Reddit handled communities that had nearly identical or similar topics:
One gets popular, the other doesn’t.
I am new to Lemmy, but from what I can tell you can create an arbitrary community, as long as the server allows it. Same name on different instances are treated as totally separate entities. In my opinion, as a new user, I think that is highly non optimal as it creates a fragmented set of users for a given topic. If you go to feedit.de and search for technology you will see a number (seems about 10 or so) different communities with the exact same name. It is up to you to go to each one of them and figure out which one, or ones, you want to follow.
Will people come?
Yes. Just keep posting. You might not get any responses for a while but keep posting news, photos, etc.
If you just create it and leave it empty, you probably won’t go anywhere. If users come and see at least one person is regularly posting, it’s much more attractive.
From what I see, Lemmy is growing and it may, eventually, grow if you create a local community for a city / region. My advice for anyone that would like to create a new community is to ensure you are creating content on a regular bases until there are enough other people to also contribute, with the knowledge could be a while (weeks / months???) before others discover it.
If you don’t make it, they definitely won’t come, so might as well make it, right?
I too wish some of the smaller subreddits I was in moved here, but not everyone wants to do that 🫤Think it’s just gonna take time to build up those small communities unfortunately
I’ve been seeing some niche subs start to pop up, which is nice.
So far half the posts are about Reddit. So that part sucks. Lemmy is very complicated compared to Reddit. I don’t think large groups will be able to migrate here until a easy-mode app comes along to make it user friendly(er).
Yeah, I would say I’m kind of struggling here. I can’t figure out how to block communities I don’t want to see. I can’t figure out how to find communities I would like to be a part of. Currently my feed is full of stuff like bean memes and foreign languages. Which, said feed doesn’t really seem to move at all.
It doesn’t have ads though, and I know I’ll eventually get stuff figured out. But currently, I don’t feel like I’m getting much actual use out of it.
When you click on a community you can click the “block community” button at the top right-ish part of the screen, it’s in the same section as “create post” and “subscribe”
Searching is a little more complicated, to keep it simple you can use the built in search. That will show you communities in the instance you’re searching on, and any community that anyone else on your instance has accessed.
To search all(not all but majority of) communities across all instances you can use this: https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Each instance is like its own little island. Some islands have a theme, some are general purpose. And the instance you make your account on is where you have your citizenship, but you can view and interact(follow,comment, like, etc) with other islands that allow visitors from your island. If an island(instance) doesn’t want to allow visitors another island, or allow their citizens(users) to go another island the mayor of the island(admin) can cut off contact with that particular island(de-federate)
Love the link, but that analogy got a little too complicated halfway through haha
If the feed seems to be stagnant, you could be using the (default in many cases) active sort, which tends to have a lot of the same posts at the top, from what I’ve seen. Switching the sort to hot generally shows more fresh content in my experience. You can block communities on the web version using the red button on the right, in what I think is the sidebar, although that might be hidden on a phone. This site looks to be helpful for finding communities as well.
I’ll give the different sorting a try, but I don’t feel like it’s made much of a difference. I’m on mobile, so I’m trying out different apps. Currently have like 4 different ones installed. I can find the block community button in two of them, but clicking it does nothing.
My guess is this is just growing pains issues. I do appreciate the site recommendation.
Almost none of those apps existed a few weeks ago so give it a little time and they’ll be more polished. Sync is coming in a month or so and I’m expecting good stuff.
Yeah, since I posted earlier, the community block button now is working in Liftoff for me.
Things are coming together. Now to rebuild my subs.
If you mean your read posts stay there forever, go to settings > hide read posts. So much better.
That easy app exists imo. Try wefwef it’s just like Apollo.
I’m using Connect, seems to work pretty well so far.
There are 3rd party clients already in the works. Have you tried wefwef.app? Just type it into your browser and enjoy
The onboarding could still use work but there’s many good apps in very active development right now. I’m using a few and each updates nearly daily.
I’m having an easier time sticking to it and not visiting reddit than I thought I would. The first day was pretty sketchy with 90% of the posts being about Lemmy, reddit, or twitter - but since then it’s been giving a more enjoyable experience.
It probably helps that I’m making an effort to post and comment, which I never really did on reddit.
As Lemmy grows I’d like to see more niche communities take off, similar to how there was “a subreddit for everything”.
I do have a big wishlist for site functionality changes though. A big sore spot is that youtube videos and text posts can’t open in-line on the front page.
My impression of lemmy changed a lot once I’ve read this updated from the lemmy devs from less than a month ago. TL;DR: Lemmy was developed by just two people and with reddit self-destructing everyone jumped to it, and lemmy wasn’t really ready for that.
With that info I’m now all the more impressed that lemmy is working as well as it currently is and not crashing every few minutes!
Yeah I think In a year or two this will be just as good as Reddit, maybe better. Personally I prefer Lemmy, it reminds me of Reddit before it gained mass appeal. The important thing is now there is a viable alternative to Reddit. Everytime Reddit does something controversial, this site will gain a wave of new users.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed with Lemmy - it’s doing an amazing job handling the migration, its structure makes a lot more sense than I thought it did when I was a newcomer, and its functionality is both adequate and actively evolving. My wishlist is mostly minor usability details and it seems like that’s something they’re actively working on - even the text posts and youtube videos thing I mentioned in my previous message has already been added as a feature on lemmy.world today alone.
Yes, posting and interacting is essential to help our communities grow. I used to only lurk but have been trying to post more on here.
I see a book icon under posts that does this when browsing through my instance’s website. Most of the mobile apps are early in development and may not have this feature yet though.
I just use the desktop site - not really a fan of mobile anything. Didn’t even do reddit on mobile. Hopefully what you’re describing will roll out to more instances sooner rather than later though.
Edit: I do actually have a button to expand text posts - it’s a small square that appears on the right side of titles. Not sure if it’s brand new or if I just never noticed it until now. Cool.
Edit again: Youtube videos also can open in-line now, plus some videos from other places. Awesome. Guessing it’s related to this update
Media handling is a big one for me too!
Seconding that I miss reddit so much less than I thought.
deleted by creator
I love it tbh. Just wish my niche communities had more people. But that just takes time
Agreed. Patience is key. One thing I remember about the digg migration and the telltale sign that digg was dead is when you went to it and digg was just full of links to reddit.
I think we need to do the same thing. Originate the content on lemmy, and xpost it on Reddit.
For sure, I can wait no problem. I’ll just explore other communities until my niches get more filled out. I’m excited for the future
You know what would help? If the instance list (and perhaps even the community lists) actually displayed a description of its purpose and intended content.
Agreed. Discoverability is kinda hard right now.
The servers (instances) aspect and different communities (forums on topics) on different servers and servers blocking others, is a mess if I’m being honest. It’s the biggest flaw. I still find it hard to find communities of topics I want…
To find communities of topics that I want across the fediverse, I go to https://lemmy.world/communities?listingType=All&page=1
Works pretty well.
Maybe freedom isn’t for you. They say you can’t unplug from the matrix after a certain age.
I think my main problem with the fediverse in general is that if I click a link to something on a different instance from an external site, I can’t instantly interact with it on my account (subscribe, vote, comment etc). I have to go back to the instance my account is on, then search for that post and hope that the fediverse has connected those two servers, then hope I’m actually able to find it, then I can interact with it. This could probably be best mitigated by some sort of solution like an app or browser extension that does those steps automatically.
Yeah this is my biggest issue with it.
I believe there are some GitHub cases open on the development side that is being discussed about possible solutions.
Re: your other issues, it’s something that will be fixed soon, but in the meantime you may find this useful: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469273-lemmy-universal-link-switcher
Sorry, I’ve been hearing so much flak from people complaining defederation exists at all (in the same universe where, for example, Zuckerberg exists) that I didn’t pay attention to anything else you were saying. My bad take.
For me, I was a longtime lurker, so I’m trying my best to come out of my shell and actually comment and have discussions. Overall, I like it so far, I just miss some communities and don’t want to run anything myself.
Its nice to have you here ☺️ I’m trying to do the same- and reevaluating kinds of stuff I previously didn’t bother to post because I didn’t wanna fall into needing the validation of strangers
Thanks! You too! And yes, exactly that! Plus on reddit, it was so over-saturated that anything you needed to say was already said for the most part.
Absolutely, the smaller size is both a blessing and a curse. The shitposing sub reddit is actually funny! But the small communities aren’t very active, or don’t exist, and that’s most of what I engaged with before. There’s room to contribute to discussions, and conversion is healthier cause there aren’t so many people its impossible to meaningfullly relate to anyone else! But its a bit harder to lurk.
Regardless, I’m excited this exists, and its neat to engage with an online community that feels different from what I’m used to :)
Hope you have a good one!
Yeah, it’s hard to find some of the little random communities (that were my lil spaces to contribute), but I’m enjoying the content much more as a whole. It definitely feels like conversations are stuff you can have, even if you see a post like 2 hours later or whatever.
I’m super happy this exists too. I’m still bouncing around with apps, but I’m enjoying myself and it definitely does feel like a better space.
Agreed. I need to try some other of the apps myself, I’ve just been using jerboa so far
Same here, pretty much always have lurked online. But seeing the tech used and the ideas and values behind this platform, I think this is going to change. I really like what this platform stands for and I hope I will be coming out of my shell to help it.
Yeah, I barely used digg and came onto reddit once it was already a thing, so I haven’t seen something in this early of an iteration. It’s a little exciting to be a part of it. I’m trying to make myself more active/engaging because I do want this to thrive.
Very same to my experience so far, I think with more content in more instances it will quickly become the best version of what was good about reddit. Happy to be here though!
Oh totally, there’s new stuff popping up everyday, it’ll get there for sure. I definitely enjoy browsing stuff here more, kind of is already giving shades of the things I used to enjoy about reddit.
Pretty nice. I just wish more people were here. The occasional bug is fine it seems to be fixed quickly.
Love your comment, it is doubled on my side.
A little dull tbh. I still pop over to reddit when I’m on my desktop to visit my favorite subreddits (especially my bumper group). Hopefully Lemmy gets better, but I think step one is the community needs to stop being so goddamn meta and focus on building active communities.
I agree. Got to start creating communities so that Lemmy becomes more interesting
Well, let’s do a pros vs cons
Pros:
Cons:
Overall I like it better than reddit tho.
At least it seems like some of the reddit app developers (like Boost) are making apps for Lemmy so hopefully the influx of developers losing their livelihood on reddit will be able to get some of that back over here.
Connect for Lemmy worked better for me. There’s also Thunder and Lift off - both good.
Pretty spot on assessment from my point of view
I like it so far. But I think the large amount of reddit users won’t like how separate everything is. Most of my friends and colleagues I’ve mentioned and shown it to, didn’t like it for that one reason. Reddit is a singular easy to access place with communities for everyone that is popular.
Fediverse (Lemmy in particular) needs to simplify I think for people to be able to adapt to it. My girlfriend made an account and is having trouble finding groups for herself, but willing to take the time cause I’m next to her all the time. But not everyones got that.
edit: also, i am using Memmy for Lemmy now on IOS, nice to have when not at my PC. Good app so far.
Agreed… A lot of the complexities don’t necessarily need to go, but a way to abstract them away, if you want to, would be much more attractive.
The less hoops people have to jump through the better.
agreed. i hope the UIs default to searching the whole fediverse and communiy search should do similar to open up and simplify for users.
the search ui could do with a little redesign maybe?
Yeah this is a good recap. I was on Reddit for over 12 years and I can not figure out how the F to add a specific community to my feed… or even how to search it out.
so you’re a lemmy.world user, in theory just go to any community there that you’re interested in (eg: https://lemmy.world/c/technology) and click subscribe at the top right of the page.
if you find a community on another server that you’re interested in, let’s say “programmer_humor” on the “programming.dev” instance (https://programming.dev/c/programmer_humor), you can go to that community on lemmy world by searching for its name on the search page (the community box has a search icon that appears when you click on the triangle). that takes you the lemmy.world view of that community. you can subscribe from there. if you know the name of the community and the server instance you can just go straight to it by entering the URL in your browser like this:
https://lemmy.world/c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
i’m not a huge fan of the lemmy web UI honestly, i find it a little clunky. there’s a bunch of good apps coming out now. i like wefwef.app (web app) and memmy (iOS). wefwef is surprisingly feature-rich and is being updated like crazy (2 or 3 big new features every day for the last few days).
I’ve got it figured out enough for now, but still can be hard without using Lemmy Explorer to find things. I am hoping some apps like Memmy can incorporate better search functionality. There is so many that have similar/same names and its annoying finding the active one.
Also gets a bit weird thinking “Oh just found this cool community” and then seeing i need to make a new account, i understand it though.
I’m really hoping better apps will bridge this gap, but I agree the devs need to make this an easier access experience.
Just use the “All” tab, instead of the “Local” one 🤣
The “All”-Tab only shows communities someone on your server joined. To find communities on unknown instances you need other methods. If you are on a fresh server you have some work to do bevore browsing!
The thing is, unknown instances won’t have large communities. Unless you want to take up the task of populating one? If so, finding or creating the community is the easy part.
I like it but can’t wait until we stop talking about Reddit
Yea, leaving reddit only to immediately be bombarded with posts about other social media is kinda lame. Can’t wait for the focuses to shift.
Give it a couple of weeks. Content is picking up
I’m not going anywhere! Just waiting until it’s old news
There’s tons of memes and stuff, but I was never into that, so meh. My thing was specialized nerd groups and they are mostly not here yet. With time, maybe they will come.
Same here. I mostly hung out in smaller, hobby subreddits. And the few I’ve found here are mostly dead. I really want to nerd-out with other people about shit nobody else cares about
Are you making any sort of posts in those “mostly dead” communities? There might be more people looking to join but had the same thought as you. Even a quick hello post could help a lot.
Fair point. I am not.
Lemmy is more picture oriented, like Instagram sort of. Reddit at least I’d you used old and shut off custom css, was more textual. -1 for Lemmy there I’m afraid.
These communities takes years to form. Lemmy will most likely die out before they come.
What makes you think Lemmy would die that quick?
Reddit isn’t going anywhere. Chances are very likely that Lemmy’s growth will just plateau and stall once all this blows over. As mentioned frequently here, Lemmy’s lack of accessibility and ease of use will prevent many from joining.
Lemmy existed years before now. It will exist for many more.