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.
I believe it’s specifically an issue with the web client. The apps don’t seem to have that problem.
This is good to hear. Hopefully they can work out their aggregation on the main page too.
They’ve also fixed the problem on Jebora
Having FOS Jerboa could mean we’ll have a sync and Boost like app hopefully rather sharpish.
Even the last 2 updates have been rather impressive.
This is incredibly helpful! Thank you so much!
😊
Oh dude! MASSIVE THANKS!
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 😅
I’d assume a post that you open, but I haven’t really tested it out much yet. If I figure it out I’ll update you here
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
It’s amazing how many Reddit comments just aren’t seen, no wonder so many people end up lurking.
I had 150k+ karma and most of my comments would go unnoticed.
150k? damn
I saw your comment :)
I know I don’t post when I see other 1000 comments, even if it’s my own personal experience and it could help someone, the truth is no one will see it and it will be just pollution
yea, not worth wasting my time on a comment no one is gonna see
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.
Yes, make homes! we need so much more hardware, while personal instances may not be a good idea, we are so short on compute that if you are inclined run your own instance, bring your friends!
The experience on smaller faster instances is already comparable, the content flow, really not bad either though it takes about an hour of finding and subbing to the communities you want and a day for your instance to really start grabbing the content for you.
Can you point out an explanation for how this works? Like, if I run my own “instance” of Lemmy in a Docker container, what all is it doing if I and a few friends subscribe to communities on other instances (eg BeeHaw, lemmy.ml, etc). Is my little instance mirroring all of that data constantly? Just when one of us requests it? I need to know what I’m getting myself into basically.
I think you might find that answer through lemmy’s github and using their guides which I’ll send it here in case anyone else is interested.
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.
This is the sentiment I’ve been rolling with. I normally don’t post often, but since the move I’ve created an instance and posted more than ever.
We have to make what we want. once we have enough content for people to be interested, the users and community will come.
Agree! with that also the smaller communities may help forever lurkers (like me) post as here it feels like comments will be seen unlike reddit where there is so much noise.
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…
There’s a speech bubble icon on the bottom of the post for me, using the jerboa app for android :)
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’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.
Your handle won’t let you login on other instances but you can follow communities on other instances from the instance you signed up for.
That surprised me a bit when I first used Mastodon. “Wait? Why can’t I log in? I just want to follow this person! Oh, right, have to go to my original server and do it from there”. New to Lemmy, but finding and following other communities feels much easier than on Mastodon.
Yeah. I think it needs to be a little bit more intuitive or easier if it’s all really going to catch on.
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.
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/[email protected]) [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.
When linking to a community from within a lemmy post or comment, use this format:
[Winnipeg Jets](/c/winnipegjets@lemmy.world)>>begets>> Winnipeg Jets
(Note: this works really well on the website, but currently my app (Jerboa) crashes for these links. I think this is a bug that will be fixed.)
Thank you, it makes so much more sense to me now.
-
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.
I’m home :)
It seems like we are struggling with a large cohort that does not remember the systems as they grew, expecting the only valid replacement to only be a system as large.
Thats not how it works, it is how you can get owned by a centralized party.
The default sorting is by “active” which to me doesn’t show a lot of new content (from the last hours). Switching to hot improves the experience a lot.
Hot should be default
I also dislike that it’s “live”. I’ll be browsing the post titles and new stuff would appear on top so I lose my place.
Is there any way to prevent that? I’ll be reading a post title and everything shifts out from under me constantly.
I have no idea. The other person who replied said that it’s a bug, but they deleted their comment. I set my view to default on Local/Hot at the moment. “All” moves too fast for me, and I’m not in the mood yet to curate my subscriptions.
I remember HATING Reddit after the great Digg migration. The information was presented in a different way and the discussions seemed to be the focus rather than the linked content. It took a while to get used to it and I’m feeling a bit of the same here. There are a ton of similarities that are already here, so it’s not as jarring and things are improving every day.
I feel like I’m interacting more here than I did on Reddit for a long time. By the time anything showed up on my feed over there, it was 1 day old, had 5000 comments, and had devolved into memes.
Honestly that is the main reason i became a lurker on reddit, why comment? if im on /r/all then anything i could think to comment has already been commented by someone else most of the time if you scroll down enough. It was really only the smaller niche subs that i was able to engage with.
This is why I want the communities to remain relatively small
Need the Goldilocks lol. Small enough to have good interaction but big enough to get enough content.
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.
Having ‘no single source of truth’ is part of the joy.
If you’re not happy with /r/cars moderators banning everyone who drives a Skoda, then you’re out of luck. Here in federation land, you can just go to a different lemmy.something/c/cars place.
Of course you can still follow and interact with all the /c/cars communities from any Lemmy instance (and interact a little from Mastodon).
@CleanDefinition @Ghast so true!
I got banned from Subs for asking questions, I couldn’t make my own without the original shadowing me on every search.
But theoretically on Lemmy every community can have a voice, if the rest of Fediverse believes it in, it can flourish. Other servers can’t report you or shadow ban beyond the confines of their server.
If a group tries to bully you they might get their entire server banned so the mod’s would likely terminate the user first
Part of the issue is that we hardly have enough people to sustain one random community, let alone several semi-independent ones. That barrier alone will turn others away and the cycle of not having enough souls will repeat itself
Right, but everyone can follow the lot, so there’s no need to divide.
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 [email protected] then you also post in [email protected]. 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 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)
It’s not going to replace Reddit overnight. Those communities have to be built here. If people stick around, it will happen.
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.
This is my biggest motivation right now. Its been a blessing in disguise as I am concentrating more and less mindlessly browsing reddit, both at work and in personal life.
What I’d recommend in your case is sorting the posts by “hot” instead of “active” which is the default setting. Posts get up the active sorting whenever somebody comments on them or upvotes (I think?), even if they are very old, whereas hot should only show you new and currently popular posts. You’ll still see the post that you’ve already seen and a setting for that is clearly missing, but it should still be an improvement.
Yeah, I think having active as the default sorting is not a good idea. It can be confusing to new users
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.
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.
Does anyone know why so many subs I’ve subscribed to say pending? Does a mod need to approve it?
I Think its a bug. if you subscribe to lemmy.ml communities it will say waiting or something else. but if you actually check your communities, you are actually subscribed to them. It’s happening to me as well.
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.
Hot doesn’t update often enough for me, do you know how to fix that?
Ah, nice one, thanks :-)
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.
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.
I don’t know if this answers your question about same posts, but here is info about the sorting algorithm:
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
I also see same posts (I am looking at you two toilets in a bathroom) a lot but I think it is just lemmys way to show posts that ppl engage in and I guess two toilets in a bathroom is a very hot/trending topic right now because it doesn’t seem to die down 😂
So I usually sort on all and new to find post that is lonely and maybe help them out a bit by commenting :D
I don’t think this is a big different from reddit tho, on reddit do I see almost the same post all the time or even repost, here I just see the same post more 😂 just go and look at r/steamdeck, same question over and over again, but I will read them all! haha
I don’t know what kinds of subs you joined but big ones like meme is posting a lot. But I saw this on reddit too, even reddit thought my feed was a bit lacking so I had maybe 50% posts from subs I hadn’t subscribed to, to scroll through 😂
But also remember we aren’t as many here(yet). we just hit over 100k users yesterday.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
And I think it is good to have multiple sources of entertainment. Even tho it is nice to have everything at one place :D
Sorry if this sounds like preaching and that I wrote a book. But here you have it haha
Edit: fixed a few grammar mistakes (that I saw right away)
Its hard for readers early on. You need lots of people to fill the feed. Get busy or wait for people to get things addressed and pipelines running.
Its mainly UX, it will come in time.
important to note, none of this made itself (even reddit); it took people using and contributing.
Yes, you’ re right, I’ve been a Redditor for more than 16 years and have seen many subreddits come and go. Even today, there are subreddits like Android that only get 200 or 300 upvotes on a good day.
