Asklemmy

I think Lemmy seems like a good idea and generally like it so far, but i do think that users that aren't that tech savvy may have issues. It's also nice that the servers are customizable in a way, but at the same time if you pick certain servers you can't see down votes, or creating communities might be disabled which will seem inconsistent to newcomers that think of Lemmy as a more traditional platform like Reddit that only has one instance. The community search is also pretty clunky, a lot of users will probably have trouble understanding why they can't just find all available communities instead of writing an obscure email-like string that still says "no results", but then magically after searching again it will be there. I would say some areas are unpolished and even a bit buggy at times too. I figured these things out pretty fast, but being a software dev myself, i know that an end-user may struggle a lot more with these things, to the point where they may just abandon the platform out of frustration. I hope some of the rough edges can be smoothed out because the idea of this platform is definitely interesting, but if average people can't use it it's less likely to really succeed. I must admit that even i am a bit skeptical, and i may have to return to Reddit if not enough users/content migrate to this platform, even though i don't really like many of the decisions Reddit make. I'm giving it a fair shot though and i definitely like it so far.

Feels very early. The site design needs quite a bit of work.

• The usual confusion on fediverse domain boundaries and usage. Seems very easy to accidentally route to another server rather than viewing that content within the current server (community/user links).
• Doesn't retain sort/filter options on the home feed. I get that the default is local to promote some growth, but when I switch to subscribed I want it to stay that way.
• Excess visual space, cluttered design with avatars and community icons and excess padding. It falls into some of the traps that make me despise the reddit redesign.
• Strange prioritization of elements; visual emphasis on features that seem pretty niche or obvious (crosspost, tooltip text post preview, comment language, usernames), while more important elements get dwarfed or lost in the noise (timestamps, comment delineation + nesting).
• Live reloads are confusing and would be nice to be able to disable.
• There's a real lack of dom class tagging that would make it easier for me to remedy some of those issues with custom css and the number of !important definitions doesn't inspire confidence.
• Ultimately the above are all things that can be worked out. If the core systems work well enough then the design is something that can be augmented. I've had some navigation issues (including a page that wouldn't load because it received a malformed json response from internal service), but the core functionality seems to be mostly there. Whether it'll hold up to more load we'll have to see.

The one thing I'm struggling with is how do I find a subreddit equivalent? For example r/formula1 or r/UKpolitics on Reddit might be.... What?

Also is it possible to find these communities using Jerboa or so I need to login on my desktop?

Edit - spelling

I find it easier than using mastodon for the first time tbh

I love it. I am genuinely excited to be on here, and it is literally the only social media I use at the moment.

The single feature I that I think would improve the site tremendously is some kind of indicator to know if I have posted in a thread before. It is silly, but sometimes discussions blow up and I cannot remember everything I write.

Like, just a colored dot next to the title in topics I have posted in would make the experience so much better.

I'm kinda hoping someone will point out this feature already exists, but I wish there was a way to subscribe to a topic. Right now it feels like multiple instances are forming their own, say, gaming community, and it feels like this is splintering the community rather than growing it?

Other than that, I actually really like the decentralised nature -- and, while this is likely due to the very early nature of things, man is it nicer here. Weirdly feels like early Slashdot days...

I find the multiple instances very confusing and also have concerns about how this will split up communities. Like right now there aren't many "niche" communities, but if there were, say I would want to browse something like /r/eu4, but there are like 4 different ones, even if i am subscribed to all of them, how would I like... browse them all at the same time to get "all eu4 content". Like it seems very problematic to do something like that.

It's gone quite smoothly so far - found an instance local to me and joined, subscribed to a bunch of communities, installed Jerboa and set it up - didn't hit any roadblocks.

The cross-server subscription thing is a bit counter-intuitive, but this seems to be an issue that people are already aware of. The Fediverse lengthy signup ritual of choosing an instance is there, but that's just a feature of how the medium works and I'm already familiar with the issues from Mastodon, so it didn't bother me.

The instance system definitely makes it a bit confusing. I'm a programmer and I've played around with some Mastodon stuff during my study. Still, as a user, it's quite chaotic sometimes.

I'm kinda wondering what this will converge towards. Is everyone going to join the same instance? Are different communities be kinda randomly spread over instances, where for every community in the end one instance dominates? Or will there just be chaos?

There's also some buggy behavior every now and then, but that's easily forgiven imo.

I like the idea, but to be honest it feels unpleasant to use. Multiple different communities with the same topic are hosted on different servers, so I have to subscribe on them all if I want to keep track on what is happening. Would be nice to have some "mega community" that would have them all there. Also web client is broken, it feels so bad when my feed is moved down when new fresh post is added on top, this is borderline annoying and unusable> chf

upd: have tried kbin, it seems there they fixed all the annoying parts of lemmy. Great usage experience!

I like it so far, it has a low key relaxed energy. I mostly used reddit for the smaller communities so this kinda works for me.

Joined today and I find Lemmy really cool. Of course there isn't that much content here yet but I'm hoping the June 12 Reddit protests and the upcoming Reddit API restrictions will bring more users in.

First comment. Still getting used to the whole fediverse concept. Super cool so far though.

A bit confused but I'm getting there. Getting an account going was the most confusing part but it seems like overnight my account got approved, so thats done with!

I've been here for about a day and I've been very impressed! I happened to pick a pretty decent seeming instance to start from and I've not had too much difficulty figuring out this whole fediverse thing

I've also had a very good experience in Firefox on Android for browsing

I do think Lemmy is going to need to implement more load balancing and I'd love to be able to spin up a server to donate some cycles and bandwidth to help load balance an existing Lemmy instance

Site looks very promising. Would be great to have an explainer video on how to find the right instance and how to join groups across instances for new comers. For sure the site has a learning curve but given the state of reddit, I for sure want to look for an alternative.

Joined kbin and checking out Lemmy through feddit.it I have a questin though: I wanted to subscribe to a medicine community in a different server but I can't find it when I search through "all" communities in feddit.it. How do I go about finding and subscribing to it?

The interface is nice and friendly, but the way the fediverse and the different instances works is kind of confusing. Still not sure what that's all about

The UI's a little bit sticky, possibly due to how busy lemmy.ml is right now. The set of communities is pretty thin as well, but that will probably change as time goes on.

Seems pretty reasonable, even the federated stuff works fine - unlike Mastodon, oddly.

I find the experience to be fine. It will be great watching as the community grows

Really liking it! I just want some simple tweaks here and there to this instance’s ui.

The Lemmy community are very welcoming. I've been here for a few days now and enjoying things so far.

It's obviously still early days regarding the whole Reddit fiasco, so there's not a lot of options for more mainstream and streamlined apps. I've been using the Jerboa app from the Play Store, which is good, but not perfected yet. So I decided to login to Lemmy on Chrome and install the web app version which is working for me right now.

What I'm keen to see is Lemmy grow and to come into its own. While it's both funny and sad watching Reddit kill itself, and is obviously the hot topic at the moment, Lemmy needs to be seen as the Reddit alternative, so when Reddit users come here - they see that there are community's here ready to go with each specific community posting and talking about their on-topic subject / news.

Lemmy / the fediverse is a little confusing (for myself anyway), as an outsider, I'm still learning the ropes of instance's and how things work specifically. As time goes on, I'll be more comfortable here without looking too much like an idiot, I'm sure.

I have found some difficulties getting set up, and there still seems to be quite a lot foreign about this tool, but I expect I shall grasp its concepts soon.

As a primarily mobile(Android) user, I downloaded Jerboa and found a list of instances. After being redirected to my browser to view this list and to sign up with my chosen instance, I came back to Jerboa to sign in.

Jerboa offered a preset list of instances, of which mine was not included. After multiple attempts at guessing what the "formal name"(?) of the instance was, I finally got an error indicating that the account didn't exist, rather than the first error that the instance didn't exist. After a bunch more bumbling around, I realized that there was a similar instance to the one I signed up on and I had to use a hyper specific identifier I only found in one place, then I could sign in.

I'm a bit disappointed at the lack of description on the esoteric settings. The app should define what is meant by All vs Local vs Subscribed. There are a few sort modes that I think I can puzzle out, but I'd much rather proper descriptions exist.

Frequently when a post is linked to and I click it inside Jerboa, the post is opened in my default browser... which doesn't stay logged in for some reason?

Unsure about community following / community discovery / community naming and namespacing.

Frequent incomprehensible errors when posts fail to load, I have to go back two pages then navigate to the attempted page to load it again for it to display.

Hopefully these are all just growing pains and everything smooths out and becomes more familiar rapidly.

I had been lurking on a few Lemmy instances for years (more or less since mid-2020 when I started getting more interested in FOSS) and with the Reddit shitshow I finally decided it was time to join, so I was already quite familiar with the concept of instances and how the Fediverse works on principle.

I'm slowly exploring more to find interesting communities to interact with, and hopefully there'll be more incoming users from Reddit creating more niche spaces.

Once I have already made an account, it turned out to be less confusing than. One of the things I like is the all tab which does not show 'random crap' like reddit's main page, but actually somewhat interesting content.

I'm also a new user and to be honest, it's pretty much the same browsing experience for me. I use Jerboa, and browse all for now, subscribing to subs that I like. I'm on Beehaw, and it federates with a lot of instances, I can pretty much find all the entertainment I would want from reddit.

Even more so, the community is much more frendly, cozier and there are much less noise and significantly more meaningful conversation which I truly appreciate.

I won't delete my account on reddit, because even though I loathe their practices, I also dislike removing information - I'm all for archiving discussions and information.

I’m really glad that browse.feddit.de exists because it’s near impossible to find instances otherwise. However, I wish the “copy” button on the search results copied !communityName@instanceName rather than a simple URL to make it easier to sub to that community from any instance.

It was meh the first ~week that I've mostly been using it anonymously via Jerboa. There just wasn't all that much stuff to read. But once I've spun up my own instance and federated with a few dozen communities - man, it's looking amazing! It's still so much better in a browser to manage everything, but simply lurking is now perfectly viable via the Android app.