this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?

I'm a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It's definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it's great to see something that isn't Reddit growing in popularity!

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[–] ArmainAP@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I personally think that Aaron Schwartz would be happy to know we are here today.

[–] knova@links.dartboard.social 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm a bit torn. I really like the Lemmy project, but kbin being able to interact directly with microblogging fedi sites as well is pretty appealing to me. That is my primary social media usage, and it basically seems like a 2-in-1 which is great. To be clear, I know I can tag Mastodon users from Lemmy, and see Lemmy posts from Mastodon. But after looking at the way kbin handles it, it seems more 'native'. Not sure how I'm going to proceed.

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[–] anthoniix@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

Having a lot of fun. I think the federation model works way better for reddit style websites as opposed to what we're trying to do with Mastodon.

[–] GoOnASteamTrain@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

I'm loving a the idea and finding a bunch of nice people in communities :) The only thing I'm finding is that things seem to be creaking a lot, as I'm getting a lot of timeouts and such when I'm using Jerboa to upvote and search.

All in all though, it's great :)

[–] SmolderingSauna@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

Joined yesterday after shutting down my 14+ year old Reddit account (mourning has commenced). So far, so good. Will spend time looking around for the next few days but do consider this home now. Jerboa is an easy transition from RIF (unlike others, no complaints on functionality - it does everything I need ATM and I do remember the early days of Reddit: this is so smooth by comparison). Just need more users and more content but that will surely come quickly given u/spez's decision-making.

[–] mo_ztt@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Quick answer, it rocks πŸ‘. Things work differently obviously, but nothing's especially confusing or awkward. Everything I've done in the short time I've been here has worked fine. The speed and UI polish show minor problems in places, but it's to be expected. As far as I can tell it's 100% usable right away as a realistic reddit replacement, which is pretty outstanding IMO.

[–] pitl@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 year ago

For the most part it hasn't been too confusing for me. I'm new to modern federated social media, but not new to the idea of federation due to experience with the IRC model. I really enjoy the idea of instances and having your own sort of smaller space while being able to contribute to larger spaces still... though there's definitely still some user experience hurdles that need overcome on that front.

[–] synthllama@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Took me a bit to decide which instance to join and get setup, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. The registration process needs some feedback instead of just spinning if you're not yet approved though I saw this is being worked on.

It has been clunky to reference other communities or search for them, I keep finding links that send me to another instance and then I'm not logged in there.

Also, there seem to be a lot of duplicate communities. It would be nice to have some kind of system for groups of communities. So that they can link together as a super-community (if agreed by their mods) and if you subscribe to one you get them all. Or maybe over time the most popular ones will become apparent.

Overall its been neat to get setup over here and see the beginning of something.

[–] Luna@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] stallmer@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 year ago

I’m really glad that browse.feddit.de exists because it’s near impossible to find instances otherwise. However, I wish the β€œcopy” 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.

[–] GNUGradyn@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm pretty tech savvy so not a problem for me but I question how viable this is as a reddit replacement just due to how unintuitive the fediverse is. Like the whole having to choose a server but still having access to all the other servers bit. If lemmy.ml could handle being the "official" server it would probably be viable

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[–] Illecors@lemmy.cafe 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] Suppoze@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] cowleggies@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

So far, so good. Excited to see more variety in communities as more users discover and migrate to lemmy.

[–] Computerchairgeneral@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Liking it so far. It's less complicated than I thought it would be, but that could just be because I'm on kbin, which seems to be fairly user-friendly. Not sure if it will become my main Reddit replacement, but I'm willing to give it a try.

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[–] CaptManiac@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm using Jerboa and I can't figure out how to see the list of my subscribed groups.

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[–] mobiuscoffee@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you're interested in reading more thoughts and comments, there was a massive thread on the same subject the other day:

https://sh.itjust.works/post/5137?scrollToComments=true

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[–] Continuous@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It was a bit confusing, I'm still a little confused on why I would choose one instance over another (I kinda just picked one?) And then there's the communities within the instances, I see some that are duplicates between instances and I'm not sure if I should just subscribe to the one on my instance or can I subscribe to the others? Are the vibes different? I'm sure I'll get used to it, I just haven't had to be an internet pioneer in many years.

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[–] Azabs@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Great, it's very similar to old reddit. It only needs a little more content.

[–] Landrin201@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I posted a comment, one of my first, about something I think would vastly improve the user experience. I stand by it 100%, what I describe there was by far the most confusing part for me. I think the new user guide in general could use a pass-over by people who aren't tech savvy and are going to be more "casual" users, right now it's quite long and IMO a bit too technical for most people. It's too much all at once.

Now that I'm past that, I'm finding it quite similar to reddit. The biggest "problem" so far is that it's so small, so a lot of the small reddit communities I was in are non existant. I'm not comfortable moderating (I don't really have the time), so I won't make them myself, but I will miss them. Tbh for some things I'll probably still use reddit on desktop (until they kill old reddit) but lemmy on mobile.

My biggest concern from the beginning, and the reason I joined a big and established instance, is what will happen to people's accounts if their instance gets taken down by the creators. To me that seems like a kinda fundamental flaw here. I'm really not sure how or if it could be fixed, either.

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[–] Moo_Lefty@toast.ooo 4 points 1 year ago

Confusing. Took me a while to figure out how to reply to this

It's gonna take a while for the chaos of everyone migrating from Reddit to die down and for the place to become useable.

Also, Lemmy seems to have the same annoying friction Masto has where it's too easy to get redirected to another instance's webpage. You suddenly can't comment, like, or basically do anything and it's not immediately obvious why.

Once again suggesting federated social media start using a centralized frontend on one single website and just let the servers themselves be federated. You would go to the same one website, ex lemmy.com and log into your chosen instance, staying logged in even if you visit another instance.

[–] genfood@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Somehow, the UI is really buggy for me so far, and I experience numerous lags. I didn't manage to create a post yet, and sporadically, it seems like my instance is not available, due to some server error pages. Usually, after a reload of the page, it is fine again.

Furthermore, the UI is differently worse, than Reddits. Searching is awful, and I miss a lot of sorting functionality or algorithm for bringing up the comments based on likes and sub-comments.

I hope this will become better now, the Lemmy gets a lot of attention. Sadly, there is no completed iOS app yet. I don't like using the Website. :D

But then, it is nice to have a decentralized version of Reddit. And it seems it has already a few users, I hope Lemmy will grow further. I will stay strong.

Edit: A grouping feature for β€œmerging” communities from different instances is much needed. I get it, it's a different instance and probably the users of the certain communities like to have specific rule variations or just don't like the other participants of the other communities. But at least for browsing content it would be a great feature.

Occasionally, I click on a link of a different instance, where I don't have an account. And it is difficult to get that link directly into your instance, so you could comment on or like/dislike it or whatever you wish to do. I guess a smartphone app would do its part there. Or some kind of switching feature, to get immediately to your instance, at the same place.

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[–] hllywluis@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Something that I will call out is that I really appreciate the live changes in the thread on the website itself. Makes interacting with comments and everyone a lot easier.

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[–] nykot@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

I'm enjoying, the UX feels a bit lacking but it can become better with time, I'm reading the docs to see if I can help and running my instance, I'm enjoying so far!

[–] Faluuria@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I need to familiarize myself to this. I have used RiF for as long as I can remember. So I need to find a new place for my fix.

I think I can get the hang ot it eventually. However, I hope a RiF like Android app for the frediverse gets developed.

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[–] NetMaze3@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)
  • I have to scroll all the way down to comment
  • I can't collapse comments
  • I need an app :/
[–] Xune531@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

You can collapse comments, it’s the little plus or minus icon next to usernames.

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