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!
I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:
- The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I’m aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that’s less than ideal)
- The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I’m aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it’s vital to the success of Lemmy.
People are much friendlier here, so far.
Echoing many things that other users are saying already:
Signing up/choosing a home instance is confusing. I don’t think it’s very confusing conceptually, but it is confusing from a UX/UI perspective. Subscribing to outside communities was the toughest part, I had to find them through a different instance using a search engine, then manually paste the community-specific URL into my home instance search, wait several seconds, then click into the community home page and finally click “subscribe.”
Not something a casual user is going to want or even figure out to do. I trust that many of these growing pains will be fixed in the coming weeks/months. I just hope that it’s not all a flash in the pan and then fizzles out totally.
Once using it though, I like the general feel of it. Better themes and some cleaner UI choices and it will be really nice imo. People are friendly so far and that’s worth a ton right there.
I will make this my first ever Lemmy post:
Overall, this definitely feels like a promising alternative with some growing pains. The bigger communities are decently active but the decentralized nature of Lemmy carries the risk of some communities becoming too fragmented where communities are duplicated in different instances. As some other users have suggested, This could be remedied by creating “Super communities” spanning the Fediverse which could help with growing to a scale large enough to rival Reddit and incentivise even more Redditors to make the switch.
Not a fan of Jerboa, but I realize that it’s early days. Hopefully we can get some of the UI people from the 3rd party reddit apps on here to develop a better client.
Feels like this might be the fediverse flavor that sticks with me. I tried mastodon and diaspora, but they didn’t stick. Didn’t help that I hated Twitter and Facebook.
This feels chill so far. I like it
Confusing. There are communities I can’t subscribe to because I can’t access them from my instance, and I have no idea why that is. The experience has been interesting so far, and growing the network is going to be something I’ll be keeping an eye on. For now, though, I’ll have to wait until someone creates the communities I was a part of on Reddit.
Edit: It seems a community won’t show up on your instance’s community list unless someone in that instance is subscribed to it.
The app I’m using (Jerboa) is a bit lacking, but I’m sure it’ll improve. I’m unsure about how accounts work with the servers, can I migrate my account if the server I am using shuts down? Communities are tiny and a lot are missing, but I’m sure those will grow and fill in as more people join.
I love it here and I’ll express myself and show love to all with manatees
I am enjoying it so far. I usually tend to lurk but the community is, as many have said, very welcoming and it creates an atmosphere where it encourages you to contribute (not just with up/downvotes but also comments).
I’m still a little confused but it’s sinking in. The difference between an instance and a “sub”, as well as how to join or interact with other “subs” without having to join each individual instance, was the part that was toughest to adapt to. I love it, though. Lemmy is giving me the feeling Reddit did when I first joined it a long, long time ago on my first ever account. It feels organic.
I’m so confused!! Still trying to figure out how to tell jerboa to show me communities that aren’t local (and aren’t showing in all - I did find memes and other juicy numbers there!)…
I might have made the mistake of trying to pick a server that wasn’t struggling under the load of the Reddit refugees, but I still don’t think it was a bad idea…
Quite a learning curve though. Some cheat sheets or heaven forbid, starter packs would be snazzy :)
Much like when I went from Twitter to Mastodon, finding “my people” is a lot more work. It’s unpleasantly easy for links to a community to take me directly to that instance instead of leaving my on my instance where I’d be able to subscribe and interact. But also like Mastodon, the experience is much nicer once things start getting set up. Really nice not getting pestered to use the app constantly!
Pretty much the same thing for me. I’m finding it very annoying to be taken to the instance, there must be an easier way.
I want to second that it’s very frustrating how links tend to go to the parent instance rather than my instance, as it seems like that’s seldom what a user would want.
Yeah there needs to be a little more user intent “modelling” (probably no more than just a quick sense check really) on some of the design decisions.
I was thinking about suggesting a “watched instance” status that would contribute to a feed that sits between “all” and “subscribed”, so if I find an instance say mytown.org, then I can get a Watched feed like All but just every community for my town. This would differ from All which would allow federated communities such as arguments@farawaytown.net to appear in the feed.
I’ll be honest. While I like the idea of decentralized social stiff, its also a huge issue. First you have to choose an instance, which isn’t too bad, but you can’t move. I hear Lemmy.ml being under pressure and I want to move somewhere else to help.with that. My account is 4 years old though and I can take nothing with me. Additionally this means all my content is on one instance. If that ever goes down, the network as a whole my keep existing, but my user and all I’ve put into Lemmy will be gone. And while I trust Lemmy instances more than reddit in terms of privacy, I’m not so sure when it comes to uptime and longevity. Finally, the whole concept of decentralized is hard to wrap my head around. My instance being separate from others but still being subscribed to communities of other instances feels unintuitive. Its the she issue I have with mastodon. I keep loosing track of instances, communities, apps etc. All with different names and logins etc.
For now, I’m trying to get used to Lemmy and just search for communities I’m subscribed to on reddit and see how it goes. It definitely works well enough. Just some conceptual issues I might have to get used to.
I think my experience can be best summed up by:
404: FetchError: invalid json response body at http://lemmy:8536/api/v3/site
Jokes aside, the web portal is pretty great. Jerboa seems… like it needs some polish.
