I don’t know about you but I was just waiting for an excuse. I ain’t ever going back. It’s a brave new world for me, part of shifting my whole suite to FOSS. Leaving the old internet behind me.
In 2022 I was Windows + Twitter + Reddit. In 2023 I’m full-time Linux + Mastodon + Lemmy.
I’ve rid myself of reddit (never used Twitter thank God) but I’m still on windows. I just got a steam deck though and I’m loving the Linux desktop mode. What branch of Linux does the deck use? I know I could do a quick Google to find out but damn I love how well it runs. Linux isn’t nearly as scary as I thought
I’ll disagree with Taiyang about Manjaro; I think it diverges too much form Arch and much prefer EndeavourOS (which is what I’m using at the moment).
With that said, I wouldn’t recommend anything Arch-based for a first timer. Quick sidebar: in Linux the “distribution” (the OS, basically - the variant of Linux) is separate from the desktop environment (the GUI). SteamOS uses the KDE desktop. If you like that, I think I’d recommend Kubuntu as a good Linux distro to start with. It’s Ubuntu with KDE instead of the default Ubuntu desktop, so there’s a ton of documentation and pretty much every app will work on it.
!linux@lemmy.ml is very active and a great place to ask questions and/or read up, or feel free to DM me!
Like taiyang said, SteamOS is based on Arch which is super not newbie friendly, but the desktop modes “desktop environment” is KDE which available on pretty much any Linux distro, including beginner friendly ones like (K)Ubuntu and Fedora (although I’m not sure how beginner friendly Fedora is, regarding proprietary drivers and codecs)
Oh, you’re like me! I did the dive into Linux, SteamOS is a fork of Arch Linux which is super not newbie friendly.
Manjaro is a good Arch Linux fork that works well for gamers, though. Still not idiot proof, as I can atest to breaking it several times, but that’s the deal when you remove the training wheels off your OS.
Lucky it’s easy to reinstall from a USB. A little less if you insist on a duel boot like me, but that’s mostly Windows being a jerk.
Try manjaro, and hear me out here:
Manjaro is actually the only distro that I would recommend to a beginner, actual beginner in this case is someone that should not be running a single terminal command to get their system to work (which is what people are expecting to do when they tell you to use Endevour or CachyOS lol)
WIth ubuntu/debian based distros you will either have to deal with installing flatpaks/snaps, which come with their own set of issues like not following the system theme, using the wrong system font, issues accesing the internet, issues accesing the home directory (yeah steam flatpak can’t be placed in the home directory lol).
You could try adding PPAs which is not something I would recommend a beginner to do.
Also some games like BeamNG hate having irqbalance, which usually comes by default on debian based distros.
On the other hand Manjaro already ships with pamac which is their GUI store that supports everything, including Aur packages which means 0 issues having to deal with broken permissions or theming if you want to install apps that are usually not found in the official repos.
Their own official repo even includes brave-browser and fastfetch, two apps that I use that are usually very hard to find in other distros.
FOSS
Same. I adopted a google account a long time ago, but I’ve finally hit my limit on what they’ve been doing with youtube and everything. Free and open source alternatives are the way to go, it may take a while to catch on or may never fully, but who cares. Switching to linux recently was the best thing I’ve ever done.
What this shows us is that more people are joining lemmy, but even more people are either leaving or going into lurker mode, as Lemmy only counts people who have commented or posted in that time period as active users, whereas most social media counts any activity while logged in as active. You have to realize that people who use reddit as Google search results don’t usually interact with the content there and most won’t even make an account.
On the upside, with fewer people, it’s easy to get noticed here just by contributing good content since you don’t really get drowned out here because of the democratic upvote based sorting instead of black box personalized recommendation algorithms. So with relatively low amount of effort, you can make sure your content is being seen instead of relying on analytics and metrics.
The last thing to in mind that Lemmy is only one aspect of ActivityPub, and Mastodon’s growth is currently the highest right now because of the ecosystem created by the whale fall of Twitter, which indirectly grows Lemmy as Mastodon users can post directly to federated Lemmy communities.
I just got recommended this site after posting on reddit re: predatory algos and the necessary regulations needed to protect people and how algos have manipulated the UX so much its disrupted the originally intended purposes; ie insta has effectively become a marketing and advertising platform.
So in response someone suggested finding alternatives to the popular social media sites and used Lemmy as an example.
I have been loving it thus far - its old school reddit.
this is my first comment on lemmy!
Welcome! So far, in my experience, this is a much friendlier community that… many of the alternatives.
Welcome! So far, in my experience, this is a much friendlier community that… many of the alternatives.
Usually. There’s definitely some who want to take their pound of flesh out of you when you disagree with them on something, but overall not so bad.
Agreed on it being old school reddit! There are some UI wrappers that make it look and feel like old school reddit that I use and love you might enjoy. The wrapper is called mlmym and is open source. There are a few hosts you can use, I use this one: https://o.opnxng.com
A direct link for your lemmy instance would be https://o.opnxng.com/lemmy.world
https://old.lemmy.world is like old reddit.
I changed the algorithms in programming.dev to take into account voters in the activity. Since stats are all calculated locally you can view any community from programming.dev to get the monthly active users including that change
e.g. https://programming.dev/c/technology@lemmy.world shows 27.8k users/month on p.d which is almost as much as the value here for all of lemmy excluding voters
There seemed to be an influx of reddit users but probably didn’t like Lemmy’s own distinct user base (*nix users for example)
I am kind of glad it settled down because I much prefer Lemmy over reddit
People are way angrier here than in Reddit, because in Reddit, mods usually clean up the angriest people from the whole platform.
That’s esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
For anyone panicking, this is exactly like what happened with the transition from ICQ to AOL messenger, from MySpace to Facebook, from 9gag/etc to Reddit, and so on.
Website makes a mistake, some people leave. Makes another, more leave. Each time this happens, more ‘main’ people of said website leave. Hell, I already saw PoppinKREAM here, so that’s a great start.
So this is exactly how it always goes. The fact it is still here means it’s staying. Look at Threads, or Metaverse, whatever those things are. All dying or dead, barely lasted. Lemmy is still here, people are still posting, so just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s already working.
Oh I was planning to check for Portarossa, one of the few usernames I recognize
On mastodon or Lemmy?
So much happiness in this little sound.
I don’t care that the fediverse has a ton of traffic. It may not have the most users, but it definitely has the best
100% agree. Have encountered a few jerkwads on Lemmy but hey, blocking works. The overall vibe here is 100x better than schmeddit.
Quick question regards blocking - how does it work exactly?
When I block someone, I can still see their message. Just won’t get a notification. I thought, it would be blocked entirely - so I’m a bit confused.
When a blocked user replies to my message I get no notification and might just see “1 more reply” or something like that but when I click it it wont load. Only when I sign out can I read it. However I believe that the blocked users can still see my messages just fine. Same with bans. I can see all posts from lemmy.ml but they can’t see mine.
I much much prefer the niche community here. Much less shit to have to wade through (see: came here to say this x 100000 per post) to get to the good comments and posts
@Pregnenolone yeah I haven’t seen a single “this is the way” comment chain since I got here.
Lemmy doesn’t have boosting. …I should check out KBin sometime, also because of the better Mastodon integration
People complaining about a loss of users are the same people that will complain about performance issues next time there is a huge influx of users that stresses the infrastructure for popular instances.
11 million comments this month. 11 million comments from people smart enough to leave behind the other. 11 million comments, likely largely from actual humans.
Lemmy is thriving.
I didn’t completely leave behind reddit. I still view, but I only comment/post on lemmy.
I’m similar, but I occasionally crosspost Lemmy posts to Reddit to try and drive more traffic here :)
