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
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
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.
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 😵💫
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.
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 😅
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’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 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/asklemmy@lemmy.ml) [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.)
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.
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 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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, that’s been my experiance too. The platform only has about 12,000 active users on it. Mastadon, in comparison, has 1.2 million active daily users. it’s alot more than previously, but still nothing in the grand scheme of things. More people are coming in though and it is still growing but at this rate, what I believe to be 3,000 new active users in a day, it’ll take a bit.
In the mean time, thank you for taking the initiative and posting. To others be the change you want to see, try posting a bit.
Edit: up to 19,000 now
There’s rough edges to be sure but the community seems pretty good and the devs seem like they’re working hard.
Right now I’m seeing less time spent endlessly scrolling as more of a feature than a bug lmao, need to break that habit anyway
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.
