TLDR: the article says , lemmy is confusing , too broken and kinda unusable coz servers run on whims.
While I have been active here since a month now , I have had nothing but only a positive experience on lemmy , what about you guys ?
While I do agree lemmy adds a layer or two of complexity compared to the simple “plug-and-play” reddit model, the article comes across as blaming all of the author’s lemmy-related issues on the software rather than admitting he just doesn’t understand how to use it.
Unlike Reddit’s approach of categorization using subreddits, Lemmy instances are mostly entire servers that act as catch-all versions of subreddits.
This is one example. Subreddits =/= instances. A more apt comparison would be communities, and then he can point out how communities are hosted by different instances. I mean, how did he miss that?
Another one is when he said there was no visual representation of “All” and “Local”. Just one look at an instance’s page shows you those options quite clearly.
Try as I might, I missed the curation and consolidation of Reddit, where content is batched up into similar topics.
Wait… What? That’s kind of exactly what’s happening in lemmy communities.
I may be biased, but despite lemmy’s many shortcomings/growing pains I feel the author should have acquired at least a basic understanding of how all this works before writing an article that points out “problems” when there is none.
Edit: I’m on mobile so it’s hard to quote every single line. But there were more than a few mistakes there.
I mean… What? That’s kind of exactly what’s happening in lemmy communities
Indeed I can understand this one. I’m really liking Lemmy but discoverability is pretty bad, add the fact the ranking is shit and pretty useless in suggesting interesting content and you will understand his point.
Reddit has both much more content and not only a better ranking system but also a functioning personalized algorithm, if you want to use it.
To this day, all of the non mainstream Lemmy communities I’m following it’s because I’ve used to follow the subreddit and it migrated here.
Oh definitely. There are many things that lemmy needs to work on. It’s nowhere near as stable as reddit as it stands.
But the author was pointing out how reddit is better since it sorts topics by subreddits, implying that lemmy doesn’t do that (which is absolutely false).
As far as discovery and amount of content, I fully agree. Reddit just has much more users than lemmy. There’s no argument. Discoverability is also another aspect I’d love to be improved on in lemmy. If you’re in a small/new instance, you probably won’t see a ton of communities compared to a bigger one.
I’m pretty optimistic, though. I think we’re just getting started.
I think we’re just getting started.
Yeah of course, we need to remember Lemmy is not even out of beta yet. But people don’t really care, they try it once and if the user experience isn’t at the level of competitors they simply won’t use it unless there’s a philosophical rationale (for example decentralization, but many don’t care at all). That’s why I’m so happy many developers with great UX experience like Sync are approaching the platform
Lemmy tell you, the article was from 16 June which was before many of the recent updates and the flurry of app development.
Oh no, a new discussion board is neither as robust nor as polished as one with over a decade of use and revision.
Most of the complaints are just whining that Lemmy isn’t a perfect drop-in replacement for his love of endless, constant time wasting on Reddit. OTOH, the issue of multiple, nominally identical communities on Lemmy is a true weakness of the platform (imho, of course).
The multiple communities doesn’t bother me, I just join both and usually don’t notice the difference. It’s a better problem than all the communities being on lemmy.world which defeats the point of federation.
My issue is that it’s an inefficient use of human resources because it clutters the interface. If you’re looking for the answer to a question, you have to post in multiple places and/or search/review multiple communities to see if the question has already been answered. For low-traffic communities the replies get split, suppressing topic participation. For high traffic communities, stories/links that get posted to the “same” community on multiple instances clog up personal home pages and - in the case of large participation - clog up the top feed.
Again, imho, there should be a way for communities to aggregate or sync across instances and be shown as a single feed, like a symlink to multiple folders that is treated as a single location for end users. I realize this causes moderation concerns. I still think its better for the participants.
One person posting the same thing to multiple communities is bad etiquette, whether the stated purpose of those communities is the same or not. Anyone who does this should be shamed, blocked and banned. Find the biggest and most relevant community and post it there, don’t spam.
I focus on comments rather than posts, but if you care about finding new links then I agree that duplicate communities is a problem. But it’s not the biggest problem on the platform, and obviously while instances are independent there’s no way to force a solution. Communities have merged, but it’s usually small communities on small instances dying as their users move to a large community on a large instances. This is a disaster for decentralization, everything needs to be as spread out as possible across instances.
Gaming journalists can’t game, tech journalists can’t tech. Nothing but a skill issue like usual.
it’ll suffer the same fate as Mastodon
You mean, be successful. Good that this fucker who “tried and promptly quit” Mastodon finds himself called to judge it.
