The decision was made to blow up the Reddit community and come here, so we have to make this work. But I’m already seeing a bunch of issues with Lemmy. Posting this so hopefully we can find solutions. Issues:
- Search-ability: I can’t find people. When I search for users it simply doesn’t work. Edit: Also apparently a client thing. Sucks though that if you choose the wrong client whole features just aren’t supported.
- Messages: Pretty bare bones interface. I guess it’s good enough to send you discord so you can have a conversation there.
- Replies: Looks like you can only reply to posts and not other replies 🤦♂️…so much for tractable conversations. This is my single biggest complaint about Mastodon - it’s almost impossible to follow a single conversation. Really hope this will be addressed. Edit: looks like this was a client thing. Phew!
- Updates: I just tried to login on a different client but couldn’t because the instance I’m on isn’t up to date enough with the minimum support version.
- Clients: I’ve tried Thunder and attempting Jerboa (can’t yet for the above reason), any other better ones?
I hope these are all fixable. The replies thing is pretty terrible.
Just so this isn’t an entirely downer post, here’s what I’m liking about Lemmy:
- Ad free: 🎉 Love love love this.
- Open source: Look, open source projects can be a little janky. But open source feels like a part of the DNA of this community, so I’m always happy to see everyone using FOSS.
- Community support: No matter what the interface, the people make the community, and it’s been pretty cool to see everyone just keep posting and carrying on over here. Like, it’s been a pretty smooth transition so far.
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This is a good post and it’s great that you’re searching for ways to improve and optimize your experience on Lemmy… but to set expectations… Lemmy isn’t as polished as reddit, it’s not going to become so overnight, and if it does become more polished it’s going to be because we each individually do things to make it so.
- It sounds like you’re struggling with janky mobile clients. You could try several write up a review of what works well on each. Jerboa v0.35.doesn’t have the comment reply problems you experienced, but DOES have login problems on older Lemmy instances. You can either wait for the v0.18.1 upgrade on your instance (a release candidate for tagged today, I expect the upgrade is only days away) or it’s possible to install Jerboa 0.34 via F-droid or Obtainium and that will let you login to Lemmy instances that are still running v0.17.x (and writing up a how-to with screenshots could help others with this problem).
- Subscribing to support communities and answering questions can help devs focus on improving the software faster by reducing the support load on them.
- Filing clear big reports in GitHub and tagging dupe reports will again help devs focus on improving things rather than tending to repeat issue reports.
