Technology

I don't really understand what's going on yet.

I wish there was a way to collapse branches of nested comments.

I'm easing into it. With more usage, more content, more users, and more updates, it'll be like I never knew Reddit. Growing pains, whatever you want to call it, just makes me happy to be part of a new adventure for sharing and consuming content.

I'm no UX/UI expert, but I hope Lemmy makes it easier to filter content on the main page, collapse comments, and find specific subcommunities and users.

After a few days messing around with it and trying to get it to work in the ways that I want it to, I'm starting to think it feels like an upgrade. There are some serious barriers to entry that make it tough if you don't know what you're doing, but with Lemmy, my online experience is almost exactly the same as before, just without having a dedicated make-things-worse guy stinking the place up.

I love it. I love how I don't usually have to deal with "right-wing" extremists. They're usually contained to lemmy.grab, but I suppose one or two might break containment every now and then.

Still, a hell of lot better then seeing their bullshit as the first comment on a new post. :|

I'm still really struggling with how much screen real estate it wastes. Honestly that's a hard thing for me to get past.

Honestly, I kind of hate it, but since Reddit is unusable, considering all the subs that have gone dark (presumably permanently).

I'll be honest. I don't like the Fediverse concept - the fatal flaw of decentralized systems is that sometimes centralized systems are great. Basically, reddit was ONE BBS style forum for everything, which was the killer convenience. Similarly Twitter was the ONE microblogging platform for everybody, which was the killer convenience.

Because the moment anybody can operate a service, everyone does.

Right now, I need to buy a car, I can't find a good Lemmy community to get advice from. Searching for 'cars' in all federated communities returns:

Fuck Cars@lemmy.ml - 3.41K subscribers
Cars@lemmy.ml - 104 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.ca - 56 subscribers
Self Driving Cars - 19 subscribers
IdiotsInCars@lemmy.world - 11 subscribers
Electric Cars@lemmy.ca - 4 subscribers
RC Cars@lemmy.world - 4 subscribers
Cars@lemmygrad.ml - 3 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.world - 2 subscribers
Cars@lemmy.world - 1 subscriber

Leave aside for a moment that "Fuck Cars" has 34x more subscribers than the biggest Cars community - there are two different "Fuck Cars" communities, and three different "Cars" communities. It's great that you have subscriber numbers, but there's no definitive place to find out information on cars. Reddit's CEO is right that Reddit was organized like a landed-gentry where a first-come-first-serve approach to the most popular forums was done, but that landed-gentry system solved this problem, whatever new problems it may have introduced.

Now, you could look for a technological solution to solve this problem: For example, you could have a centralized server for all federated Lemmies, some sort of "lemmyhub.com"

We'd all have to agree on it. People could set up alternatives, but we'd all have to basically coalesce and say: Yes, this is the thing we want. Maybe it'd use blockchain, I don't know. Point is, it's centralized and easy to find information. It would work "just like Reddit" where you would have ONE authentication/authorization that works seamlessly across all instances (the current system is anything but seamless), and there would be ONE key/value combo for keyword. So, instead of going to Cars@lemmy.ml & Cars@lemmygrad.ml & Cars & lemmy.world, you just go to cars.lemmyhub.com.

If you want to post, you just use your lemmyhub account and your post appears on the "default" community. You can still post on individual lemmies by going to the individual lemmy page as well, or by specifying which of your Lemmy instance accounts you want to post as.

Here's the problem with the merging all the cars communities together, though: There is nothing to prevent someone from creating Cars@NeoNaziHeartsFascism.com and spamming the community with bile or trolling. Lemmyhub could operate a blocklist for troll and hate communities and instances, but once you're doing that, you're making editorial decisions. And forget all the nasty ethics problems around "what's free speech/what's hate speech?" "what's acceptable to view/what's not?", you have legal liability problems if anything slips through the cracks.

Reddit wasn't perfect, and certainly they could have been more proactive with shutting down hate speech, and more speedy with shutting down illegal content, but by and large reddit worked. Reddit's authoritarian approach worked because it was mostly benevolent -- right up until the point that it wasn't.

So I don't think Lemmy can technologically make it's way out of the situation.

I think what needs to happen is a solution like the Wikipedia foundation; we establish a non-profit designed to create a centralized server which may choose or not choose to incorporate Lemmy instances. It runs on donations, not advertising, and it's not designed to maximize profit, only to keep the servers running. It would borrow heavily from the Wikipedia model in organization and structure.

Because I'll be honest - Lemmy and Mastodon are okay, but there's really nothing in them improving on the old Newsgroups system of the late 80s and 1990s. Reddit captured the market for forum discussions because it was simply a better solution, there's nothing in Lemmy that makes it better - for the user - than Reddit.

Should we then abandon Lemmy and go back to Reddit? No, of course not. Reddit, if anything shows us that eventually all authoritarian systems, no matter how benevolent they start, always eventually turn tyrannical, and can do so on a whim, and once they do so, it is impossible to get back to benevolence.

But I've been a redditor for 15 years - I predated subreddits, if you can believe that. And I'm not finding the things I used to go to Reddit for here on Lemmy - information, expert and informed discussion, and niche topics. Maybe that's an adoption problem that will be solved with scale (and I hope it is), but right now, I feel like my luxury Bently sedan got totaled and I'm driving a 20 year old Honda Civic with manual transmission. By all means I'm grateful for the tent, but I still miss my Bentley

It's cool, but the community needs to grow.

The fediverse? Meh. Beehaw? Loving it

Feels a bit broken tbh. I'm currently on dbzer0 instance and I couldn't post in the community I created. Wonder what's happeneing. Did I get shadowbanned?

Testing a lemmy instance to see how it might work for the r/blind community. There will be a bunch of accessibility issues fixed in the next release it looks like, so it's a bit early to judge. Also, it's pulled me, personally, into the world of being a sysadmin for other people. Now I get to figure out why email doesn't work and why when you search for a community you need to press search nine times before anything shows and all kinds of other niggles like that before I feel ready to open an instance to the general masses.

I like the being here. A bit part of it is my desire to host my own stuff. I've never been much of a contributor on Reddit, but now that my instance is reporting to have some actual users it just feels so rewarding! Love the sense of the earlier decentralized internet.

I dislike the idea of multiple communities for the same topic spread across multiple instances. Sure, you can subscribe to multiple communities, but that's just extra overhead. I'm hopeful reddit backs down after the protest (as unlikely as it may be), but either way I will probably go back to using it regardless. Social media is about content, and unless there is a dramatic shift away from reddit being the content hub that it currently is, nothing else will be as useful.

I'm also a recent transplant. I too find the (current) lack of activity in certain niche areas disappointing, but I'm hoping that's temporary. I hope discussions of some of those topics can survive the inevitable fragmentation among instances.

On the other hand, I've installed Jerboa on my phone, and it's working very well. Now I've just got to get busy participating in those niche communities--could be tricky, 'coz the ones I often liked best were the ones I knew the least about. I enjoyed learning from people who already knew the ropes.

Hey Chris. Seeing more and more people from my Mastodon feed here :)

I'm very impressed by Lemmy. Some of the communities like Beehaw have been excellent, even before the recent Reddit API-apocalypse. Self-hosting has been a bit challenging compared to the more mature (I guess) Mastodon but I hope to get it sorted out soon.

Havn't tried Lemmy yet... does my comment show up alright coming from fedia.io? The fediverse is neat.

I feel the generation gap for the first time when I see people complaining about the difficulty of selecting a server to sign up and connect to!

Other than that, it does bring a lot of the atmosphere of the wild west times of the web, in a good way. I'm liking it!

Hopefully we retain a healthy amount of users after this wave passes and everyone is back at reddit. :)

I quite like it so far, though the users of the communities I've been moderating are not necessarily the most tech savvy and may not find their way here. So ultimately I feel like throwing 1.5M people to the wolves (though some other mods might stick around, who knows).

On the other hand, I might also have outgrown some of my communities, and just stuck around due to the familiarity. Joined reddit in my mid 20s, now I'm pushing 40.

I love it! I'm looking around the fediverse and the options are impressive.

It's a bit rough around the edges,but it does the job and so far I haven't missed reddit at all.

The fact that it will use activity pub is rather interesting to me, but I don’t have faith in that lasting long term. Eventually they’d defederate I feel or purposefully have features that only work on the Meta client making it worse for everyone else to interact with.