I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
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I love it here and I’ll express myself and show love to all with manatees
I love how it feels like a smaller but friendlier reddit. I hope more people can join
This! I don’t feel like people here (so far) are inherently geared toward being toxic.
Much like when I went from Twitter to Mastodon, finding “my people” is a lot more work. It’s unpleasantly easy for links to a community to take me directly to that instance instead of leaving my on my instance where I’d be able to subscribe and interact. But also like Mastodon, the experience is much nicer once things start getting set up. Really nice not getting pestered to use the app constantly!
I want to second that it’s very frustrating how links tend to go to the parent instance rather than my instance, as it seems like that’s seldom what a user would want.
Pretty much the same thing for me. I’m finding it very annoying to be taken to the instance, there must be an easier way.
cool that it’s written in Rust also decentralization (not the blockchain kind) is the future, but…
lemmy ui feels kinda unpolished, and sometimes community join requests just hang forever.I only disagreed regarding the UI. I like it.
Although there is always room for improvement.
You can like the UI while also agreeing it is unpolished. It needs a lot of when before it’s ready for prime time
Yeah, the odd hangs are a little iffy (subscribing and upvoting). Though I actually like the UI so far since it’s very clean. If I care enough I could always implement my own custom CSS using the “Stylus” extension in chrome/edge.
Sorry if this has been asked before. But my front page seems to dynamically add new posts as I’m scrolling. It makes me lose my place during the scroll. How can I have it just load once at start, and then allow me to scroll through?
The one thing I’m struggling with is how do I find a subreddit equivalent? For example r/formula1 or r/UKpolitics on Reddit might be… What?
Also is it possible to find these communities using Jerboa or so I need to login on my desktop?
Edit - spelling
Many specific subreddits don’t have equivalents yet; check Communities (top bar on website)/All. On Jerboa the Communities button is the three dots on the bottom bar: https://reddthat.com/post/8623
I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:
- The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I’m aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that’s less than ideal)
- The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I’m aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it’s vital to the success of Lemmy.
The first point is CRUCIAL for setting up your own “scrolling page/account” for, since the instances are only very vague directions, at least while the site is still growing. And in a similiar vein, the second point with B) would be better than manually blocking communities I genuinely have no interest whatsoever in, like fountain pens (unless I don’t know how to operate this site yet).
In fact, C) feels unnecessary because of that right now, since I already see many new communities just in my instance alone. Though it WOULD add things to browse since there isn’t as much happening here, yet…
Have you seen the search option, in the top right corner? Is that not enough to you? It works ok for me.
You can’t discover every community throughout the lemmy’s fediverse that way though. Only the communities that other users previously subscribed/searched for. https://browse.feddit.de/ is the thing to use if you’d like to see everything
It’s pretty cool so far. Takes some getting used to, little buggy here and there, but nothing intolerable. People are more respectful on here. On reddit and most all other platforms, I just lurked for the most part to avoid getting “aKsHuAlLy’D” by some angry poster. It’s chill here and it’s got potential -
This. It’s so annoying posting my own opinion or some comment that isn’t annoying or karma farming at all, and seeing it get downvoted.
I think Lemmy seems like a good idea and generally like it so far, but i do think that users that aren’t that tech savvy may have issues. It’s also nice that the servers are customizable in a way, but at the same time if you pick certain servers you can’t see down votes, or creating communities might be disabled which will seem inconsistent to newcomers that think of Lemmy as a more traditional platform like Reddit that only has one instance. The community search is also pretty clunky, a lot of users will probably have trouble understanding why they can’t just find all available communities instead of writing an obscure email-like string that still says “no results”, but then magically after searching again it will be there. I would say some areas are unpolished and even a bit buggy at times too. I figured these things out pretty fast, but being a software dev myself, i know that an end-user may struggle a lot more with these things, to the point where they may just abandon the platform out of frustration. I hope some of the rough edges can be smoothed out because the idea of this platform is definitely interesting, but if average people can’t use it it’s less likely to really succeed. I must admit that even i am a bit skeptical, and i may have to return to Reddit if not enough users/content migrate to this platform, even though i don’t really like many of the decisions Reddit make. I’m giving it a fair shot though and i definitely like it so far.
I find it easier than using mastodon for the first time tbh
Agreed. I’m finding a lot more stuff to do here.
One thing I do miss a bit from the Spezhole is the ability to just mindlessly scroll through all the links from all the communities I’m subscribed to. If that is here already, I haven’t found it yet. But I am enjoying the vibe quite a bit more.
I barely just started but it feels almost as natural as normal reddit.
Lemmy federates Reddit better than Mastodon federates Twitter. Mastodon is confusing. But on Lemmy I can clearly see the relationship between instances, and I can use it all as one big system.
It’s still a little hard for me to know the extent to which federation works on Lemmy. For example, when I select “All” in the filter at the top of the page, am I seeing all the content from instances that the main instance (in this case lemmy.world) is federating with?
I was new to Reddit (3 weeks of activity), and switching to Lemmy is a bit confusing. But one evening is enough to learn the basics, I hope. Let’s keep it rolling. :)
I like it here a lot more than Mastodon and its so much easier to go and subscribe to other communities at other nodes/servers also to engage in other servers as well. Mastodon was a little more complicated, you do that but it was a little fincky IMO and of course I love Lemmy more than Reddit and I hope it blows up also stays that way too lol (RIP all the servers)
I tend to agree. Just not sure comparing Lemmy to Mastodon is fair, since they seems like different platforms (eg. Reddit vs. Twitter).
I could see why you’d say that. The comparison I was trying to make was more so towards how easy it is to take advantage of the Fediverse in Lemmy than in Mastodon. At Mastodon, I wanted to interact with other servers and their timelines, it seemed to me it was a convoluted mess rather than seeing what I want to see.
Feels very early. The site design needs quite a bit of work.
- The usual confusion on fediverse domain boundaries and usage. Seems very easy to accidentally route to another server rather than viewing that content within the current server (community/user links).
- Doesn’t retain sort/filter options on the home feed. I get that the default is local to promote some growth, but when I switch to subscribed I want it to stay that way.
- Excess visual space, cluttered design with avatars and community icons and excess padding. It falls into some of the traps that make me despise the reddit redesign.
- Strange prioritization of elements; visual emphasis on features that seem pretty niche or obvious (crosspost, tooltip text post preview, comment language, usernames), while more important elements get dwarfed or lost in the noise (timestamps, comment delineation + nesting).
- Live reloads are confusing and would be nice to be able to disable.
- There’s a real lack of dom class tagging that would make it easier for me to remedy some of those issues with custom css and the number of
!important
definitions doesn’t inspire confidence. - Ultimately the above are all things that can be worked out. If the core systems work well enough then the design is something that can be augmented. I’ve had some navigation issues (including a page that wouldn’t load because it received a malformed json response from internal service), but the core functionality seems to be mostly there. Whether it’ll hold up to more load we’ll have to see.