this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy

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[–] [email protected] 264 points 1 year ago (14 children)

I’m loving it too- I miss a lot of subreddits and the sheer volume of content from the other site, but it feels quite special here at the moment. Also I am loving how quickly Lemmy and all of the supporting apps are developing! I am using Mlem and am very impressed. I want to like wefwef and agree that it is very similar to Apollo, but I just can’t cope with web apps.

[–] [email protected] 93 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think the content level has gotten better even in the past few days.

I predict at ~200,000 users, there will be a good enough flow of posts and comments that it won’t feel as empty compared to Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I feel like I've seen a lot more posts in just the past few days since I've started coming here.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It was slow when I came in last month, but it has gotten to pretty high levels of interaction since.

We just need the niche stuff for us to customize and we will be good to go.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It takes time to develop custom content. Reposts are easy. Culture takes effort. Beans take effort.

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[–] [email protected] 141 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Nice overall but still a bit silent here and there.

But I actually have more motivation to interact here than I ever had on Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

With it being a little quieter it’s so much more calmer feeling

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Commenting in Reddit felt very claustrophobic in a way. And saturated. Kind of sad, also, if you were some days late to some nice topic, and get buried under thousands and thousands of comments made prior yours, and have zero interactions at that point from anyone, even if you asked a very relevant question or whatever.

But I suspect Lemmy will get to that point too. Right now, though, it’s light enough to actually warrant wasting energy writing anything as a response to anything.

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[–] [email protected] 127 points 1 year ago (5 children)

It's fine but way too much talk about reddit.

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[–] [email protected] 100 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I'm having an easier time sticking to it and not visiting reddit than I thought I would. The first day was pretty sketchy with 90% of the posts being about Lemmy, reddit, or twitter - but since then it's been giving a more enjoyable experience.

It probably helps that I'm making an effort to post and comment, which I never really did on reddit.

As Lemmy grows I'd like to see more niche communities take off, similar to how there was "a subreddit for everything".

I do have a big wishlist for site functionality changes though. A big sore spot is that youtube videos and text posts can't open in-line on the front page.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My impression of lemmy changed a lot once I've read this updated from the lemmy devs from less than a month ago. TL;DR: Lemmy was developed by just two people and with reddit self-destructing everyone jumped to it, and lemmy wasn't really ready for that.

With that info I'm now all the more impressed that lemmy is working as well as it currently is and not crashing every few minutes!

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (15 children)

It's fine for news, tech and memes but none of the niche subs that I loved are here. I really miss the sub for my city.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (13 children)

So far half the posts are about Reddit. So that part sucks. Lemmy is very complicated compared to Reddit. I don't think large groups will be able to migrate here until a easy-mode app comes along to make it user friendly(er).

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I love it tbh. Just wish my niche communities had more people. But that just takes time

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago (8 children)

There's tons of memes and stuff, but I was never into that, so meh. My thing was specialized nerd groups and they are mostly not here yet. With time, maybe they will come.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (6 children)

The servers (instances) aspect and different communities (forums on topics) on different servers and servers blocking others, is a mess if I'm being honest. It's the biggest flaw. I still find it hard to find communities of topics I want..

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

As a long time reddit lurker. Loving it here so far.

When I heard about it I was kind of expecting it to be contentless and bare. Oh boy was I wrong and so pleasantly surprised.

The amount and the quality of the posts and comments is very high. The people super friendly and I'm loving the sense of community and respect. Bonding over something new and exciting also enchances this feeling.

I also visit reddit now and then but I noticed my browsing sessions leave me more satisfied here on Lemmy, than on Reddit.

Obviously there are some communities that I miss, but I'm sure with time replacement tor those will start to appear.

Lemmy and the community not only fills the "gap", but for me, it also stands by itself providing something that reddit didn't .

Super excited about what is being created here.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pretty nice. I just wish more people were here. The occasional bug is fine it seems to be fixed quickly.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

For me, I was a longtime lurker, so I’m trying my best to come out of my shell and actually comment and have discussions. Overall, I like it so far, I just miss some communities and don’t want to run anything myself.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's reminding me a lot of when I first joined Reddit (nearly 15 years ago). Not too much is happening day-to-day so I'm checking in every couple of days or so.

I think this is a much healthier relationship than checking a site compulsively every couple of hours. I'm liking it so far, also a crazy repercussion is that I'm using the internet like the early days again. I think of a topic and I do a deep dive on my own, researching into it and going down weird rabbit holes.

I feel like Reddit discouraged this behavior by having a non-stop flow of communities that "mostly" interested me enough to not go "browsing the web"

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago

I kinda miss Reddit, but after browsing it today, it felt kinda weird. Lemmy is starting to feel more and more like home as more people join in and participate. And also the fact that the 0.18 update fixed the numerous issues, it really helps.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A little dull tbh. I still pop over to reddit when I'm on my desktop to visit my favorite subreddits (especially my bumper group). Hopefully Lemmy gets better, but I think step one is the community needs to stop being so goddamn meta and focus on building active communities.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Well, let's do a pros vs cons

Pros:

  • I wasn't banned for saying Putin should die after he invaded a country
  • It's a decent time killer
  • It's growing
  • Idk I just like it

Cons:

  • /c/NCD and some other instances are too small and not even close to their counterparts levels
  • Jerboa for Lemmy has not been behaving too well for me
  • It's still fairly small and new so communities need to consolidate still

Overall I like it better than reddit tho.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

I like it so far. But I think the large amount of reddit users won't like how separate everything is. Most of my friends and colleagues I've mentioned and shown it to, didn't like it for that one reason. Reddit is a singular easy to access place with communities for everyone that is popular.

Fediverse (Lemmy in particular) needs to simplify I think for people to be able to adapt to it. My girlfriend made an account and is having trouble finding groups for herself, but willing to take the time cause I'm next to her all the time. But not everyones got that.

edit: also, i am using Memmy for Lemmy now on IOS, nice to have when not at my PC. Good app so far.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I like it but can't wait until we stop talking about Reddit

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Loving actually having conversations with people, instead of talking into the void where by the time you see a post it's already so old that commenting is useless

I love the concept of a federated network, it definitely feels way more punk than just being another data set for a corporation

I do wish a few of the more niche subreddits had similar communities here, but I'm trying to do my part by making that content

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Still not enough content. I already feel the slow down in activities. I'm in a weird spot rn. I go back to reddit because there's more interesting stuff to see, but the official apps is so bad, that I come back here. Also People here seems more intelligent on avg.

I like lemmy because there is no ads and no gold and premium stupid stuff like NFTs and 50$ awards. I liked the awards ideas ,but damn paying up to 100$ for digital emojis that everyone will forget in a day?

The big downside is the lack of embedded videos. Of course videos takes a lot of server power compared to text. But I hope we find a way to implement this in the future.

I think we should have a public board that shows the instance hardware spec and the finance. So we can set donations goals to upgrade servers or keep them afloat.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

Not as many things to mindlessly scroll by, but I'm liking the new community vibe so far!

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I was on Reddit for over 8 years, nearly entirely using Apollo. It was frustrating to arrive β€œlate” to a thread and only see funny jokes, and have any comments buried if you bothered to make one. Here, it is nice to actually have a conversation with posters and maybe you might actually see them again someday.

Maybe the difference between having a conversation at your favorite pub with good friends versus yelling at someone in the stands at a football stadium. It is nice to be seen and heard.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (10 children)

None of the communities I'm interested are here, and a lot of the posts feel like they're coming from cryptobros. I'm fundamentally interested in the format and tech, but I'm only here because I refuse to use Reddit on mobile, for now. Things could get better or worse, hard to say.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There's one aspect of it that I didn't expect, and that's its exclusivity. Seems like this is a small, but vibrant, community of geeks, just like the whole internet was in the 90s and 2000s.

I'm not 100% sure it'll be able to replace reddit in the area of getting advice on niche topics, but I do believe I'll enjoy being here.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Kinda not liking that the more niche communities are me and another 5 people are best

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's a bit of a mixed bag. I do enjoy Lemmy. I think that the conversations that take place here are interesting (though many now revolve around Reddit in one way or another). I don't really find the front page to be as good as Reddit's.

And then, of course, I think the most important difference is that Lemmy draws a specific type of person, even after the Reddit migration, and there aren't as many of us as there are average Internet users. I'm not saying Lemmings are a special breed; rather, I'm saying that we're the sort of people who might have used Usenet at its peak. We're the sort who might be Linux users. Many of us are morally aligned with open source technology and the ethics thereof. This makes the discussions a little less diverse on Lemmy than they are on Reddit (which can be good and bad, depending on the sort of conversation).

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

17 years on Reddit, 15 years as a registered user. I'm done with Reddit.

https://old.reddit.com/user/irqbreaker

Two weeks in on Lemmy and I've even set up my own instance. It feels like old Reddit and I'm loving it!

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Definitly hurting for engagement and content, but seemingly improving.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

gets better everyday indeed

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It’s okay. I was optimistic at first, but I don’t think this platform is cohesive enough yet to be worth using consistently, especially with instances defederating from each other off and on. It means you have to have multiple accounts to access certain communities, and then kbin is a whole other thing I guess? Because I can’t log into kbin from wefwef so I can’t even access the stuff posted there.

Honestly the reason I’m even still continuing to even open lemmy other than to check its growth is because of how nice wefwef is.

Also, like other people have said, the jerking each other off about leaving Reddit has gotten unappealing. There’s only so much self congratulation I can take.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

It's kind of a ghost town so far. But if we can wrestle control of social media away from corporate control, democracy across the world will be stronger for it. Regardless, I'm here for the long haul, making contributions FAR exceeding my efforts on Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Really enjoying it, especially with the wefwef app (apollo refugee :( ). Compared to my experience on Reddit I actually feel the urge to contribute to discussions here and not lurk.

The only downside so far is that I kinda miss my niche subreddits... I've been checking sub.rehab on and off to see if they've migrated to Lemmy.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Ok so far. Missing some subs that i was active on at Reddit, but maybe they will show up eventually.

Only thing i don't realy get is what the point of having it divided in different service is, when it is all going to show up everywhere else anyways. I go to Lemmy and i get kbin and mastodon post, i go to kbin and i get lemmy posts...

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

The communities are a lot smaller as is to be expected, but it feels really good compared to Reddit. People are active enough and the overall design is so much less cluttered.

Although the bar is pretty low, given that half the Reddit app is just ads.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

Generally I like it. It has a lot going for it. So for some constructive (uninformed probably, I only signed up today, but I have been lurking for about a month) criticism:

I don't really like how there can be 10 "Official Linux" subs, because 10 self-hosted servers can create it locally. But Okay, I can deal with it, searching for subs I can see where everyone has mostly subscribed to for a particular topic.

Which leads me to, Although its distributed, it should be distributed with common "global subs" which sit on all instances of self-hosted. This would allow me to see that "/g/Official Linux" is the main one (others might exist and that is fine but they are local self-hosted and accessible globally but might be more niche). This would eliminate some small popup Lemmy's self-hosted since they would need a reasonable amount of storage. But I'm not sure this is good or bad, if you want to self-host and not participate in sharing/storing that data, then fine but your local subs are not replicated to the distributed network. I don't know in my own mind if this is all good or bad, but something like this should be explored.

Currently, it appears to me in my limited usage, some sub on some self-hosted (lemmy.cheapdomain.for.fun) could blow up and that self-hoster cannot afford to maintain it, and shuts down. Boom, sub gone? (see previous, note I have not explored self-hosting a Lemmy server yet).

Server blocking/banning: This one concerns me, since its hardest to manage and deal with. Firstly, IMO you are going to get bad actors setting up bad servers with 'nazi love' subs or worse, and they should be filtered from the main distributed service. However currently this is in a terrible state of affairs and needs to be addressed, since free speech is what its about. People may disagree with things and even reddit had dubious subs. But you could choose to ignore it and not subscribe. There needs to be a way to inform users of a selfhosted site, and *why" the decision to block it was. So not just a federated list of "blocked" but with clear reasoning as to why it was blocked by lemmy.world or lemmy.me . Users could then at least identify a site that is blocked and if the reasoning for the block is against their belief they can at least go and check it out for themselves.

While being distributed, perhaps there can still be a self managed tagging system for subs and guidelines for how to tag your local sub, for global acceptance. You dont have to tag as the system says, but not doing so may prevent you from being shared across the federated net.

Everything else is great. Most of the reddit communities I had anything to do with exist here, albeit smaller. The Jerboa app is great (and another that I tried which I forget the name of off the top of my head).

I even like that the fanboys of Apple, Raspberry Pi, Docker etc are here to downvote the crap out of anything remotely negatively said, against their favourite thing... (That one might be a bit facetious, but that is what freedom of expression is).

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

For now, not great. It's annoying to have 99% of my feed taken up by posts like this one. I don't care about Lemmy, reddit, or any other related sites. I'd like to just find some actual content thanks.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So far it seems like Reddit but with a lot less content. I'm assuming that's primarily a popularity problem.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm enjoying the site overall, but I feel like a lot of people are way too die-hard into the philosophy here, to the point where everything seems to come back around to endless circle jerks about how cool and awesome we are for using the superior open platform.

I like it because it's open, but it really isn't THAT big of a thing, and I'm getting pretty burned out only the endless talks about what is and isn't the best pure way to implement the perfect utopia of federation.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The β€œfront page” experience of seeing general news I should be aware of is getting better but it’s harder to find active niche communities as expected, and I wish there was combined or less fracturing with communities, like having to choose whether to follow [email protected] or @lemmy.world since I would assume they’re somewhat redundant

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Good, but why are there sooo many duplicate communities?

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Honestly I'm kind of struggling with the concept. I'm using the connect android app but it's just not clicking for me.. how do I know if I've found the right community? On Reddit there was only one /r/gaming but when i search on lemmy I get lots of small communities all for the same thing across different instances. Am I misunderstanding how this works? This must be how my parents felt when i first tried explaining Reddit to them 5 years ago

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

3 or so days in and liking it more than I've liked reddit in a long time. Boost for lemmy is likely going to be the thing that makes it permanent for me

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