this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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I really want to like lemmy, but it's difficult. I'm new to all this fediverse thingy, and I might just have old habits and perceptions how things should work but... I keep seeing the same posts more than once, iOS experience is not that good really, sometimes I see dead posts from 2 years ago for some reason, despite having subscribed to like 30 communities there aren't that many new posts to read.

Part of it probably that subreddits had millions of people so a lot of posts every minute, but it still feels underwhelming.

It's not as doomscrolly. Maybe I should find something else to waste my time on haha

What is your experience with lemmy? Maybe I just do things wrong. Let me know

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 year ago (2 children)

i mean so far, I'm enjoying it. sure, the community isn't as large, but that's mostly a good thing. on reddit, if i made a post, it would be like a 25% chance to get hundreds of comments, and a 75% chance to get none. here, I've gotten a few, high quality responses on every question post I've made. i do miss the "auto hide read posts" feature, but maybe that'll get added some day

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fediverse currently reminds me of Reddit from 10 years ago in frequency of content. There is something nice about not being in the rat race, less toxicity.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

yeah it's nice knowing that someone is gonna see my comment instead of it getting lost amongst hundreds. feels a lot more like a community that way

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

You can hide read posts here! In the web app settings for your profile:

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is there a way to stop the endless loading of posts on the website? Because every time I try to click a post, it moves down because a new post loaded, and this happens every ten seconds, constantly.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's a bug that wasnt an issue when the community was smaller. Last I heard they will replace it with a refresh icon that pops up at the top when new posts are available.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oh thank God is a bug, I really thought it was a feature of the site.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Thank jeebus. I was getting all fussy thinking it was a me/my phone/my browser problem.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I’ve heard that one is just a bug. Hopefully they’re working on it. Mlem (the iOS app) seems to have it handled, but it does crash a lot, and it’s frustrating to lose your scroll progress. I think we just have to wait it out in these early days 😵‍💫

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

I also don't seem to have that problem with Jerboa.

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

This is incredibly helpful! Thank you so much!

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The reality is that there was/is no reddit alternative and right now we're all in this transitory phase where we're all looking for a new home. We'll all just have to wait for the dust to settle. Lemmy isn't perfect but is improving and additionally other alternatives like kbin and tildes are in the works.

To your larger point, much of what you're feeling is the abrupt break in habits. I've been using the gap to develop more positives ones, and it's been great.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

A thought came to my mind when reading your comment.

Instead of finding a new home, let's make lemmy our new home. Let's try to populate lemmy more, get its activity up, and post more than we would've on reddit (since we have less users, we would need more posts per user), so it can stand a chance at being a reddit competitor.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This is the sentiment I've been rolling with. I normally don't post often, but since the move I've created an instance and posted more than ever.

We have to make what we want. once we have enough content for people to be interested, the users and community will come.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

I've been told my handle should work on all the lemmys but so far it only works on lemmy.one. I tried logging in with this at lemmy.world and beehaw and it didn't work. I tried creating a new login on both of those and it also didn't work. I want to like it but I'm confused and frustrated. I'll give it some time and see where the dust settles as you said. Call me old fashioned though but I just don't think shitposting on a forum should be so damn complicated.

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

You should never have to go to the actual websites for the other instances. Just like email, you wouldn’t expect to be able to use your Gmail account to log into Yahoo, right? Use lemmy.one as your homepage and browse everything from there. From there, you can use the Communities section to search/browse communities hosted on any instance, including Beehaw and lemmy.world.

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

You don't need to create multiple Lemmy accounts. You can search for and find and join subs from lemmy.world on your Lemmy.one account. it's not instantly intuitive coming from Reddit, but once you make the connection to the other subs on different instances its established for you

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

Yeah, I try to share this to help people get it...

GUIDE:

  • don't go to a community on the server that it's on (e.g. https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy) [NO login]

  • do go to a community on the server you're on (e.g. https://lemmy.one/c/[email protected]) [YES login!]

everything else works the same using the instance-to-instance federation, but only as long as you use YOUR lemmy instance, NOT the one that the Community lives on.

When linking to a community from within a lemmy post or comment, use this format:

(Note: this works really well on the website, but currently my app (Jerboa) crashes for these links. I think this is a bug that will be fixed.)

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Agree that it shouldn't be so complicated. I see that as a major flaw of the platform that will curtail adoption, but who knows, maybe one will win out over the others?

In any case, my understanding is that you can't log into the other instances with your username from lemmy.one, but you can read posts and interact with communities on different lemmy sites. For instance, I'm commenting from lemmy.world on a post you made using lemmy.one at a community hosted on lemmy.ml, but we can both read each other's comments, and so can people that signed up on other instances like beehaw.org.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Im talking to you from a lemmy.world account right now. Whatever instance you chose to create your account with is the website you need to go to each time you login. From there, you will still have access to search comment etc with any other community through your current instance.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It will get better quickly—there are people working around the clock on apps and improvements right now. This isn’t like your normal social media site where they can use seed money and advertising to buy the best infrastructure right off the bat. This is a grassroots effort to make something that can evolve into a unique and independent service.

If we all stick it out with alternative options like this right now, we will be looking at a much freer future for online communication later. If we get annoyed and go crawling back to the capitalist overlords at FB/Twitter/Reddit, then we give them everything they wanted in the first place, and the internet will take one more step towards being a walled garden casino of ideas.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Your handle does work for all of the various Lemmy servers. But to access them it's like your email, you wouldn't log in to your Gmail account from Yahoo. Yahoo has no idea what your Gmail username and password is. So how can it let you in? And like email because both servers speak the same protocol you can interact with other users on other servers just like if you had their email address.

In your case lemmy.one is your email server so to speak. You can access any other Lemmy community or set of communities on another lemmy server by searching directly for their address on your home server or if someone else has interacted with another server already that server's communities will show up in your home server's All list and you can see those posts there and interact with them as if they were local to your home server.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You make it sound like not doomscrolly is a bad thing

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

I remember HATING Reddit after the great Digg migration. The information was presented in a different way and the discussions seemed to be the focus rather than the linked content. It took a while to get used to it and I'm feeling a bit of the same here. There are a ton of similarities that are already here, so it's not as jarring and things are improving every day.

I feel like I'm interacting more here than I did on Reddit for a long time. By the time anything showed up on my feed over there, it was 1 day old, had 5000 comments, and had devolved into memes.

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

What I'd recommend in your case is sorting the posts by "hot" instead of "active" which is the default setting. Posts get up the active sorting whenever somebody comments on them or upvotes (I think?), even if they are very old, whereas hot should only show you new and currently popular posts. You'll still see the post that you've already seen and a setting for that is clearly missing, but it should still be an improvement.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Honestly man, as much as I 100% agree on the UI difficulties, it's like a breath of fresh air. There's good music posted, people posted books and I looked and really wanted to read them. It's more human. There's this tiny little handful of content here, but it's not all same-y and in-joke-y and weird.

I'm not trying to hate on reddit, I still go to reddit for news because of more or less what you're talking about (the weird sorting in the newsfeed here and the lack of certain content). But what I like about here is that there are nerdy people, there's real content, there's not this weird hivemind and endless dopamine content. The great stuff about reddit was always the in-depth storytelling and unique content, to me, not just the gratification aspect of everything working right and new content popping up. I'm happy with Lemmy despite the hiccups because it seems like it's getting back to that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I keep seeing the same posts more than once

In my experience, it sorts by "active" which keeps showing the same 5 posts. Try sorting by "hot" instead.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (9 children)

It's tricky at times, but I'm really liking it after a few days. It's a bit chaotic but in a fun way I think.

If you haven't seen it yet, check out https://browse.feddit.de for a way to search for more communities

Hope you start to enjoy it more :-)

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

I don't know if this answers your question about same posts, but here is info about the sorting algorithm:

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

I also see same posts (I am looking at you two toilets in a bathroom) a lot but I think it is just lemmys way to show posts that ppl engage in and I guess two toilets in a bathroom is a very hot/trending topic right now because it doesn't seem to die down 😂

So I usually sort on all and new to find post that is lonely and maybe help them out a bit by commenting :D

I don't think this is a big different from reddit tho, on reddit do I see almost the same post all the time or even repost, here I just see the same post more 😂 just go and look at r/steamdeck, same question over and over again, but I will read them all! haha

I don't know what kinds of subs you joined but big ones like meme is posting a lot. But I saw this on reddit too, even reddit thought my feed was a bit lacking so I had maybe 50% posts from subs I hadn't subscribed to, to scroll through 😂

But also remember we aren't as many here(yet). we just hit over 100k users yesterday.

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

And I think it is good to have multiple sources of entertainment. Even tho it is nice to have everything at one place :D

Sorry if this sounds like preaching and that I wrote a book. But here you have it haha

Edit: fixed a few grammar mistakes (that I saw right away)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Feels like an older reddit, which I enjoy(ed). I also appreciate the genuine interactions and that upvotes are a 1:1 with users. No smoke and mirrors.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I'm actually enjoying the lack of doomscroll.

Since Lemmy isn't built to trap you for hours on end to get that sweet ad revenue, you can just run out of new stuff to see and then stop lemmying. Bust open the eReader or get to that backlog of bookmarked articles.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

In my opinion, were in the 'keep swimming' fishing boat scene from Nemo.

Reddit wants to stay the 'homepage of the internet' but also force everyone to go through their tools for ad bucks.

If we succeed, we can bust our communities out of the centralized net and reform on the other side.

We fail by not working together here today in this moment, we have to use this event to convince the average person to switch now, we might not get another opportunity like this.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I find it exciting. Very reminiscent of the Digg exodus. Sure, it can be a little frustrating at times. But reddit was going downhill for me long before the API stupidity. Lemmy feels like returning home in a way.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think it's just going to take some getting used to. I've been riding the struggle bus for the last couple of days but it's getting better. I'm just excited to be somewhere new for a change. The echo chambers were getting pretty bad.

Mlem (iOS app) isn't great but I'm sure it will get better. The official reddit app is atrocious.

I was on reddit for over 12 years. I mostly lurked because my comments were never seen by the time I saw a thread. That's not super important tot me but I'd like to have more of a voice. Sure, things are easy now, but back in the day it was a pain in the ass in some regards. I'm still shocked the search sucks so bad over there. Give it some time to grow and see what happens.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I know the feeling, but the way I'm dealing with it is twofold.

  1. Create content. If the commuity you like has few posts, then start something. If the community doesn't exist, create it. I'm doing my part by creating maliciouscompliance (quick shoutout: /c/[email protected] , https://lemmy.world/c/maliciouscompliance , [email protected] ).

  2. Recognise that I used to spend too much time on Reddit and I should spend less time on social media in general. "Not as doomscrolly" is a feature for me, although I recognise this isn't for everyone.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It's far from perfect, but I'm taking a stand.

Half the reason I used Reddit was to cure boredom. I've decided to find other things to do. The other main reason I loved to check in was to make sure I don't miss big news. So far, Lemmy seems to scratch that itch. It'll take a long time for niche communities to establish, but I'll just deal with that for now. Maybe I'll just go back to some old forums for that purpose.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Lemmy is still very early in it's development and there's only two full time working on it afaik.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I would say to breathe deep and take your time. Lemmy is not a clone of Reddit, and it shouldn’t be viewed as, say you would compare functionality between 2 third-party Reddit apps.

Think of it as coming in to a new MMO after having played the old one for many years. Some things will be familiar, and some things will be different. Some mechanics may feel like a “step backwards” while others are cool additions.

Lemmy isn’t new, but it’s getting fresh eyes on its user experience and that is a good thing. And unlike Reddit, each community/server/whathaveyou can be far more responsive to their users feedback. That said, not every response will be a “yes” but you don’t have requests filtering through various levels of technological red tape, which I understand has been a challenge for the Reddit moderators, who still do not have the necessary tools to effectively moderate their subreddits.

When I first joined Beehaw, and saw, originally, a “lack” of diverse subreddits (including my mainstays) I was a bit disappointed, but then I thought to myself: “damn the torpedoes, I’m just gonna wing it” and subscribed to a bunch of communities that looked promising.

I’ve been on Lemmy since the disastrous AMA and have not looked back. I’ve even engaged more in these last 5 days on Lemmy/Beehaw than in the last year on Reddit. And while I still miss my 250+ subreddits (including r/superbowl and the subreddits I collected as part of a Reddit gestalt (r/inthesoulstone, the subreddit for Purple button pushers, r/buddhistasfuck (created as a lark, someone posted it wouldn’t last a day and I stayed to prove them wrong, and while it was a quiet subreddit, every once in a while someone would post something they thought was “extremely” buddhist)) the Lemmy communities have provided more meaningful interactions. Plus, Lemmy will create its own gestalts, and I’ll have new ways to experience the never-ending stream of random data tidbits I have grown to crave.

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

You aren't doing anything wrong! This site/app (lemmy) and the concept (fediverse) are still super early days so there are going to be many problems. The site has some layout issues and there isn't nearly as much content as Reddit but that's just because it is new.

The most important bit, to me at least, is that the fundamental idea of the fediverse is good. We have had to many instances where social sites like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter can just decide what people can and can't say, they can remove our content and they can monetize it all without doing any real work of their own as far as creating content. The idea of the fediverse ensures that no one server, person or company has all the content and thus the control.

I really hope people stick with something fediverse whether it be lemmy, kbin or any of the other projects out there. Post content there, cross post it from Reddit if you really have to post to Reddit too for whatever reason. Please don't give these companies all the control anymore.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Give it some time, you'll start to see more and a bigger variety of posts. Additionally, change your sort of posts once in awhile, and enable the "all" selection and you'll see a bigger variety of posts

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Oh my, that has just been there the whole time and I repeatedly glossed over it!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

I used web version of lemmy.world on desktop (1080p monitor) yesterday, coming from old.reddit + RES, I really hate:

  1. The web trend to leave white space on both side of websites, it's space inefficient and causes thread with longer title to take two lines to display.

  2. Everything has a thumbnail slot even if it's just text thread, makes each thread took more height to display, also space inefficient.

  3. You need to be authorized to even subscribe/join to a community (that is not on lemmy.world).

  4. Image expand button is hard to spot for me, and I am pretty sure some threads with image didn't have expand button.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I got the beta Mlem for iPhone. I’m liking it better than the mobile web. For two days it seems to be growing ok. I don’t miss the ads every other post for sure! (Didn’t have on Apollo either)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I know what you mean. The biggest issue I'm having is finding and subscribing to communities that are not a part of the instance I joined with.

I kept seeing links that listed communities I was interested in subscribing to, but then it would ask me to log in, I'd put in my credentials, only for the log in to not work. I finally realized I had to make a new account with that instance, and then i could log in and join it. I don't want to have to juggle between 3 or 4 accounts to enjoy content, plus much if it is duplicated as some instance are linked, but others are not.

Also I use Jerboa to browse lemmy, don't have a PC, and would rather use an app than my web browser(Brave).

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

That's not how it works.

You can subscribe to remote instances from your own instance. You shouldn't be using multiple accounts.

For example, you are on lemmy.world, and the group you replied to is on lemmy.ml. I'm replying to the conversation from lemmy.blahaj.zone. The instances communicate with each other.

What you need to do is search for the instance you want to join. So if you see a cool group called CoolGroup on a server called some.instance, you would go to the search box and search for [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]). That will let you find it.

Yes, that could and should be easier, but lemmy is not a finished product, and it was not prepared for the reddit influx, so it will take time to iron out usability stuff.

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[–] arthur 3 points 1 year ago

Any new platform will have far less content to begin with. And far less tools. I hope that people do create apps like Infinity, Relay and Apollo for Lemmy soon (or that Jerboa grows to that quality level).

The content will come, as Reddit becomes a shell of it's former self to satisfy the VCs.

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

I just love it, but you have to make sure to subscribe to a lot of communities from lots of different instances.

Im also on Android which I think has a better mobile client.

Beehaw is very chatty, join their popular communities. :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There's rough edges to be sure but the community seems pretty good and the devs seem like they're working hard.

Right now I'm seeing less time spent endlessly scrolling as more of a feature than a bug lmao, need to break that habit anyway

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

If I'm spending less time staring at my phone and more time picking up a book or something, all the better for me. I've found myself engaging more and doomscrolling less though, so the time feels more well spent even though I'm spending less time then I would have on reddit.

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