Pretty great tbh. The tricky thing with being an early adopter is you kind of have to be the change you want to see, but I'm old enough to feel no shame about just barging into places and starting new threads as needed.

So far started two accounts on two different instances (I like to keep different subjects somewhat separate) and had really cool interactions on both.

Obviously there are a few UX issues, trying to sub to remote communities is kind of a nightmare, but hopefully I've subbed to enough that other people on my instance will find it a bit easier to find them through search.

great, i've really liked lemmy so far. its really the first alt big tech platform like this that i've gotten into, was never big on mastodon or any of the others out there.

lemmy is honestly a breath of fresh air. really great platform so far, i think it has very strong potential.

i still use reddit for some things, but overall i'm starting to use lemmy a lot more. great work from the devs, can't wait to see the future!

At least on my instance everything is running fast, snappy. I like the clean interface. Haven't encountered any major bugs yet.

The only downside for me so far is that there is not a lot to see yet. The only active posts and communities are about lemmy itself. Which is understandable of course but I can't wait to actually get to the phase where I actually get to experience real content lmao

Oh man it has been unironically great! First day I joined there was basically nothing but a meme sublemmy and a couple of tech subs too, but nowadays there are communities popping up left right and center, and I'm seeing so many familiar subs recreated on here, too

Overall my past week of using Lemmy have been phenomenal, and I'm happy to say that Lemmy has become my mindless scrolling app of choice now

Edit: correct number of weeks

While not every community is on Lemmy yet that I visit on Reddit, by people migrating from Reddit to here, hopefully that issue will be solved soon. The community here seems way more welcoming than the Reddit community is too

I love it so far,only needs more people

Well, I'm here !

I have removed my Reddit account after 10yrs + 100k + karma and more hours invested than I would like to admit.

This time, I'm legit done with the place. I don't like where they are headed and decided to give Lemmy a go.

So far, so good :)

I got my account approved and I'm good to go. This is my first comment of many, many more to come.

Good to be here folks...

I'm excited for the possibilities, but daunted by the realities.

It's going to be tough to get enough foot traffic to start populating smaller subs. It seems like the Reddit API drama is the big break needed to hit a critical mass of users, but how many will take the time to figure out something like Lemmy? And are the Lemmy instances ready? It's strange to root for Reddit to go through with the API changes after using Reddit for so long. But if there was ever a time to pay a bit extra for additional hosting resources, June 11th (or now!) should be it. If a large influx of new users crash Lemmy instances, and no one can sign up, a golden opportunity will be lost.

Signing up was not a flawless process. You are asked to make a choice about servers with little guidance on what it all means.

Requiring a 10 character password with additional character conditions is going to turn a lot of possible new users OFF. It should be 6 characters, with no conditions. Yes, it's not secure, but we need sign ups above everything else. Users can choose to get as complex as they want, but simplicity should also be an option. If people later grow to value their Lemmy accounts, they can secure them at a later time. But extremely easy sign up should be the default for now.

Asking people to write an extensive answer as to "why you want to join this particular server" should also be suspended temporarily. Again, it's about ease of signing up. We should try to get as many signups in as quickly as possible, and weed out the problem people later. After the possible Reddit migration boom ends, you can go back to application essays as a requirement for entry.

The web interface is buggy. The site will often "reset" as you are reading a thread, and the whole thread will act if "refreshed". If this causes users to lose a long post they are typing, they might quit Lemmy then and there.

The community structure needs to be more unified across instances. It's confusing that there are local groups as well as "multiverse" groups across federations, often with the exact same name. It's a bummer that the communities can be splintered, and will have people not realize what's really available.

I think we're might see some weaknesses of a distributed system like Lemmy in the next few weeks. It's hard to organize and get everyone rowing in the same direction with no "CEO" or clear leader. It does feel like little fiefdoms doing their own things, and that makes it even harder to hit critical mass.

In terms of content and userbase, so far so good. It obviously leans heavily towards the technically competent. Lemmy sort of screens for the technology inclined since it's only well known to those who are up to date with the latest in tech. So of course it's easy to feel like everyone is like minded and cool for now. But we need to attract casuals if we want vibrant, non-tech groups to exist and flourish too.

I've only been exploring for 2 days though, so I can be very wrong.

I really like it. The platform itself is great. The main thing that needs improvement is the onboarding experience. It seems really confusing at first, but I think that's mainly because it's not explained well.

For example, the first step of the onboarding process is choosing which server to join, which I think is kind of a misleading decision. It seems like you're choosing what community you're going to interact with, but that's not really the case. You're mainly just choosing who's going to foot the bill for your network traffic. The decision seems important but it's really not IMO, at least not for someone who's just trying to jump in and see what Lemmy is all about.

Also, community discoverability is a problem, but I think that could easily be solved with better UX on the community page. (For example I think there should be a message that says "Looking for more communities? Try doing {insert instructions here} to find them."

So, first day of Lemmy and so far I’m enjoying it. I’m looking through communities and seeing what I’d like to follow or not.

Criticism (hopefully constructive) that I do have:

• I miss the random niche subreddit side of things, but I’m not sure if that’s as a result of lack people on the platform, or the UI not promoting that style of thing much.
• I am missing a good iPadOS client. I’m currently using the Web UI, which works well enough, but it’d be great to have a more native app.
• It seems strange that I can’t have a One True Fediverse Identity where my mastodon identity is the same as my lemmy identity and vice versa. I note that Takahē has started refocusing into more of an identity broker for ActivityPub and less of an online experience, so maybe it will be the one true unifying identity.

On the plus side:

• There are a lot of fun general communities on here.
• People are really nice, in general, and this doesn’t seem to be changing, compared to the histories I’ve been browsing
• I really like markdown as a way to post, and it seems to work ok from my iPad

All in all, it’s been a positive 24hrs, I might give an update after a week or two.

Hey I'm new here bc fuck spez. There's definitely potential here. Would like it to be easier to find communities (sublemmies?) And the app needs work but I'm ready to go all in. Did I mention fuck spez yet

Just signed up a few minutes ago. I honestly really like it so far. I was never into Twitter but I did try out mastodon and just couldn't get used to the look of everything. It was also confusing to sign up. So far Lemmy has been great. I am surprised how many active users there are. I was worried it would be super dead.

edit: spelling

So far I am really enjoying it, mostly because whenever you post something you don't get 130493025084385 people telling you that your are a horrible person and completely wrong and offering you unsolicited advice and ignoring your question in the first place.

It is NICE here. For now at least.

I like it ~ I joined mastodon but I think it was way too slow to load images - probably joined some dodgy overloaded server (though I like the Reddit format and community better rather than Twitter)

It's giving me Reddit 15 years ago vibes - smaller tech-savvy and agile community - my Reddit use was on and off through the years; but I like the idea that each community in the Extended Lemmiverse can all have their own vibes and cultures and implementations of the platform and we can all chat and follow topics together 🕊️

I've only been here a short while; but maybe one thing I'd love is not to see reposts in the /all section ; I know the communities are small and growing and can cross post for more stuff , but I'm sure there could be a way for the system to know that the title and url are the same - so only show one , or auto-merge the comments and prioritise posting your comment to your local community instance's post Edit - I might try install an instance on my website and try to make a merge function ~

I'm enjoying figuring out how the place works. For example, when I first signed up, I couldn't work out how Beehaw.org was part of Lemmy was part of the Fediverse, but I'm now subbed to almost as many communities on other servers as I am on Beehaw.

The learning curve has perhaps been more steep than on Reddit, but no more so than Twitter > Mastodon.

It's fine, but it's a pain having to create multiple accounts when some instances aren't linked to the one you picked to create an username. For the rest I think the other comments have already pointed out what would need to improve in the future if we expect to leave Reddit; curiously, most of the problems we have here are the same or similar to the ones while trying to use Mastodon.

Now I've got my head around how the instances work and how everything is connected but not connected at the same time I'm growing to like it. Once more communities pop up I think it's going to be good

I had a bit of a rocky start, but I picked up the concepts fairly quickly.

The Good:

• The discussion threads here remind me of what Reddit's discussions were like about five years ago.
• Comments feel more meaningful and thought-provoking as opposed to a race to "craft the wittiest meme."
• The community here seems to be relatively friendly and welcoming.

The Less Good:

• I find the mobile experience quite clunky at the moment. For the site, there seem to be some random overflow issues, and the interface and UI elements feel a bit too small for a mobile experience. The lack of polished, dedicated apps is somewhat of a bummer, but I'm hopeful the community will fill these gaps over time with dedicated applications.
• The onboarding process is somewhat lackluster. It seems more geared towards an audience that is already familiar with federated services. I feel most new users will default to lemmy.ml out of an unwarranted sense of FOMO for not being a direct member of the largest instance, simply due to a lack of understanding of how federated apps work.
• Redundant communities across multiple instances could become problematic over time. Personally, I would like to see something like user (or even mod) specified mono-communities, grouping multiple communities across multiple instances into a single thread. For example, if a user went to m/movies, whoever runs that mono could add movie-specific feeds from places like lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.
• We need to have a serious discussion about generating funds for instances. Dedicated servers with high traffic can get incredibly expensive. I fear that many smaller instances will eventually go dark due to escalating operational costs. Ko-Fi donations will only go so far. We, as a community, need to start thinking of more sustainable alternatives that align with the community's core values.
• The documentation for the JS SDK could use some TLC. Thankfully, it's fully typed with Typescript ❤️, so it's not too cumbersome to work out what everything does, but more code examples and descriptions for all the various methods would be a welcome change.

All in all, I'm happy with my decision to check this place out and am hopeful more people will come aboard in time. It's already become a part of my daily routine.

I have just joined for the same reason and I'm (positively) surprised how familiar it feels to reddit.

I’m not ditching Reddit, just here trying out alternatives.

How has your lemmy experience been so far?

Well… I’m scrolling and F5’ing as if I was on Reddit, so honestly doesn’t feel that different, yet.

I'm honestly really lost and just stumbling around in the dark. It's been really confusing to learn about federation and what ever makes lemmy so unique.

But I'm really happy to see an open source alternative to reddit which is cool.

It's been a little tough? Trying to join communities hosted on other instances than the one I've joined is a little cumbersome so been having some trouble with that It almost encourages people to join the large instances for the sake of that convenience, undermining (to a certain degree) the whole point of this being federated

I really don’t like the cringe tankie culture here, hope that gets diluted as more people come in

I think it’s awesome. It’s the first time in a whole I’ve been on “new” social media and it’s bringing back a lot of feelings I thought were dead since the internet became so centralized

Only been 2 days. I'm feeling things out. Happy I found an Android app to use.

Already posted a cat photo. Not sure if it is correctly viewable.

Almost certain this has already been mentioned, but subscribing to other communities outside of your instance is kinda clunky. Having to go to another site to browse their communities and plug whatever relevant community's link into your own instance's search?

Surely there has to be a better way to find other communities that doesn't involve having to go to another instance's website.

It was a bit rough getting an account I'm happy with set up, but beyond that I'm really enjoying the experience so far.

I'm very impressed with the federation here. Kept thinking each instance was on its own but you can post across different instances. Kind of neat.

I think it is annoying that most posts, like this one, are about Lemmy itself. I hope this will change soon.

Like others have said I'm going to miss the niche subreddits and the thousand different cat subs lol

Something that bugs me on the desktop... When I'm scrolling down a long post like this, if someone puts up a new top-level reply the page jumps back to the top to show that reply and I lose where I was reading at. I could turn off page notifications, but then I won't get the live feeds on the front page.

it's nice, but we need more content and more 3rd party mobile apps, i mean Jerboa is nice, but many of us are used to their favorite reddit app