Technology

My overall journey was the GameFAQS message boards -> Digg -> Reddit (via RIF) -> Lemmy

Lemmy has filled my content aggregation desires while boycotting Reddit. Overall, I could see being here to stay

I'm still having minor issues, but they aren't deal breakers. Like, I've had issues with my up votes not saving (press it, turns blue, wait a second, then it changes back), so I need to press it multiple times before it saves. On the whole, these errors will be resolved with time, so it doesn't bother me much

Main issue I'm trying to figure out now is: how to use federated users for other Lemmy instances. If I'm using the website for beehaw, then go to another instance, it appears I need to sign in, but I can't see how to use my beehaw account. I started using Jerboa and it seems to handle it, but the comments I'm making don't show up (when I checked in a browser), so it might be in the UI only, or I'm missing something

I like the concept, and overall experience. On a more technical side getting my own private lemmy instance up and running (I wanted to retain full control of my account) was not easy due to somewhat lacking documentation on the process. Had to dig through posts from other people having similar issues, and do a bit of troubleshooting to fill in the gaps.

Now that I have it working will see if I can find the time to do a writeup on the process if others are looking to do the same.

Lemmy's UI on desktop is... dogshit and really needs some love. Some web designer could volunteer for a better desktop theme? But thanks to the Jerboa app it looks amazing on Android!

Only issue right now with Jerboa is that it allows very long images to occupy a large space on your frontpage, I think it should show them as thumbnails instead.

I appreciate the clean interface and the relatively chill vibe. Regardless of what happens with reddit I think I'll be hanging out and enjoying the communities.

I'm trying to like it, but it's hard. It doesn't quite scratch the doom scrolling itch like Reddit did. I'm using Jerboa and it's missing a lot of features that I relied heavily on with Relay. Ultimately I'm just going to have to adapt though because it looks like Reddit isn't backing down and I'm not going to use the official app.

In good news, I always hated my Reddit username so it's nice to finally get to change it lol.

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

My guess is that redditers will want lemmy to be just like....reddit, but without the public-corp nonsense and with UI that is at minimum on-par with 3rd party apps people gravitate toward on reddit.

I'm totally new to this so I'm also figuring out my way around. The federated organization is confusing for sure, but not so much that people can't get it.

Some work could be done from a user focus... Simplify(including caring for duplicated hosts and communities), educate on lemmy's benefits, make searching for new communities seamless and less of a quest.

I feel like it's more of a community than Reddit. There is more collective spirit here right now.
I'm concerned about the tankie baggage.

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

I'm still confused by the instance decentralized structure. And my feed seems chaotic. But so far I'm liking it !

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.

The Software lemmy+jerboa does the job. It's basic and misses a lot of features that one would ideally want, but it's good enough.

I'm enjoying the back-to-the-roots vibe of early reddit or early internet that comes with lemmy.

Now, it's ask about content and how the communities will form in the ecosystem. Federation is nice, but wilm people actually find the communities relevant to them.

The most difficult part so far has been finding communities and joining them.

1. It's difficult to search for communities that aren't on your home instance.
2. If you go to a big instance and search for communities there, you can't directly join them, but have to go back to your home instance and paste something into a specific field, then click "next" since the community is never the first result, then click on the community to load it up in your home instance and THEN join it.
3. Communities are fractured across instances - I found at least five different serves with a "cat" / "cats" communities, and there's no way to aggregate these, and it's difficult to search out the rest of the cat content without just going to the other instance servers one-by-one and doing it manually

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 think it's nice so far, though I haven't used it much. There are some communities on Reddit that I miss on Beehaw. I also check Raddle (not fediverse) for trans memes since r/traa users have moved there. ~Cherri

I'm leaving behind reddit after 10 years of on and off use, in the last 5 years almost constant use. I'm happy because I feel rhus platform seems really great , I really like the layout and stye of it all. I hope to understand it better going forward

Im liking Lemmy so far. It’s an adjustment and clearly the software is in its infancy, but it does not suck once one adjusts.

Moved from Twitter to Mastodon in November. I spend less time on Mastodon than I did on Twitter but I feel much less anxious afterwards.

Lemmy has lots of potential and I'm excited for it. Even started a community for my city (Oakland).

I actually like it a lot. I think I can stick with it. I hope that this is the moment when the fediverse and the decentralized social networks will have the chance to become mainstream.

I really like it, but I'm concerned for rough times ahead.

Running instances is hard, thankless but necessary work. A for-profit company like Reddit can afford to pay engineers to do it. A lot of open-source / free software things survive because people are generous and donate their time, creativity, expertise and often even money to keeping them running. But when it's a hobby not a job, it gets to a point where people often have to think of their own sanity and step away.

The fediverse design seems well suited to handle that without major disruption, but there will definitely be some disruption.

I'm also hoping that people are tolerant of design quirks. Design by committee is often seen as one of the worst ways to do things, and FOSS is nothing but committees. Reddit's design obviously influenced Lemmy (as Slashdot influenced Reddit, and so-on). But, while I wasn't a fan of the new Reddit design, at least it was a unified view. I'm incredibly impressed at how smooth Lemmy has been so far, but again, I expect it's just a matter of time before there are some controversial choices in what new features to add, how to expose them, what defaults to choose, and so on. I hope people are tolerant of the churn that that might cause.

Basically, I just really hope that whatever controversies and rough periods are ahead, that the communities I care about choose to weather the storm and stick around. If we can survive that, social media that isn't owned by any company, and that isn't part of the "surveillance capitalism" world is very promising.

I'm getting used to the slight UI differences but it has a similar vibe. The biggest difference to me is the server/global federated dynamic. I like that it's owned by individuals running communities rather than a megacorp mining data and engagement for profit. I'm also on mastodon, but I never used twitter so I feel like there's fewer expectations to unlearn.

I got Jerboa right where RIF used to be on my home screen, it's almost like nothing changed.