I run a few groups, like @fediversenews@venera.social, mostly on Friendica. It’s okay, but Friendica resembles Facebook Groups more than Reddit. I also like the moderation options that Lemmy has.
Currently, I’m testing jerboa, which is an Android client for Lemmy. It’s in alpha, has a few hiccups, but it’s coming along nicely.
Personally, I hope the #RedditMigration spurs adoption of more Fediverse server software. And I hope Mastodon users continue to interact with Lemmy and Kbin.
All that said, as a mod of a Reddit community (r/Sizz) I somewhat regret giving Reddit all that content. They have nerve charging so much for API access!
Hopefully, we can build a better version of social media that focuses on protocols, not platforms.
It’s looking great! I joined just 2 days ago and the communities I subscribed to are already looking much more lively today. Thanks, Reddit blackout!
Also written in Rust, btw :)
A year ago, I viewed the Fediverse as an unnecessary, complicated framework created by a handful of well-intentioned individuals as a solution to a problem that wasn’t really there.
Today, I view it as a necessity.
This past year has been a hard lesson for me to stop placing trust in massive, centralized web services like Twitter and Reddit and to start federating more of my online activity. There’s going to be growing pains, but Lemmy has been pretty good so far and it’s definitely going to be worth it in the end.
For wide spread adoption there are a lot of issues with the fediverse. The main one is the home pages of fediverse instances or join-X.org sites immediately turn people away with their language, jargon and content. Nobody cares about the open source licence, or how it’s “federated” or what the developers can do, or that you can run your own server or what languages and frameworks it’s built on etc. These all will turn people away. Literally the first sentence on join-lemmy is “Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform”. Nobody wants to self host anything (well I do, but near to 100% of people don’t). Then there are screen shots of code diff’s and actual code, then a list of programming languages, then some Latin with hard to see ‘mod tools’, and then at the end back to self hosting “With Lemmy, you can easily host your own server, and all these servers are federated”. None of this is enticing people in. It’s turning people away.
These entrances to the fediverse should be about community, discussions, engagement etc. That’s what people want to sign up for and start participating. Just get them signed up. Once they’re in they can learn about the other benefits and that they can move the profile to different servers, or whathaveyou. Keep all the other bumf hidden away behind a “benefits” link.
Someone needs to come up with better terminology to fediverse and federated to avoid having to explain it all the time. It’s federated… You know… Like email. Well I’ve used email a long time and nobody has ever called it federated or used that term before when talking about any aspect of email - and I run my own email server.
Tl:dr: just cut the crap and make on-boarding easier. Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.
“Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform”
Okay seriously, this was my first issue. Someone on Reddit recommended Lemmy to me and I saw that and immediately went back to them and was like “WTF?”.
I do agree that for the average user, its not as easy as “lol funny cat gifs and memes are here, just make an account”
Reddit was much more easy for user adoption
Lemmy: Front pages of the internet
In theory, I agree with you! A 100%, but the problem is that currently Lemmy doesn’t support migrating your profile to a different server. So that already slightly complicates things. So from the get-go they are forced to make choice. A choice which isn’t clear, what potential consequences are and the fact they currently easily migrate to a different server, obviously doesn’t help.
“Like email” is basically the same description I’ve been using to explain it to non-tech people.
Long story short, onboarding needs to get better. But that also applies for other Fediverse projects (like Mastodon or Friendica).
I’m not sure the ‘like email’ thing helps.
Email is confusing and not what most people use to connect with others. I don’t know anyone who met via email.
Trying to get groups of people to connect meaningfully over email didn’t work. Messenger apps did work as they removed user freedom to top-reply and break everything.
I’m vaguely interested in IT, seflhost a little and compile a kernel from time to time but email still seems esoteric and confusing to me.
Join the fediverse! It’s as simple as setting up an email server!
I’m not sure the ‘like email’ thing helps. Email is confusing and not what most people use to connect with others. I don’t know anyone who met via email.
In my experience it at least helps in the sense that, when people ask “why are there more then 1 site?” ? And up to a certain degree you use that to explain the concept of federating.
I agree for the most part and that the front page should be more focused on what the user will gain or be able to do if they join and in language that understand. However, the first sentence is “Follow communities anywhere in the world” not bad at least. It should elaborate on what that means.
Some people of course really do care about FOSS and letting people know that or even just having them see those words/ideas is important IMHO. It could, however, elaborate by saying “social media that is not corporate controlled” or whatever that may make the point about it more clear.
Finding a good analogy is hard. But at the risk of sounding like a snob, a little barrier to entry isn’t always a bad thing…
The thought of trying to explain this to one of our users (helpdesk monke). No thanks…
A barrier to entry might be a life and death issue for Lemmy.
Lemmy was not created last week, man. All you see here today already existed and was running when spez hit the fan.
In that sense, part of what attracts me to this is a bit of the barrier to entry. I find it enticing, it reminds me of the good old days, where you had to earn your way in, in a sense. Of course that’s silly old man talk, because honestly, all you have to do is select any random site and sign up.
Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, it all comes down to the same thing. This “barrier” to entry is almost fictitious, and I feel that’s the ideal type of barrier.
Similar to how the internet culture was before it was popular, only vested people were online
Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.
I get the sentiment, but who is going to do it? just as the developers are donating their time, there will need to be community minded folks doing the same.
Lemmy doesn’t have a marketing budget to spend on a community manager.
There are a couple issues open on join-lemmy’s github - https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues, but not a lot in the way of contributing to fix it.
I mean, I get for a lot of people it’s not user friendly, but ultimately Lemmy is not some start up that has to grab a market share quick. If no one contributes better documentation, perhaps there won’t be a high enough adoption rate, but that’s ok for Lemmy.
I think a lot of developers tend to massively underestimate the value of product management and good copywriting. Granted it’s probably a lot harder to find people with those skills in open source communities but I think that having a clear idea of who your target audience is goes a long way.
The apps need some work, but overall it’s “okay.” The rest of my gripes lie entirely around the lack of content, which can’t be helped
The idea is outstanding. The parts of the UI that work are great. There’s much work to be done, especially with regard to subscription and discovery. The whole “copy/paste this into your server’s search bar” thing is… not great.
In general, it works pretty nice, but there are some limitations.
The biggest one for me is discoverability. The federation means that there is more fragmentation and it’s harder to find the right community for something.
For example, there are country/city communities for my country/city on multiple instances. And since it’s hard to find the “correct” one, it fragments out much harder than Reddit did. Combine that with generally lower attendance numbers and you get really tiny communities.
This is not aided by Jerboa, which doesn’t open internal links internally. So if someone posts a link to a community and I press it, it instead tries to open it with my email app.
I signed up for Mastodon awhile back but never really got into it since I don’t really do Twitter much either. I have been reading about lemmy but didn’t sign up until today.
It was a little confusing trying to sign up, the first instance I tried to sign up with had a waiting period for account approvals but I finally found one I could sign up with instantly and then I started poking around. I think I am getting the hang of it!
I have also downloaded Mlem to test on my iphone. It’s easy and simple to use, not a lot of features yet but it seems promising.
So far outside of a bit of focus time to figure out how to actually get signed up and find communities to subscribe to I’m cautiously optimistic. This seems more like how the older days of the internet were, before the enshittification of social media. Let’s see if this trend continues!
The UX is kinda rough around the edges, but it’s filling my scroll addiction while reddit takes a steaming dump on everyone.
I hate when threads and comments automatically update, scrolling content down my browser.
I hate that when I hit back on my web browser, it doesn’t bring me back to where I was previously on the page. I have to scroll down all over again.
Lack of content or small communities don’t bother me. It just means more people need to contribute, myself included.
This has been driving me nuts. I’ll be reading and come back to it a few mins later and it’s at the top again.
I cannot collapse subthreads. I really would.
I love the concept of decentralization. Feels more like the internet of old.
It feels like the start of something new, you know? Sort of exciting because coming from Reddit to Lemmy feels like taking a leap of faith as we are looking for this place to replace what we have lost. At the end of the day, communities are what make or break a platform and we have that going.
In terms of the platform itself, I am still trying to figure my way around here but the UI/UX feels easy to interact with. I guess I would love to have a mobile app for iOS down the line to replace my addiction to Apollo!
I tried the fediverse with Mastodon to replace Twitter, but it didn’t work out. On Twitter, I was exclusively following accounts of personalities/organizations. As these accounts did not make the switch from Twitter to Mastodon, there was little use.
I feel like the fediverse works way better with content aggregation. I don’t really care who specifically is on Lemmy, as long as there is content and discussion. So far it’s been really nice.
I hope the #RedditMigration sours adoption
I think you meant spurs lol
Anyway yeah I’m liking Lemmy and the fediverse so far. I actually prefer the UI/UX of https://kbin.social more for desktop, but Jerboa is great for mobile. If they stay actively in development it’s going to be hard to beat IMO
I’ve followed from Fark to StumbleUpon to Digg to Reddit, and now many years later, to Lemmy. I think the communities being spread across instances is extremely powerful for overall global community resiliency (if the separation is respected and we don’t end up with a bunch of duplicated “subs” everywhere).
I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of people say this today, but the one thing I feel the most is excitement. The chaos reminds me of the early-ish days (~1996?) of the web when everything was discoverable and not already aggregated to be served up to you inbetween advertisements.
I’m confused, but I’ve got the spirit. Reddit was confusing at first too, given I joined before it was mainstream popular. I figured it out, I’ll figure this out too. Looking forward to a restart and seeing this grow.
For me, 10/10 just as good. It only needs more content.
I think it’s important to make sure your instance is federated with all the other big ones, though, since adding a new one is not user-friendly.
