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
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
You can hide read posts here! In the web app settings for your profile:
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.
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.
Oh thank God is a bug, I really thought it was a feature of the site.
Thank jeebus. I was getting all fussy thinking it was a me/my phone/my browser problem.
It’s amazing what kinda bugs can be exposed in your system when your user base expands by orders of magnitude overnight
Do you remember where you heard it? I have been looking around for info about this feature
Here’s the comment (and link to) where I learned about the GitHub issue
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 😵💫
I also don’t seem to have that problem with Jerboa.
I believe it’s specifically an issue with the web client. The apps don’t seem to have that problem.
This is good to hear. Hopefully they can work out their aggregation on the main page too.
They’ve also fixed the problem on Jebora
Having FOS Jerboa could mean we’ll have a sync and Boost like app hopefully rather sharpish.
Even the last 2 updates have been rather impressive.
This is incredibly helpful! Thank you so much!
😊
What is considered “read”? Something you scroll past or a post that you open?
Ok, I just tested it out. It’s any post that you upvote, downvote, or open the comments for. Expanding an image is not enough.
Edit: Seems like opening a post’s comments in Mlem (iOS app) doesn’t seem to flag something as “read”. But open a post in the web app and it disappears from both on next reload. Up/downvoting work on both.
Edit 2: If you upvote a post and then remove your upvote, that seems to count as “read” as well. In case you’re like me and can’t commit to an upvote or downvote for every post 😅
I’d assume a post that you open, but I haven’t really tested it out much yet. If I figure it out I’ll update you here
Incredible
Oh dude! MASSIVE THANKS!
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.
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
It’s amazing how many Reddit comments just aren’t seen, no wonder so many people end up lurking.
I had 150k+ karma and most of my comments would go unnoticed.
I saw your comment :)
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.
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.
Yeah I agree and am working on it in terms of engagement. Usability is going to be key for whichever platform eventually takes over. It could absolutely be Lemmy, but I’m watching for other possibilities as well.
Yes, make homes! we need so much more hardware, while personal instances may not be a good idea, we are so short on compute that if you are inclined run your own instance, bring your friends!
The experience on smaller faster instances is already comparable, the content flow, really not bad either though it takes about an hour of finding and subbing to the communities you want and a day for your instance to really start grabbing the content for you.
Can you point out an explanation for how this works? Like, if I run my own “instance” of Lemmy in a Docker container, what all is it doing if I and a few friends subscribe to communities on other instances (eg BeeHaw, lemmy.ml, etc). Is my little instance mirroring all of that data constantly? Just when one of us requests it? I need to know what I’m getting myself into basically.
I think you might find that answer through lemmy’s github and using their guides which I’ll send it here in case anyone else is interested.
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.
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.
Can you tell me how to make a new comment? So far, it’s just allowing me to reply to others but no option to make one new…
There’s a speech bubble icon on the bottom of the post for me, using the jerboa app for android :)
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
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/asklemmy@lemmy.ml) [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:
[Winnipeg Jets](/c/winnipegjets@lemmy.world)>>begets>> Winnipeg Jets
(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.)
Thank you, it makes so much more sense to me now.
-
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.
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.
Your handle won’t let you login on other instances but you can follow communities on other instances from the instance you signed up for.
That surprised me a bit when I first used Mastodon. “Wait? Why can’t I log in? I just want to follow this person! Oh, right, have to go to my original server and do it from there”. New to Lemmy, but finding and following other communities feels much easier than on Mastodon.
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.
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.
You’re successfully doing it right now, commenting on a post from Lemmy.ml. You don’t need to log in to other instances, like Beehaw, to comment.
Are you on mobile or are you using desktop? The mobile app is definitely still in development so it’s missing a lot of those QOL things that you are missing.
For me it’s been helpful to use that fediverse search tool, and copy and paste it into the search. Seems to work better on desktop. I’ve got a decent feed going today, but it’s definitely a work in progress.
Your handle only works on the instance you signed up on (lemmy.one).You can view communities from all other federated instances (lemmy.ml,etc) from your home instance (again, lemmy.one). You shouldn’t be trying to sign into other instances with your handle
I’m home :)
It seems like we are struggling with a large cohort that does not remember the systems as they grew, expecting the only valid replacement to only be a system as large.
Thats not how it works, it is how you can get owned by a centralized party.
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.
Honestly that is the main reason i became a lurker on reddit, why comment? if im on /r/all then anything i could think to comment has already been commented by someone else most of the time if you scroll down enough. It was really only the smaller niche subs that i was able to engage with.
This is why I want the communities to remain relatively small
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.
Yeah, I think having active as the default sorting is not a good idea. It can be confusing to new users
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 :-)
I really just want a good r/all functionality.
If you filter to All and sort by Active does that not more or less do the job? I never really used /r/All so I’m maybe not the best judge.
As someone who used /r/all before, what you say is exactly the same as I’m used to. Maybe sort by “Hot” though. Reddits algorithm is somewhere between “Hot” and “Active” here. Active is too slow, hot is too fast.
Ah, nice one, thanks :-)
Hot doesn’t update often enough for me, do you know how to fix that?
I’ve no idea why that would be or what exactly “often enough” means for you - hot has mostly 8-16h old posts, and if I start scrolling down a bit I even start to see 15 minute old posts. Which is probably not how it should be, but 15 minutes certainly seems “often enough”.
I also see 2 year old posts on hot for some reason, so yeah, it’s definitely not perfect, but reddit had more than a decade to get it right, I’m sure lemmy will get better.
Is there a way to stop everything from constantly updating/moving around once I’ve loaded the page? It’s like it adds new posts to the top (even when sorting by active/hot) and bumps everything down.
I don’t think so, seen a lot of people talking about that. I tend to stay in Subscribed/New, so it’s not a thing I see often, but I know what you mean.
I think maybe developers are working on it, but not sure tbh.
Oh well, thanks for your response. I’m sure it will get sorted eventually.
Yeah, hope so.
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.
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.
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.
The default can also be set from your profile settings page.
I think most of the issues we’re all running into are just growing pains. The sorting algorithms will be improved, performance and other bugs will be addressed. Most of us have been here for a day or so. 😅 I’m going to stick with it for a while longer and see what happens. If another service springs up that seems better, I’ll check that out too.
Just can’t really support Reddit right now…
The default can also be set from your profile settings page.
Hey thanks for this! I just set mine to “hot” because that seems to have the most fresh content for me.
You make it sound like not doomscrolly is a bad thing
People will rarely say they want to endlessly scroll, but given the options, they’ll always choose the option that let’s them consume more content, aka doom scroll.
doomscrolly is a bad thing, but god is it addictive even after the point that you want to vomit from how draining it is
The community and the app is still relatively new. To be honest, I prefer smaller communities where I can leave for a few hours without half the posts sliding to page 5 and beyond. Instead of uncritically consuming digital content, try to contribute to smaller communities, post a couple of cool links, or even (Gasp! Horror!) do something else for a while.
The default sorting is by “active” which to me doesn’t show a lot of new content (from the last hours). Switching to hot improves the experience a lot.
I also dislike that it’s “live”. I’ll be browsing the post titles and new stuff would appear on top so I lose my place.
deleted by creator
Is there any way to prevent that? I’ll be reading a post title and everything shifts out from under me constantly.
I have no idea. The other person who replied said that it’s a bug, but they deleted their comment. I set my view to default on Local/Hot at the moment. “All” moves too fast for me, and I’m not in the mood yet to curate my subscriptions.
The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example. Lemmy should prevent this, community names should be unique, it should have an index of all the Lemmy Fediverse where instances can lookup if a community exists instead of waiting for a user to import that community to his instance. Something similar to what BTC does with the decentralized ledger.
Having ‘no single source of truth’ is part of the joy.
If you’re not happy with /r/cars moderators banning everyone who drives a Skoda, then you’re out of luck. Here in federation land, you can just go to a different lemmy.something/c/cars place.
Of course you can still follow and interact with all the /c/cars communities from any Lemmy instance (and interact a little from Mastodon).
Part of the issue is that we hardly have enough people to sustain one random community, let alone several semi-independent ones. That barrier alone will turn others away and the cycle of not having enough souls will repeat itself
Right, but everyone can follow the lot, so there’s no need to divide.
@CleanDefinition @Ghast so true!
I got banned from Subs for asking questions, I couldn’t make my own without the original shadowing me on every search.
But theoretically on Lemmy every community can have a voice, if the rest of Fediverse believes it in, it can flourish. Other servers can’t report you or shadow ban beyond the confines of their server.
If a group tries to bully you they might get their entire server banned so the mod’s would likely terminate the user first
The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example.
I agree, to an extent. You’re right in that if you were part of the vibrant community of /r/piracy then it’s miserable to see it shatter here on lemmy. That said, this only applies if you’re expecting lemmy to be a 1 for 1 reddit replacement. For this type of community to remain cohesive, /r/piracy would have had to spin up their own instance and in /r/piracy direct everyone to lemmy.piracyinstance.whatever.
You can’t really “fix” this in a central way because even if you did, it would be trivial to create an instance that would allow duplicate community names. Also, I can see a lot of use cases for lemmy which do not intend to be federated.
That said, it’s not necessarily as big a problem as it appears, if you just accept that this is how the fediverse works. There’s no single source of control, so of course people can create 147 different /c/piracy communities if they wish to. Once you accept that, then it’s not really that difficult to subscribe to all the /c/piracy communities you can find.
The problem itself could be diminished by a few new features which I feel certain will emerge in the future:
- linked communities, where one communities content is syndicated to another. So if you post in !selfhosted@lemmy.world then you also post in !selfhosted@lemmy.ml. This would work differently to cross-posting, all comments would be reflected on both instances.
- grouped communities, where you can subscribe to a group of /c/selfhosted communities with one click, so you see them all in your feed.
I think that makes a lot of sense. Reddit was also like that, I moderate /r/me_irl, rival of /r/meirl. But now you can also use the same names if you want.
What about usernames though? Are they universal throughout Lemmy?
Usernames are only universal in the same way an email address is. Any instance can have an @citizenpremier but only you can be @citizenpremier@lemmy.ml.
I don’t mean to be a douche about it but you’re still thinking about it in a very corporate-social kind of way. For something to be universal it requires a central point of control, which doesn’t exist in the fediverse.
Fragmentation is definitely annoying, but if names had to be unique across the entire Fediverse then you would likely see a huge amount of name squatting where someone mass creates community names just so they have control of them. The way it is now, eventually one community on one server will likely end up becoming the defacto one when it is moderated well and a significant number of people flock to it. I don’t think the fragmentation will be a problem in the long run.
I think what they really need is an autosubscribe, so you can autosubscribe to /c/Piracy on all federated servers. (Then of course be able to block certain instances if they’re horrible)
I love this idea, but you would need a list of communities for a given topic, and some way to curate it.
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.
There are definitely a few bugs or perhaps performance issues that are annoying, but the experience seems already 1000 times better than just 2 days ago. I have also checked on lemmy every few months for about 2 years now, it’s day and night. It already feels kinda like 2012 reddit to me, and that’s a good thing in my view.
Same here, that was about the time I joined reddit and the nostalgia and excitement for something new is amazing
Hey same! Been really missing those days of reddit and lemmy has really been filling the void. I’m excited to see where things are gonna go on this site.
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.
