It’s ugly, difficult to understand, And the search function is fucked. All in all, it’s pretty crap and I miss reddit a great deal. That said, I’m never going back. I just wish lemmy was better.

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 :)

I like it - I just want a few Reddit-ish features:

1. Hiding reply chains for scrolling cleanliness in comments of a post
2. Hiding posts on the main page should be easy to do (buttons unclear)
3. Dedicated copy link button - so it’s clear I’m copying the link to the page that is being spoken about in a post, rather than a link to the comments of the post itself.

Honestly, I kind of hate it, but since Reddit is unusable, considering all the subs that have gone dark (presumably permanently).

I’ll be honest. I don’t like the Fediverse concept - the fatal flaw of decentralized systems is that sometimes centralized systems are great. Basically, reddit was ONE BBS style forum for everything, which was the killer convenience. Similarly Twitter was the ONE microblogging platform for everybody, which was the killer convenience.

Because the moment anybody can operate a service, everyone does.

Right now, I need to buy a car, I can’t find a good Lemmy community to get advice from. Searching for ‘cars’ in all federated communities returns:

Fuck Cars@lemmy.ml - 3.41K subscribers
Cars@lemmy.ml - 104 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.ca - 56 subscribers
Self Driving Cars - 19 subscribers
IdiotsInCars@lemmy.world - 11 subscribers
Electric Cars@lemmy.ca - 4 subscribers
RC Cars@lemmy.world - 4 subscribers
Cars@lemmygrad.ml - 3 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.world - 2 subscribers
Cars@lemmy.world - 1 subscriber

Leave aside for a moment that “Fuck Cars” has 34x more subscribers than the biggest Cars community - there are two different “Fuck Cars” communities, and three different “Cars” communities. It’s great that you have subscriber numbers, but there’s no definitive place to find out information on cars. Reddit’s CEO is right that Reddit was organized like a landed-gentry where a first-come-first-serve approach to the most popular forums was done, but that landed-gentry system solved this problem, whatever new problems it may have introduced.

Now, you could look for a technological solution to solve this problem: For example, you could have a centralized server for all federated Lemmies, some sort of “lemmyhub.com”

We’d all have to agree on it. People could set up alternatives, but we’d all have to basically coalesce and say: Yes, this is the thing we want. Maybe it’d use blockchain, I don’t know. Point is, it’s centralized and easy to find information. It would work “just like Reddit” where you would have ONE authentication/authorization that works seamlessly across all instances (the current system is anything but seamless), and there would be ONE key/value combo for keyword. So, instead of going to Cars@lemmy.ml & Cars@lemmygrad.ml & Cars & lemmy.world, you just go to cars.lemmyhub.com.

If you want to post, you just use your lemmyhub account and your post appears on the “default” community. You can still post on individual lemmies by going to the individual lemmy page as well, or by specifying which of your Lemmy instance accounts you want to post as.

Here’s the problem with the merging all the cars communities together, though: There is nothing to prevent someone from creating Cars@NeoNaziHeartsFascism.com and spamming the community with bile or trolling. Lemmyhub could operate a blocklist for troll and hate communities and instances, but once you’re doing that, you’re making editorial decisions. And forget all the nasty ethics problems around “what’s free speech/what’s hate speech?” “what’s acceptable to view/what’s not?”, you have legal liability problems if anything slips through the cracks.

Reddit wasn’t perfect, and certainly they could have been more proactive with shutting down hate speech, and more speedy with shutting down illegal content, but by and large reddit worked. Reddit’s authoritarian approach worked because it was mostly benevolent – right up until the point that it wasn’t.

So I don’t think Lemmy can technologically make it’s way out of the situation.

I think what needs to happen is a solution like the Wikipedia foundation; we establish a non-profit designed to create a centralized server which may choose or not choose to incorporate Lemmy instances. It runs on donations, not advertising, and it’s not designed to maximize profit, only to keep the servers running. It would borrow heavily from the Wikipedia model in organization and structure.

Because I’ll be honest - Lemmy and Mastodon are okay, but there’s really nothing in them improving on the old Newsgroups system of the late 80s and 1990s. Reddit captured the market for forum discussions because it was simply a better solution, there’s nothing in Lemmy that makes it better - for the user - than Reddit.

Should we then abandon Lemmy and go back to Reddit? No, of course not. Reddit, if anything shows us that eventually all authoritarian systems, no matter how benevolent they start, always eventually turn tyrannical, and can do so on a whim, and once they do so, it is impossible to get back to benevolence.

But I’ve been a redditor for 15 years - I predated subreddits, if you can believe that. And I’m not finding the things I used to go to Reddit for here on Lemmy - information, expert and informed discussion, and niche topics. Maybe that’s an adoption problem that will be solved with scale (and I hope it is), but right now, I feel like my luxury Bently sedan got totaled and I’m driving a 20 year old Honda Civic with manual transmission. By all means I’m grateful for the tent, but I still miss my Bentley

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.

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

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 like it and was able to adapt easily, but some of the UI is terrible (and I mean this in a constructive way), specifically:

• Page weight is too high, when I use back/forward or switch tabs on mobile my browser has to do a full refresh. Tildes and kbin are very lightweight by comparison, not sure what the JS code of Lemmy/Beehaw are doing to cause this issue.
• Adding new subs is confusing, but mostly because the “Subscribe” button is hidden by default when you visit a community on another instance.
• The process of subscribing is convoluted You 1. visit an instance, 2. find a community, 3. copy the url,4. go back to your community, 5. past it, 6. open the search link in your instance, then 7. click subscribe and wait a little. It feels like that can be streamlined or something.
• Loading “All” is slow, I understand why, but the UI should do something to explain it to me instead of popping in posts.

But, the discussion seems good, the actual UI is reminiscent of old reddit so I’m happy, and I’m surprised how easy it is to discuss things across instances.

I like it so far, but my reddit was very well curated, it can’t live up to that yet. Lemmy can be a bit confusing at times and the ‘all’ option seems to be either not moving at all or at a million miles an hour. It will take me a while to get a nice feed, I think.

it is really annoying to subscribe to communities on federated servers – there should be a link that will redirect you to your home server. As of now I seem to have to copy and paste the community address into the URL because the feddit.de community search doesn’t seem to be working for me

It’s hardly been 24 hours, but this is the most engaged I’ve felt in an online space in years. I’ve gone on a k.bin/Lemmy/Mastodon tear over the past day, exploring instances and looking for the one that I vibe with the most. So far I’ve been very happy with Beehaw as my home base, and love that I still have access to the communities on the other instances as well. It takes a slight bit of effort to find communities and make sure that I’m subscribed to them on this account, but I’ve actually found some satisfaction in the process.

Sure, there’s a low volume of content compared to the old place, but if I wanted a constant barrage of content I could just go back to RSS readers and have my fill. It’s the discussion and sense of connection that has made it worth investing my time here.

so far it’s really nice, it’s what I liked in reddit and before that forums, without being what reddit became.

the fediverse is hard though, but it kinda makes sense. I’ll see if I get more used to it

As sad as I am by how Reddit turned out, this was the kick I needed to start truly indulging in the fediverse! Everybody’s been nice so far, and I hope that it continues to be that way

I like it, but to me, it just needs more people, more communities, more life! Hopefully people keep migrating from Reddit to Lemmy.

How beautiful would it be, to have an open source federated system be one of the leading internet communities.

Biggest issue right now is the inability to hide posts you’ve already read. Will this eventually be addressed?