I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
I’ll be honest. While I like the idea of decentralized social stiff, its also a huge issue. First you have to choose an instance, which isn’t too bad, but you can’t move. I hear Lemmy.ml being under pressure and I want to move somewhere else to help.with that. My account is 4 years old though and I can take nothing with me. Additionally this means all my content is on one instance. If that ever goes down, the network as a whole my keep existing, but my user and all I’ve put into Lemmy will be gone. And while I trust Lemmy instances more than reddit in terms of privacy, I’m not so sure when it comes to uptime and longevity. Finally, the whole concept of decentralized is hard to wrap my head around. My instance being separate from others but still being subscribed to communities of other instances feels unintuitive. Its the she issue I have with mastodon. I keep loosing track of instances, communities, apps etc. All with different names and logins etc.
For now, I’m trying to get used to Lemmy and just search for communities I’m subscribed to on reddit and see how it goes. It definitely works well enough. Just some conceptual issues I might have to get used to.
Couldn’t you just make a new account on another instance and link to it on your old profile? Perhaps a feature to subscribe to export/import your subscribed communities would be nice.
It works nicley for me but a lot of stuff could need QoL updates. Honestly my biggest concern is that this instance (lemmy.ml) will dominate everything else and host every good Community. From what I heard, the old guard on lemmy.ml has certain political believes that I don’t share and I have a lot of negative expierence with this kind of people, back on reddit. A little concerned about powermods on lemmy.ml.
I like it a lot so far! Most of the time it’s pretty much indistinguishable from how Reddit used to be, with the only annoyance being that any interaction with an instance other than the one your account is on has a very noticeable lag, but I guess that can’t really be helped.
Somehow, the UI is really buggy for me so far, and I experience numerous lags. I didn’t manage to create a post yet, and sporadically, it seems like my instance is not available, due to some server error pages. Usually, after a reload of the page, it is fine again.
Furthermore, the UI is differently worse, than Reddits. Searching is awful, and I miss a lot of sorting functionality or algorithm for bringing up the comments based on likes and sub-comments.
I hope this will become better now, the Lemmy gets a lot of attention. Sadly, there is no completed iOS app yet. I don’t like using the Website. :D
But then, it is nice to have a decentralized version of Reddit. And it seems it has already a few users, I hope Lemmy will grow further. I will stay strong.
Edit: A grouping feature for “merging” communities from different instances is much needed. I get it, it’s a different instance and probably the users of the certain communities like to have specific rule variations or just don’t like the other participants of the other communities. But at least for browsing content it would be a great feature.
Occasionally, I click on a link of a different instance, where I don’t have an account. And it is difficult to get that link directly into your instance, so you could comment on or like/dislike it or whatever you wish to do. I guess a smartphone app would do its part there. Or some kind of switching feature, to get immediately to your instance, at the same place.
yeah, the UI seems very buggy right now. Jzst now I had the start page endlessly load various posts for no reason. I had to reload the page to make it stop.
Also the popup menus just stay up when they shouldn’t and I expect a new tab when clicking post links, instead it loads in the same tab, so I always have to go back.
Just got the account approved and checking things out. It feels comfortably reddity with a hint of newness that invites for exploration. I am curious how the community will shape this site and if and how it will establish itself in the greater vacuum I foresee will be left in reddit’s once great tracks.
Confusing. There are communities I can’t subscribe to because I can’t access them from my instance, and I have no idea why that is. The experience has been interesting so far, and growing the network is going to be something I’ll be keeping an eye on. For now, though, I’ll have to wait until someone creates the communities I was a part of on Reddit.
Edit: It seems a community won’t show up on your instance’s community list unless someone in that instance is subscribed to it.
I’m still a little confused but it’s sinking in. The difference between an instance and a “sub”, as well as how to join or interact with other “subs” without having to join each individual instance, was the part that was toughest to adapt to. I love it, though. Lemmy is giving me the feeling Reddit did when I first joined it a long, long time ago on my first ever account. It feels organic.
I actually think the double-split between communities/subs and instances is rather unfortunate overall.
I’m guessing, many people will end up subbing almost identical subs on different instances. In my opinion, it would have been better to use instances more as identity providers and let the communities be the first level distinction.
I actually don’t feel it’s organic at all, I have to make an effort to even find this post here on a different instance.
I hope that they can add the ability to create subs that exist in multiple instances. (i.e. !aww@lemmy.lh and !aww@beehaw.org could both have the same posts and mods)
I think I’m getting the hang of it, I’m just concerned it won’t ever get to the point of having as many in depth communities as Reddit, because that’s what I like most about Reddit
In the longer-term, we’re more likely to see the opposite problem. The in-depth communities are going to be niche by definition, and interested users will be fragmented across similar communities on different instances. 100 different groups of 10, instead of a single group of 1000.
But those “groups of 10” are much more pleasant than Reddit has been for years. That could change in the future, but for now there’s passion and enthusiasm wherever you look.
Smaller groups means less activity, though. And that’s what’s keeping communities alive.
I already wrote it in another comment, but I think subs should not be under instances in the hierarchy, but on the same level.
Too confusing for the average user.
I dislike many things about the UI and UX.
Nevertheless, it’s useable, and interesting enough to keep using for now and see how it goes.
Just did it.