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.

  • @main_water@beehaw.org
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    132 years ago

    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.

    • @lolcatnip@lemmyrs.org
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      22 years ago

      Another really clunky thing I noticed right away is that there’s a huge difference between viewing a sub through your home instance vs its home instance, in that you’re no longer logged in when using the remote instance’s URL, and there’s no obvious way to get back to the corresponding location on your home instance. This means, for example, that when someone posts a link to another thread, it’s always kind of broken for remote users.

      I feel like something could be done to ease interoperability using the same techniques ad trackers use.

      I’m especially baffled as to why the UI had a dedicated button to view content on its home instance. I can see how that might be useful in some circumstances and it would make sense to have it hidden in a menu, but I think it’s just a confusing distraction for new users who typically have no use for a crippled view of what they’re already looking at.

    • @two_wheel2@lemm.ee
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      12 years ago

      Cross-instance discussion is definitely great! I agree with the UI gripes you have, but I’m mainly just excited for someone to make a LES like we had RES

  • @Criton@feddit.uk
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    82 years ago

    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 :)

    • PenguinCoder
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      62 years ago

      How do you know something is developed with Rust?

      Don’t worry, the devs will tell you.

      • KNova
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        22 years ago

        Check the GitHub! It’s linked at the bottom of the web page (“Code”)

      • Flickertail
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        22 years ago

        I’ve also found this to be true with Julia devs

        Source: am Julia dev

    • nii236
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      32 years ago

      Weirdly enough the fact that it’s written in rust is why I am using it instead of kbin (PHP)

            • @CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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              2 years ago

              Fast because it’s pointer-based like C/C++, but better because it’s memory safe, which means it won’t crash, leak or mysteriously overwrite it’s own data constantly.

              • Danacus
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                22 years ago

                I’d say that it’s fast because it’s compiled to machine code and doesn’t use garbage collection. But I see what you mean with “pointer-based”.

        • bhj 🦥
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          02 years ago

          Rust is a very good language but is relatively new on the scene so it has to compete against other languages that fit the same niche(primarily C++) that have been around a lot longer.

          Rust has been very popular for hobby projects for a while but it’s still pretty rare to see it for larger projects, and you still almost never see it for enterprise projects. So it’s cool seeing an app that uses it blow up.

          • @Ragoo@feddit.de
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            12 years ago

            It should be noted that while Rust is rarely used, some very big players are pushing it. E.g. last year Microsoft Azure’s CEO tweeted that “it’s time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++ and use Rust for those scenarios where a non-GC language is required”, Windows contains some Rust code now and the Linux kernel also supports Rust in addition to C since December.

  • 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.
    • @xylem@beehaw.org
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      32 years ago

      (1.) should already be here, at least - on the web version it’s the [-] icon next the commenter’s name, and on Jerboa you just tap the top bar of the comment. Agree that there should be a way to hide posts permanently - it’s kind of annoying to always scroll past the same pinned posts at the top of the “Local” view.

      • spicy pancake
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        I tried tapping the top area of a comment. It displays a gray bar as click feedback but doesn’t seem to collapse anything. Am I just being a noob?

        Edit: updating fixed it :]

  • I didn’t until I found Beehaw. I’m enjoying it now.

    I wish you could block servers personally, though. Like some of the stuff that’s blocked here makes this place a lot better to be around. There’s less hate and reactionary fear mongering. Everything is more chill.

    • Gil (he/they)
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      22 years ago

      Yeah, as of right now, the only thing users can do is individually block users or specific communities.

      I’m glad that you’re enjoying your experience on Beehaw though! Even on the admin end there’s still not a lot of granular control, but hopefully, the explosion of users will help bring more attention to Lemmy’s development.

      • Yeah. In the end I think it’ll be beneficial, honestly, to put more control in the hands of the user. If you notice all of the problem people are coming from on place, blocking them all feels so counter-intuitive when you can just block the source. And every argument I hear against it is the same tired “free speech means you have to listen to me and give me a platform” thing you hear from just about everyone who has an opinion most people really don’t wanna listen to.

        And they take over every new social media site until people find a way to filter them out. That’s why they fight so hard against said filters.

        • codus
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          22 years ago

          Things got much nicer in Mastodon when a user could migrate instances. The problem with all of Server A blocking all of Server B is it’s very difficult for a user on Server B to migrate.

        • @maynarkh@feddit.nl
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          12 years ago

          I’m new here and have not met that drama yet. I joined a very small server to spread out the load and I doubt obscene cheese memes will get my instance defederated from the pack.

          Who does Beehaw block? Is it a Trump thing again?

          • Oh, it blocks the genzedong reddit crowd (who are worse here because there are no admins to tell them to stop openly advocating genocide) and the alt-right skinhead types. They tend to come from a few specific instances. What’s left is a blend of progressives and socialists and anarchists and moderates that can generally talk about things without treating you like you should be put to the firing squad for not loving Stalin or Hitler.

            You’ll come across it at some point and know immediately what I’m talking about.

    • @Gatsby@lemm.ee
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      I can block individual people as well as individual communities on the jerboa app

  • @boomboxnation@beehaw.org
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    So far so good. This is actually my first comment.

    I had a hard time wrapping my head around how the federation worked. But figured out I just search here in communities only with my keywords. If I don’t get a result here and https://browse.feddit.de then it means no community has yet been created anywhere.

    I decided to make Beehaw my ‘home’ server after discovering it actually had an ‘interview’ that I jived with and a moderated/structured set of communities. As my first deeper ‘test’ of lemmy I have created my first community at lemmy.world since it seemed like the place for my random community about a grocery store chain: !traderjoes@lemmy.world

    If I was making a specific tech/software related community I likely would have chosen lemmy.ml as that’s where many other tech/software related projects have landed so far. But lemmy.world seemed the better choice for random.

    Does this seem relatively close to be how I should handle things in the lemmyverse?

    Edit: It would be nice if there was a user setting to open external links in new tabs.

  • 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

  • @drapermache@lemmy.world
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    62 years ago

    I think its a little rough around the edges, but thats to be expected given that its less than a year old. The big hit for me is the mobile app which just isn’t that good. This will come with time. I’d rather have an half-baked implementation thats showing promise over what Reddit is doing. I like decentralized social media because you can pick and choose what communities you interact with. If lemmy.world decides to go full enshitification (although I can’t figure out how they would monetize), you can just pack up and going to another community.

    This honestly reminds me of when I was growing up in the early 00s, I was part of several different community forums that I loved dearly. There were other groups I looked into, but some were just toxic and unappealing, so I left after a while. I feel like Lemmy gives us the same freedom. I really hope to meet some awesome people here. Right now it’s just big enough to still allow meaningful dialogue and create cool relations. I felt like Reddit was too big for its own good even with niche subreddits; it didn’t feel like posting was worth it as it would get buried or just get a low effort response.

  • 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

  • @loops@beehaw.org
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    52 years ago

    I love it. I love how I don’t usually have to deal with “right-wing” extremists. They’re usually contained to lemmy.grab, but I suppose one or two might break containment every now and then.

    Still, a hell of lot better then seeing their bullshit as the first comment on a new post. :|

  • @archon@dataterm.digital
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    52 years ago

    It’s buggy, but I’m managing. Weird things like having to press the “Subscribe” button twice. I’m assuming most will be solved when traffic stabilizes.

    The federation is… strange. Confusing when I click a link to another instance when trying to subscribe to a community, but also kinda cool how it works. I’m not sure federation should really be a concern for users, but time will tell. I’m sure it will only improve.

  • @TooMuchDog@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    52 years ago

    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.

  • @Jimmni@beehaw.org
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    42 years ago

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