I honestly do not mind it one but. I quite like the interface. It’s minimal but there are some bugs to it which is to be expected. I really do like the overall design of it though. There isn’t too much going on. It’s like old Reddit which I am a big fan of
Involve more work but this kind of change is for the best. Freedom from the tyranny of corporate greed!
Is this the part where we seize the means of production and eat the rich? Because I’m here for it.
Nah, we’re just seizing a little corner where the bosses mostly leave us alone.
Okay but if we eat the rich, I’m here for it
Just so we’re clear, we’re definitely eating the rich, right? Don’t just tell me we have the rich at home.
I think having friction to use it can end up as a good thing. Works as a good first filter for bad/low effort users.
I’m starting to think the splintering caused by instances blocking each other is going to cause users to abandon Lemmy entirely. At the moment instances can suddenly decide to block other instances, and that is going to hurt both users on the instance that put a block into place, as well as users on the blocked instance.
The blocking is awful for an average Lemmy user, because you can get cut off from communities you already subscribed to, without any notification! So you might post and comment without realizing that your content is not getting published, even though you and your local instance still see it.
The user experience would be improved by getting a warning if you try to contribute to a community in this case. And also your subscriptions should show warnings about not working anymore, and those should come up as notifications on the account.
It’s nice, I just wish there was more activity. Hopefully it will grow overtime. My concern is the barrier of entry for new users. The whole “different instances” thing can be quite confusing.
Overall, I’m liking it, but I have some critiques:
- The apps won’t follow hyperlinks to third-party servers. This is not Lemmy’s fault; the Universal Links feature of Apple OSes and App Links feature of Android were not made with federation in mind. This will be a tricky problem for them to solve without getting seriously technical.
- I don’t like how external links don’t open in new windows/tabs by default, and there appears to be no preference to fix this.
- There appears to be some bugginess with the web interface and voting where, if I upvote something, the upvote may disappear a second or two later. But if I refresh and re-read the comment, my original upvote stuck.
- There needs to be more centralization of subs; as of now, there is so much duplication that it’s worse than Reddit. Reddit has some forked subs, mainly on ideological grounds or because of mergers, but it’s got nothing on Lemmy so far.
- When reading on the web, my view jumps around a lot. I’m guessing it’s loading in new comments as they come in on the server. That’s fine, but the abruptness of the whole thing causes me to sometimes lose my place. If it’s going to continuously load new comments, I would prefer that they be animated, so at least I can observe the change in motion.
- While I was typing this, I noticed that the page top reloaded with a different topic. I’m guessing that’s a bug.
- It’s good to have rules to prevent conversations from descending into chaos. I just hope that the rules are not interpreted too broadly.
For point 1, does this help? https://feddit.uk/post/9352
No, because I’m talking about Universal Links/App Links, the feature of Android and iOS/macOS where you tap/click on an HTTP(S) link to some site, and the link opens & gets handled in the app. The feature was made with centralization in mind, so it won’t work with federated servers, especially for users on small servers.
So what I think you’re talking about is called deep links, and it’s certainly a challenge in this scenario
I’m pretty sure it’s solvable with some effort, I’m working on a Lemmy client now and will look into intents that could be sent from the Lemmy front end. My main concern is just recognizing the links in-app robustly as people learn how to format them - if the client doesn’t kick you into the browser, it solves half the problem and I’ll worry about the other half
4- You signed up for a decentralized service that advertises the lack of a central authority, to leave a central authority, and now you’re complaining there’s no central authority.
This isn’t Reddit, and it’s not designed to be a Reddit clone. There are people working on 1 for 1 clones, and it’s totally fine if you want that, but maybe you should find one of those instead of demanding the people who built a specific platform with a specific vision immediately ditch all of that to cater to Reddit exiles.
I didn’t demand anything; I just made a criticism. There’s a difference.
I’m fine with there being no central authority for servers; I just wish there was a central authority for subs, like there is with Usenet, which has no central authority for servers, but it has a central authority for groups carried by the servers. Without one, the user base gets fragmented pretty quickly.
Without one, the user base gets fragmented pretty quickly.
A- I’ve seen a few community browsers pop up, you can find one in most intro threads and there’s also a built in explorer.
Yeah, I’m enjoying it outside of the small bugs. They’re not breaking the platform so I can live with them until they’re smoothed out. But the smaller communities are kind of a nice change of pace to be honest, it’s definitely like old Reddit before it got a case of the capitalisms. Terminal case, unfortunately.
But with the decentralized nature of it, we don’t have to worry about that happening again!
Using Mastodon for years now, I’m familiar with the structure and liking it. But I’m afraid most of the smaller subreddits that I followed won’t migrate here.
Can you name a few? Are they really that niche?
Many of the subs are going dark, so I can’t view everything. Here are some under 10k: r/Balconygardening r/filen_io r/MagicaVoxel r/saneprepping r/shotcut r/HistoricalFencing r/SimpleMobileTools r/volunteerplants
Under 50k: r/archeologyworld r/containergardening r/wma r/fonts r/Inkscape r/JewelsofRussia r/Mastodon r/Medievalart r/neverwinternights r/Banished r/EnaiRim r/opsec r/StainedGlass r/VOXEL r/vtmb r/WhiteWolfRPG
These are some of them that’s still open to public view.
Is historical Fencing about sword sports or garden walls?
It’s about using swords.
I’d imagine r/Mastodon would quickly find a replacement
I’m still getting used to this and there’s not much activity yet, but I’ll stick with it. Reddit isn’t worth it, so I’m happy there’s a chance for an alternative.
I like it. I prefer the UI plus it’s really refreshing to browse some similar communities i also browse on reddit and not seeing that many memes.
It took a solid couple days to wrap my head around how things work, where posts are coming from and how to find communities I’m interested in. I’m nervous that’s going to be just enough of a barrier that folks will say forget it when trying it out.
Otherwise it’s a refreshing take. Really wish there was an iOS app you could find in the App Store. All I find is mastodon apps.
Once you get a hang of how the fediverse works in general, it’s pretty good so far. Using mostly mobile atm, nice and clean, functional pretty similar experience to reddit. Aside from a few features missing like search, I’d imagine there is plenty of room for moderator tools too, and the occasional error codes, I’m loving it so far. No ads, just content, and while it’s not the firehose that reddit is/was, if this keeps getting popular, I could forsee just as many communities popping up across instances as there are subreddits.
I’m sure with the influx of users from reddit, especially the more technically savvy mods we’re going to see a lot of good tools made for the app and with it being open source, I imagine the devtimes are going to be even quicker than dealing with an ok API.
I am very excited to see what kinds of moderator tools pop up, for sure. I love this a bit more than I thought I would even though yes, getting started does feel pretty wobbly. lol
I mostly like it, until the front page spazzes out (I think it’s randomly starting to update, or something?). Then it becomes totally unusable. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that that should even be physically possible, and is really starting to annoy me.
It’s a known bug and a fix is being worked on
Nice username lol
I’m glad I’m not the only one that had this happen. The content of the front page in general (at least on mobile) is still a bit confusing to me. There are some posts that are a few hours old and others that are already a few days old. Other than that I also really like it. I’ve been more active on here in the last couple of days than I’ve been on Reddit in the past three years.
I signed up yesterday. It is close enough to something like old.reddit where I feel comfortable navigating around. I dont know how else to describe it, but it really feels like the site is populated by people creating content organically, and not just a bunch of bots or marketing accounts instigating engagement. Its refreshing that way
I’m looking it, though I haven’t found much good content yet. Gotta do a serious community search.
Sidenote: anyone know if I can replicate Reddit’s “hide post after upvoting” behavior?
It’s ok. Navigating takes some getting used to and the lower content and engagement so far is a bummer. Hopefully it will take off though. A mobile app at some point would be nice.
If on android, there’s Jerboa for an app. Kbin is working on an app iirc. It’s all open source too, so if it really picks up there will probably be a few others that pop up eventually.
KBin is also a PWA so pretty “app-like” already.
I can’t get kbin to “install” on my phone as a pwa. When I click “add to home screen” I just get a blurry icon and the navbar at the top of the page is still there. Am I missing something? Lemmys app and higher user count is what got me to settle on it instead of kbin but if I could get the pwa working I might give kbin a fairer shot.
That’s really odd! It sounds like you’re doing things right. You might try another browser? PWAs live in the mobile browser so sometimes that can help.
I appreciate the suggestion, but I thought the same thing and tried switching from Firefox to Chrome and got the same problem. Even updated both browsers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There is Jerboa for Lemmy if you want to use an app.
Testing a reply from that app!
Your test was successful.
Liking the clean interface reminiscent of old reddit
