Technology

Jerboa is what I'm using, has a very old school android feel to it or Windows Phone

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

Havn't tried Lemmy yet... does my comment show up alright coming from fedia.io? The fediverse is neat.

I have been enjoying it so far, the software feels quite similar to old reddit in many ways but the community so far is a bit less toxic. If anyone is wishing to use it on iPad I recommend going to your instance and in the share menu adding it to the home page as there isn't yet a good option for iPad.

I am also looking forward to the addition of 2fa in the next update

I think its really cool! I will definitely stay here.

Lemmy's UI on desktop is... dogshit and really needs some love. Some web designer could volunteer for a better desktop theme? But thanks to the Jerboa app it looks amazing on Android!

Only issue right now with Jerboa is that it allows very long images to occupy a large space on your frontpage, I think it should show them as thumbnails instead.

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.

It's cool, but the community needs to grow.

Communities will grow and shape with time, but the only thing I'm really missing is some of the RES features: j and k keyboard navigation, click-and-drag expando resize.

My guess is that redditers will want lemmy to be just like....reddit, but without the public-corp nonsense and with UI that is at minimum on-par with 3rd party apps people gravitate toward on reddit.

I'm totally new to this so I'm also figuring out my way around. The federated organization is confusing for sure, but not so much that people can't get it.

Some work could be done from a user focus... Simplify(including caring for duplicated hosts and communities), educate on lemmy's benefits, make searching for new communities seamless and less of a quest.

I think it will take time to smooth few rough edges but already now it's usable.

However I have big concerns on how this structure can scale, it already suffers with few thousands users. Plus security, privacy and sustainability of the fediverse is still a big question mark to me.

But it's exciting and I hope it will be the future of socials.

It feels so freaking empty, maybe it's my lemmy client but I can't see any post older than two days

I’m happy to be a part of growing this community. I like that no one is trying to make money from my engagement.

It's different, but getting the hang of it, also using the jerboa app currently which isn't bad for such a new app. Considering developing my own app for Android but might end up in the unfinished projects list.

Community discovery is lacking IMO at the moment, even using browse.feddit I'm found communities that aren't on there, through the app so not the easiest to use currently.

It's very interesting and I remember wishing for a long time that "two-server" protocols like email would start being made again. I already switched from Twitter to Mastodon last fall and don't regret that in the slightest. The community here seems nice so far, and the UI is simple and clean.

I've encountered some glitches like the live-update feature seemingly changing what post I'm viewing and mixing comments from the two posts. The instance I picked has had some performance issues and has gone down a couple times, but I'm chalking that up to a mass influx of users and activity (of which I'm very much a part).

I could use a browser extension that just adds an "open this post/community/user in my home instance" button when I'm browsing another instance so I can interact. Also some ability to put a link to e.g. a community in your post text that automatically sends you to that community via the instance you are viewing the post in.

I appreciate the clean interface and the relatively chill vibe. Regardless of what happens with reddit I think I'll be hanging out and enjoying the communities.

I really like it, but I'm concerned for rough times ahead.

Running instances is hard, thankless but necessary work. A for-profit company like Reddit can afford to pay engineers to do it. A lot of open-source / free software things survive because people are generous and donate their time, creativity, expertise and often even money to keeping them running. But when it's a hobby not a job, it gets to a point where people often have to think of their own sanity and step away.

The fediverse design seems well suited to handle that without major disruption, but there will definitely be some disruption.

I'm also hoping that people are tolerant of design quirks. Design by committee is often seen as one of the worst ways to do things, and FOSS is nothing but committees. Reddit's design obviously influenced Lemmy (as Slashdot influenced Reddit, and so-on). But, while I wasn't a fan of the new Reddit design, at least it was a unified view. I'm incredibly impressed at how smooth Lemmy has been so far, but again, I expect it's just a matter of time before there are some controversial choices in what new features to add, how to expose them, what defaults to choose, and so on. I hope people are tolerant of the churn that that might cause.

Basically, I just really hope that whatever controversies and rough periods are ahead, that the communities I care about choose to weather the storm and stick around. If we can survive that, social media that isn't owned by any company, and that isn't part of the "surveillance capitalism" world is very promising.

After a few days messing around with it and trying to get it to work in the ways that I want it to, I'm starting to think it feels like an upgrade. There are some serious barriers to entry that make it tough if you don't know what you're doing, but with Lemmy, my online experience is almost exactly the same as before, just without having a dedicated make-things-worse guy stinking the place up.

Ok so far. Only complaint is posts moving when new posts get added while I'm in the middle of scrolling. It's a little clunky.

Edit: After a few hours of using I have a second complaint, searching/sub discovery is a little undercooked feeling. It's a bit sticky to figure out what communities exist, what they exist under and how to navigate around to them. I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually but it currently doesn't feel great.

Loving it so far. Once you get used to how you connect to other instances it's a breeze.

Like you said Jerboa, is really coming along nicely and is easy to use.

Can't reysee myself using Reddit much any more tbh

I like the concept, and overall experience. On a more technical side getting my own private lemmy instance up and running (I wanted to retain full control of my account) was not easy due to somewhat lacking documentation on the process. Had to dig through posts from other people having similar issues, and do a bit of troubleshooting to fill in the gaps.

Now that I have it working will see if I can find the time to do a writeup on the process if others are looking to do the same.

i like it and can totally abandon reddit for it assuming people continue to show up and like all my tiny little niche communities pop up. I do feel like it's a bit confusing at first as far as finding communities and connecting to them all so some work there would probably go a long way.

basically when there is a community for stock tank pools specifically and has 2,000 subscribers we're in the money lol