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.
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 :)
How do you know something is developed with Rust?
Don’t worry, the devs will tell you.
Check the GitHub! It’s linked at the bottom of the web page (“Code”)
I’ve also found this to be true with Julia devs
Source: am Julia dev
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.
Finding “the right community” is definitely an issue, and I’m sure will continue to be one for a while. But remember Reddit had the same issue, with multiple redundant subreddits when one would have been better.
I’m sure things will consolidate over time, with less popular communities going quiet and their subscribers moving to more active ones.
That is true, that was an issue on Reddit as well. But here it’s even worse, since you can have a community with the same name on different instances. It basically adds another dimension to the discoverability issue.
It’s true, but I guess it’s the price of federation. And Reddit having a single namespace meant a lot of subreddits needed to have “real” or “true” prefixed to their names, which was pretty confusing.
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.
Yep, same. For that reason I never really managed to get into mastodon, tried it for a bit and found the signup system too convoluted, then dropped it altogether. Though granted, I also never used Twitter, never understood why people liked it (and still don’t), so I tried mastodon out of curiosity, not actually looking for something.
With Lemmy it’s all different. I feel like I need to leave reddit and find a new community, so there’s an inherent desire to like it, which makes the adaptation way easier.
I am admittedly still active on Twitter, but during the whole Twitter exodus, I decided to give Mastodon a try, and I abandoned it because I just kept running into people complaining about Elon without seeing much else.
Until I read somewhere during this whole Reddit fiasco that you can follow hashtags in addition to people on Mastodon. Total game changer!
Used Reddit for 13 years, tried out Kbin and Lemmy yesterday and settled on Lemmy.
Long story short, I’m going back to Reddit.
- There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto. This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting. Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.
I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.
Deciphering the distributed nature of it took me, a relatively tech-friendly person, almost the entire day and several ‘What the fuck?’ posts. I now understand it more. There are some very low-level guides that have been haphazardly put together, but there absolutely needs to be a MUCH smoother guide/explanation to this whole thing. That learning process will turn people away for sure.
- BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security. If this is going to become a mainstream thing, as it reaches and before it gets to that critical mass of users, there’s going to be SO. MANY. SECURITY ISSUES. There’s no 2fa at all, hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant, and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is. In the ‘Fediverse’ your server instance might be hosted in a US or EU data center with proper digital and physical security, or it could be Joe Blows basement in Iowa running off a NAS. The easy-to-see future here is that Lemmy will fail to attract a critical mass of people because they’ll initially arrive, after a few months their instances will just cease to exist/get shut down/the hosts will decide its no longer a fun hobby to do.
With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them. Beyond that, if there IS a breach, they have the ability to recognize it, understand the legalities and requirements of reporting it, and can be held accountable by regulatory bodies. Joe doesn’t have the resources to really maintain and keep a server running, nor the knowledge of his responsibilities for keeping the data safe digitally or physically.
On top of that, if Joe’s basement loses power/gets hacked/Joe decides he’s moving to San Fransisco and can’t bring his NAS with him and the server goes down, and that’s where my instance is hosted well there goes my entire account/comments/data.
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Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.
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There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me, and I’ve gotten used to having a single place to get it from that floods me with thousands of different articles/memes/posts/etc every minute. Until the user base arrives in one single place and starts generating content, there’s no reason for most people like me to be there as by far the larger number of users never create anything at all and only exist to consume the content generated.
Sorry, but a lot of your concerns you outline, I just don’t agree with.
There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto.
No… Reddit’s singular biggest issue is the fact that everyone is beholden to Reddit’s whim. Leaving any of this to any singular company/persons whims is a big problem. Moderator banned you from a subreddit cause they powertrip? What’s your recourse? You have none.
This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting.
And yet emails are not a problem. Why specifically is this off putting? You’ve never emailed anyone outside of gmail.com? or outlook.com?
Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.
Statistically this is very wrong. Quite the opposite in fact. Users are terrible at identifying ANYTHING malicious as actually being “Wrong”.
I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.
Just like setting up an email on Gmail doesn’t mean you can just migrate to Outlook… and yes I would hope that deleting your account would delete all your comments. That’s a GOOD thing.
BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security.
What security are you talking about? There’s nothing “secure” here. You’re posting things to a public forum for all intents and purposes. What security are you expecting?
There’s no 2fa at all
Slated for release with v0.18 which will probably drop within the next few weeks or so… But if your only concern for account security is 2fa… then you probably don’t realize that long unique passwords are perfectly fine. I only really see this being an issue if you’re a moderator or admin of an instance though. As both of those things… I actually don’t currently see a problem. 2fa will be a welcomed addition though.
hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant
Just like on every other service on the internet? It seems that most places do fine without this worry.
and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’
On the instance you signed up for your account on. In your case that would appear to be lemmy.ca. That’s the only instance that even really knows who you are. The rest of the instances just believe the origin instance of the data.
The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is.
Yup. But that’s the case with ANY online service. Where’s your facebook data? How about the massive amounts of data that google collect on you? Where’s every bit of that? The hope and prayer is that it’s safe in some datacenter that has armed guards and all that. The reality is that data leaks happen. Engineers go home with harddrives full of backups that have all your data on it. Hell your doctors office probably has this issue… https://www.classaction.org/pediatric-data-breach-connexin. I don’t see you complaining about that. This service is not super sensitive… and if you believe it is… host your own instance.
With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them.
And yet everyday you hear about some other company that got completely shafted… and more user information leaked out there like it belongs in the wild. But I once again have to ask… Aside from password (which is hopefully long and unique)… What content do you have on lemmy that actually matters? You realize that everything you post on a platform like this or Reddit is public… There’s nothing you should ever assume to be “secure” or private on a platform like this, including Reddit. You bring this up so many times… What are you uploading that’s sensitive that you think needs to be secure?
Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.
Finally a legit concern. Yes, finding communities is actually a bit annoying. There’s work being done to fix it. Remember this is version 0.17.4 that we’re on right now. And the mass influx of people trying the platform out is putting a ton of stress on lots of undersized server instances. Things will happen… But same story with reddit… Reddit just had 3-4 hours of downtime because some subreddits went private. They’re not perfect either… what’s their excuse? It can’t be because it’s new and small…
There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me
What? There’s TONS of content already. You need to join more communities I think. Reddit was never there to generate content either though. It’s an aggregator, not typically a source.
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.
It desperately needs a compact, efficient UI similar to old.reddit’s design philosophy. Otherwise its not bad. The auto-refreshing front page is very frustrating to use. I want to click on an article, and between when I move the cursor and click, new articles have refreshed and the link I clicked was the wrong one
What I like about Lemmy is how it’s UI and backend are completely separate. I’ve seen others already asking for old.reddit type of an interface, so it is just a matter of time now…
The auto-refreshing front page is very frustrating to use.
Sounds like that’s being fixed soon.
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.
The community, particularly Beehaw, is fantastic! I love it.
Lemmy itself needs a lot of work. It’s incredibly far behind, but my expectations are staying measured and I’m excited to see how it develops. Right now it’s not a case of me enjoying the platform itself, but more so ‘putting up’ with the limitations of the platform to access the nice community.
Jerboa is the mobile client I’m using currently, and it’s off to a good start but needs a lot of fixes to be fully usable. Such as sorting comments and searching. The ability to easily click a button to jump to the next comment thread is my most missed feature as well from clients such as Boost for Reddit.
Additionally, I still have issues signing into the mobile website. I can sign in through Jerboa or the Beehaw website on desktop, but not on mobile (or at least not always). So I’m often navigating content on the mobile website, then using Jerboa to comment on it. Most won’t deal with these issues, but I’m still holding out to see what comes from it all.
A couple of last side notes, it’s really annoying to need to click on the title, and not being able to click on the text of a post to navigate (mobile site) - and visually it needs some improvements to draw more people in. That last part seems minor, and for a large part of the existing community, myself included, it truly is minor - but for widespread adoption it needs a big revamp.
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 know it’s in its infancy but the great thing about Reddit was I could search any niche topic and guarantee there was a subreddit setup for it.
Obviously this is solved by more and more people using Lemmy but I personally can’t see Lemmy appealing to the the masses. Depending how active the communities become I can see me using Lemmy going forward but I don’t think it will be the “One site for everything” that Reddit has become but rather 1 of many sites I check going forward instead
Removed by mod
I hope the #RedditMigration sours adoption
I think you meant spurs lol
Anyway yeah I’m liking Lemmy and the fediverse so far. I actually prefer the UI/UX of https://kbin.social more for desktop, but Jerboa is great for mobile. If they stay actively in development it’s going to be hard to beat IMO
I’ve followed from Fark to StumbleUpon to Digg to Reddit, and now many years later, to Lemmy. I think the communities being spread across instances is extremely powerful for overall global community resiliency (if the separation is respected and we don’t end up with a bunch of duplicated “subs” everywhere).
I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of people say this today, but the one thing I feel the most is excitement. The chaos reminds me of the early-ish days (~1996?) of the web when everything was discoverable and not already aggregated to be served up to you inbetween advertisements.
Yep, I actually caught that typo and edited it, but it’s frustrating that the edit didn’t federate to your server. Oh well, maybe that will improve with time 🤷♂️
I love the concept of decentralization. Feels more like the internet of old.
This is also something I really like. Dedicated forums on dedicated web sites for different topics, but this time they’re accessible through a single interface and you can communicate across forums.
Exactly! I used to think of reddit like that, until it became something…different. I’ve found myself going back to old forums instead of reddit lately.
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
Just remember: Only You can prevent dead communities!
it can be helped!
