i mean so far, I'm enjoying it. sure, the community isn't as large, but that's mostly a good thing. on reddit, if i made a post, it would be like a 25% chance to get hundreds of comments, and a 75% chance to get none. here, I've gotten a few, high quality responses on every question post I've made. i do miss the "auto hide read posts" feature, but maybe that'll get added some day
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
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You can hide read posts here! In the web app settings for your profile:
Is there a way to stop the endless loading of posts on the website? Because every time I try to click a post, it moves down because a new post loaded, and this happens every ten seconds, constantly.
It's a bug that wasnt an issue when the community was smaller. Last I heard they will replace it with a refresh icon that pops up at the top when new posts are available.
Oh thank God is a bug, I really thought it was a feature of the site.
It’s amazing what kinda bugs can be exposed in your system when your user base expands by orders of magnitude overnight
Thank jeebus. I was getting all fussy thinking it was a me/my phone/my browser problem.
Fediverse currently reminds me of Reddit from 10 years ago in frequency of content. There is something nice about not being in the rat race, less toxicity.
Honestly man, as much as I 100% agree on the UI difficulties, it's like a breath of fresh air. There's good music posted, people posted books and I looked and really wanted to read them. It's more human. There's this tiny little handful of content here, but it's not all same-y and in-joke-y and weird.
I'm not trying to hate on reddit, I still go to reddit for news because of more or less what you're talking about (the weird sorting in the newsfeed here and the lack of certain content). But what I like about here is that there are nerdy people, there's real content, there's not this weird hivemind and endless dopamine content. The great stuff about reddit was always the in-depth storytelling and unique content, to me, not just the gratification aspect of everything working right and new content popping up. I'm happy with Lemmy despite the hiccups because it seems like it's getting back to that.
I would say to breathe deep and take your time. Lemmy is not a clone of Reddit, and it shouldn’t be viewed as, say you would compare functionality between 2 third-party Reddit apps.
Think of it as coming in to a new MMO after having played the old one for many years. Some things will be familiar, and some things will be different. Some mechanics may feel like a “step backwards” while others are cool additions.
Lemmy isn’t new, but it’s getting fresh eyes on its user experience and that is a good thing. And unlike Reddit, each community/server/whathaveyou can be far more responsive to their users feedback. That said, not every response will be a “yes” but you don’t have requests filtering through various levels of technological red tape, which I understand has been a challenge for the Reddit moderators, who still do not have the necessary tools to effectively moderate their subreddits.
When I first joined Beehaw, and saw, originally, a “lack” of diverse subreddits (including my mainstays) I was a bit disappointed, but then I thought to myself: “damn the torpedoes, I’m just gonna wing it” and subscribed to a bunch of communities that looked promising.
I’ve been on Lemmy since the disastrous AMA and have not looked back. I’ve even engaged more in these last 5 days on Lemmy/Beehaw than in the last year on Reddit. And while I still miss my 250+ subreddits (including r/superbowl and the subreddits I collected as part of a Reddit gestalt (r/inthesoulstone, the subreddit for Purple button pushers, r/buddhistasfuck (created as a lark, someone posted it wouldn’t last a day and I stayed to prove them wrong, and while it was a quiet subreddit, every once in a while someone would post something they thought was “extremely” buddhist)) the Lemmy communities have provided more meaningful interactions. Plus, Lemmy will create its own gestalts, and I’ll have new ways to experience the never-ending stream of random data tidbits I have grown to crave.
You make it sound like not doomscrolly is a bad thing
People will rarely say they want to endlessly scroll, but given the options, they'll always choose the option that let's them consume more content, aka doom scroll.
Feels like an older reddit, which I enjoy(ed). I also appreciate the genuine interactions and that upvotes are a 1:1 with users. No smoke and mirrors.
The reality is that there was/is no reddit alternative and right now we're all in this transitory phase where we're all looking for a new home. We'll all just have to wait for the dust to settle. Lemmy isn't perfect but is improving and additionally other alternatives like kbin and tildes are in the works.
To your larger point, much of what you're feeling is the abrupt break in habits. I've been using the gap to develop more positives ones, and it's been great.
A thought came to my mind when reading your comment.
Instead of finding a new home, let's make lemmy our new home. Let's try to populate lemmy more, get its activity up, and post more than we would've on reddit (since we have less users, we would need more posts per user), so it can stand a chance at being a reddit competitor.
One of your issues is probably sorting by Active instead of sorting by Hot. A major difference in the experience on Lemmy is the "Active" sort method being the default.
There are definitely a few bugs or perhaps performance issues that are annoying, but the experience seems already 1000 times better than just 2 days ago. I have also checked on lemmy every few months for about 2 years now, it's day and night. It already feels kinda like 2012 reddit to me, and that's a good thing in my view.
Same here, that was about the time I joined reddit and the nostalgia and excitement for something new is amazing
I know the feeling, but the way I'm dealing with it is twofold.
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Create content. If the commuity you like has few posts, then start something. If the community doesn't exist, create it. I'm doing my part by creating maliciouscompliance (quick shoutout: /c/[email protected] , https://lemmy.world/c/maliciouscompliance , [email protected] ).
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Recognise that I used to spend too much time on Reddit and I should spend less time on social media in general. "Not as doomscrolly" is a feature for me, although I recognise this isn't for everyone.
The community and the app is still relatively new. To be honest, I prefer smaller communities where I can leave for a few hours without half the posts sliding to page 5 and beyond. Instead of uncritically consuming digital content, try to contribute to smaller communities, post a couple of cool links, or even (Gasp! Horror!) do something else for a while.
I had the same problem of seeing posts more than once or consistently when viewing the site.
I had to dig under the Menu, click onto my profile name, select Settings, and make some changes.
Under that page I changed “Type” to “Subscribed” (Default was Local) and “Sort Type” to “Top Day” rather than “Hot”. Then make sure to click “Save”
This seems to have improved for me a bit.
I used web version of lemmy.world on desktop (1080p monitor) yesterday, coming from old.reddit + RES, I really hate:
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The web trend to leave white space on both side of websites, it's space inefficient and causes thread with longer title to take two lines to display.
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Everything has a thumbnail slot even if it's just text thread, makes each thread took more height to display, also space inefficient.
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You need to be authorized to even subscribe/join to a community (that is not on lemmy.world).
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Image expand button is hard to spot for me, and I am pretty sure some threads with image didn't have expand button.
Yeah I would agree with all these things. Hopefully, the fact that this project is open source will mean that someone or a group of people will put some time and effort into improving the UI bits as issues with it come up.
The problem with Fedi apps is that they're built as replacements or clones of other apps like Reddit (Lemmy), Instagram (Pixelfed) or Twitter (Mastodon).
People come to expect the same experience that they had there and they're disappointed by the small community and confused because it's built on a fundamentally different philosophy and concept.
And of coruse, bugs are to be expected. It's not a multi million dollars company that's building these apps but a community of volunteers.
It's very new. Very valid concerns, but most of them are growing pains. If people just stick with this for a while it will improve by leaps and bounds.
Personally I've focused more on the community aspect than the software for now, since the latter is actively being worked on by a lot of people, so that's just a waiting game. The community has been fantastic, though. Already a nice feel in a lot of discussions.
Give it some time, you'll start to see more and a bigger variety of posts. Additionally, change your sort of posts once in awhile, and enable the "all" selection and you'll see a bigger variety of posts
The default sorting is by "active" which to me doesn't show a lot of new content (from the last hours). Switching to hot improves the experience a lot.
Another good sort is "Top Day". The blackout and subsequent activity here really highlighted an issue in Hot where the most popular communities just endlessly get interaction and stay at the top of Hot/Active. On the other hand, Top Day has been continuously bringing in new posts from all my communities.
The best experience is probably going to be using a combination of the two, swapping if one feels like it's getting stale.
I just sort by hot, check twice a day, make a thread if I want an inbox and it's fine
@jaykay I'd actually like to see bots rip top posts from reddit to post to Lemmy, and the subreddits who would like to I would love to see them create their sister Lemmy instances and create an auto crosspost process. This way, they are keeping their subscribers happy and can make the transition whenever they feel like it if it really comes time to completely abandon ship... Which for me it is time!
Oh my, that has just been there the whole time and I repeatedly glossed over it!
You aren't doing anything wrong! This site/app (lemmy) and the concept (fediverse) are still super early days so there are going to be many problems. The site has some layout issues and there isn't nearly as much content as Reddit but that's just because it is new.
The most important bit, to me at least, is that the fundamental idea of the fediverse is good. We have had to many instances where social sites like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter can just decide what people can and can't say, they can remove our content and they can monetize it all without doing any real work of their own as far as creating content. The idea of the fediverse ensures that no one server, person or company has all the content and thus the control.
I really hope people stick with something fediverse whether it be lemmy, kbin or any of the other projects out there. Post content there, cross post it from Reddit if you really have to post to Reddit too for whatever reason. Please don't give these companies all the control anymore.
I'm still feeling my way around and have subbed to a community or two here and there, but (using Jerboa on Android) so far it's actually not that different from using rif (for me, anyway.)
The only real issue that I've encountered so far is I kept getting timeout errors whenever I tried to comment (though the comments seem to have posted anyway) or when I clicked into a comment thread, but those seem to have subsided for the most part...
I just love it, but you have to make sure to subscribe to a lot of communities from lots of different instances.
Im also on Android which I think has a better mobile client.
Beehaw is very chatty, join their popular communities. :)
Agreed. Its all a bit too confusing. I'm sort of understanding it all now after a few hours. I think great apps for android and iOS will definitely help a lot, but also I just really miss apollo :(
The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example. Lemmy should prevent this, community names should be unique, it should have an index of all the Lemmy Fediverse where instances can lookup if a community exists instead of waiting for a user to import that community to his instance. Something similar to what BTC does with the decentralized ledger.
The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example.
I agree, to an extent. You're right in that if you were part of the vibrant community of /r/piracy then it's miserable to see it shatter here on lemmy. That said, this only applies if you're expecting lemmy to be a 1 for 1 reddit replacement. For this type of community to remain cohesive, /r/piracy would have had to spin up their own instance and in /r/piracy direct everyone to lemmy.piracyinstance.whatever.
You can't really "fix" this in a central way because even if you did, it would be trivial to create an instance that would allow duplicate community names. Also, I can see a lot of use cases for lemmy which do not intend to be federated.
That said, it's not necessarily as big a problem as it appears, if you just accept that this is how the fediverse works. There's no single source of control, so of course people can create 147 different /c/piracy communities if they wish to. Once you accept that, then it's not really that difficult to subscribe to all the /c/piracy communities you can find.
The problem itself could be diminished by a few new features which I feel certain will emerge in the future:
- linked communities, where one communities content is syndicated to another. So if you post in [email protected] then you also post in [email protected]. This would work differently to cross-posting, all comments would be reflected on both instances.
- grouped communities, where you can subscribe to a group of /c/selfhosted communities with one click, so you see them all in your feed.
I think what they really need is an autosubscribe, so you can autosubscribe to /c/Piracy on all federated servers. (Then of course be able to block certain instances if they're horrible)
I find it exciting. Very reminiscent of the Digg exodus. Sure, it can be a little frustrating at times. But reddit was going downhill for me long before the API stupidity. Lemmy feels like returning home in a way.
I'm confused to be honest, but I admit I just started. But like, where do I look at pictures of houseplants and post mine? Do I find a server devoted to houseplants? Or maybe I should just finally figure out Instagram for that.