I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:
- The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I’m aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that’s less than ideal)
- The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I’m aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it’s vital to the success of Lemmy.
The first point is CRUCIAL for setting up your own “scrolling page/account” for, since the instances are only very vague directions, at least while the site is still growing. And in a similiar vein, the second point with B) would be better than manually blocking communities I genuinely have no interest whatsoever in, like fountain pens (unless I don’t know how to operate this site yet).
In fact, C) feels unnecessary because of that right now, since I already see many new communities just in my instance alone. Though it WOULD add things to browse since there isn’t as much happening here, yet…
I’m having a great time. Lemmy is a little bit harder than Reddit but I have been on Mastodon for some time now so I know how federation works. The only thing about Lemmy I don’t like is that it feels kinda buggy and unpolished as it is very early stage and the same posts often reappear. But I like the community and it actually seems to be working so that’s pretty cool!
Comment syncing to my instance is a problem. I get posts but comments, not so much.
I like the concept
But it feels very much like its been designed by nerdy developers and has had little to no-input on user friendly design.The federated idea can work but it needs to be more seemless than this.
- Communities with the same name should be merged when viewing it from any instance, so you can see all the posts from these communities, they can be moderated seperatley and for advanced users you should be able to select which communities make up the merged community.
- By default you should see all of the merged communities in a central place and be able to subscribe to them easily, at the moment its handled different per instance but you have to seek out these communities to subscribe or follow them.
- I strongly believe there should be a centralised log-in system, so you can log into any instance with an account from another instance, this means if your instance goes down your account is centralised and is safe.
Regarding point three: I want to be able to migrate my profile to another instance if my current instance has performance issues or admins going rogue.
I think even better, you should be able to sign into any instance via some type of centralised federated login, though I guess the argument is you can’t do that in multiple email clients as email is the most popular federated example.
This may unironically be the first time I’ve ever suggested this: this may actually be a use case for the block chain.
If the user data from all instances was being saved to a distributed and verified ledger, it would fix the problem of one node going down losing all of those users, and would be a decentralized yet centralized way to go about it.
… I feel dirty, I swear I’m not a cryptobro
I love it here and I’ll express myself and show love to all with manatees
Interface is better than “new” Reddit, not as good as old Reddit + RES.
Also: if I click on a link on another instance (for example https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy when I’m signed in on lemmy.world), I’m not signed in to lemmy.ml so I have to manually search for it in lemmy.world to post there - is there a common solution to that?
Very confused… I have a direct link to a Linux community and can’t figure out how to open it, or join it, or whatever I’m supposed to do with it in Jerboa. Discovery seems severely limited.
Jerboa search only finds communities that at least 1 person on your instance subscribed to, to find new communities from other instances easily I like to use https://browse.feddit.de/
Then when you find a community, go to the web version of your instance (don’t worry it’s (mostly) mobile friendly) and type !name@instan.ce (don’t forget the !) Then you can subscribe there. Close and reopen Jerboa and your new community will show up in the list. The Jerboa devs are working on fixing this.
There needs to be a place that brings all of these features together in one place. Otherwise the people who are used to being spoonfed functionality (which now makes up the majority of reddit users) will not switch over; or they’ll switch and bounce off.
Thank you.
New thing I don’t like: I could not reply to you from my inbox. I had to go back to this thread, start from the top, find my own comment again, and then respond to you. The button in my inbox that looked like a reply button just marked the message as read instead.
Also I just found the search, the icon looks nothing like a search icon.
Look 2 buttons to the right of the impostor button, the box with dots in it.
Oh, I see it now. My brain must have seen the one chat bubble and ignored all others. Surely that would make more sense to be a bell icon or something.
Or an eye or something, yeah. I had the same problem until I got used to it.
It doesn’t feel ready for mass adoption.
The difficulty of finding
subredditscommunities is a problem. And, when you do find one, nine times out of ten the link you click takes you to a different Lemmy server, from which you cannot join the community.And then there’s the problem of fragmentation and duplication, which has been explained better by other users on this thread.
There are lots of little problems here and there, like the language defaulting to “Undetermined” which hides your post from everyone who just naively selected English.
Fortunately, I’m (reasonably) technically-competent so I can make it work for me, and I recognise that even getting this far with development is a massive achievement. But I’m pretty sure the average internet user isn’t going to stick around until the project’s a bit more polished and mature.
It’s growing on me.
Once I added a few different instances it became much better! Content will come. But the best users from Reddit will migrate along with us!
Same here. I do feel and see that a LOT of work will be required to get lemmy where it needs to be but something tells me that these are the interesting days for Lemmy!
Echoing many things that other users are saying already:
Signing up/choosing a home instance is confusing. I don’t think it’s very confusing conceptually, but it is confusing from a UX/UI perspective. Subscribing to outside communities was the toughest part, I had to find them through a different instance using a search engine, then manually paste the community-specific URL into my home instance search, wait several seconds, then click into the community home page and finally click “subscribe.”
Not something a casual user is going to want or even figure out to do. I trust that many of these growing pains will be fixed in the coming weeks/months. I just hope that it’s not all a flash in the pan and then fizzles out totally.
Once using it though, I like the general feel of it. Better themes and some cleaner UI choices and it will be really nice imo. People are friendly so far and that’s worth a ton right there.
Yeah, there is a ton of room for Lemmy to grow. With time, it should get easier for newer people to use it as the apps mature.
Liking it so far. A social network is only as good as its community. The community is small but high quality. I’m excited to see Lemmy grow.
Worried about the future of fediverse, all it takes is a few external bad apples and servers will start defederating. Also even less internal bad apples who decides to make specific desirable features proprietary with the goal to amass the majority to users. Both of these are bad for the fediverse.
I was new to Reddit (3 weeks of activity), and switching to Lemmy is a bit confusing. But one evening is enough to learn the basics, I hope. Let’s keep it rolling. :)
