Asklemmy

New user and reddit refugee here! The instance system isn't as straightforward as something like reddit where all of the content exists in the same place, but once I understood how the system works (via the first few posts I saw after opening the Jerboa mobile app for the first time) I got signed up on an instance that ISN'T lemmy.ml and I've just began surfing in earnest! Thanks to the community that's made this possible!

I have a terrible experience on mobile. I'm literally only on desktop because I was ready to delete my account. It's extremely unintuitive, Lemur doesn't work for lemmy.world and the other app is confusing to use. :/

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

The interface is nice and friendly, but the way the fediverse and the different instances works is kind of confusing. Still not sure what that's all about

I've been here for about a day and I've been very impressed! I happened to pick a pretty decent seeming instance to start from and I've not had too much difficulty figuring out this whole fediverse thing

I've also had a very good experience in Firefox on Android for browsing

I do think Lemmy is going to need to implement more load balancing and I'd love to be able to spin up a server to donate some cycles and bandwidth to help load balance an existing Lemmy instance

I think Lemmy seems like a good idea and generally like it so far, but i do think that users that aren't that tech savvy may have issues. It's also nice that the servers are customizable in a way, but at the same time if you pick certain servers you can't see down votes, or creating communities might be disabled which will seem inconsistent to newcomers that think of Lemmy as a more traditional platform like Reddit that only has one instance. The community search is also pretty clunky, a lot of users will probably have trouble understanding why they can't just find all available communities instead of writing an obscure email-like string that still says "no results", but then magically after searching again it will be there. I would say some areas are unpolished and even a bit buggy at times too. I figured these things out pretty fast, but being a software dev myself, i know that an end-user may struggle a lot more with these things, to the point where they may just abandon the platform out of frustration. I hope some of the rough edges can be smoothed out because the idea of this platform is definitely interesting, but if average people can't use it it's less likely to really succeed. I must admit that even i am a bit skeptical, and i may have to return to Reddit if not enough users/content migrate to this platform, even though i don't really like many of the decisions Reddit make. I'm giving it a fair shot though and i definitely like it so far.

I wasn't a Reddit user really, so I might come from a different angle than others. I wasn't a big fan of Twitter but I liked Mastodon, so when I heard about Lemmy I figured I'd give it the same chance.

So far I'm liking it. Communities are active in most cases, and stuff works. Maybe not the most easy way when getting started, but it does work. For me that's generally fine, I'm a functionality over form person (as in, can I do it matters more than is it pretty and easy breasy). But I can see people's point in wanting a sleeker experience.

Mainly using Lemmy on phone, using Jerboa and again, it works fine. But also here, I never used Reddit so I'm not used to fancy clients yet.

I'm only worried about a few older communities that where inactive for years now coming back to life. Mainly the modding situation, as those mods might not come back to (at least) hand it over to new people, locking the place into a wild west. A way to hand over moderation in those cases where mods have been inactive for years could prove useful..

It was meh the first ~week that I've mostly been using it anonymously via Jerboa. There just wasn't all that much stuff to read. But once I've spun up my own instance and federated with a few dozen communities - man, it's looking amazing! It's still so much better in a browser to manage everything, but simply lurking is now perfectly viable via the Android app.

Lots of problems here... I'm an experienced Mastodon user, and I have to say that I correctly predicted my experience with Lemmy.

It's not optimized for mobile, it's a lot of work to find what you want, and whereas Mastodon seems like an improvement on Twitter, this seems like a step back from Reddit.

Reddit also has an issue with finding subreddits, but Google indexes it and you can pretty easily find and subscribe to things just using keywords.

We need better app UIs ASAP, that make basic functions obvious and easy. It's a platform that probably does great on PC but I'm stuck with Jerboa, and it's really killing my enjoyment.

It does remind me of Reddit when I first joined. I like federated services like Matrix and Mastodon, but Reddit was exactly how I liked interacting online. I'm really missing RES keybindings (in particular a/z voting, j/k navigation, x expandos, <Return> thread collapse) but the UX fits my needs very well otherwise.

One question I still have is how quickly posts and comments propagate across the Fediverse. How can I be sure the comment I'm writing actually shows up across other instances, and how long after I write it does it take on average to show up other places?

I like the idea, but to be honest it feels unpleasant to use. Multiple different communities with the same topic are hosted on different servers, so I have to subscribe on them all if I want to keep track on what is happening. Would be nice to have some "mega community" that would have them all there. Also web client is broken, it feels so bad when my feed is moved down when new fresh post is added on top, this is borderline annoying and unusable> chf

upd: have tried kbin, it seems there they fixed all the annoying parts of lemmy. Great usage experience!

Site looks very promising. Would be great to have an explainer video on how to find the right instance and how to join groups across instances for new comers. For sure the site has a learning curve but given the state of reddit, I for sure want to look for an alternative.

The instance system definitely makes it a bit confusing. I'm a programmer and I've played around with some Mastodon stuff during my study. Still, as a user, it's quite chaotic sometimes.

I'm kinda wondering what this will converge towards. Is everyone going to join the same instance? Are different communities be kinda randomly spread over instances, where for every community in the end one instance dominates? Or will there just be chaos?

There's also some buggy behavior every now and then, but that's easily forgiven imo.

Getting signed up was a bit hairy. I tried going through the lemmy.one server and still hasn't gone through, so I went back and signed up through lemmy.ml and that got approved pretty quickly.

Aside from that still getting a hang of things. Not sure how to search for communities for specific interests, not sure how many of those exist yet.

I downloaded the Jerboa app on Android and the UI is pretty familiar coming from the Boost reddit app.

I'm really enjoying Lemmy so far, it's a lot different from Reddit but at the same time feels familiar. I understand and like the concept of a bunch of small hosted servers federated together. I feel like if user logins were also federated that would solve a ton of the onboarding issues for new people. I really miss default subreddits too.

It's an exciting re-imagining of a few ideas (usenet, digg) seemingly mashed together.

I'm finding a lot of content that I've voted on, and I'm maybe done-with. I'd love to know (where to find) an option to hide content I've seen and voted around, so I can just count on regular in-mail to chase the conversation. I'm sure that nit will go away once I find some menu-option I'm just not seeing!

Feels very early. The site design needs quite a bit of work.

• The usual confusion on fediverse domain boundaries and usage. Seems very easy to accidentally route to another server rather than viewing that content within the current server (community/user links).
• Doesn't retain sort/filter options on the home feed. I get that the default is local to promote some growth, but when I switch to subscribed I want it to stay that way.
• Excess visual space, cluttered design with avatars and community icons and excess padding. It falls into some of the traps that make me despise the reddit redesign.
• Strange prioritization of elements; visual emphasis on features that seem pretty niche or obvious (crosspost, tooltip text post preview, comment language, usernames), while more important elements get dwarfed or lost in the noise (timestamps, comment delineation + nesting).
• Live reloads are confusing and would be nice to be able to disable.
• There's a real lack of dom class tagging that would make it easier for me to remedy some of those issues with custom css and the number of !important definitions doesn't inspire confidence.
• Ultimately the above are all things that can be worked out. If the core systems work well enough then the design is something that can be augmented. I've had some navigation issues (including a page that wouldn't load because it received a malformed json response from internal service), but the core functionality seems to be mostly there. Whether it'll hold up to more load we'll have to see.

Long live federation! For me it’s just nice to see centralized social networks are losing popularity.

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!

For the most part it hasn't been too confusing for me. I'm new to modern federated social media, but not new to the idea of federation due to experience with the IRC model. I really enjoy the idea of instances and having your own sort of smaller space while being able to contribute to larger spaces still... though there's definitely still some user experience hurdles that need overcome on that front.

So far, I find it's pretty good. I couldn't find a client for Emacs so I may create one.

little wonky ngl, and i wish there were ui tool tips/ a small user guide for the uninitiated, but once u get over the initial learning curve it seems to be fine.

Literally just got here, but I'm finding it easier to get started than Mastodon, since communities are easy to find.

However I'm wondering if there is a bunch of communities I have yet to discover, and no idea how to discover them.

I'm loving a the idea and finding a bunch of nice people in communities :) The only thing I'm finding is that things seem to be creaking a lot, as I'm getting a lot of timeouts and such when I'm using Jerboa to upvote and search.

All in all though, it's great :)

Somehow, the UI is really buggy for me so far, and I experience numerous lags. I didn't manage to create a post yet, and sporadically, it seems like my instance is not available, due to some server error pages. Usually, after a reload of the page, it is fine again.

Furthermore, the UI is differently worse, than Reddits. Searching is awful, and I miss a lot of sorting functionality or algorithm for bringing up the comments based on likes and sub-comments.

I hope this will become better now, the Lemmy gets a lot of attention. Sadly, there is no completed iOS app yet. I don't like using the Website. :D

But then, it is nice to have a decentralized version of Reddit. And it seems it has already a few users, I hope Lemmy will grow further. I will stay strong.

Edit: A grouping feature for “merging” communities from different instances is much needed. I get it, it's a different instance and probably the users of the certain communities like to have specific rule variations or just don't like the other participants of the other communities. But at least for browsing content it would be a great feature.

Great so far. I am on .word shit just works and kbin. Trying to decide which one I like more and as a fail safe during downtime of one instance. But getting a hang of lemmy (and kbin) I like it so far after 7 years of daily Reddit.

still getting used to it. its a diferent way of operating. I want to see bigger numbers/engagment on servers and communities

Enjoying it a lot. We just need more content over here. But I assume that is a problem that will solve itself very soon.

Having trouble creating a community. Wanted to create a Rimworld and a Hunt showdown community but it's taking ages. Otherwise, great! I don't even miss Reddit.

It's pretty good. Looks like early days but hopefully more users will bring more content and we can all do our part to contribute and help it to grow in the mean time!