19
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by atomicpoet@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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.

top 47 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] unique_hemp@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

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 :)

[-] Penguincoder@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

How do you know something is developed with Rust?

Don't worry, the devs will tell you.

[-] knova@links.dartboard.social 1 points 1 year ago

Check the GitHub! It’s linked at the bottom of the web page (“Code”)

[-] flickertail@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I've also found this to be true with Julia devs

Source: am Julia dev

[-] Jonny@vlemmy.net 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Biggest issue right now is the inability to hide posts you’ve already read. Will this eventually be addressed?

[-] Thelaea@feddit.nl 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] BrokenToshy@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

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

[-] Sirquacksalot@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

[-] squaresinger@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Diana_has_wings@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] squaresinger@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Diana_has_wings@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] flickertail@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] godless@latte.isnot.coffee 0 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] danielton@outpost.zeuslink.net 1 points 1 year ago

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!

[-] PurrJPro@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

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

[-] CodingAndCoffee@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] atomicpoet@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

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 🤷‍♂️

[-] dracul104@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

I love the concept of decentralization. Feels more like the internet of old.

[-] eofs@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] dracul104@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Tandrios@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

What perhaps will be the final nail in the coffin for Reddit is working here perfectly! Mobile apps! Jerboa is perhaps lacking some features, but works like a charm.

[-] Lexicon@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I'm confused, but I've got the spirit. Reddit was confusing at first too, given I joined before it was mainstream popular. I figured it out, I'll figure this out too. Looking forward to a restart and seeing this grow.

[-] araly@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

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

[-] UnderlyingLogic@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] brianala@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I signed up for Mastodon awhile back but never really got into it since I don't really do Twitter much either. I have been reading about lemmy but didn't sign up until today.

It was a little confusing trying to sign up, the first instance I tried to sign up with had a waiting period for account approvals but I finally found one I could sign up with instantly and then I started poking around. I think I am getting the hang of it!

I have also downloaded Mlem to test on my iphone. It's easy and simple to use, not a lot of features yet but it seems promising.

So far outside of a bit of focus time to figure out how to actually get signed up and find communities to subscribe to I'm cautiously optimistic. This seems more like how the older days of the internet were, before the enshittification of social media. Let's see if this trend continues!

[-] worfamerryman@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I was never much of Twitter user, but I like mastodon due to the community. It’s such a wholesome place. Lemmy seems to be going that way as well.

[-] 1st@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

I tried mastodon very briefly about 6mths ago, and it seemed pretty quiet ala diaspora - has it filled up a bit now?

[-] worfamerryman@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I was never a big Twitter user. So it’s hard for me to judge, but it requires being a bit more active and following people.

Start searching hashtags and following the people you find interesting. I typically just use it as a way to scream into the void about what’s on my mind and then respond to the responses I get.

[-] Stumblinbear@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago

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

[-] psudo@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Just remember: Only You can prevent dead communities!

[-] palitu@lemmy.perthchat.org 1 points 1 year ago

it can be helped!

[-] Woozy@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I'm very impressed. It just needs more 3rd party apps!

[-] ndr@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There are already many! The problem is they lack polish, to varying degrees.

EDIT: Damn, Thunder wasn't showing me my comment!

[-] MyNamesNotMatt@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

3rd party apps and hide on read

[-] rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Lemmy has bugs and lacks features. Assuming those get ironed out and I expect they will in time, I'll like it a lot better than Reddit. Actually even with its shortcomings I like it better. The issues facing Reddit are of a different nature and for sure those will never get worked out, only worsen.

Otherwise the content on Lemmy is adequate for me. What's interesting is I actually get more rounded information here. Reddit is so big that I can only subscribe to a limited number of subs before I get overloaded. Here I'm subscribed to a healthy set of communities so I see posts on a wider array of topics.

I think people are a bit intimidated by the Fediverse at first. Once you have a basic understanding of what's going on, it becomes pretty transparent. It's just the added step of finding a good instance to log into. Once you've overcome that, it's all downwind sailing.

[-] complex_potato@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

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

[-] Zamboniman@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

The auto-refreshing front page is very frustrating to use.

Sounds like that's being fixed soon.

[-] pimeys@lemmy.nauk.io 1 points 1 year ago

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...

[-] omarciddo@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] bdiddy@lemmy.one 0 points 1 year ago

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

[-] neotecha@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago

My overall journey was the GameFAQS message boards -> Digg -> Reddit (via RIF) -> Lemmy

Lemmy has filled my content aggregation desires while boycotting Reddit. Overall, I could see being here to stay

I'm still having minor issues, but they aren't deal breakers. Like, I've had issues with my up votes not saving (press it, turns blue, wait a second, then it changes back), so I need to press it multiple times before it saves. On the whole, these errors will be resolved with time, so it doesn't bother me much

Main issue I'm trying to figure out now is: how to use federated users for other Lemmy instances. If I'm using the website for beehaw, then go to another instance, it appears I need to sign in, but I can't see how to use my beehaw account. I started using Jerboa and it seems to handle it, but the comments I'm making don't show up (when I checked in a browser), so it might be in the UI only, or I'm missing something

[-] aradon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 year ago

The entire concept of federated users feels counter-intuitive and off-putting. I'm trying to see if I can get this to grow on me.

[-] neotecha@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I think the concept is intuitive and interesting, but the implementation/interface isn't.

[-] yippy@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago

I like the jerboa app on mobile but I dislike the desktop site layout. I've used Shine for Reddit for years for the grid layout. I'm hoping someone will eventually release custom layouts to make use of all the space on desktop. The content is about the same after subscribing to lots of communities.

[-] BuckShot686@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

There's some work going on currently to allow the previous Reddit third party apps to connect to Lemmy instead of Reddit. This should allow you to use Shine for Lemmy in the near future.

load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
19 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37699 readers
275 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS