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 :)

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 it’s going to be worth it in the end.

For wide spread adoption there are a lot of issues with the fediverse. The main one is the home pages of fediverse instances or join-X.org sites immediately turn people away with their language, jargon and content. Nobody cares about the open source licence, or how it’s “federated” or what the developers can do, or that you can run your own server or what languages and frameworks it’s built on etc. These all will turn people away. Literally the first sentence on join-lemmy is “Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform”. Nobody wants to self host anything (well I do, but near to 100% of people don’t). Then there are screen shots of code diff’s and actual code, then a list of programming languages, then some Latin with hard to see ‘mod tools’, and then at the end back to self hosting “With Lemmy, you can easily host your own server, and all these servers are federated”. None of this is enticing people in. It’s turning people away.

These entrances to the fediverse should be about community, discussions, engagement etc. That’s what people want to sign up for and start participating. Just get them signed up. Once they’re in they can learn about the other benefits and that they can move the profile to different servers, or whathaveyou. Keep all the other bumf hidden away behind a “benefits” link.

Someone needs to come up with better terminology to fediverse and federated to avoid having to explain it all the time. It’s federated… You know… Like email. Well I’ve used email a long time and nobody has ever called it federated or used that term before when talking about any aspect of email - and I run my own email server.

Tl:dr: just cut the crap and make on-boarding easier. Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.

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.

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

The idea is outstanding. The parts of the UI that work are great. There’s much work to be done, especially with regard to subscription and discovery. The whole “copy/paste this into your server’s search bar” thing is… not great.

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

The UX is kinda rough around the edges, but it’s filling my scroll addiction while reddit takes a steaming dump on everyone.

I hate when threads and comments automatically update, scrolling content down my browser.

I hate that when I hit back on my web browser, it doesn’t bring me back to where I was previously on the page. I have to scroll down all over again.

Lack of content or small communities don’t bother me. It just means more people need to contribute, myself included.

It feels like the start of something new, you know? Sort of exciting because coming from Reddit to Lemmy feels like taking a leap of faith as we are looking for this place to replace what we have lost. At the end of the day, communities are what make or break a platform and we have that going.

In terms of the platform itself, I am still trying to figure my way around here but the UI/UX feels easy to interact with. I guess I would love to have a mobile app for iOS down the line to replace my addiction to Apollo!

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!

I’m quietly hopeful that more and more people migrate over to lemmy, if it wasn’t for all this api nonsense I’d have never heard of the fediverse. I don’t know how it passed me by but I’m glad to be here now.

All in all, pretty good. Wish finding and subscribing to communities was easier tho. That’s probably my biggest gripe. I click some URL to join a new community, and it bitches to me that I’m not logged in because it’s an embedded safari page (on Mlem). Really wish it was simpler.

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.

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 internet when everything was discoverable and not already aggregated to be served up to you inbetween advertisements.