thanks! this post made me try out thunder, and I have to say it’s my favorite so far! sync is way too flashy, the standard font is way too small, the condensed feed view options (smaller cards, list, compact) are virtually all the same shitty list view, and it’s too floaty and zoomy.

thunder on the other hand gets all the little, but super-important things just right; how one-finger zooming of pictures is so smooth, how the download button is in a logical spot and is responsive to show the succeeded download; how the preview in the feed is just the right size; how collapsing comment chains is smooth and not disorienting. great app, thanks for the recommendation!

oh and I couldn’t care less if an app is open source, closed source, pay-to-use or not, as long as the UI is good. I’d just block ads anyway, or try to find a ripped version (revanced etc) – but having an app that’s not reporting home is of course even better!

EU policy is so hit and miss because the EU Parliament mostly has our backs, and is introducing good legislation protecting consumers of corpo overreach (like the roaming directive). The EU Commission on the other hand has only the interest of the EU countries’ governments in mind, which makes many of its proposals rather shitty of the common citizen. Also tells you a lot about what the actual national governments stand for, when somebody else is doing more for the citizens than they are.

I thought about this comment, and realized that somehow, I just don’t care so much anymore. Instead of worrying about what I left behind, I’m looking forward to what’s ahead of us.

I think it’s because even before the whole 3d-party-app drama, there already was this undefined feeling that Reddit’s best days are behind it. Maybe it’s the effect of ad money and monetization, or it’s the inevitable trend towards low quality content that comes with mass adoption, probably it’s both.

Whatever the cause, in most subreddits, the old Facebook-style rot had already set in. Once-cool subs now being an endless barrage of tired memes, bots farming karma, and people being assholes. The things I joined for years ago, the engaging discussion, random encounters with amazing experts, the cutting-edge internet anarchy, it’s all already long gone.

When I opened the app (Baconreader in my case), I only did it out of habit, to then spendy time scrolling through an endless list of things that made me slightly go “heh”.

So, maybe most people will stay on Reddit for now, and probably I will have to leave behind certain communities instead of finding direct replacements. But I see that as a good thing. As long as even just 2% of Reddit’s users make it here, I’m excited it will grow into something much better than what I left behind.

I thought about this comment, and realized that somehow, I just don’t care so much anymore. Instead of worrying about what I left behind, I’m looking forward to what’s ahead of us.

I think it’s because even before the whole 3d-party-app drama, there already was this undefined feeling that Reddit’s best days are behind it. Maybe it’s the effect of ad money and monetization, or it’s the inevitable trend towards low quality content that comes with mass adoption, probably it’s both.

Whatever the cause, in most subreddits, the old Facebook-style rot had already set in. Once-cool subs now being an endless barrage of tired memes, bots farming karma, and people being assholes. The things I joined for years ago, the engaging discussion, random encounters with amazing experts, the cutting-edge internet anarchy, it’s all already long gone.

When I opened the app (Baconreader in my case), I only did it out of habit, to then spendy time scrolling through an endless list of things that made me slightly go “heh”.

So, maybe most people will stay on Reddit for now, and probably I will have to leave behind certain communities instead of finding direct replacements. But I see that as a good thing. As long as even just 2% of Reddit’s users make it here, I’m excited it will grow into something much better than what I left behind.

whatsapp’s killer feature was “no killer features, just a messaging app with number-bound IDs and good UI that even my grandma can use with minimal setup”. for anything like that again I’d change, but the minute they think they need to add something like numberless IDs, or stickers, or a social media feature, or a payment system, they can fuck right off.

and smaller screens? 145 x 65 mm would be perfect! and anything larger than 150 x 70 is too big.

same here, I’d be happy about an invite too!

before leaving as in before switching to another community while browsing? or as in when you unsubscribe? and what if I never leave

or we could just all stop caring about the vote count instead! why even pay attention to that? I’d honestly rather have two good comments on a post than 300 upvotes, or view counts, or whatever. couldn’t care less about any of those.

If you decide on TNG, make sure to look up viewing guides on TNG (they should be around here somewhere). Like most Star Trek series, they’re off to a bit of a bumpy start, and I’d heavily recommend only watching the last episode of season 1, the five or so highest rated episodes of season 2, and then jumping in fully at season three. You can come back later to rewatch what you missed, but it will make for a much more pleasant start.

Solid advice all around. Man am I glad to be here again!

First of all, it has one big difference: What types of communities you see when you browse the “Local” communities (on most apps or web UIs it’s gonna be a setting at the top). “Local” shows you threads posted in communities that are on your instance; “All” shows you the whole network, similar to /r/all on reddit; and “Subscribed” shows you only the communities you’re interested in, similar to the main page on reddit. It makes sense to switch this setting to All for the time being, and to see what’s going on everywhere else and which communities develop; to Local when you get confused, e.g. with lots of posts in languages you don’t speak or lots of duplicate posts; and to Subscribed once things have settled down and once you have found your communities that you’re interested in (and other stuff that you’re not interested in becomes more and more on the All feed).

There’s some eceptions when the “linked instances” structure does make a difference:

• during heavy development (like in the early stages right now), federation might break here and there (for example right now between some servers using on older version of the Lemmy backend and those that already updated). also, there’s probably gonna be multiple similar communities on various instances (nearly every instance has a “main” community and a “Lemmy discussion/reddit bashing” community). this will all settle down with time, federation in general will be more stable, and “main” communities will develop, with smaller alternative ones spread around that can take over if the main one is taken offline.
• when instances decide to “defederate” from each other. this is a conscious decision by the admins (standard setting is to share everything with everybody else, but specific instances can be added to a blocklist). this means their content doesn’t show up on your instance, and users from those instances can’t interact with one another anymore. this happens at the moment with lots of NSFW instances and the more tame ones, but once moderation tools are improved, it will settle as well.

Quick tips: Don’t be too stressed about “missing” content on other instances, right now it’s still early days and a bit chaotic. And do consider making multiple accounts on other instances, and checking out what’s different. the apps that are being developed right now make switching between multiple accounts easy, and one day will hopefully bring bookmarks and comments across multiple accounts together as well. Shop around for different instances and apps and see what’s out there, read people’s recommendations, try and find instance and community lists. And in general, don’t see your current account as the only way you’ll interact with the Lemmy network (just as alt accounts were a thing on Reddit), and don’t expect the network to serve you everything on a golden platter, you’ll have to do some hunting around for the cool things, a bit like in the internet days before Web 2.0 happened – but that’s half the fun!

then we’d better get started!

yeah it’s great isn’t it‽

baconreader here. best media display behavior, hands down.

we’re on what list now?

I honestly think it’s ok to do this. Segregating instances that serve different goals in the Fediverse is not always a bad thing. As an example, the Mastodon creator having the same experience led to him implementing this very feature over there in the early days.

Yes, it does create inconveniences, especially now to all the new users that are already struggling with the concept of instances in general. I remember I did, and I was wondering, isn’t that looming threat of defederation, taken together with the decision paralisys when being forced to select a home instance enough to make the whole service unusable for most users?

But thinkig a bit further ahead, I’d honestly still MUCH prefer this to the other outcome, which is those other, offending communities inevitably ending up being banned because the one big, overly cautious, profit-driven company under which all non-federated content lives has to sanitize its content for the advertisers.

So, yes, it might be cumbersome for some users who expected to use the service by cross-federating, for example by creating an account here and then subscribing to something like noncredibledefense on sh.itjust.works. They did both in good faith, probably being driven here because the sensible policies and promise of the protected stewardship on Beehaw seemed like a good home base, but also subscribing there because it’s the best replacement community of the popular subreddit, and it sucks.

But to those we can say: The equivalent of a kiddy pool is not the same place as the deep ocean, so don’t expect to access both with the same account! So to alleviate that, just go over to those instances and create another one – I know I did just that right when reading this post, because I definitely plan on subscribing to communities over there as well.

And yes, it would be nice if a more long-term solution was found to the above-mentioned problems of federation. Conceptually, I doubt it ever will, and I also don’t buy the argument that federation of different instances is “just like email”, because obviously, problems like this don’t manifest with your email inbox.

But practically, these issues will be less impactful once things have stabilized a bit and the inevitable culling of instances sets it, eventually there’s gonna be a couple big, established “standard” instances (some of them maybe even run by profit-driven companies!) that people know what they stand for and what to expect when signing up, and the federation as well as the paralysis will not be so important anymore.

Just keep in mind that, for most of us, these are the very early days on Lemmy, and hiccups along the way are to be expected, it’s all (along with the whole Fediverse!) still very much “in beta” right now.

Ultimately, we’ll probably have to learn to getting a bit more flexible with our instances and accounts on them, just like alt accounts on singular websites.

No hard feelings!