this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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I really want to like lemmy, but it's difficult. I'm new to all this fediverse thingy, and I might just have old habits and perceptions how things should work but... I keep seeing the same posts more than once, iOS experience is not that good really, sometimes I see dead posts from 2 years ago for some reason, despite having subscribed to like 30 communities there aren't that many new posts to read.

Part of it probably that subreddits had millions of people so a lot of posts every minute, but it still feels underwhelming.

It's not as doomscrolly. Maybe I should find something else to waste my time on haha

What is your experience with lemmy? Maybe I just do things wrong. Let me know

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 2 years ago (2 children)

i mean so far, I'm enjoying it. sure, the community isn't as large, but that's mostly a good thing. on reddit, if i made a post, it would be like a 25% chance to get hundreds of comments, and a 75% chance to get none. here, I've gotten a few, high quality responses on every question post I've made. i do miss the "auto hide read posts" feature, but maybe that'll get added some day

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 years ago (7 children)

You can hide read posts here! In the web app settings for your profile:

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Is there a way to stop the endless loading of posts on the website? Because every time I try to click a post, it moves down because a new post loaded, and this happens every ten seconds, constantly.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (4 children)

It's a bug that wasnt an issue when the community was smaller. Last I heard they will replace it with a refresh icon that pops up at the top when new posts are available.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Oh thank God is a bug, I really thought it was a feature of the site.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Thank jeebus. I was getting all fussy thinking it was a me/my phone/my browser problem.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

It’s amazing what kinda bugs can be exposed in your system when your user base expands by orders of magnitude overnight

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

I’ve heard that one is just a bug. Hopefully they’re working on it. Mlem (the iOS app) seems to have it handled, but it does crash a lot, and it’s frustrating to lose your scroll progress. I think we just have to wait it out in these early days πŸ˜΅β€πŸ’«

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I also don't seem to have that problem with Jerboa.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is incredibly helpful! Thank you so much!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Fediverse currently reminds me of Reddit from 10 years ago in frequency of content. There is something nice about not being in the rat race, less toxicity.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

yeah it's nice knowing that someone is gonna see my comment instead of it getting lost amongst hundreds. feels a lot more like a community that way

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It's amazing how many Reddit comments just aren't seen, no wonder so many people end up lurking.

I had 150k+ karma and most of my comments would go unnoticed.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 years ago (18 children)

The reality is that there was/is no reddit alternative and right now we're all in this transitory phase where we're all looking for a new home. We'll all just have to wait for the dust to settle. Lemmy isn't perfect but is improving and additionally other alternatives like kbin and tildes are in the works.

To your larger point, much of what you're feeling is the abrupt break in habits. I've been using the gap to develop more positives ones, and it's been great.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (5 children)

A thought came to my mind when reading your comment.

Instead of finding a new home, let's make lemmy our new home. Let's try to populate lemmy more, get its activity up, and post more than we would've on reddit (since we have less users, we would need more posts per user), so it can stand a chance at being a reddit competitor.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I remember HATING Reddit after the great Digg migration. The information was presented in a different way and the discussions seemed to be the focus rather than the linked content. It took a while to get used to it and I'm feeling a bit of the same here. There are a ton of similarities that are already here, so it's not as jarring and things are improving every day.

I feel like I'm interacting more here than I did on Reddit for a long time. By the time anything showed up on my feed over there, it was 1 day old, had 5000 comments, and had devolved into memes.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Honestly that is the main reason i became a lurker on reddit, why comment? if im on /r/all then anything i could think to comment has already been commented by someone else most of the time if you scroll down enough. It was really only the smaller niche subs that i was able to engage with.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (9 children)

It's tricky at times, but I'm really liking it after a few days. It's a bit chaotic but in a fun way I think.

If you haven't seen it yet, check out https://browse.feddit.de for a way to search for more communities

Hope you start to enjoy it more :-)

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What I'd recommend in your case is sorting the posts by "hot" instead of "active" which is the default setting. Posts get up the active sorting whenever somebody comments on them or upvotes (I think?), even if they are very old, whereas hot should only show you new and currently popular posts. You'll still see the post that you've already seen and a setting for that is clearly missing, but it should still be an improvement.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Yeah, I think having active as the default sorting is not a good idea. It can be confusing to new users

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

Honestly man, as much as I 100% agree on the UI difficulties, it's like a breath of fresh air. There's good music posted, people posted books and I looked and really wanted to read them. It's more human. There's this tiny little handful of content here, but it's not all same-y and in-joke-y and weird.

I'm not trying to hate on reddit, I still go to reddit for news because of more or less what you're talking about (the weird sorting in the newsfeed here and the lack of certain content). But what I like about here is that there are nerdy people, there's real content, there's not this weird hivemind and endless dopamine content. The great stuff about reddit was always the in-depth storytelling and unique content, to me, not just the gratification aspect of everything working right and new content popping up. I'm happy with Lemmy despite the hiccups because it seems like it's getting back to that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (7 children)

The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example. Lemmy should prevent this, community names should be unique, it should have an index of all the Lemmy Fediverse where instances can lookup if a community exists instead of waiting for a user to import that community to his instance. Something similar to what BTC does with the decentralized ledger.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example.

I agree, to an extent. You're right in that if you were part of the vibrant community of /r/piracy then it's miserable to see it shatter here on lemmy. That said, this only applies if you're expecting lemmy to be a 1 for 1 reddit replacement. For this type of community to remain cohesive, /r/piracy would have had to spin up their own instance and in /r/piracy direct everyone to lemmy.piracyinstance.whatever.

You can't really "fix" this in a central way because even if you did, it would be trivial to create an instance that would allow duplicate community names. Also, I can see a lot of use cases for lemmy which do not intend to be federated.

That said, it's not necessarily as big a problem as it appears, if you just accept that this is how the fediverse works. There's no single source of control, so of course people can create 147 different /c/piracy communities if they wish to. Once you accept that, then it's not really that difficult to subscribe to all the /c/piracy communities you can find.

The problem itself could be diminished by a few new features which I feel certain will emerge in the future:

  • linked communities, where one communities content is syndicated to another. So if you post in [email protected] then you also post in [email protected]. This would work differently to cross-posting, all comments would be reflected on both instances.
  • grouped communities, where you can subscribe to a group of /c/selfhosted communities with one click, so you see them all in your feed.
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

I'm actually enjoying the lack of doomscroll.

Since Lemmy isn't built to trap you for hours on end to get that sweet ad revenue, you can just run out of new stuff to see and then stop lemmying. Bust open the eReader or get to that backlog of bookmarked articles.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

You aren't doing anything wrong! This site/app (lemmy) and the concept (fediverse) are still super early days so there are going to be many problems. The site has some layout issues and there isn't nearly as much content as Reddit but that's just because it is new.

The most important bit, to me at least, is that the fundamental idea of the fediverse is good. We have had to many instances where social sites like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter can just decide what people can and can't say, they can remove our content and they can monetize it all without doing any real work of their own as far as creating content. The idea of the fediverse ensures that no one server, person or company has all the content and thus the control.

I really hope people stick with something fediverse whether it be lemmy, kbin or any of the other projects out there. Post content there, cross post it from Reddit if you really have to post to Reddit too for whatever reason. Please don't give these companies all the control anymore.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

I mean having 1 less thing to doomscroll on is good innit

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (5 children)

The default sorting is by "active" which to me doesn't show a lot of new content (from the last hours). Switching to hot improves the experience a lot.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

It's far from perfect, but I'm taking a stand.

Half the reason I used Reddit was to cure boredom. I've decided to find other things to do. The other main reason I loved to check in was to make sure I don't miss big news. So far, Lemmy seems to scratch that itch. It'll take a long time for niche communities to establish, but I'll just deal with that for now. Maybe I'll just go back to some old forums for that purpose.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I don't know if this answers your question about same posts, but here is info about the sorting algorithm:

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

I also see same posts (I am looking at you two toilets in a bathroom) a lot but I think it is just lemmys way to show posts that ppl engage in and I guess two toilets in a bathroom is a very hot/trending topic right now because it doesn't seem to die down πŸ˜‚

So I usually sort on all and new to find post that is lonely and maybe help them out a bit by commenting :D

I don't think this is a big different from reddit tho, on reddit do I see almost the same post all the time or even repost, here I just see the same post more πŸ˜‚ just go and look at r/steamdeck, same question over and over again, but I will read them all! haha

I don't know what kinds of subs you joined but big ones like meme is posting a lot. But I saw this on reddit too, even reddit thought my feed was a bit lacking so I had maybe 50% posts from subs I hadn't subscribed to, to scroll through πŸ˜‚

But also remember we aren't as many here(yet). we just hit over 100k users yesterday.

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

And I think it is good to have multiple sources of entertainment. Even tho it is nice to have everything at one place :D

Sorry if this sounds like preaching and that I wrote a book. But here you have it haha

Edit: fixed a few grammar mistakes (that I saw right away)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

In my opinion, were in the 'keep swimming' fishing boat scene from Nemo.

Reddit wants to stay the 'homepage of the internet' but also force everyone to go through their tools for ad bucks.

If we succeed, we can bust our communities out of the centralized net and reform on the other side.

We fail by not working together here today in this moment, we have to use this event to convince the average person to switch now, we might not get another opportunity like this.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

The problem with Fedi apps is that they're built as replacements or clones of other apps like Reddit (Lemmy), Instagram (Pixelfed) or Twitter (Mastodon).

People come to expect the same experience that they had there and they're disappointed by the small community and confused because it's built on a fundamentally different philosophy and concept.

And of coruse, bugs are to be expected. It's not a multi million dollars company that's building these apps but a community of volunteers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

The community and the app is still relatively new. To be honest, I prefer smaller communities where I can leave for a few hours without half the posts sliding to page 5 and beyond. Instead of uncritically consuming digital content, try to contribute to smaller communities, post a couple of cool links, or even (Gasp! Horror!) do something else for a while.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

I am also new here and I am a long time lurker, 2008, from the place that shall not be named.

My initial feel is that Lemmy is very much like pre Digg days and a kin to the traditional style forum boards where discussions aren't old news when the post is only 12 hrs old.

This is a breath of fresh air even with the growing pains I expect may come with the sudden influx of refugees.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

There's rough edges to be sure but the community seems pretty good and the devs seem like they're working hard.

Right now I'm seeing less time spent endlessly scrolling as more of a feature than a bug lmao, need to break that habit anyway

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You make it sound like not doomscrolly is a bad thing

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

It's very new. Very valid concerns, but most of them are growing pains. If people just stick with this for a while it will improve by leaps and bounds.

Personally I've focused more on the community aspect than the software for now, since the latter is actively being worked on by a lot of people, so that's just a waiting game. The community has been fantastic, though. Already a nice feel in a lot of discussions.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Lemmy is still very early in it's development and there's only two full time working on it afaik.

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