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.

@atomicpoet
I like it! I especially like that you don’t even need to make a separate account to interact with the communities on there! (I’m literally commenting from a custom fork of glitch-soc right now) That alone makes Lemmy better than any normal Forum out there.

Edit: doesn’t appear that Lemmy handles content warnings in replies

Honestly, I kind of hate it, but since Reddit is unusable, considering all the subs that have gone dark (presumably permanently).

I’ll be honest. I don’t like the Fediverse concept - the fatal flaw of decentralized systems is that sometimes centralized systems are great. Basically, reddit was ONE BBS style forum for everything, which was the killer convenience. Similarly Twitter was the ONE microblogging platform for everybody, which was the killer convenience.

Because the moment anybody can operate a service, everyone does.

Right now, I need to buy a car, I can’t find a good Lemmy community to get advice from. Searching for ‘cars’ in all federated communities returns:

Fuck Cars@lemmy.ml - 3.41K subscribers
Cars@lemmy.ml - 104 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.ca - 56 subscribers
Self Driving Cars - 19 subscribers
IdiotsInCars@lemmy.world - 11 subscribers
Electric Cars@lemmy.ca - 4 subscribers
RC Cars@lemmy.world - 4 subscribers
Cars@lemmygrad.ml - 3 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.world - 2 subscribers
Cars@lemmy.world - 1 subscriber

Leave aside for a moment that “Fuck Cars” has 34x more subscribers than the biggest Cars community - there are two different “Fuck Cars” communities, and three different “Cars” communities. It’s great that you have subscriber numbers, but there’s no definitive place to find out information on cars. Reddit’s CEO is right that Reddit was organized like a landed-gentry where a first-come-first-serve approach to the most popular forums was done, but that landed-gentry system solved this problem, whatever new problems it may have introduced.

Now, you could look for a technological solution to solve this problem: For example, you could have a centralized server for all federated Lemmies, some sort of “lemmyhub.com”

We’d all have to agree on it. People could set up alternatives, but we’d all have to basically coalesce and say: Yes, this is the thing we want. Maybe it’d use blockchain, I don’t know. Point is, it’s centralized and easy to find information. It would work “just like Reddit” where you would have ONE authentication/authorization that works seamlessly across all instances (the current system is anything but seamless), and there would be ONE key/value combo for keyword. So, instead of going to Cars@lemmy.ml & Cars@lemmygrad.ml & Cars & lemmy.world, you just go to cars.lemmyhub.com.

If you want to post, you just use your lemmyhub account and your post appears on the “default” community. You can still post on individual lemmies by going to the individual lemmy page as well, or by specifying which of your Lemmy instance accounts you want to post as.

Here’s the problem with the merging all the cars communities together, though: There is nothing to prevent someone from creating Cars@NeoNaziHeartsFascism.com and spamming the community with bile or trolling. Lemmyhub could operate a blocklist for troll and hate communities and instances, but once you’re doing that, you’re making editorial decisions. And forget all the nasty ethics problems around “what’s free speech/what’s hate speech?” “what’s acceptable to view/what’s not?”, you have legal liability problems if anything slips through the cracks.

Reddit wasn’t perfect, and certainly they could have been more proactive with shutting down hate speech, and more speedy with shutting down illegal content, but by and large reddit worked. Reddit’s authoritarian approach worked because it was mostly benevolent – right up until the point that it wasn’t.

So I don’t think Lemmy can technologically make it’s way out of the situation.

I think what needs to happen is a solution like the Wikipedia foundation; we establish a non-profit designed to create a centralized server which may choose or not choose to incorporate Lemmy instances. It runs on donations, not advertising, and it’s not designed to maximize profit, only to keep the servers running. It would borrow heavily from the Wikipedia model in organization and structure.

Because I’ll be honest - Lemmy and Mastodon are okay, but there’s really nothing in them improving on the old Newsgroups system of the late 80s and 1990s. Reddit captured the market for forum discussions because it was simply a better solution, there’s nothing in Lemmy that makes it better - for the user - than Reddit.

Should we then abandon Lemmy and go back to Reddit? No, of course not. Reddit, if anything shows us that eventually all authoritarian systems, no matter how benevolent they start, always eventually turn tyrannical, and can do so on a whim, and once they do so, it is impossible to get back to benevolence.

But I’ve been a redditor for 15 years - I predated subreddits, if you can believe that. And I’m not finding the things I used to go to Reddit for here on Lemmy - information, expert and informed discussion, and niche topics. Maybe that’s an adoption problem that will be solved with scale (and I hope it is), but right now, I feel like my luxury Bently sedan got totaled and I’m driving a 20 year old Honda Civic with manual transmission. By all means I’m grateful for the tent, but I still miss my Bentley

Its pretty much the same as old reddit, so it is fine. I am sure that there will be addons and stuff to bring back any functionality that is missing.

In terms of the community, it is hard to say - the same subs that I spent so much time and enjoyed so much are either not here or nowhere near as big and developed. I used to spend a lot of time on Formula1, Battlebots, but my account was nearly 12 years old and I had many that I used to visit from time to time for fun. Many of those are just not there in any meaningful way.

It is just going to take time to rebuild, I think.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 :)

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

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.

It’s ugly, difficult to understand, And the search function is fucked. All in all, it’s pretty crap and I miss reddit a great deal. That said, I’m never going back. I just wish lemmy was better.