No one really knows how things will play out but I was wondering if people are committed to Lemmy, or would the mod team migrate to greener pastures if a better, more functional alternative comes to the forefront.
I’m hoping Lemmy can improve but I personally don’t love using it. Its still early days though so that might change. There are a couple promising alternatives in development right now but since they aren’t out, everyone is migrating to lemmy.
As someone with a disability, the UI/UX is problematic and makes me physically ill after using it for a short period of time.
I’m committed to ActivityPub. I don’t really care if the specific server backend ends up being lemmy, kbin, or something new.
Eh. I was on Mastodon for a few days then left. Turns out I don’t care to follow specific people. So it’s a bit more than the protocol I will chase. The type of interaction also matters a lot.
Well yea, that’s not a knock against Mast, that’s a preference for a type of social media. Mast is the Twitter equivalent; if you don’t like Mast, you would t like Twitter (or vice versa as it were).
I think the point of Twitter is to follow famous people. Since there are very few famous people on Mastodon it makes it less useful. They need celebrities and media platforms to make the switch. That’s not really a problem for a link aggregator like Lemmy. I think this site has a bright future.
Lots of people will hate me for this take but the best part of Twitter was its recommendation algorithm specifically between 2018-2021ish. The ability for everyone to meme about the same thing in the span of a few hours was fantastic and hilarious. I generally didn’t give a shit about following famous people and have only been on Twitter for the meme culture.
Nowadays the algorithm is TERRIBLE though. I personally can’t see myself moving to mastodon because I don’t care about individual people though.
Mostly I used Twitter to follow specific journalists and a few famous people. Mostly sports stuff. There isn’t much sports media on Mastodon unfortunately.
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if you don’t like mast, you wouldn’t like twitter
Well, not entirely true. I like twitter but I haven’t found the same variety of “culture” in mastodon yet. And I’m not talking about trolls or racists or whatever else twitter is known for. I follow nearly 1000 people on twitter— and few of them are “famous”—mostly because I like their art or humor or insights. Let me make it clear that I don’t have a problem with mastodon subculture; i followed many of these people as well before they moved platforms. But it’s very insular and I want to see a greater variety of posts. People posting on mastodon seem to exclusively form part of the very specific intersection in a venn diagram composed of lgbt, neurodivergent, and political activist, who fled twitter in search of a safe space at any cost (and I don’t blame them). So I find myself still opening twitter because there’s lots of gaps in my feed ranging from normie posts, memes, cynical satire, people I disagree with (yes, I wanna see those, too), lots of artists, and many figureheads from communities I’m interested on like anime and games. I feared lemmy/kbin would have a similar fate but I guess our migration happened for different reasons and I don’t feel the need to open reddit at all now because I can find/build qualitatively analogous communities here. It doesn’t depend on specific people as long as someone keeps the place alive.
I have almost exclusively followed artists on Twitter (still do), but I have not logged in once ever since Musk took over. It’s unfortunate that so few artists have a Mastodon account. I mean, it does make sense, since they are looking for an audience, so I don’t blame them. I just won’t be part of their audience then. A lot of people seem worried about what that new Instagram App which uses Activitypub is gonna change for Mastodon. But I am ecstatic! For me it means tons of artists I can follow right from my Mastodon account. After Twitter, Instagram is probably the second biggest platform for artists to find an audience.
This.
Why ActivityPub specifically?
For clarity, I’m not disagreeing, just trying to understand.
It’s a widely accepted standard for decentralised social media. It can be adapted to many use cases relatively easily. If someone makes a better link aggregator server based on ActivityPub, it would be much easier to bring all the lemmy data and users to it than if someone started from scratch. As in what happened going from Reddit to lemmy, as Reddit doesn’t have a standardised federation behavior.
Thanks for expanding on that!
Not OP but probably because it let’s us all communicate with each other. I can watch und discuss stuff from Kbin and even had a couple of Mastodon users commenting in one of my threads. It doesn’t look you on a platform, everything is more or less cross platform.
i did a lookup for ActivityPub, found an article and an image. thanks!
It seems like lemmy picked up the bulk of the refugees so far. Shifting again would be risky at this point, it just serves to dilute the numbers again. Some stay, some go etc.
I firmly believe this is only the beginning here. Reddit is probably fine to lurk so long as old.red*it.com remains, but it has become a pretty hostile place for people who participate.
My prediction is that reddit will just end up hosting content posted by bots and commented on by different bots and nobody will have any idea that there’s so few real users left. This will become the home for actual discussion between humans.
As a matter of fact: I’m already eyeing to move to Kbin as soon as I can manage to install it on my server. If something even better comes up and it also works with ActivityPub, then back to moving ships it is for me
A lot of people switched to lemmy recently, so the development focus is on scaling for now. It’ll probably take a while until that’s sorted out properly and the devs can focus on accessibility.
I think lemmy is a good place for this community because we don’t need to worry about big platforms overmoderating.
Looking at other fedi apps like Mastodon, accessibility and UI/UX will soon follow. Which is promising.
But yes, it’s the early days of Lemmy and maybe even the fediverse. So we’ll see what the future brings ;)
I started on Mastodon last year and watching it increase in size by orders of magnitude over the last several months has been a beautiful thing to watch. I am thrilled Lemmy has taken off, finally. The fediverse has restored my faith in humanity quite a bit and consuming it feels healthier, there is no way I am going back to centralised platforms. Come to mastodon and get a glimpse at what Lemmy may become. :)
Was talking to my non-techie wife yesterday and she asked what I was working on. I said “replacing reddit.” I explained the reddit situation and then we talked about alternative social networking and I was shocked she knew what Mastodon was AND said a lot of people were moving there!
Welcome the normies, we need them too. :)
it DOES feel healthier, doesn’t it? since starting here yesterday, i have been retraining my hand to not click on reddit. but honestly, i don’t even want to.
i am willing to commit to lemmy.
I’ve been naturally gravitating towards lemmy the last few days, it’s really refreshing. I’ve not had to check myself as I’m reaching to open Apollo at all recently
100% agree!
Can you get Mastodon and Lemmy working together? Like is there a way to see them in the same feed?
@cccc @fossilesque i’m reading you from my mastodon home feed since i’m following @piracy as if it were a user
You can follow users and communities and I think communicate from mastodon to lemmy, but you cant really follow from lemmy, yet. I do believe there are ways to comment, though. if you search the community or user name on mastodon (eg [email protected]) then it should pop up.
But yes, it’s the early days of Lemmy and maybe even the fediverse.
Agreed. I think the fediverse is still pioneer territory.
No apollo app no reddit. I agree the UI/UX is problematic but the native reddit ad filled app is way worse. Lemmy both has lots of room to still improve the experience but its build well enough already to actually function and people to be here.
Its also open source, decentralized, possible to self host. Aka owned by the people rather then corpos. All those things for the new homepage of the internet? I can only get so errect.
Memmy is starting to look like it could be an Apollo for Lemmy soon.
I literally just download it. Your reply is my first notification on it. 🐭
+1 For Memmy. App looks promising.
I have looked into it but since they want me to “build” it and it seems to involve typing a bunch of code I don’t understand I’m less keen on it.
Hopefully there will be a straight up app sooner rather than later, and I can download that.
If you’re on iOS you can join the testflight on the github to use the app already.
On android, you need to build it yourself for now, or wait (a few weeks probably?) until it’s fully released on the playstore.
go to the Github and there is a link to join the TestFlight.
You’re (understandably) misunderstanding how github works. The code is there for people to review if they want to, but you can just download the finished product. Are you on android or IOS?
https://wefwef.app has an identical UI to apollo
I am quite happy trying memmy now but its really cool how smooth wefwef feels for working inside a web browser.
Ikr! And if you “install” the PWA it works even better, i never expected a web app to be this good (but this says more about lazy web app developers)
I am committed to federated services from here on out. I am personally really liking lemmy… There are some minor annoyances but nothing major. The mobile browsing experiences makes me pretty cozy. With the dark theme it’s not too far from rif. Apps and plugins are coming that will make it that next special thing. Like I couldn’t imagine aliensite without old and res. It’s coming… I’m loving it.
I’m a week into having setup my own personal instance and LOVING Lemmy. The community, the software stack, federation, all of it. I don’t visit reddit daily anymore (15 year old reddit account to be deleted this week once 3rd party apps get shut down).
Exact same situation (Instance been about 3 weeks now). I went back to the alien.site once to make a throw away account to update a community where I had a loose end. Besides that I haven’t been back. I had a alien.site account for like 12 years. Basically was my internet. I am loving it here.
Come on, give it some time. It’s coming a long way, and devs are working their ass off to deliver some quality updates.
Also, there are a dozen apps in the works for iOS and Android that are to be released soon, if that’s not already the case. So you should have more choice to pick a better experience browsing lemmy in the coming days.
There’s already jerboa for android, made by lemmy.ml devs, kind of an “official” app
I mean yes, but you know… sync…
Yes I think a lot of us are waiting for the sync app. Hope it’s as good as the reddit one because that would really elevate my experience here
It’s a proprietary app though. Some other Free and Open Source alternatives:
I’m cool with it being proprietary if the dev is cool and it’s a good product. If I find a superior FOSS alternative I’ll certainly go that route
I wouldn’t count on it being the latest reddit Sync tier on the first release
But I have no doubt it’ll get there eventually, after some updates.
I’m obviously very committed. But I understand the frustration. However be a bit patient, the interest in the Software is just beggining and it has a completely open API. Great frontends will be developed very shortly
As a user of old.reddit I really don’t even find this interface to be much different. It really seems to be similar. Some of the issues I see as confusing comes to the federation specific things. As someone new to federation but from a technical background even I am finding that aspect confusing. So I imagine for people less tech savvy it would be an even harder learning curve. The idea of going to a completely separate domain, but being able to still subscribe to their community via the dbzer0 account is a totally different kind of concept and the UI can make it a bit complicated.
But overall using one specific instance feels very similar to the old.reddit UI if not slightly nicer in my opinion.
I’m not necessarily committed to Lemmy, but I am fairly committed to a fediverse Reddit-like app. And Lemmy is the one I’ve liked the most. The nice thing is, if something comes along that you prefer, you could switch to that and we’d still be able to interact.
As long as that other app also uses activitypub which might not be the case
I like to remember how ugly and difficult it was to adjust to Reddit after moving from Digg’s slick 2.0 interface. I think Lemmy will face more growing pains but will be the best solution in the end.
Reddit has literally never had a good UI/UX. It was worth it because it was the best alternative at the time.
That said, my requirements for a reddit alternative would have to be decentralized and open source. I just couldn’t get into another situation like this one and I won’t support it.
I’m hoping some of the 3rd party talent that Reddit threw away will contribute and help refine the Lemmy experience.
They’ve already begun work, and I’m excited to see it too! SyncForLemmy and Artemis are my top two right now
Yeah, saw about sync. I’m still hoping for RIF. Jerboa is pretty close, but I’d love for a few changes
reddit shined because of 3rd party apps for me.
I’m committed to open source (or at the very least indie dev) more than to a single platform.
A piracy forum needs to be decentralised and based on FOSS software to be able to have quality content, we are not advertisement friendly lol.
Lemmy is the best option.
If not Lemmy then maybe a discourse forum but that would be even worse for mobile users.
Lemmy will only get better from now on, but tbh I prefer its UI over other alternatives official app.
I’d think that we’re here for the quality of our experience and not for loyalty to a specific platform. Lemmy has some great advantages, especially for those of us fresh from Reddit who are sick and tired of corporate shennanigans and enshitification.
There’s lemmy politics which seems about disagreements that may or may not lead to defederating. But this isn’t for me a dealbreaker, and Reddit corporate made it super clear that it was on the side of the conservatives even if it found their hate speech brand-unsafe. My kind were not liked, and we could expect spittle in our drinks now and again.
So what would woo me away from Lemmy? Only if I found subs of my interests that I couldn’t find here, and then I’d haunt both platforms.
IMO, the solution is not to switch to something better, but to communicate to the developers on how to make the UI/UX better
They seem to be ramping up the updates lately.
Yep, I’m on lemmy.ca and in my settings I found Rediggit as a theme, which makes lemmy look similar to Old Reddit, so there’s definitely progress
Nice! I’mma check that out.
Yeah, we must keep forking or invention as a last resort to prevent fragmentation in the community.
We’re just getting started. Sync for Lemmy and Memmy’s (heavily inspired by Apollo) release in a few weeks will go a long way for accessibility, and will likely already offer better UX than reddit.
No doubt contributors in the GitHub will add similar UX features as those fantastic apps once they’re out.
Sync for Lemmy
I can’t believe I somehow missed this, and I use Sync! The recent UI changes were a godsend, swipe to upvote is very convenient.
Yeah people are not spreading the word about these fantastic apps coming to Lemmy as much as they should
Lemmy? Not specifically committed to Lemmy forever, but I very much see myself using it as my top Social Media 2-3 years from now.
I’m really invested that Lemmy (and the Fediverse in general) is only going to get more awesome.
I’m just the past few weeks we’ve seen growth in not only the infrastructure, apps, and features of Lemmy, but there’s really great conversations happening around how the community is growing and possible threats to the system from big corps.
I think the Fediverse is a great place and is a great future of “Social Media”.
Even if no one else joins Fedi, I think we have enough entertaining content and news to sustain me for a long time. More people will join, though. Things will keep getting better, but it will take time.
Fuck Reddit, Fuck Twitter, Fuck FAANG. I hope distributed is the future.
