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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[–] milkytoast@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year 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

[–] adj16@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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

[–] adriator@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (2 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.

[–] CosmicSploogeDrizzle@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (3 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.

[–] Quartz@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] instamat@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] b34k@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year 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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[–] adj16@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 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 😵‍💫

[–] atp2112@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] psilves1@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago
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[–] briongloid@aussie.zone 4 points 1 year 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.

[–] milkytoast@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 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

[–] briongloid@aussie.zone 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

[–] orbit@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago (13 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.

[–] Oslypsis@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (4 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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[–] pistachio@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] mo_ztt@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year 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.

[–] turbulentMagma@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You make it sound like not doomscrolly is a bad thing

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[–] statlerwaldorf@vlemmy.net 4 points 1 year 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.

[–] FlaxPicker@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] dracul104@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago

If I'm spending less time staring at my phone and more time picking up a book or something, all the better for me. I've found myself engaging more and doomscrolling less though, so the time feels more well spent even though I'm spending less time then I would have on reddit.

[–] relyn@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year 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.

[–] dystop@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I know the feeling, but the way I'm dealing with it is twofold.

  1. Create content. If the commuity you like has few posts, then start something. If the community doesn't exist, create it. I'm doing my part by creating maliciouscompliance (quick shoutout: /c/maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world , https://lemmy.world/c/maliciouscompliance , !maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world ).

  2. Recognise that I used to spend too much time on Reddit and I should spend less time on social media in general. "Not as doomscrolly" is a feature for me, although I recognise this isn't for everyone.

[–] araquen@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

I would say to breathe deep and take your time. Lemmy is not a clone of Reddit, and it shouldn’t be viewed as, say you would compare functionality between 2 third-party Reddit apps.

Think of it as coming in to a new MMO after having played the old one for many years. Some things will be familiar, and some things will be different. Some mechanics may feel like a “step backwards” while others are cool additions.

Lemmy isn’t new, but it’s getting fresh eyes on its user experience and that is a good thing. And unlike Reddit, each community/server/whathaveyou can be far more responsive to their users feedback. That said, not every response will be a “yes” but you don’t have requests filtering through various levels of technological red tape, which I understand has been a challenge for the Reddit moderators, who still do not have the necessary tools to effectively moderate their subreddits.

When I first joined Beehaw, and saw, originally, a “lack” of diverse subreddits (including my mainstays) I was a bit disappointed, but then I thought to myself: “damn the torpedoes, I’m just gonna wing it” and subscribed to a bunch of communities that looked promising.

I’ve been on Lemmy since the disastrous AMA and have not looked back. I’ve even engaged more in these last 5 days on Lemmy/Beehaw than in the last year on Reddit. And while I still miss my 250+ subreddits (including r/superbowl and the subreddits I collected as part of a Reddit gestalt (r/inthesoulstone, the subreddit for Purple button pushers, r/buddhistasfuck (created as a lark, someone posted it wouldn’t last a day and I stayed to prove them wrong, and while it was a quiet subreddit, every once in a while someone would post something they thought was “extremely” buddhist)) the Lemmy communities have provided more meaningful interactions. Plus, Lemmy will create its own gestalts, and I’ll have new ways to experience the never-ending stream of random data tidbits I have grown to crave.

[–] Brad_Brace@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The mobile browser version is pretty much unusable for me. I select view All, then organize by either Hot or Active, and what I get is an endless stream of posts, but newly made and from two years ago (so, neither Hot not Active). And the page becomes unresponsive because of the endless stream.

The app works better but kept timing out when trying to upvoted stuff. Just updated to see if that fixes it.

So far, I gotta say squabbles is working better for me as a reddit alternative.

[–] pfannkuchen_gesicht@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

I hope they disable the live-update stuff soon.

[–] CleanDefinition@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (4 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.

[–] dogmuffins@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year 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 !selfhosted@lemmy.world then you also post in !selfhosted@lemmy.ml. 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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[–] ForbiddenRoot@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

What is your experience with lemmy?

Personally I am glad that decentralization is slowly picking up again with things like Lemmy and Mastodon. To me using it does not feel all that different from Reddit actually (UI-wise).

I grew up in the days of the old internet where newgroups and mailing lists were the way to interact with other "netizens" (a term I have not heard being used in years btw). Very little moderation and yet people behaved themselves, though of course the number of non-tech people on the net were far lesser as well so that certainly had something to do with it. Lemmy has that advantage too currently of smaller, ideologically-inclined, and willing-to-jump-a-few-hoops people.

TL;DR: I've no issues with using Lemmy and I like it so far, including smaller size of the community.

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[–] nosurf@unilem.org 2 points 1 year ago

I have a similar experience, but its like a user base of 200k vs idk how many million on reddit. There wont be an infinite amount of posts until lemmy grows more.

I think only 1 percent of all users on lemmy and reddit post. So its 2k active posters vs 60k active reddit posters (assuming reddit has 6m).

The sorting has been bad i also see dead posts but overall im enjoying lemmy more than i had reddit in the later years (joined 2010).

[–] circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year 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.

[–] bizzle@lemmy.moorefam.net 2 points 1 year ago

I mean, you're being realistic, and nobody can fault you for that. The jank is going to be too much for some people, they'll come here maybe but won't stick around. Other people will come and think that the positive aspects are more important than the negative ones and they'll migrate.

I'm a FOSS nerd and advertising makes me physically sick, so I'm more than willing to put up with the frustrating things about Lemmy.

My one advice is, if you want to see more content then post it.

[–] Boozilla@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I find it exciting. Very reminiscent of the Digg exodus. Sure, it can be a little frustrating at times. But reddit was going downhill for me long before the API stupidity. Lemmy feels like returning home in a way.

[–] c7plumbcrazy@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year 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.

[–] arthur@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 year ago

Any new platform will have far less content to begin with. And far less tools. I hope that people do create apps like Infinity, Relay and Apollo for Lemmy soon (or that Jerboa grows to that quality level).

The content will come, as Reddit becomes a shell of it's former self to satisfy the VCs.

[–] axzxc1236@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

I used web version of lemmy.world on desktop (1080p monitor) yesterday, coming from old.reddit + RES, I really hate:

  1. The web trend to leave white space on both side of websites, it's space inefficient and causes thread with longer title to take two lines to display.

  2. Everything has a thumbnail slot even if it's just text thread, makes each thread took more height to display, also space inefficient.

  3. You need to be authorized to even subscribe/join to a community (that is not on lemmy.world).

  4. Image expand button is hard to spot for me, and I am pretty sure some threads with image didn't have expand button.

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[–] Kuma@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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 😂

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 😂 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 😂

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)

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] motcho@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] thesalamander@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] mvu@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year 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.

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