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
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).
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.
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
i setup my own instance ('bin, not Lemmy), and have subscribed it to so much content my doomscrolling is sitting at a comfortable, pre-reddit-death level. i am still scanning the 'verse for new instances to subscribe to.
they just added a feature in mbin that automatically groups crossposts, which is very nice.
i guess i prolly shouldnt have answered cuz im not using lemmy, technically…but
i would recommend:
- checking another instance, maybe you’ll get better content ( mine is public!, https://moist.catsweat.com )
- subscribe your instance to more external content
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, make homes! we need so much more hardware, while personal instances may not be a good idea, we are so short on compute that if you are inclined run your own instance, bring your friends!
The experience on smaller faster instances is already comparable, the content flow, really not bad either though it takes about an hour of finding and subbing to the communities you want and a day for your instance to really start grabbing the content for you.
