I run a few groups, like @fediversenews@venera.social, mostly on Friendica. It’s okay, but Friendica resembles Facebook Groups more than Reddit. I also like the moderation options that Lemmy has.
Currently, I’m testing jerboa, which is an Android client for Lemmy. It’s in alpha, has a few hiccups, but it’s coming along nicely.
Personally, I hope the #RedditMigration spurs adoption of more Fediverse server software. And I hope Mastodon users continue to interact with Lemmy and Kbin.
All that said, as a mod of a Reddit community (r/Sizz) I somewhat regret giving Reddit all that content. They have nerve charging so much for API access!
Hopefully, we can build a better version of social media that focuses on protocols, not platforms.
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 :)
A year ago, I viewed the Fediverse as an unnecessary, complicated framework created by a handful of well-intentioned individuals as a solution to a problem that wasn’t really there.
Today, I view it as a necessity.
This past year has been a hard lesson for me to stop placing trust in massive, centralized web services like Twitter and Reddit and to start federating more of my online activity. There’s going to be growing pains, but Lemmy has been pretty good so far and it’s definitely going to be worth it in the end.
For wide spread adoption there are a lot of issues with the fediverse. The main one is the home pages of fediverse instances or join-X.org sites immediately turn people away with their language, jargon and content. Nobody cares about the open source licence, or how it’s “federated” or what the developers can do, or that you can run your own server or what languages and frameworks it’s built on etc. These all will turn people away. Literally the first sentence on join-lemmy is “Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform”. Nobody wants to self host anything (well I do, but near to 100% of people don’t). Then there are screen shots of code diff’s and actual code, then a list of programming languages, then some Latin with hard to see ‘mod tools’, and then at the end back to self hosting “With Lemmy, you can easily host your own server, and all these servers are federated”. None of this is enticing people in. It’s turning people away.
These entrances to the fediverse should be about community, discussions, engagement etc. That’s what people want to sign up for and start participating. Just get them signed up. Once they’re in they can learn about the other benefits and that they can move the profile to different servers, or whathaveyou. Keep all the other bumf hidden away behind a “benefits” link.
Someone needs to come up with better terminology to fediverse and federated to avoid having to explain it all the time. It’s federated… You know… Like email. Well I’ve used email a long time and nobody has ever called it federated or used that term before when talking about any aspect of email - and I run my own email server.
Tl:dr: just cut the crap and make on-boarding easier. Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.
I love the concept of decentralization. Feels more like the internet of old.
The apps need some work, but overall it’s “okay.” The rest of my gripes lie entirely around the lack of content, which can’t be helped
In general, it works pretty nice, but there are some limitations.
The biggest one for me is discoverability. The federation means that there is more fragmentation and it’s harder to find the right community for something.
For example, there are country/city communities for my country/city on multiple instances. And since it’s hard to find the “correct” one, it fragments out much harder than Reddit did. Combine that with generally lower attendance numbers and you get really tiny communities.
This is not aided by Jerboa, which doesn’t open internal links internally. So if someone posts a link to a community and I press it, it instead tries to open it with my email app.
The UX is kinda rough around the edges, but it’s filling my scroll addiction while reddit takes a steaming dump on everyone.
I tried the fediverse with Mastodon to replace Twitter, but it didn’t work out. On Twitter, I was exclusively following accounts of personalities/organizations. As these accounts did not make the switch from Twitter to Mastodon, there was little use.
I feel like the fediverse works way better with content aggregation. I don’t really care who specifically is on Lemmy, as long as there is content and discussion. So far it’s been really nice.
The idea is outstanding. The parts of the UI that work are great. There’s much work to be done, especially with regard to subscription and discovery. The whole “copy/paste this into your server’s search bar” thing is… not great.
It feels like the start of something new, you know? Sort of exciting because coming from Reddit to Lemmy feels like taking a leap of faith as we are looking for this place to replace what we have lost. At the end of the day, communities are what make or break a platform and we have that going.
In terms of the platform itself, I am still trying to figure my way around here but the UI/UX feels easy to interact with. I guess I would love to have a mobile app for iOS down the line to replace my addiction to Apollo!
I signed up for Mastodon awhile back but never really got into it since I don’t really do Twitter much either. I have been reading about lemmy but didn’t sign up until today.
It was a little confusing trying to sign up, the first instance I tried to sign up with had a waiting period for account approvals but I finally found one I could sign up with instantly and then I started poking around. I think I am getting the hang of it!
I have also downloaded Mlem to test on my iphone. It’s easy and simple to use, not a lot of features yet but it seems promising.
So far outside of a bit of focus time to figure out how to actually get signed up and find communities to subscribe to I’m cautiously optimistic. This seems more like how the older days of the internet were, before the enshittification of social media. Let’s see if this trend continues!
I’m confused, but I’ve got the spirit. Reddit was confusing at first too, given I joined before it was mainstream popular. I figured it out, I’ll figure this out too. Looking forward to a restart and seeing this grow.
I’m quietly hopeful that more and more people migrate over to lemmy, if it wasn’t for all this api nonsense I’d have never heard of the fediverse. I don’t know how it passed me by but I’m glad to be here now.
I hate when threads and comments automatically update, scrolling content down my browser.
I hate that when I hit back on my web browser, it doesn’t bring me back to where I was previously on the page. I have to scroll down all over again.
Lack of content or small communities don’t bother me. It just means more people need to contribute, myself included.
For me, 10/10 just as good. It only needs more content.
I think it’s important to make sure your instance is federated with all the other big ones, though, since adding a new one is not user-friendly.
How do I go about getting as many communities federated as possible without having to personally subscribe to all of them? Mastodon/Pleroma had relay servers if I recall.
From what it looks like to me in testing, in any given instance All is any other instance that communicates with said instance, Local is all communities within an instance, and Subscribed is just the communities within the instance you have explicitly subscribed to.
I see some on my communities list with no local subscribers, so I think you only have to connect the instance, not every community within it.
I’m new, though, and know nothing about relay servers.
My understanding is as long as any user from your instance subscribed to any community from anothet instance, then it will become federated with yours
Not quite. If anyone on your instance searches for a community your instance will download the top 20 items from that community right away. Your instance from that point on should start syncing that community including the backlog of any comments/additional items. But not the whole instance and it doesn’t take actually subscribing to it.
Ah. You sound like you’ve looked at the code, can you say if there’s some sort of admin command to sync a whole instance?
I’ve looked at some stuff… More to get an understanding of ActivityPub in specific.
I do not particularly know of a specific “sync everything” command and even if there was one that would be problematic… Sync everything… as in what exists right now? or forever in perpetuity?
The only way I can think of doing it right now would be to grab a list of all the communities on a server and just script searching for them all one by one. That would effectively sync everything forever for all the communities that currently exist.
Yeah, that would work. Paging @cephi@lemmy.bunbi.net, who started this discussion and who does self-host. To save you a click, here’s the libraries you could use for that.
