I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:
- The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I’m aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that’s less than ideal)
- The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I’m aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it’s vital to the success of Lemmy.
The first point is CRUCIAL for setting up your own “scrolling page/account” for, since the instances are only very vague directions, at least while the site is still growing. And in a similiar vein, the second point with B) would be better than manually blocking communities I genuinely have no interest whatsoever in, like fountain pens (unless I don’t know how to operate this site yet).
In fact, C) feels unnecessary because of that right now, since I already see many new communities just in my instance alone. Though it WOULD add things to browse since there isn’t as much happening here, yet…
I love it here and I’ll express myself and show love to all with manatees
Comment syncing to my instance is a problem. I get posts but comments, not so much.
I’m having a great time. Lemmy is a little bit harder than Reddit but I have been on Mastodon for some time now so I know how federation works. The only thing about Lemmy I don’t like is that it feels kinda buggy and unpolished as it is very early stage and the same posts often reappear. But I like the community and it actually seems to be working so that’s pretty cool!
Same here. I do feel and see that a LOT of work will be required to get lemmy where it needs to be but something tells me that these are the interesting days for Lemmy!
Joined today and I find Lemmy really cool. Of course there isn’t that much content here yet but I’m hoping the June 12 Reddit protests and the upcoming Reddit API restrictions will bring more users in.
It doesn’t feel ready for mass adoption.
The difficulty of finding
subredditscommunities is a problem. And, when you do find one, nine times out of ten the link you click takes you to a different Lemmy server, from which you cannot join the community.And then there’s the problem of fragmentation and duplication, which has been explained better by other users on this thread.
There are lots of little problems here and there, like the language defaulting to “Undetermined” which hides your post from everyone who just naively selected English.
Fortunately, I’m (reasonably) technically-competent so I can make it work for me, and I recognise that even getting this far with development is a massive achievement. But I’m pretty sure the average internet user isn’t going to stick around until the project’s a bit more polished and mature.
I like it a lot. I feel more engaged. I like the community.
Seems pretty reasonable, even the federated stuff works fine - unlike Mastodon, oddly.
Once I added a few different instances it became much better! Content will come. But the best users from Reddit will migrate along with us!
Interface is better than “new” Reddit, not as good as old Reddit + RES.
Also: if I click on a link on another instance (for example https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy when I’m signed in on lemmy.world), I’m not signed in to lemmy.ml so I have to manually search for it in lemmy.world to post there - is there a common solution to that?
Echoing many things that other users are saying already:
Signing up/choosing a home instance is confusing. I don’t think it’s very confusing conceptually, but it is confusing from a UX/UI perspective. Subscribing to outside communities was the toughest part, I had to find them through a different instance using a search engine, then manually paste the community-specific URL into my home instance search, wait several seconds, then click into the community home page and finally click “subscribe.”
Not something a casual user is going to want or even figure out to do. I trust that many of these growing pains will be fixed in the coming weeks/months. I just hope that it’s not all a flash in the pan and then fizzles out totally.
Once using it though, I like the general feel of it. Better themes and some cleaner UI choices and it will be really nice imo. People are friendly so far and that’s worth a ton right there.
Yeah, there is a ton of room for Lemmy to grow. With time, it should get easier for newer people to use it as the apps mature.
Liking it so far. A social network is only as good as its community. The community is small but high quality. I’m excited to see Lemmy grow.
Worried about the future of fediverse, all it takes is a few external bad apples and servers will start defederating. Also even less internal bad apples who decides to make specific desirable features proprietary with the goal to amass the majority to users. Both of these are bad for the fediverse.
I was new to Reddit (3 weeks of activity), and switching to Lemmy is a bit confusing. But one evening is enough to learn the basics, I hope. Let’s keep it rolling. :)
