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…
People are much friendlier here, so far.
It feels like my experience on Mastodon after Twitter imploded. Hopefully it lasts.
I like the concept
But it feels very much like its been designed by nerdy developers and has had little to no-input on user friendly design.The federated idea can work but it needs to be more seemless than this.
- Communities with the same name should be merged when viewing it from any instance, so you can see all the posts from these communities, they can be moderated seperatley and for advanced users you should be able to select which communities make up the merged community.
- By default you should see all of the merged communities in a central place and be able to subscribe to them easily, at the moment its handled different per instance but you have to seek out these communities to subscribe or follow them.
- I strongly believe there should be a centralised log-in system, so you can log into any instance with an account from another instance, this means if your instance goes down your account is centralised and is safe.
Regarding point three: I want to be able to migrate my profile to another instance if my current instance has performance issues or admins going rogue.
One question I still have is how quickly posts and comments propagate across the Fediverse. How can I be sure the comment I’m writing actually shows up across other instances, and how long after I write it does it take on average to show up other places?
For instance, when I look at the list of comments on this thread sorted by both Hot and New, directly on Lemmy.ml versus on my home instance of Lemmy.pt, I don’t see the same set of comments. Not all of the ones from Lemmy.ml appear to have made it over to my instance. Is there some sort of eventual consistency mechanism in the system?
Wait, what comments do you see?
D—Do you see my comment?
No, nothing to be seen unfortunately.
I don’t really know whats going on the whole instance thing confuses me. Whats it’s pros? Why use it
Basically 4 things:
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Pick your own admin. I’m sure the kbin admin is awesome (can’t be worse than spez, lol) but it’s nice to have the option
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Have more control over what your server federates with. Hate interacting with people from a specific server? Move to one that blocks it. Want to interact with people from a blocked instance? Move to one that doesn’t block them. Basically more options.
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Don’t like the rules on your server? Go to one where you like the rules better.
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Your server is down? That’s fine, go to a different one temporarily. You’re gonna feel this hard on Monday. Kbin’s gonna get crushed by the Reddit hug of death. You might wanna join up to a small Lemmy instance that the horde won’t notice if that happens and you still wanna be on.
If you like kbin’s admin, federation settings and rules? Then cool! You’re missing absolutely nothing from being there (except when it’s down). It’s nice to have options though.
Secret number 5:
If you know how to host a server, you can host your own Lemmy instance and have all the powa!
@Barbarian So I have a few questions, being new to all this:
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Seemingly I am responding to you when you’re on a different instance. I’m on kbin and you’re on… sh.itjust.works? Am I understanding this right?
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My kbin account is restricted to just kbin, correct? I cannot use my kbin credentials to log on to another instance like sh.itjust.works.
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How do I make an original comment (this is a bit dumb lol). I see the option to reply to others but no “comment” button for me to comment on my own.
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On kbin specifically… what is a microblog?
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(Last one promise), what is up with the @stuff. I see this post link is kbin.social/m/[email protected]… I figured the /m is like reddit’s /r, but what is the [email protected] meaning that this is the magazine/community from lemmy.mt when shown on the kbin /m/ instance version? Not sure if this question makes any sense lol I’m just trying to understand how this all works
Your username in the fediverse is not honorfaz, but @[email protected], just as an email. It’s the same for communities (or sublemmy, or whatever we decide to call it). It’s not c/something, but c/[email protected]. This is why everyone still has a unique handle, but no unique admin.
I’m on my own instance for example, running in my living room, and yet here we are, talking. Internet as it was intented.
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It’s not bad, but there are a couple of issues that concern me. One is that communities are fractured - that is, that communities about the same topics exist on different instances and don’t connect with each other.
So I’m subscribed to a Books community on one instance, but that doesn’t mean I’ll see any of the posts on the same topic on other instances unless I subscribe to each of them. The total community of users on Lemmy who are interested in books are split up into small groups on different instances.
That’s very limiting.
Of course there’s also the issue of the relatively small user base overall. For some purposes a small community may be preferable, but for many others you really need a large user base. Looking for gamers for a face to face tabletop RPG, for example. Without a large user base, the odds of finding people within a reasonable real world distance of you is virtually nil.
I’m new and could be wildly wrong, but it seems like an improved UI could consolidate multiple communities into one “this is my <hobby> feed” so you can participate in all of them. If one dies, you don’t lose everything.
Yeah, if a community is a “magazine” on here it’d be really nice to collate a number of magazines I’m interested in into a “rack” similar to a multireddit.
@StrictMachine Dunno if it would even be possible, but it would be cool to be able to somehow be able to categorize each instance/magazine with a limited amount of tags - like each book- or literature-related instance could have a “Book” or “Literature” tag that would basically add it to a view of every single instance with the tag in it, so users could look up tags versus looking up specific instances.
I like that it’s still so small. None of this karma farming just diluting from high quality content and conversations
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I like the idea, but to be honest it feels unpleasant to use. Multiple different communities with the same topic are hosted on different servers, so I have to subscribe on them all if I want to keep track on what is happening. Would be nice to have some “mega community” that would have them all there. Also web client is broken, it feels so bad when my feed is moved down when new fresh post is added on top, this is borderline annoying and unusable> chf
upd: have tried kbin, it seems there they fixed all the annoying parts of lemmy. Great usage experience!
do bees be?
Very confused… I have a direct link to a Linux community and can’t figure out how to open it, or join it, or whatever I’m supposed to do with it in Jerboa. Discovery seems severely limited.
Jerboa search only finds communities that at least 1 person on your instance subscribed to, to find new communities from other instances easily I like to use https://browse.feddit.de/
Then when you find a community, go to the web version of your instance (don’t worry it’s (mostly) mobile friendly) and type [email protected] (don’t forget the !) Then you can subscribe there. Close and reopen Jerboa and your new community will show up in the list. The Jerboa devs are working on fixing this.
Thank you.
New thing I don’t like: I could not reply to you from my inbox. I had to go back to this thread, start from the top, find my own comment again, and then respond to you. The button in my inbox that looked like a reply button just marked the message as read instead.
Also I just found the search, the icon looks nothing like a search icon.
Look 2 buttons to the right of the impostor button, the box with dots in it.
Oh, I see it now. My brain must have seen the one chat bubble and ignored all others. Surely that would make more sense to be a bell icon or something.
Or an eye or something, yeah. I had the same problem until I got used to it.
The app I’m using (Jerboa) is a bit lacking, but I’m sure it’ll improve. I’m unsure about how accounts work with the servers, can I migrate my account if the server I am using shuts down? Communities are tiny and a lot are missing, but I’m sure those will grow and fill in as more people join.
