Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to become a member of the community, theres a reasonable amount of subs (or whatever the other word for em is) that fit my interests, enough linux content and shitposting for my liking, and the overall random posts made by people equally fed up with Leddit. (also i admit i used reddit a little cus there was this post on the fedora sub showing how to fix a sound issue i been having after a recent update)
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At least on my instance everything is running fast, snappy. I like the clean interface. Haven’t encountered any major bugs yet.
The only downside for me so far is that there is not a lot to see yet. The only active posts and communities are about lemmy itself. Which is understandable of course but I can’t wait to actually get to the phase where I actually get to experience real content lmao
I’m starting to understand how all of the individual Lemmy servers are connected and it’s awesome. Understanding how Lemmy is fundamentally different than something like Reddit makes me very appreciative. I think something like Lemmy is the natural future as corporations continue to try to milk the wallets of the average person.
Its social media on our own terms!
The coolest part is, Lemmy is bigger than just Lemmy. Kbin & Mastodon users can also see and respond to posts here!
How exactly does someone on mastodon respond to posts I can’t find any info anywhere on how it’s done
They have to subscribe to the community (it looks like a user to them, so it looks like @lemmy@lemmy.ml). Then they can see the posts from that “user”. From there, you see the posts and can reply to them just like they were any other user.
Great thanks so much
Just as i thought i understand it, you confused me again. How can Mastodon users participate here?
I don’t know in a “what to click sense”, but lemmy and mastodon differ from reddit and Twitter in that they’re open source running on open standards. There’s no proprietary walled garden to protect.
The underlying protocol is called activitypub. Think of lemmy and mastodon as different interfaces for viewing the same data.
I would like to understand how all of the individual Lemmy servers are connected… do you have any good resources for learning about lemmy?
If you just want the bare minimum, the ActivityPub article on wikipedia isn’t bad. For a deeper dive if you want to get technical, w3.org has a much more detailed explanation.
the w3 article is certainly worth the read. thanks.
Well, I’m here !
I have removed my Reddit account after 10yrs + 100k + karma and more hours invested than I would like to admit.
This time, I’m legit done with the place. I don’t like where they are headed and decided to give Lemmy a go.
So far, so good :)
I got my account approved and I’m good to go. This is my first comment of many, many more to come.
Good to be here folks…
Is there a way to find when new instances or communities come online?
I can’t answer your question, but I have a question for you.
Are you like, a man who is a cat, or a man who has a bunch of cats?
Yes. 👨🦯🐅🐆🐈🐅🐆🐆🐆🐈🐈🐆🐅🐆🐅🐈🐆🐅
Wild
i doubt ill be fasting from reddit cus theres always instances where i look for smt and the answers are there (like in the search results). but ima be using lemmy from now on for casual scrolling and entertainment instead
Welcome! Same boat here, wiped several decade+ old accounts today. Sad but… the community here seems great. Lacking on the cat gifs and tiktok reposts etc for sure, but that’s not why I loved reddit either.
Hey I’m new here bc fuck spez. There’s definitely potential here. Would like it to be easier to find communities (sublemmies?) And the app needs work but I’m ready to go all in. Did I mention fuck spez yet
Just signed up a few minutes ago. I honestly really like it so far. I was never into Twitter but I did try out mastodon and just couldn’t get used to the look of everything. It was also confusing to sign up. So far Lemmy has been great. I am surprised how many active users there are. I was worried it would be super dead.
edit: spelling
Same experience here, I checked out Mastodon and was impressed with the fediverse and open nature of everything, but the style of social media just didn’t gel with me. Not surprising as I was exactly the same with Twitter.
I was literally saying “someone needs to make Mastodon for Reddit” before I discovered Lemmy!
I feel like a lot of the discussion on here at the moment is obviously focused on Lemmy itself and Reddit, but that’s not surprising given the huge influx of new users.
Looking forward to the various communities and platform itself maturing. The first time I’ve been optimistic about social media in years, haha.
Totally agree with everything. Another major complaint I see people making is that smaller communities will form when we should just have one central one for each topic. I think this will naturally sort itself out. I will likely join a community if the content is good and the people are nice. If there is a community with 2k people and everyone is mean but a small one with 10 people and good content, I’ll join that one.
Like you I am very excited to see where it goes. I don’t think it can become massive. But it would be nice to see communities with 500k people in them. Optimizing server hosting is probably one of the biggest problems right now. I also wonder how the larger instances will make enough money to cover cost of servers.
Now I’ve got my head around how the instances work and how everything is connected but not connected at the same time I’m growing to like it. Once more communities pop up I think it’s going to be good
I’m not ditching Reddit, just here trying out alternatives.
How has your lemmy experience been so far?
Well… I’m scrolling and F5’ing as if I was on Reddit, so honestly doesn’t feel that different, yet.
I’m honestly really lost and just stumbling around in the dark. It’s been really confusing to learn about federation and what ever makes lemmy so unique.
But I’m really happy to see an open source alternative to reddit which is cool.
Like others have said I’m going to miss the niche subreddits and the thousand different cat subs lol
it’s nice, but we need more content and more 3rd party mobile apps, i mean Jerboa is nice, but many of us are used to their favorite reddit app
I really don’t like the cringe tankie culture here, hope that gets diluted as more people come in
I’m very impressed with the federation here. Kept thinking each instance was on its own but you can post across different instances. Kind of neat.
Absolutely, I actually downloaded a lemmy app then deleted it because I thought I had to create another account for each instance. So glad to see that I was wrong. Happy to be here as a reddit refugee!
This feels a lot like Reddit did 15 years ago, when they first introduced subreddits-- like I’m seeing something brand new for the first time, but it’s somehow comfortable and innocent.
I’m rapidly coming to appreciate it.
Maybe it’s the demographic of users (young vs old, tech savvy vs casual, w/e) but threads here have far more activity in ratio to the number of subscribers and members.
Reddit just feels like a popularity context. Tell your ‘I also choose this guy’s dead wife’ joke, get your karma, and for god’s sake DON’T USE EMOJIS! Subs rapidly became echo chambers, or lose identity as they get larger.
Lemmy however… while not all threads have activity (it’s small after all), the activity is legitimately interactive. People actually discussing ideas. We’re talking like thinking adults, and I’m enjoying it.
It’s taking me a bit to grasp the practical use of the “federated” thing.
It seems like there aren’t a lot of tutorial-type instructions on the web of how to use it. Like a YouTube video.
I would be nice if a good number of redditors would join for activity to flourish.
Be the change you want to see! This is an open source project, not a for-profit company, so that kind of thing is down to us.
If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer. I may be new to Lemmy (5 days old user), but I’ve been following the fediverse for a while, and I get a lot of what’s happening here at a UI & technical level.
In terms of making a youtube video, I’ve never made one before, maybe somebody reading this can make a decent video covering the basics?
Edit: Thought I might as well answer the first part, practical use of “federated” thing. Spez is an asshole, right? Well, what if you could just block Spez’s server and just keep on chugging, and lose absolutely nothing? Maybe you’re on Spez’s server. Easy, just move to a different Spez-free server and everything just works exactly the same. The federation gives protection against bad-actor admins.
The logical next question is ok, we can protect against greedy power-hungry assholes, but what about bad actors? What if a new instance starts, let’s call it nazi.st, and they are arguing with everybody and start fights? Simple. If everybody on an instance is being assholes, egged on by asshole admins, then your instance can just block them. Famously, Truth Social is just another Mastodon instance. They’ve been blocked by every single other Mastodon server and now they’re just shouting at themselves.
Thanks for explaing this, as someone new to this whole thing coming for reddit, it is a bit of an adjustment. Does this not come with the problem of sort of diluting the same topic out in different places. Like say the different servers all have a “technology” instance, and they all have a post about Apollo shutting down right now. Then you will have many different discussions going on in separate places about that. Is that correctly understood?
So, there’s 2 separate issues colliding here:
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Nobody atm knows what the hell they’re doing, what their instance will eventually become, what communities will die or survive. Beehaw (your server) is the best situated for this. They tightly control the new communities made, and will only make a new one if absolutely necessary. There’s gonna be a lot of single user communities in a week. People simply don’t get that you can’t just create a super niche community of /c/PeopleWhoPlayMySuperSpecificHouseruleSystemBasedOnGURPSv1987 and summon users from the void.
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/r/Tech, /r/Technology, /r/Computing, and /r/TechNews. Which of these is the “real” technology subreddit? Should we close down the other three? Some amount of dispersion is natural and normal. A user can just subscribe to all of them if they really want. Reddit is far more fragmented than you might realize.
Thank you so much for your reply. It makes sense and I agree with you. I guess in the end the community on an arbitrary instance might win out as the main one for each niche hobby, so that most talk will happen there, with others as alternatives. I’m really looking forward to the experience of getting used to this and getting it up and running.
I think a good example are the /r/gaming and /r/games subreddits.
/r/gaming is a default subreddit so it has a lot of traffic from users (37 million) of all different backgrounds that may not mesh nicely with the actual hardcore gaming community.
/r/games is not a default, users (3 million) need to seek it out. It generally is more civil and encourages good discussions.
Something like this can be done where !gaming@lemmy.ml could have a different user base and feel than !gaming@beehaw.org , or even !gaming@feddit.de which could be specific to the German gaming community.
How do you think niche communities will succeed? Will they be more successful in more populated servers? Like should a Monster Hunter community be made in a server dedicated to gaming? Hoping this makes sense, I’m still trying to understand how it all works.
There’s no rulebook, it depends on how the community wants to do it.
Take my thinking here with an EXTREME grain of salt. This is just me, and how this place would work in an ideal scenario in my head. I have no control over what people want to do, how they want to structure their own instances, anything like that. With all that pre-amble out of the way:
An instance should contain people that are generally on the same page. Maybe one instance is more techy, another more social activists, another more art & literature, and we’ve already seen that language-specific regional instances are doing well. They should maintain enough diversity that they don’t become echo chambers or cliquey. They all have their own rules, and enforce them on their own users and visitors to their communities.
The communities on a particular instance should play to the strengths of their users. The communities should reflect the general vibe of the users. Users will, naturally, have more interests than their instance provides for and pull in stuff from other instances. In a sense, your instance and the communities in it are your home street, where you know most of the active users, and the others are the big city, where you go to get things you can’t on your street.
Thanks for this, it actually helped a lot! I think I’m finally starting to figure things out lol. I do really like this idea though, as I think it’ll lead to a lot less friction in various communities than Reddit had, where fighting in the comments was just commonplace. Either way I’m excited to see how things progress!
And thank you again, I really appreciate it!
No problem, happy to help. Oh, and just to reinforce the whole instances as home street, I already have some expectations & stereotypes about beehaw users: Goody two-shoes, but great to talk to :P
Feel free to shoot me any more questions. I’m feeling very contemplative, although that might just be the beer talking.
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So what happens if your instance blocks my instance and we both participate in a thread in a third instance? Are we invisible to each other? Can you reply to me? Can i reply to you? Will we see each other’s comments?
