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.

I hate when threads 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.

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 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 hope the #RedditMigration sours adoption

I think you meant spurs lol

Anyway yeah I’m liking Lemmy and the fediverse so far. I actually prefer the UI/UX of https://kbin.social more for desktop, but Jerboa is great for mobile. If they stay actively in development it’s going to be hard to beat IMO

I’ve followed from Fark to StumbleUpon to Digg to Reddit, and now many years later, to Lemmy. I think the communities being spread across instances is extremely powerful for overall global community resiliency (if the separation is respected and we don’t end up with a bunch of duplicated “subs” everywhere).

I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of people say this today, but the one thing I feel the most is excitement. The chaos reminds me of the early-ish days (~1996?) of the internet when everything was discoverable and not already aggregated to be served up to you inbetween advertisements.

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 am enjoying actual discussions and not just hot takes or rants. I don’t care if the platform is “perfect”. It’s good enough for me. The admins aren’t some corporation just looking for pavlovian click labor (‘likes’ and upvotes) to power their algorithm run ad fest.

As others have said, I need it to not act like a Twitter feed and constantly update, pushing stories down the page as new ones come in even while I’m trying to read the existing ones. I suspect that fixing this will also make returning to the page from a followed link not send me back to the top, because that is really annoying. Navigation is also a bit clunky at the moment, and it’s still hard to switch to a new community without going all the way back to the main page. I feel like the negatives are outweighed by the positives however, and I’m really starting to like this place…

Enjoying it, but wondering if I’m missing a way to work backwards to find communities.

I’ll give an example - Sleep Token, a band I like, released an album not too long ago. If I Google “reddit sleep token”, I can see a few communities like /r/metalcore and /r/progmetal discussing them, so I can guess I might want to join those communities.

If I Google for “lemmy sleep token”, I get a bunch of random websites with articles about sleep token with links and quotes about motorhead.

Whats the strategy for working backwards like that on Lemmy? Is there one?

I dig it so far. The vibes are good and the people are cool. My one question, though, is how active things are once people here lose interest in talking about Reddit.

New platforms are always at their hottest when people are talking about what they’ve left or what the new platform could be. Will be interesting to see how Lemmy is once that dies down a bit.

I was one of the original refugees from digg.com. This feels like R*ddit of old - simple layout, techie userbase, friendly community. Feels like home.

All in all, pretty good. Wish finding and subscribing to communities was easier tho. That’s probably my biggest gripe. I click some URL to join a new community, and it bitches to me that I’m not logged in because it’s an embedded safari page (on Mlem). Really wish it was simpler.

I’m loving it. It’s like the good old days of smaller forums, except they all link together to become a reddit-like conglomerate, best of both worlds.

I like it and was able to adapt easily, but some of the UI is terrible (and I mean this in a constructive way), specifically:

• Page weight is too high, when I use back/forward or switch tabs on mobile my browser has to do a full refresh. Tildes and kbin are very lightweight by comparison, not sure what the JS code of Lemmy/Beehaw are doing to cause this issue.
• Adding new subs is confusing, but mostly because the “Subscribe” button is hidden by default when you visit a community on another instance.
• The process of subscribing is convoluted You 1. visit an instance, 2. find a community, 3. copy the url,4. go back to your community, 5. past it, 6. open the search link in your instance, then 7. click subscribe and wait a little. It feels like that can be streamlined or something.
• Loading “All” is slow, I understand why, but the UI should do something to explain it to me instead of popping in posts.

But, the discussion seems good, the actual UI is reminiscent of old reddit so I’m happy, and I’m surprised how easy it is to discuss things across instances.

The community, particularly Beehaw, is fantastic! I love it.

Lemmy itself needs a lot of work. It’s incredibly far behind, but my expectations are staying measured and I’m excited to see how it develops. Right now it’s not a case of me enjoying the platform itself, but more so ‘putting up’ with the limitations of the platform to access the nice community.

Jerboa is the mobile client I’m using currently, and it’s off to a good start but needs a lot of fixes to be fully usable. Such as sorting comments and searching. The ability to easily click a button to jump to the next comment thread is my most missed feature as well from clients such as Boost for Reddit.

Additionally, I still have issues signing into the mobile website. I can sign in through Jerboa or the Beehaw website on desktop, but not on mobile (or at least not always). So I’m often navigating content on the mobile website, then using Jerboa to comment on it. Most won’t deal with these issues, but I’m still holding out to see what comes from it all.

A couple of last side notes, it’s really annoying to need to click on the title, and not being able to click on the text of a post to navigate (mobile site) - and visually it needs some improvements to draw more people in. That last part seems minor, and for a large part of the existing community, myself included, it truly is minor - but for widespread adoption it needs a big revamp.