- Exclude explicit software bugginess or missing features
- Include experiences or knock-on effects that may have arisen from (1)
- Comparisons to Reddit are ok. We know the reasons for the differences, but this is just about expressing yourself
Discovering communities is easily the #1 complaint, I don’t think it’s a technical issue, it feels mostly a conceptual issue with how everything works. I understand why duplicate communities exist because of how the Fediverse works, but in practice it’s pretty annoying to the users. For example I tried to look for an anime community just to see if there’s any discussion, but I had no idea where people were.
There’s [email protected], this looks like the most popular but it’s mostly repost bots. There’s [email protected] and [email protected], both of which barely have users. There’s [email protected], which has some threads going on but few users.
Because of the amount of duplicates nobody knows where the users actually are. Since everyone’s confused, nobody participates because they feel like nobody else is going to see their content. On Reddit you had one definitive subreddit for each topic, on Lemmy it feels like a guessing game at times which one’s the right one.
We’re settling into communities more as time goes on (like how [email protected] is the definitive movie/tv hub), but I think we’ve got a ways to go. If Lemmy wants to go more mainstream it needs to tackle this, whether it’s through multi-reddit style communities that combines feeds or some way to combine comments on crossposts or maybe some other way.
The Fediverse is rather different. I’m sure there will develop some sort of sign posting system to point out where to go but by its very nature, it will be subjective. Perhaps some sort of vivacity score could be used to judge how alive a community is and some way to show all communities across all instances in a say top 10 listing. In time communities with the same broad focus will develop a particular or set of focuses (foci, focae - not for me). Time will tell.
Lemmy is different to the walled gardens and it needs to mature and develop its own way of doing things. I love the fact that the largest instance went down with a bang for a while and the rest carried on fine. I feel for lemmy.world residents and admins - I’m a sysadmin myself. However that demonstrates the sheer power of the fediverse. I will be spinning up an instance eventually, once I’ve got the hang of using it and I run some quite important stuff at work.
Tools and memes will develop over time but make no mistake, the fediverse has hit its teens in life. What sort of adult we get will be interesting. We do need to keep it out of the hands of a single authority whilst still allowing civilized discussion, for a given value of civilized. Instances can refuse to peer with others so we can gradually develop networks that work for subsets of the human race. The tricky bit is enabling this to happen within earthly laws and boundaries. Governments hate decentralization for obvious reasons. Instead of Messrs Apple, Google, MS etc they potentially have to deal with me and you and the other n billion people on the planet!
Its just super unattractive to join. If I am thinking about joining a platform I want to know if there is content that is interesting to me. Now if I go to https://join-lemmy.org/ what do I see? It greets me with explanations of the Licensing, tells me all the programming languages and frameworks, shows me pictures of code and something about mod tools and of course immediately offers me to run my own server. None of that is even remotely interesting to me even now that I am a registered user. Not to mention that the design is questionable. Then it says “Join a server”. I am not here to join a server, I am here to join a platform. And if I click on that I am met with about 50 different instances, of which I have no idea what to choose and what implications my choice has.
The whole federation thing, the design, everything is just unintuitive and unattractive to join.
I agree that it is unclear to folks that Lemmy is not a platform and this causes frustration and disappointment for new users. It probably should be clearer on join-lemmy.org that this whole thing is just a bunch of servers talking to each other.
join-lemmy.org needs some serious work if it’s really what people are going to link when others ask about it; it’s really no wonder that we’ve mostly only amassed technical folks. I also think the default UI/UX could use a lot of work to bring it up to standards with other modern social sites. I wish that would be a priority for the devs, but I know they only have so much time to devote to things
I tried to solve this a tiny little bit by giving my own instance a clean and friendly frontpage, but I think I still need to do more work to attract people who aren’t fedi-inclined.
I like that front page, nice for a ‘smaller instance’ that has a specific target. I should steal it for no.lastname.nz
Please feel free! Source is on GitHub, it uses Astro with the Starlight template.
I love this landing page. Great job!
Can make this argument for email…
Which is why no one is running their own email server and people go to the platform that is easiest and most well known.
Email has the benefit of legacy. Lemmy does not.
Multiple communities with the same theme in diverse servers mean lots of repeated information in my home page.
I find hard to find new niche communities. All is all, the common denominator. My home is what I already have subscribed. Local instance communities are there. But I don know a good way to get offended content from communities outside of those categories.
There’s a few different community browsers:
It’s still got the problem of being repetitive.
And there’s not a great way to suggest “you might like…” based on your current subscriptions.
IMO, moderators of communities need to merge their communities. Identify which community is bigger and quite frankly push users to just use that one, to reduce the ambiguity over which one to use. The software ideally would also have an officially supported way to just close your community and transfer everyone’s subscriptions to a different one, so that we don’t have these duplicates confusingly still showing up in the listings.
I personally did this. I tried to create and promote a community I thought I was the first to make. When I learned it actually already existed (and just… didn’t show up in search because of course not), I shuttered the one I made and pointed it at the other one.
What’s bizarre to me is that the Android community even did switch to a different one… and then switched back to having two?? It’s weird and I don’t understand why they did it.
It’s a solution, but I don’t like it.
1.- It’s less resilient. If (more like when) one server goes down it could take the only community in a topic with it. 2.- If the moderators for the community of your interest are kind of dickwads, or absent, or malicious, you have no alternative. 3.- Federation can create weird problems. If your account instance is not the community’s one, you could be effectively banned, without doing anything wrong. 4.- Creates a perverse incentive for using the biggest instance you can for both creating communities and users. Some of the bigger Lemmy instances already are under heavy load and having problems to stay online. Imagine if we discourage using small instances.
Some mechanisms to “merge” communities across servers would be cool addition. Every Android community in every server that still federates with each other lists every post in all of them. Moderators moderate the posts in their instance. Link repetition is the same as inside of one single community. If one of the composing communities moderator team doesn’t does it’s part it could be expelled from the composite. Like a soft de-federation.
Just rambling. It’s a complex problem.
It’s a solution, but I don’t like it.
1.- It’s less resilient. If (more like when) one server goes down it could take the only community in a topic with it. 2.- If the moderators for the community of your interest are kind of dickwads, or absent, or malicious, you have no alternative. 3.- Federation can create weird problems. If your account instance is not the community’s one, you could be effectively banned, without doing anything wrong. 4.- Creates a perverse incentive for using the biggest instance you can for both creating communities and users. Some of the bigger Lemmy instances already are under heavy load and having problems to stay online. Imagine if we discourage using small instances.
Some mechanisms to “merge” communities across servers would be cool addition. Every Android community in every server that still federates with each other lists every post in all of them. Moderators moderate the posts in their instance. Link repetition is the same as inside of one single community. If one of the composing communities moderator team doesn’t does it’s part it could be expelled from the composite. Like a soft de-federation.
Just rambling. It’s a complex problem.
It’s a solution, but I don’t like it.
1.- It’s less resilient. If (more like when) one server goes down it could take the only community in a topic with it. 2.- If the moderators for the community of your interest are kind of dickwads, or absent, or malicious, you have no alternative. 3.- Federation can create weird problems. If your account instance is not the community’s one, you could be effectively banned, without doing anything wrong. 4.- Creates a perverse incentive for using the biggest instance you can for both creating communities and users. Some of the bigger Lemmy instances already are under heavy load and having problems to stay online. Imagine if we discourage using small instances.
Some mechanisms to “merge” communities across servers would be cool addition. Every Android community in every server that still federates with each other lists every post in all of them. Moderators moderate the posts in their instance. Link repetition is the same as inside of one single community. If one of the composing communities moderator team doesn’t does it’s part it could be expelled from the composite. Like a soft de-federation.
Just rambling. It’s a complex problem.
It’s difficult to figure out what to do when copies of your particular niche community exist in 5 different places, all with very similar subscriber counts.
The “front page” of lemmy, either the local of the instance you’re on or the “all”, is pretty bad. Low quality, uninteresting, obscure, sometimes vaguely rude. News about small video games, hyper specific gripes, obscure memes, uninteresting articles with no comments. Compare that to reddit when it was good, which reliably emphasized the biggest world news stories, genuinely interesting user anecdotes or personal stories, academic knowledge (especially AskHistorians), videos or images that grip you, etc. I’m not sure what the issue is with lemmy’s front page. Is it an algorithm problem? Something to do with federation? Is the user base merely too small for now and this will improve on its own with more engagement?
It’s too bad because the “front page” is the user’s first taste of lemmy. Most users will browse without making an account for a while before finally making an account and subscribing to specific communities.
In general, I think lemmy is already great. There are starting to be lots of cool communities, and even if the quantity is lower, the quality seems to be higher.
I strongly agree that it needs to improve. Besides the sorting algorithm issues, one issue is that “all” depends on what people on your instance have subscribed to. So small instances might not have much or have a very biased all. I think Lemmy should at least default to basically subscribing to the N biggest communities for all instances, purely to seed the “all” view.
As well, most instances should default to “all”, because “local” is usually going to be extremely limited and misleading. Defaulting to local will just make the fediverse look bad. New users aren’t going to realize they can switch to all. They’ll just think there’s barely any content and leave.
Some sorting would be good. I’d also like to be able to hide posts without having to block the poster. Right now there is very little user control.
Lemmy has no algorithm.
deleted by creator
but it is just a simple vote count/time decay, no consideration given to what you have interacted with in the past, ie the “algorithm” on other platforms
That’s why the content isn’t sorted as well as it could be. There’s no one-size-fits-all for social media as people have different things they like.
That’s not really what I was referring to. Sure it selects posts automatically but it’s not like it picks what it thinks a specific user is going to click on.
deleted by creator
Yes there is, and it’s not that different from reddit. The sorting algorithm is what they refer to. Eg, hot is some balance of time vs votes, which greatly favours newer posts (too new, IMO – posts it shows will typically no comments or maybe just one or two). Active favours high commenting rates and based on my observations, it seems to drop off around 2 days (too old, IMO – a considerable number of posts shown by this algorithm seem to be around the 2 day mark). The top and new algorithms are straightforward enough.
All the algorithms favour big communities. There’s a “best” algorithm in development, which would try to look at the top for each community and thus give smaller communities a chance. I can’t wait for that, because right now, you’ll rarely if ever see a small community hit the front page and it sucks bad.
Even finding Lemmy was not easy. Just doing a search brought up Lemmy from Motörhead. Talented guy, but not really what I wanted. It took me awhile before I even found an instance, and that was only because of a YT video. Most folks will just use the first page of their chosen search engine, and then give up.
Then signing up to… pretty much anything federated is a confusing experience for new users. Trying to wrap your head around instances, communities, and so on. “Why does there have to be an XYZ community at Example instance, when there already is one on ABC Instance? Can’t they just merge? What’s the point? What if I want to be a part of example instance, but want to subscribe to communities on the ABC instance?“
When signup is done, but you then enabled 2FA. You input the string on your app, click apply. Then when you try to log back in, you find you’re logged out, and don’t know why. It’s because Lemmy is one of the few services to use SHA256, and not SHA1. So it doesn’t work with something like Bitwarden. I had to find a GitHub post to find out why this was happening. Not a good first impression.
Then when you subscribe to communities they’re either lacking in content, or reposting, sometimes from another instance.
There seems to be issues with posting media, and the whole integration with other ActivityPub seems to need some work.
Overall I think all this is growing pains. I wouldn’t say the service is ready, but I don’t think it’ll be ready, until it onboards new users. However I don’t think many new users (non-technical users especially) will stay, due to the issues above.
Onboarding is unclear for people. So if they just Google Lemmy it’s a bit of a adventure for them to figure out they have to make an account where to make the account.
The friction around account creation is difficult. Many let me instances require manual approval, so that slows down me onboarding funnel.
Let’s be Frank most people don’t want to make an account, entering email and password and validation. Using some federated identity like Google Apple would make The onboarding easier for people
Discovery is very difficult, especially if you’re on a smaller instance, you have to know what communities to individually subscribe to. There’s some mitigations with find a Lemmy community websites but they’re not built into most of the apps yet. So unless you’re joining a very large server, Lemmy’s going to feel pretty empty.
There’s some gaps between Lemmy and other platforms around media rich posts, especially videos and GIFs. Posting a video on Lemmy is difficult especially if you’re on a mobile device.
I still love Lemmy, these are just observations with respect to your query
Kbin allows login with Google since recently
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=gOkXkMzhdko
https://piped.video/watch?v=IPSbNdBmWKE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Joined on one instance, it went away, had to create a new account on this instance.
Finding communities and content has been challenging, at least Memmy has the number of subscribers front and center when searching.
Content depth could be better.
These are also, IMO, growing pains that will resolve over time
To me, all the complaints in this thread are a great filter. It keeps away all the people that are too lazy and/or incapable to figure out basic things, which are not the people I want to interact with online anyway
My tech self surprised me, as I agree.
However, my art self is sad. I’m sure the art community will take a long time to figure out Lemmy.
attitudes such as this one are my biggest complaint tbh
“It’s a good filter” is often just an excuse to not improve the UX. You hear this way more from open-source technically-inclined folks than you do from folks who care about building a product that people want to use.
Honestly I don’t think the UX is bad. Sure, a few things could be improved, but it’s in a great overall state, especially considering its current growth rate
The same problem I have when it comes to Mastodon/Misskey/Firefish - I feel like everything is so fragmented, like I have to jump from one place to another. Thankfully, this applies significantly less in the “threadiverse” (Outdated name, we definitely need a new one) because there aren’t 6 different platforms and tens of different forks, and Lemmy and Kbin are pretty much 100% compatible with one another, unlike those moments where you can’t see Mastodon re-toots on Firefish a lot of the time or sometimes accounts’ posts appear much later in a different instance. We don’t need to worry about that here.
wait re-toots (boosts) on Mastodon are not visible on Firefish?
There are cases where reposts on some Mastodon instances and most of Misskey’s reposts aren’t seen on Firefish, but are seen on Misskey, because for some reason Misskey seems to have better protocol interoperability, so you get a vastly different experience even when following the same people.
Links between instances often don’t work as intended, and there’s no good way to redirect me from
some-other-instance.pub/c/cool-communitytomy-instance.pub/c/[email protected]automatically.You should check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fediredirect/. This works for redirecting both communities and posts, although the latter requires to give your log in credentials to the extension.
Thanks, I’ll try it out!
This is something we have a workaround on an extension I’m working on. You can right-click on a link and have it open in your home instance
Thanks, this is lovely!
where are the technical criticisms?
Make account migrating possible
When federating, load past content
Allow servers to have backups in place in case the initial goes down, or even better automatically share the load across instances (with usrt approval of course)
add multi community aggregation to aggregate communities of the same topic on different instances.
god yes, or anything better than the current. Maybe something like community ‘groups’ where one can subscribe to them all with a single click, or jsut remove some to their tastes. Tbh add a couple layers of that and it’d be an insanely powerful way to group similar communities
Setting up a Lemmy server outside of the golden path of using the Ansible template is extremely difficult. I do this professionally and I couldn’t get federation working properly when running Lemmy on my Kubernetes instance.
Figuring out why federation is failing is very, very hard.
Lemmy requires a lot of resources to run. You need a VPS that’s at least $20/mo to work adequately under any load. Disk storage requirements for the DB are also rather high.
Lemmy 0.18.2 has some horrendous N+1 DB calls, e.g. one query per language (173 of them) when you create a new community. This hamstrings databases that are not colocated onto the same machine, e.g. neon.tech’s hosted pg db. I expect this will improve with time as the codebase matures, yet…
Instance administration tools are sorely lacking.
The redditors are really racist and really anticommunist sometimes. I get that the admin wants a diversity of opinion but the orientalism feels pretty intense nowadays
There shouldn’t be votes. Activitypub itself shouldn’t have votes but I can understand the broader community around it wanting them to kludge in functionality of places they’re trying to ape.
If you’re coming from Reddit or wherever though and don’t see this as a perfect opportunity to get rid of the part of the site all the problems stem from or are enabled by, I don’t know what to say.
Get rid of the votes.
How do you sort the content without votes? How do you pick out the good stuff from the spam?
You read it and when it’s good you respond with a contribution or expansion on the ideas presented.
Maybe you quote the post but write nothing, or put an emoji nodding and smiling and pointing at the quoted text.
When something’s spam you either ignore it or tell that person to fuck off. Maybe you report their posts, then a mod drops in and confirms that they should fuck off and either gently corrects them or bans them with whatever level of granularity is appropriate.
I like this…upvote! 😁
Hell yeah!
Hey everybody, come prove electoralism works!
Also, Boosts in Kbin are more effective than upvotes but it’s not obvious to a person who isn’t aware of that
