Ask Lemmy

With sync, it was a pretty easy transition from reddit to here, though there are obviously differences in size and functionality. Overall, though, l'm happy to report that I can doomscroll and be just as miserable here as I could on reddit.

It's alright. It could definitely use some more growth, and it's been a bumpy road with it being Beta software and with the federation issues, but I've enjoyed my experience overall.

I like that it is a lot more independent but I also miss a lot of niche communities. Overall I still like it a lot .And there really is no going back since reddit has completely gone to shit. I now take more time off from social media.

It's no Reddit.... And thank goodness!

Hell yeah! I feel like a chill new pub opened up in my neighborhood. I found a new place where I belong

I love how both liked and dislikes are visiable. Feels less one sided than reddit.

It great for me it’s better than Reddit it has that small internet feeling

It aiight. Too many assholes sometimes but these kinds of people run rampant on the internet so I don't blame it. I only wish that the UI got a little more love but it works just fine.

I like it. Left reddit a while ago and this fills that spot.

Same shit different platform. Dumb that people keep bringing up Reddit though. I don't have an app though so I still use Reddit on my phone. Sometimes porn.

I like it a lot, enough to stay through the tumult of figuring out issues like CSAM, spam, federation inconsistencies, and an inability to block instances at a user level. It’s small and doesn’t have many active niche communities, but Reddit had the same issue in the beginning. Honestly I like the small size of Lemmy, there’s enough content to keep me interested but isn’t so crowded that it feels like I’m shouting into the void.

It’s not bad and has improved rapidly. It still needs a lot of growth. It has most of the main topics covered like news and politics, but what’s really missing are all the niche interests. Reddit still has all the small topics. It’s going to take time to build that here. Although federation is cool, it doesn’t help that an interest might be split across several communities. For instance, there are several steam deck communities. It makes it hard to build the user base large enough to get good, consistent content.

I like the format but I'm having a hard time finding the time to curate my own feed so I can see something other than the same rephrased headlines for a mile of scrolling.

It's good so-far, & I hope it continues to grow & improve. I've seen some communities partially shift to Lemmy, which is good, & I hope more of them come over. There are/were some thriving niche communities on Reddit which might be better served on an open platform like Lemmy. We already have c/vexillology for instance, but it's still relatively small & inactive compared to the old r/vexillology. I've got some stuff I've been working on myself which I hope to help contribute to this project.

I love it.

I have accounts on a dozen or so instances, though I'm only really active on maybe half of them. That gives me a fair amount of variety (every instance is different, depending on who they're federated with and what communities the users have subscribed to), and makes it so that if one of them is having issues, all that means is that I won't be using that particular account.

The relative lack of users doesn't bother me in the long run - yeah, it's sort of unfortunate that there aren't enough people to maintain really narrow communities, but I much prefer a thread here, on which there might be only three responses but they're all trying to actually communicate ideas, as opposed to a thread on Reddit, where there's 100 responses and 99 of them are just regurgitating memes.

Really, my biggest problem with the threadiverse is all of the people who want to make it into something it's not - who want to centralize and streamline and homogenize it so it'll have more appeal to easily-confused, meme-regurgitating idiots. I like it pretty much the way it is (with minor improvements around the edges of course), and would much rather that it be left to just slowly and surely draw in people who actually appreciate it for what it is.

It's a better setup being free of corporate ownership, and it's slowly growing, but I wish we could get the word out somehow.

I'm really loving it.

I like it. Sucks that the more niche communities are not very active but hopefully they will continue to grow.

I enjoy all of Mötorhead, not just Mr. Killmister.

Oh wait, that's not the Lemmy you ment.

It lacks the critical mass of users needed to make even moderately niche communities feasible; basic examples are: City communities, State communities, communities based on car make/model - these are types of communities that Reddits excels at having and it's because of the size of the user base. The only point I'm making with this is that Lemmy is a very long way off from being a viable replacement for Reddit.

Next big problem is: Lemmy has a HORRIBLE new user experience...which I'm sure is significantly responsible for slowing Lemmy adoption. Single biggest issue is content discovery (which is just-ok if you got lucky and joined a super-massive Lemmy instance when you first joined, all the way to an atrocity if you got unlucky and joined a small instance when you first joined.

There's also a lot of complicated activities needed just to be a functional Lemmy user: like regularly backing up your user/instance preferences (including subscriptions) and replicating those preferences into another account/instance in case something happens to your current account/instance or your instance becomes temporarily or permanently inaccessible. This is asking too much of your common non-technical user, but it's still currently necessary just because of how often instances have problems. Think about all the user accounts on all the .ml instances that had to be re-created from scratch because there's no built-in way for users to do it. Users should be able to sync their user accounts similarly to how instances sync their content with each other.

For the record, the first instance I created an account on (when I was a brand new Lemmy user months ago) was a very small instance (but recommended on the very first page of the official join-lemmy.org site), and there just wasn't functional content discovery at all on that instance. It was a barren wasteland. The fact that servers aren't even aware of what content is out there on federated systems until some user on that system already happens to know about the content/community and subscribe to it is setting a lot of new users up for failure. Once I realized that it sucks being on a small instances, the second account I created was on Lemmy.world, but that instance suffers from it's popularity and is the frequent target of DDOS and was going down for me several hours a day. So, there's also a penalty for joining a big instance. I ultimately had to create numerous accounts on numerous instances and then try to keep the user preferences in sync across multiple accounts on multiple instances so that I can easily swap to a different account when an instance had problems.

Elitist user base: I swear, some lemmy users are worse than the old BSD forums and worse than stack exchange when it comes to taking criticism about the platform. Guaranteed, this comment will get downvoted, and I'll be mansplained about how content discovery is facilitated through having to have foreknowledge about some 3rd party websites that keep track of communities (which don't always work because not all instances can be indexed yet do to a laundry list of other problems), and what an idiot I am for not knowing this, etc, etc.

Having to go to this length just to use a reddit alternative - that's unacceptable to most non-technical users. Lemmy doesn't stand a chance of gaining momentum until these issues are solved.

The only thing missing is a large contingent of sports fans to populate game threads and it’s perfect

Its decent for me. As others have said it's still got a long way to go but it works for what I use it for. I'll likely be sticking around here unless something better pops up or lemmy goes the way of the dinosaurs.