I run a few groups, like @fediversenews@venera.social, mostly on Friendica. It’s okay, but Friendica resembles Facebook Groups more than Reddit. I also like the moderation options that Lemmy has.
Currently, I’m testing jerboa, which is an Android client for Lemmy. It’s in alpha, has a few hiccups, but it’s coming along nicely.
Personally, I hope the #RedditMigration spurs adoption of more Fediverse server software. And I hope Mastodon users continue to interact with Lemmy and Kbin.
All that said, as a mod of a Reddit community (r/Sizz) I somewhat regret giving Reddit all that content. They have nerve charging so much for API access!
Hopefully, we can build a better version of social media that focuses on protocols, not platforms.
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.
Another really clunky thing I noticed right away is that there’s a huge difference between viewing a sub through your home instance vs its home instance, in that you’re no longer logged in when using the remote instance’s URL, and there’s no obvious way to get back to the corresponding location on your home instance. This means, for example, that when someone posts a link to another thread, it’s always kind of broken for remote users.
I feel like something could be done to ease interoperability using the same techniques ad trackers use.
I’m especially baffled as to why the UI had a dedicated button to view content on its home instance. I can see how that might be useful in some circumstances and it would make sense to have it hidden in a menu, but I think it’s just a confusing distraction for new users who typically have no use for a crippled view of what they’re already looking at.
it is really annoying to subscribe to communities on federated servers – there should be a link that will redirect you to your home server. As of now I seem to have to copy and paste the community address into the URL because the feddit.de community search doesn’t seem to be working for me
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It’s looking great! I joined just 2 days ago and the communities I subscribed to are already looking much more lively today. Thanks, Reddit blackout!
Also written in Rust, btw :)
How do you know something is developed with Rust?
Don’t worry, the devs will tell you.
I’ve also found this to be true with Julia devs
Source: am Julia dev
Check the GitHub! It’s linked at the bottom of the web page (“Code”)
Weirdly enough the fact that it’s written in rust is why I am using it instead of kbin (PHP)
What makes rust so special?
God damn! Okay now I’m fully behind it
Fast because it’s pointer-based like C/C++, but better because it’s memory safe, which means it won’t crash, leak or mysteriously overwrite it’s own data constantly.
I’d say that it’s fast because it’s compiled to machine code and doesn’t use garbage collection. But I see what you mean with “pointer-based”.
Rust is a very good language but is relatively new on the scene so it has to compete against other languages that fit the same niche(primarily C++) that have been around a lot longer.
Rust has been very popular for hobby projects for a while but it’s still pretty rare to see it for larger projects, and you still almost never see it for enterprise projects. So it’s cool seeing an app that uses it blow up.
It should be noted that while Rust is rarely used, some very big players are pushing it. E.g. last year Microsoft Azure’s CEO tweeted that “it’s time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++ and use Rust for those scenarios where a non-GC language is required”, Windows contains some Rust code now and the Linux kernel also supports Rust in addition to C since December.
PHP!? They’re writing the shiny new thing in the joke language from r/ProgrammerHumor?
lol
Imagine letting the circle jerk program you like that.
Hello future person, Kbin is dead now. You can go ahead and give me your pitch for why PHP is a great programming language, though - I’ve never used it.
You could also word that as “deferring to other people with more experience trying to use PHP”.
It gets a lot of hate. But it also drives a whole bunch of large businesses, and a lot of products. Its not trendy, but it gets the work done. In the past there were many bad products made ontop of it, but those products made sales, so were they really all that bad?
Its popular to use it like a punching bag, but the reality is its sigificantly better than the time period where most of the “hate” comes from. A time before javascript.
Its funny, people struggle to hit c10k with modern application stacks, but we had been doing it since before the iPhone.
I quite like it, its quite clean, the tooling isn’t painful, and its fairly easy to make applications go fast.
tl;dr its a conservative technical choice, and ergo, unfashionable, but also drives a good portion of the internet.
Disclosure: I write PHP unless I have a good reason not to, I also do some .Net and some Go.
Interesting to hear it’s fast.
Saying “you can use it and it has been used a lot” feels a bit like faint praise, on the other hand. I appreciate the effort to write me up a reply, though.
Honestly, keeping the excitable children in TypeScript-land is for the best. I just wish they’d shut the fuck up about their AI workflows while I’m around.
It is quite performant, most of the performance issues are more bad architecture than anything else.
Also it scales horizontally rather well without requiring me to build the infrastructure out before the need is there.
Exactly right?
To the average Redditor I guess its fine, but to me its unacceptable haha.
Repo link: https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
Welp, I guess I chose right after all.
There is:
- The right choice
- The other choice (PHP)
- The wrong choice (PHP)
He was the best frontman motörhead ever had
I like it - I just want a few Reddit-ish features:
- Hiding reply chains for scrolling cleanliness in comments of a post
- Hiding posts on the main page should be easy to do (buttons unclear)
- Dedicated copy link button - so it’s clear I’m copying the link to the page that is being spoken about in a post, rather than a link to the comments of the post itself.
(1.) should already be here, at least - on the web version it’s the
[-]icon next the commenter’s name, and on Jerboa you just tap the top bar of the comment. Agree that there should be a way to hide posts permanently - it’s kind of annoying to always scroll past the same pinned posts at the top of the “Local” view.That is a strange place for that to be, but thank you for the tip.
I tried tapping the top area of a comment. It displays a gray bar as click feedback but doesn’t seem to collapse anything. Am I just being a noob?
Edit: updating fixed it :]
It’s buggy, but I’m managing. Weird things like having to press the “Subscribe” button twice. I’m assuming most will be solved when traffic stabilizes.
The federation is… strange. Confusing when I click a link to another instance when trying to subscribe to a community, but also kinda cool how it works. I’m not sure federation should really be a concern for users, but time will tell. I’m sure it will only improve.
I think its a little rough around the edges, but thats to be expected given that its less than a year old. The big hit for me is the mobile app which just isn’t that good. This will come with time. I’d rather have an half-baked implementation thats showing promise over what Reddit is doing. I like decentralized social media because you can pick and choose what communities you interact with. If lemmy.world decides to go full enshitification (although I can’t figure out how they would monetize), you can just pack up and going to another community.
This honestly reminds me of when I was growing up in the early 00s, I was part of several different community forums that I loved dearly. There were other groups I looked into, but some were just toxic and unappealing, so I left after a while. I feel like Lemmy gives us the same freedom. I really hope to meet some awesome people here. Right now it’s just big enough to still allow meaningful dialogue and create cool relations. I felt like Reddit was too big for its own good even with niche subreddits; it didn’t feel like posting was worth it as it would get buried or just get a low effort response.
My only issue so far is that it can be difficult to find a particular post if you don’t remember which community and instance it was on, afaik there’s no search across all posts in all instantiations.
Not a huge fan of the UI (so much wasted space!) but it works for now. I’m subscribed to a few communities but the content is pretty stale. I’ve seen the same posts at the top for a few days now. The “Active” selection keeps the same things over. I tried a few of the other selections (Hot, Top Day, etc) but there is this weird thing where it randomly refreshes the feed and adds one or two new posts at the top and then pushes everything down. Again, UI/UX issues.
Yeah the stuff popping in while scrolling is weird and can be a bit aggravating.
There’s a user style that makes Lemmy a lot like old.reddit and it’s awesome.
Edit: This one: https://userstyles.world/style/10311/old-reddit-ish-lemmy
@CalcProgrammer1 @diemunkiesdie That sounds dope! What’s it called?
I just edited my post, here it is https://userstyles.world/style/10311/old-reddit-ish-lemmy
What kind of space is wasted? Genuinely curious. I only really use it on my iPhone. On desktop is the comments area too narrow?
Here’s another user style https://userstyles.world/style/10301/better-lemmy.
It widens the display, changes bright green buttons to blue ones and improves the indentation of replies.
If you use TamperMonkey or a similar browser extension you can try this.
Makes it abit closer to old reddit and a lot easier to read on desktop imho.
I love it so much that I started contributing to the project on GitHub
You’re awesome. Thank you
So far so good. This is actually my first comment.
I had a hard time wrapping my head around how the federation worked. But figured out I just search here in communities only with my keywords. If I don’t get a result here and https://browse.feddit.de then it means no community has yet been created anywhere.
I decided to make Beehaw my ‘home’ server after discovering it actually had an ‘interview’ that I jived with and a moderated/structured set of communities. As my first deeper ‘test’ of lemmy I have created my first community at lemmy.world since it seemed like the place for my random community about a grocery store chain: !traderjoes@lemmy.world
If I was making a specific tech/software related community I likely would have chosen lemmy.ml as that’s where many other tech/software related projects have landed so far. But lemmy.world seemed the better choice for random.
Does this seem relatively close to be how I should handle things in the lemmyverse?
Edit: It would be nice if there was a user setting to open external links in new tabs.
You’re doing perfectly!
I didn’t until I found Beehaw. I’m enjoying it now.
I wish you could block servers personally, though. Like some of the stuff that’s blocked here makes this place a lot better to be around. There’s less hate and reactionary fear mongering. Everything is more chill.
I can block individual people as well as individual communities on the jerboa app
Yeah this is why I changed instances as well.
Yeah, as of right now, the only thing users can do is individually block users or specific communities.
I’m glad that you’re enjoying your experience on Beehaw though! Even on the admin end there’s still not a lot of granular control, but hopefully, the explosion of users will help bring more attention to Lemmy’s development.
Yeah. In the end I think it’ll be beneficial, honestly, to put more control in the hands of the user. If you notice all of the problem people are coming from on place, blocking them all feels so counter-intuitive when you can just block the source. And every argument I hear against it is the same tired “free speech means you have to listen to me and give me a platform” thing you hear from just about everyone who has an opinion most people really don’t wanna listen to.
And they take over every new social media site until people find a way to filter them out. That’s why they fight so hard against said filters.
Things got much nicer in Mastodon when a user could migrate instances. The problem with all of Server A blocking all of Server B is it’s very difficult for a user on Server B to migrate.
I’m new here and have not met that drama yet. I joined a very small server to spread out the load and I doubt obscene cheese memes will get my instance defederated from the pack.
Who does Beehaw block? Is it a Trump thing again?
Oh, it blocks the genzedong reddit crowd (who are worse here because there are no admins to tell them to stop openly advocating genocide) and the alt-right skinhead types. They tend to come from a few specific instances. What’s left is a blend of progressives and socialists and anarchists and moderates that can generally talk about things without treating you like you should be put to the firing squad for not loving Stalin or Hitler.
You’ll come across it at some point and know immediately what I’m talking about.
First impression is very good. But many instances do not allow the creation of new communities. Which brings me to all the little specialized subreddits that I used daily on Reddit are not on Lemmy. :-( Yeah general ones like Movies is there but I need my fix for r/Dune! :D
The great thing about Lemmy though is that a community you interact with or even moderate doesn’t need to be on your instance. If you’re a member of Beehaw, which doesn’t allow community creation, you could start your Dune community on Lemmy.ml or another instance and moderate it with your Beehaw account.
That is true, but for most users that is a bit convoluted. Also you have several communities with the same subject name. What makes Reddit great is how many users are at a single specialized sub.
It’s ugly, difficult to understand, And the search function is fucked. All in all, it’s pretty crap and I miss reddit a great deal. That said, I’m never going back. I just wish lemmy was better.
the search function is fucked.
At least some things never change.
To be completely honest I don’t like it. It could be the app I’m using (Jerboa) but it’s just missing so many features. For example, comments are shown in seemingly random order with no way to sort
I’ve found using the mobile app way easier than Jerboa. I feel like Jerboa may become something nice, but it just isn’t there yet for me.
Jerboa is in Alpha so there is tons of features missing in it. You’ll want to use desktop for full functionality for now.
