I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
People are much friendlier here, so far.
It feels like my experience on Mastodon after Twitter imploded. Hopefully it lasts.
I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:
- The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I’m aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that’s less than ideal)
- The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I’m aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it’s vital to the success of Lemmy.
The first point is CRUCIAL for setting up your own “scrolling page/account” for, since the instances are only very vague directions, at least while the site is still growing. And in a similiar vein, the second point with B) would be better than manually blocking communities I genuinely have no interest whatsoever in, like fountain pens (unless I don’t know how to operate this site yet).
In fact, C) feels unnecessary because of that right now, since I already see many new communities just in my instance alone. Though it WOULD add things to browse since there isn’t as much happening here, yet…
I like the concept
But it feels very much like its been designed by nerdy developers and has had little to no-input on user friendly design.The federated idea can work but it needs to be more seemless than this.
- Communities with the same name should be merged when viewing it from any instance, so you can see all the posts from these communities, they can be moderated seperatley and for advanced users you should be able to select which communities make up the merged community.
- By default you should see all of the merged communities in a central place and be able to subscribe to them easily, at the moment its handled different per instance but you have to seek out these communities to subscribe or follow them.
- I strongly believe there should be a centralised log-in system, so you can log into any instance with an account from another instance, this means if your instance goes down your account is centralised and is safe.
Regarding point three: I want to be able to migrate my profile to another instance if my current instance has performance issues or admins going rogue.
Very confused… I have a direct link to a Linux community and can’t figure out how to open it, or join it, or whatever I’m supposed to do with it in Jerboa. Discovery seems severely limited.
Jerboa search only finds communities that at least 1 person on your instance subscribed to, to find new communities from other instances easily I like to use https://browse.feddit.de/
Then when you find a community, go to the web version of your instance (don’t worry it’s (mostly) mobile friendly) and type !name@instan.ce (don’t forget the !) Then you can subscribe there. Close and reopen Jerboa and your new community will show up in the list. The Jerboa devs are working on fixing this.
Thank you.
New thing I don’t like: I could not reply to you from my inbox. I had to go back to this thread, start from the top, find my own comment again, and then respond to you. The button in my inbox that looked like a reply button just marked the message as read instead.
Also I just found the search, the icon looks nothing like a search icon.
Look 2 buttons to the right of the impostor button, the box with dots in it.
Oh, I see it now. My brain must have seen the one chat bubble and ignored all others. Surely that would make more sense to be a bell icon or something.
Or an eye or something, yeah. I had the same problem until I got used to it.
It’s not bad, but there are a couple of issues that concern me. One is that communities are fractured - that is, that communities about the same topics exist on different instances and don’t connect with each other.
So I’m subscribed to a Books community on one instance, but that doesn’t mean I’ll see any of the posts on the same topic on other instances unless I subscribe to each of them. The total community of users on Lemmy who are interested in books are split up into small groups on different instances.
That’s very limiting.
Of course there’s also the issue of the relatively small user base overall. For some purposes a small community may be preferable, but for many others you really need a large user base. Looking for gamers for a face to face tabletop RPG, for example. Without a large user base, the odds of finding people within a reasonable real world distance of you is virtually nil.
I’m new and could be wildly wrong, but it seems like an improved UI could consolidate multiple communities into one “this is my feed” so you can participate in all of them. If one dies, you don’t lose everything.
Yeah, if a community is a “magazine” on here it’d be really nice to collate a number of magazines I’m interested in into a “rack” similar to a multireddit.
@StrictMachine Dunno if it would even be possible, but it would be cool to be able to somehow be able to categorize each instance/magazine with a limited amount of tags - like each book- or literature-related instance could have a “Book” or “Literature” tag that would basically add it to a view of every single instance with the tag in it, so users could look up tags versus looking up specific instances.
I like that it’s still so small. None of this karma farming just diluting from high quality content and conversations
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One question I still have is how quickly posts and comments propagate across the Fediverse. How can I be sure the comment I’m writing actually shows up across other instances, and how long after I write it does it take on average to show up other places?
For instance, when I look at the list of comments on this thread sorted by both Hot and New, directly on Lemmy.ml versus on my home instance of Lemmy.pt, I don’t see the same set of comments. Not all of the ones from Lemmy.ml appear to have made it over to my instance. Is there some sort of eventual consistency mechanism in the system?
Wait, what comments do you see?
D—Do you see my comment?
No, nothing to be seen unfortunately.
The app I’m using (Jerboa) is a bit lacking, but I’m sure it’ll improve. I’m unsure about how accounts work with the servers, can I migrate my account if the server I am using shuts down? Communities are tiny and a lot are missing, but I’m sure those will grow and fill in as more people join.
