I tried out Sync for Lemmy. Loved it, but I was not a fan of the tracking for ads and the price to get rid of that being $20. Anyone tried the free open source Lemmy apps? I used to use RedReader for Reddit, so I don't mind it being a bit worse than something like Sync.

Hi everyone, I'm quite new to working the cross-server world of the Fediverse. Is there a way to search the Fediverse in one place, instead of just my server / instance?

For example, being able to search for #cats in not just my Mastodon server / instance, but on the others as well? And if it can search Lemmy and others as well, that would be AMAZING.

I thought I'd share my own patterns as a writing prompt to hear yours.

• Tildes -- This keyboard-to-keyboard connection we have here is why I loved Reddit years ago. It's slow-brain (vs. fast-brain), considerate, insightful, enjoyable, and yet doesn't waste my time.
• Lemmy -- This has my hopes up that it could be a way to find niche communities (one of the strengths of Reddit) in the federated lemmyverse, but instances large and small seem overwhelmed by users who, like me, are still figuring it out. I joined https://lemmy.one/ but I have a feeling that https://lemmy.ml/ is slightly more my style. I might jump or not, but no big difference since the federated communities that I like are available in both places. This may just be me being nitpicky over instance quirks (such as an instance that does not have downvotes or currently allow community creation).
• Mastadon -- Too Twitter for me. I never got (understood) Twitter or its appeal, and I don't understand the appeal of Mastadon, either. I deleted one account that I created and may leave it altogether. If you like/liked Twitter, you'll likely like Mastadon.
• Reddit -- niche interests and citywide subreddits are still valuable to me, but even these were and are dropping in quality due to terse Reddit mobile users and meme-culture and my interest in them is dropping in correlation. I nearly exclusively only read /r/loseit (I'm maintaining -125 pounds lost for 8 years so far) and a multireddit of local subreddits in my local area. Since the Rexxit, I don't look at much else on Reddit.
• Facebook -- like the local and niche subreddits, I read Facebook on and off (mostly off) for these as well. The Facebook Marketplace is the way I find second-hand items locally.

I'm beginning to understand why I'm not practicing my music (Barbershop Harmony) as much as I should recently!

I was inspired to say this in a different conversation, but having said it, I want to say it more loudly/noticably.

A few, not many fellow newcomers to Tildes have made comments comparing it unfavorably to Lemmy/Kbin or Squabbles. We have options and there will likely be many more. To steal a good quote from a totalitarian dictator, Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.

Tildes vs Lemmy/Kbin or Squabbles reminds me of the disagreement between the Ents and the Entwives. Some people prefer gardens. Some people prefer the wilderness. Some like both. I am grateful that Deimos created this nifty site for me to play in.

http://www.tolkien.cro.net/talesong/ents.html
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/wiki/philosophy/index

I'll admit that I am a new user to Lemmy as a way to replace reddit in my free time, so a lot of my opinions will be relative to it. So far I've found it decent. I won't comment much on the UX or functionality, since I think it wouldn't be fair to criticize a fairly new platform in that way. I won't try to compare it to Tildes either, since I think they are very different in scope and purpose. I will say that the discussions in tildes are higher quality than both reddit and lemmy on average.

Overall the experience for me has been hit or miss. Joining a smaller server relevant to my interests was a good move. I joined SDF's instance and the people there are very friendly, and I enjoy the tech-forward posts. Throughout the fediverse as a whole, the discussions felt shorter and not as good as even reddit.

The posts and discussion on the larger instances to me felt a little immature. Generally I came across a lot of: (1) hyper-contrarians--it reminds me somewhat of linux/oss forums that skew younger. Lots of circlejerking the common themes/in-jokes/ideals of the free-software circles. (2) reddit-bad circlejerking (3) mediocre memes

I also came across a few very thoughtful discussions related to the fediverse regarding its place in the world, the sort of content that would do well, and the culture of its members. I'm very excited to watch the more niche communities grow. I'll admit that I miss reddit somewhat for music discovery and the smaller genre subs (although not enough to spend my time there again).

After a few months, I haven't felt compelled to visit reddit nor really Lemmy all that often, since I think both suffer from the same immaturity and hivemind thinking.

What do you all feel about Lemmy so far? Any good community recommendations? (Especially for music :) )

https://lifehacker.com/the-four-best-reddit-alternatives-1850562547

Tildes scores a mention:

Tildes

Tildes is another website trying to be the new Reddit. It’s still in an invite-only alpha stage, so you’ll need to ask somebody for an invite.

Tildes is not federated, so there’s only one place to sign up. And it has yet another name for its communities: They are, of course, tildes. (A tilde is the “~” character, and in the old old Internet, a lot of personal web pages had a tilde at the start of their names, a continuation of an even earlier tradition.) On Tildes.net, each tilde can have tags, so there is ~health and it contains the tag “fitness.”

How to sign up for Tildes: Find someone who has a tildes account, and ask for an invite.

This month, I have been exploring reddit alternatives due to the ongoing events currently going on the site. It resulted in me requesting to be invited to this site, but I also played around with Lemmy, Kbin, Beehaw, and other sites within the lemmy/mastodon network. The conclusion I have come to is that these federated sites shows a lot of potential into becoming something interesting if proper care is put into it by the community and the mods and admins. But as it is now, it is fundamentally broken, ill-equipped to handle the userbase it has inherited from the reddit fallout, and potentially dangerous if steps aren't taken to protect users and their communities.

The signature feature, greatest strength and biggest weakness of these sites all lie within the "fediverse" (which I hate the term. gives me "metaverse" vibes.) From how I understand it, There are several different instances of lemmy that acts as its own site, hosts it's own content and users, and can have its own rules, features, and restrictions. All the content of these instances can be featured on other instances, basically allowing you to see all the communities, users, and content within the fediverse without having to leave the instance you are on. The admins are also able to restict the content of other instances from being shown on their site, though how this works I don't completely understand, and I'll go into detail later.

Anyway, I figured all this out through a lot of trial and error. When I first tried to search for and join Lemmy, I ended up joining the Canadian instance by mistake, and my feed was mostly Canadian related news and communities. I eventually figured out there were several differences I could join. I ended up joining lemmy.world and kbin because they were the most popular, but I basically had to create sepperate accounts on each.

I started out spending most of my time on Kbin. I was mostly following gaming communities, hobby communities, a few tech communities, and the lgbtq community. one thing I noticed in the comments in some of the lgbtq posts were a lot of transphobic comments. Granted they were heavily downvoted, and there was a lot of pushback from the community members, but they were featured near or at the top of the comments, as if I were sorting by controversial on reddit.

I also noticed there were a lot of pro-Russian articles featured in the news, with the majority of the comments pushing Z-propaganda. Apparently a lot of these came from an instant called lemmygrad, which is a pro-China, pro-Russia instance of lemmy. To the fediverse's credit this particular instance is blocked by most other instances, but it didn't stop me from seeing many of these posts featured, or users from that instance commenting in other subs.

At this point I was starting to get a little skived out. It gave me the same vibes Voat gave me during the reddit migration of 2014. I decided to try lemmy. world instead, since it seemed a little more down to earth. Had a few of the same problems there, though I began to sort some of them out as I began to learn the site better. It was around this time when the news that Beehaw, one of the instances that hosted many of the lgbtq and other communities I followed basically unfederated lemmy.world and a few other popular instances due to harrassment from the instances. At this point I was getting fed up, but thought, maybe I'll stick it out, and just follow Beehaw and Lemmy. world separately. After joining beehaw, I posted some of my grievances on the chat community there. In the end, I ended up getting an inbox flooded with notifications, which I couldn't turn off, many of which were replies from the post ranging from supportive to accusational, to some harrassing DMs. This happened on beehaw, which was supposed to be one of the "safer" instances, but many of the replies came from off the instance, and even from instances defederated by beehaw. What's worse is I even posted one of the means spirited replies as an example, and many people accused me of making it up because they couldn't find the reply itself, which I guess you can or cannot see depending on the instance your on and WHO THE FUCK KNOWS AT THIS POINT!

I ended up deleting all my accounts on the fed instances I had accounts on, except for beehaw, because the interface would often keep infinitely loading. The gripes mentioned above aside, I would frequently have issues with the site breaking, up and downvotes not showing the proper numbers, replies disappearing into the ether, accidentally double posting, seeing infinite amounts of the same comment posted over and over again, infinite loading, and so one, no matter what instance I was on.

At this point I have given up on the fediverse. Maybe if all the bugs are ironed out, and the site(s) are better managed, maybe I might return to it. But as it is now there are just way to many fundamental flaws that get in the way of me getting any enjoyment out of it. And none of the communities ever felt like a replacement for the subreddits I left behind.

That all being said, I have enjoyed my time on Tildes so far, and I think it is due to the fact that it is a smaller and better managed site than anything on the fediverse. The discussions here feel a lot more down to earth, the communities safer. And hell even the disagreements actually worth engaging in. Granted, there are a lot of niche topics missing here because subs aren't community created, but it's nice being able to view a site, and not have to self filter half the site because anything and everything is overloading my feed.

Anyway, forgive me if this was hard to follow. I wrote this at 4am with not a lot of clear direction. Just wanted to get my thoughts on lemmy and the fediverse out there, and why I decided not to stick with it.

Some of the things I'm concerned about are browsing across unconnected instances - will I need twenty accounts to follow all of the groups? What is the likelihoood of an instance dissapearing? How do you gauge the culture of an instance? Is the https://redditmigration.com/ actually being populated by real admins of those subreddits? Are there any gotchas from joining an instance that I should be aware of? Thanks!