To those who started using Lemmy recently, what are your impressions so far on its content and discussions?
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 :) )
I'm waiting to form an opinion on it. It's a bit of a mess right now and full of posts like this one and others comparing it to Reddit. I'll see what it's like once the dust settles a bit, but I already love Tildes and will be sticking around here for sure.
I've been checking kbin for some time and my impressions are the same. On top recently it started pushing more and more German magazines from lemmy to me which ended up with me playing whack-a-mole with "unsubbing" from one every day.
Alas, I don't think it's a problem that is going to end because every day I check, I see a new magazine that is completely unrelated to the ones that I've subscribed to. This could also start being a problem with adding more subjects here. I've been here since 2018 and I only unsubbed to a handful once and it was a done deal ever since. If we keep adding more tildes to peoples' home feeds, I can see that being also annoying like kbin is doing. Thankfully so far things looking good and haven't had that problem.
To go back to to the community subject, let's be honest, most of the new magazines created will be around joking around due to human nature. That we just love joking around, even if it is at the cost of keeping the flow of the important question. Because of this, I have no clue how the websites in question are going to work. And If there is a way to stop new magazines from invading my feed, why is it so hard for me to find them?
I am definitely planning on sticking around Tildes for the more long form discussion. I do have a lot of hope for Lemmy when it comes to getting into broader and more niche areas, though. It has growing to do, but there's a lot of value in being able to establish those topical communities (such as getting in to the weeds on specific hobbies or video games) where Tildes is less of a fit. This Reddit exodus might end up being the kick in the butt it needed to really get eyes on it and start getting that growth going.
The main issue I have with it currently is that it’s trying to ramp up content and users to make it more like Reddit. But by doing so it’s inviting all the low effort content (memes, images, reposts) that just make it a chore to look at.
I like tildes as the content is good at a cost of frequency. What I miss most about Reddit is it being a one stop place for my news and information.
The only thing I'd like more from Tildes is to have that niche community feeling that subreddits had, minus the circlejerks of course. It was nice to ask a question about a video game that came out 30 years ago and have 3 replies within a day, and I'm hoping for more engagement about sports without it devolving into what the sports subreddits became eg: r/nba is mostly commenting on tweets and gossiping about players like the sport is a soap opera for dudes.
But I love the caliber of discourse we see here. There will be an interesting balancing act as Tildes continues to grow.
This is my sentiment as well. I have used RIF for some 10 years. I've never had Instagram, Twitter, etc. 99% of my Reddit use is on the phone. It has been my one stop shop for online connectedness for a decade. Whether it was world news, national headlines, my local city's circlejerk subreddit, game announcements, tour announcements for bands I follow, or anything else, it was how I stayed up to date with the information I wanted (and lots I didn't want).
I'm sure I'll slowly find ways to fill some of those niches, or just end up checking Reddit on my computer periodically for video game news/band announcements.
I am testing out News Minimalist as a way to stay up to date with big headlines, so that I'm not completely oblivious to headlines.
The rest.. I'll figure out with time. It is odd to change a decades worth of habits, but on the other hand it was never smart for me to depend on one thing so much to begin with!
I have really liked using News Minimalist so far. It’s given me exactly what I need to keep abreast of the latest while also, weirdly, not making me as anxious as I usually feel when I’m reading or watching the news. I’m also trying out the “Boring” app which takes clickbait headlines and converts them into something more readable.
I tried making an account, it made me fill in a questionnaire to apply, I had to answer genius questions like "why do you want to register".
I researched and found out there are a bunch of instances and if you can't make an account with one, you should try another. I tried a second instance. It also asked me to fill a questionnaire. I tried a third instance. It also asked me to fill a questionnaire. I tried a forth instance. It also asked me to fill a questionnaire. The fifth instance finally let me register. But when I tried to login afterwards, the loading wheel would spin and nothing would happen.
When complaining on reddit about it the next day, another user finally gave me an instance where I successfully registered.
Then finding content I was interested in was struggle. If I open the instance I just see a bunch of administrative stuff, the admins announcing things and so on. Why they'd fill the front page with this is beyond me. The equivalent of "all" was just people bitching about reddit non-stop. I tried to subscribe to a community but I couldn't find a way. When I tried logging in it wouldn't let me. Apparently the claim that it doesn't matter which instance you register with is a lie. You can't login to another instance and you can only see/interact with their posts if the admin of your instance let them.
I spent way too much effort into this and still couldn't get it to work, I'm pretty sure you'd lose most of people with all that complexity. Lemmy is 0/10 for me. I hope somebody makes a well-moderated centralized alternative to reddit. Tildes is great for serious discussion, but sometimes I want to just giggle at a meme or see cute cat pictures.
I've been enjoying squabbles.io for that lately. I tried lemmy first, but it's become increasingly a nightmare for all the reasons you described, and on average, the quality of the content there isn't nearly enough to make up for the hassle (at least outside of a few niche instances/communities imo, like startrek.website is still pretty solid). But anyway, squabbles gives me a lot of the same feelings as reddit, except much smaller/newer of course and without nearly as much of the toxicity (at least not yet -- hopefully that doesn't come with growth). It's a nice place for casual scrolling, and I'm already starting to see a few cool niche squabbles communities popping up that are scratching some specific itches that tildes (by its more open and generalist nature) doesn't quite manage by design. Tildes is still definitely my favourite of the two, but squabbles has become a nice counterpart imo.
I feel that segmenting those two use cases into two separate sites is better for everyone, as well.
Having a massive "grocery store outlet" for everything versus boutique stores for niche foods; you might want fun candy one day but you want a smoked meats and beer cheese another. The grocery store will have a little of everything, but lack depth. The dedicated store will meet your needs and have a depth to discover.
Tildes is offering my beloved death of text-based consumption and, you're right, squabbles appears to be a great place for the memes.
I briefly tried squabbles, and both the mobile site and the one android app have a ui that I can't make nearly compact enough for my taste. I might give it a second look if that ever changes.
I think this is my greatest hesitation to believing in anything related to the fediverse, like Lemmy and even bigger tickets like Mastodon.
There are far too many technical rules and nuances and details constantly applying to your experience. You're not just needing to learn a new app format and a new paradigm of community relations, but also an entire new suite of visibility rules and connection rules and....
It's something that only power users will really get, and that's never going to scale to the common population.
My anecdotal support of this is that I was recently on a Zoom call (a thing we have been doing for years now) for product managers (a 'smart' white collar job), and when asked to post in chat where we were individually from.... someone still managed to put their state into the Q&A tab. Which is a completely separate button.
I used then left Lemmy a couple years ago and tried peeling through a couple instances recently. They still seem pretty sparse. I think Lemmy has a better shot at being software for a new community rather than trying to be a Subreddit destination. Kind of like the PHPBB of today. Tildes is its own community, with its own culture and its own moderation, and its strength lies in that.
I signed up for kbin and it's okay but I'm not sure if it's the right fit for me. Apart from Tildes the only reddit alternative I can see myself using long term is Squabble.io. And that's mostly because it has a lot of the meme/shitposting that's missing from tildes.
Don't get me wrong, I've always loved this community's focus on higher level discussion but sometimes I just want to browse some memes or watch a bunch of gifs. So I consider squabbles to be a compliment to tildes. Between the two sites the reddit shaped hole in my digital life is now filled.
It feels very similar to Reddit to me, though I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing. It's just as full of memes and shitposting.
Personally a nice side effect of the Reddit and Twitter collapses is that it's prompted me to seek out better sources of news and entertainment. I spend more time on sites like lobste.rs/tildes/mastodon which all seem to have a much higher "signal to noise" ratio.
I was looking into it but for some reason my little mind finds the whole thing scattered and incomprehensible. Also other comments here mention the memes and shitposting and frankly I'm over those.
I subscribed to Beehaw right away after it provided its reasoning to prune a few major instances.
It's a pretty chill community that I like; being on the major federation, as a whole, is too open to the wild west of the internet, something I grew out of years ago. Without proper guard rails, we already know where the bottom of the barrel is regarding content thanks to the -chan sites, among others.
I am also glad I found tildes, since I am a huge fan of text-only content.
That's certainly one thing that put me off about reddit more and more as time went on. I don't want to watch videos and only sometimes want to see pictures. We are probably in the minority but I prefer reading comments and discussions.
I appreciate the thoughtful commentary on this site and hope that it grows and matures without too much trouble.
I am not sure what these federated instances are overall even though I did sign up for a couple. I just don't think that those sites are for me at this point in my life.
I am strongly considering just returning to reading hard copy books especially when I travel instead of relying on internet sites.
Imagine if Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit were all connected. The same content appeared on all of them. That network is the so-called "Fediverse." Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit are instances.
You can create an account on kbin, Lemmy, Beehaw, etc. In fact it goes deeper than that; the main kbin instance is kbin.social. There's also kbin.run, kbin.cafe, kbin.chat, kbin.tech, kbin.ai, kbin.dk, kbin.place, and on and on.... All of them are federated through ActivityPub, meaning they're all interconnected even across platforms. You see the same content on kbin that someone else sees on Lemmy. Each instance can also choose to defederate or cut off any other instance.
It's a mess, frankly. It wasn't ready for the flood of reddit refugees last month, and the whole deal is going through some growing pains right now. In the two weeks I was on kbin, it became a completely new place multiple times. I liked the atmosphere when I joined, and currently I find it insufferable. Hopefully it matures.
Lemmy reminds me a lot of the stuff I came to dislike about Reddit.
The memes, the circular jokes etc.
The fact that there are so many fediverses and is confusing to navigate put me off.
I'm not sure how it'll evolve, but compared to Tildes, I'll take Tildes any day.
Maybe i'm just stupid but i can't make it work for me
I don't know how to find new communities, i don't know if the communities i find are THE main community, i don't know what beehaw is and why it being de-federalized matters, if i'm subscribed on a lemmy istance for some reason i can't login into another instance even tho the website looks exactly the same, but i know that i'm not supposed to make multiple accounts so i don't know what's going on, etc etc...
And even then, the community jumped straight to karma farming (or bluevote farming, i don't know what they call upvotes on lemmy) and started posting low effort memes with broad appeal to get as many fake internet points they could.
No thanks, i'll chill out here for a bit and when things settle down i might give lemmy a second shot
From a cursory (logged out tbf) view, Lemmy seems to have attracted the more shitpost-y meme-y part of Reddit, while kbin seems to have attracted the discussion oriented parts (although it's less "active" and feels a bit under-moderated compared to Lemmy). The fact that they can talk to each other means you still have the ability to get both under one account (and of course handle the exceptions to this shaky rule of thumb), but if I do make an account and start not-lurking it'll probably be on a kbin instance.
Yes I signed up on Kbin and it seems decent enough for now although I prefer this site.
I'm not super fond of it.
But that's probably also because I don't understand what lemmy is supposed to be.
I'll check it out again in a 6-ish months and maybe then I'll get it
I gave kbin another chance, and I've actually started getting into it, to the point to where it's taken over what little reddit time I had left. Yes there are some quirks and bugs that I do hope get solved eventually, but even despite the smaller communities and the unpolished nature of the site, I've been able to engage with it pretty well.
That being said, I worry about Meta's attempts to federate with the rest of the fediverse, and how that might affect the community as a whole. At the very least I have Tildes if things go pear shaped on kbin.
So, I'm kind of curious, in your use of reddit, did you use new reddit or old reddit? Do/did you ever use RES at all?
When people talk about reddit and comparing it to other forums/communities, I always wonder which reddit they are talking about.
Me I typically use old reddit and usually use RES with it. New reddit is too broken and takes too many clicks to get to the meat of any posts or discussion. Lemmy has its warts and drawbacks, but it's a simple enough interface I think it has some near term future potential. It won't be a drop in replacement for reddit, but it can scratch some of the same itch for many.
I've been using it for a little while and I like it so far, but it's not quite there yet, there's many bugs and it could go for some QoL improvements, depending on your instance you could also run into server-side performance issues, so it's important to choose your instance wisely.
The lack of decent apps is a detriment in my opinion as well, but there are many being developed right now and that might change in then near future. Regarding the communities, they're fine, slower than Reddit to be sure but the content, especially for news in my case, is serviceable (definitely better than Tildes' constant influx of dO yOu LiKe XyZ tHiNg??? threads spamming the ask tag 🤮) and the overall userbase seems more well-behaved for now than Reddit's, there's not much trolling or flaming from what I've seen.
Overall, I like it and I think if it keeps going full steam ahead and growing it could become a decent reddit alternative for the more tech literate people.
It's been... Okay. I've used it for about a week.
I think if I devoted some time to learn it it'd be perfectly fine.
I don't have the level of familiarity with lemmy I had with reddit (knowing which subs I like and were active and stuff) yet so it naturally feels a bit sparser content wise as I don't currently know where I want to be on it.
The quality of the comments is better here on Tildes, and about 50% of the posts seems to be about Reddit. My impression is that people are generally nicer to eachother - at least on Beehaw - than the hostility that have plagued Reddit in recent years. I don't post much but do check in from time to time to see how it develops.
It’s probably closest to the feel of what I’d like to see in a post-Reddit landscape, though content is a bit light now. I’d seen some people complain about right-wing/bigoted speech on there, but I’ve yet to see anything like that myself, it’s mostly memes and people just talking about the shift from Reddit, which I wish we could all just move away from and talk about something else. Literally anything else. Secret Invasion sucks. Global climate change. Ukraine. UFO sightings. 4th of July fireworks scaring dogs. Anything else, really.
If you want to read about 4th of July fireworks upsetting old shut-ins with animals, Nextdoor is a goldmine.
Our Condo Assoc is so bad with communication, Nextdoor is actually the only place I can go to find out about what's actually going on in our neighborhood sometimes. It's nice in that respect, but there are plenty of people making petty complaints about strangers walking down the street too, so it's a mixed bag.
I like Lemmy. It's fun watching it evolve in real time. I registered on lemmy.one and programming.dev. I was using Jerboa until it stopped working (won't let me log in). When some more apps come out an old the software continues to mature, I will have very little to complain about.
People seem to like https://wefwef.app/ as an alternative to a native app. I'm using liftoff from the play store for the time being.
Having used Lemmy since the start of the blackout, I would basically describe it as a promising, but rough around the edges, work in progress. Unlike many here, I didn't really find it difficult to sign up or use it, which isn't to say that technical issues weren't a semi-regular occurrence. This may have something to do with the fact that I signed up on a somewhat smaller instance.
My 2 biggest complaints right now is that there aren't yet many niche communities that are active, and that if anything the culture there is a little too much like reddit for my liking. I suppose that was kind of the point though, so I can't complain too much.
I've basically been going back and forth between the various Android clients and so far I like Jerboa and Summit the best, but I have yet to fall in love with any of them. Hoping that something closer to rif eventually comes along.
Personally so far I've found it to be mostly "okay". Once I wrapped my head around how the federation stuff works I was able to find some communities I enjoy. I'm patiently waiting for the sync app to come and when it does I'll probably get more invested.
A big problem I've had though is that, while I only ever lurked, I enjoyed a lot of more niche communities on reddit that just haven't migrated so for now I'm still using redreader (the only 3rd party app that was given an exemption to my knowledge) and old.reddit to lurk in those places. If those ever go I'll be totally off reddit because theres no way I'm using they're default app or website, but hopefully by then lemmy has been more fleshed out.
Honestly tildes has been my favorite alternative so far, enough that it's gotten me out of my lurking habits and actually engaging.