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!
The worst part of the experience is actually figuring out how to make an acount
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.
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.
People are much friendlier here, so far.
Echoing many things that other users are saying already:
Signing up/choosing a home instance is confusing. I don’t think it’s very confusing conceptually, but it is confusing from a UX/UI perspective. Subscribing to outside communities was the toughest part, I had to find them through a different instance using a search engine, then manually paste the community-specific URL into my home instance search, wait several seconds, then click into the community home page and finally click “subscribe.”
Not something a casual user is going to want or even figure out to do. I trust that many of these growing pains will be fixed in the coming weeks/months. I just hope that it’s not all a flash in the pan and then fizzles out totally.
Once using it though, I like the general feel of it. Better themes and some cleaner UI choices and it will be really nice imo. People are friendly so far and that’s worth a ton right there.
New user and reddit refugee here! The instance system isn’t as straightforward as something like reddit where all of the content exists in the same place, but once I understood how the system works (via the first few posts I saw after opening the Jerboa mobile app for the first time) I got signed up on an instance that ISN’T lemmy.ml and I’ve just began surfing in earnest! Thanks to the community that’s made this possible!
The app is good considering its in the early version. Have only been testing out for a few hours. The whole instance and server thing is still bit confusing regarding how it handles the post and comments in one server over to a user coming from snother instance. Any place to search for communities?
Honestly, pretty good.
The webapp Is only fine on desktop. On Android I’m having to use Jerboa which works and does its job but still has an extremely outdated and unpolished user experience
So far, I find it’s pretty good. I couldn’t find a client for Emacs so I may create one.
Quick answer, it rocks 👍. Things work differently obviously, but nothing’s especially confusing or awkward. Everything I’ve done in the short time I’ve been here has worked fine. The speed and UI polish show minor problems in places, but it’s to be expected. As far as I can tell it’s 100% usable right away as a realistic reddit replacement, which is pretty outstanding IMO.
I think my experience can be best summed up by:
404: FetchError: invalid json response body at http://lemmy:8536/api/v3/site
Jokes aside, the web portal is pretty great. Jerboa seems… like it needs some polish.
I’m still a little confused but it’s sinking in. The difference between an instance and a “sub”, as well as how to join or interact with other “subs” without having to join each individual instance, was the part that was toughest to adapt to. I love it, though. Lemmy is giving me the feeling Reddit did when I first joined it a long, long time ago on my first ever account. It feels organic.
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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Yup! I personally don’t really care how many upvotes/downvotes/ratio I have, or karma or whatever. I just post based on my interests and ask questions/make posts that reflect what I want to know/am interested in.
Just joined Lemmy, logged out of my reddit account last night. I’m done with reddit, they’ve fucked around for too long. 13 years on that site for them to absolutely fuck us.
I’m very much enjoying it here though, I can lurk (while still upvoting to ensure I participate), I can get a lot of the same stuff here. Less commentary, but that’ll change as this place grows. Unless reddit cedes and spez fucks off, I doubt I’ll go back. Thanks for accepting me Lemmy, y’all are dope.
