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.
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.
Check the GitHub! It’s linked at the bottom of the web page (“Code”)
I’ve also found this to be true with Julia devs
Source: am Julia dev
Weirdly enough the fact that it’s written in rust is why I am using it instead of kbin (PHP)
PHP!? They’re writing the shiny new thing in the joke language from r/ProgrammerHumor?
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)
What makes rust so special?
God damn! Okay now I’m fully behind it
Fast because it’s pointer-based like 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”.
Is there anything with no garbage collection that doesn’t work with pointers? If the compiler is handling all the memory allocation for you it might as well just collect garbage, so I figured they were kind of synonymous.
Since we’re now going into details, Rust is neat because they figured out a way to keep track of the memory safety of pointers at compile time. That’s hard to do, which is why it’s a new language and not the old standard.
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.
There’s a bit of a groundswell, where I’ve seen young devs try to push an organisation that they’re working in towards Rust. This is usually a terrible mistake because it means you’ll be forcing all the other devs to maintain your Rust code.
While I lean more towards Go, I have found that any Rust project that actually reaches maturity tends to be amazingly well built.
It might be a side-effect of Rustaceans on average being good programmers, or maybe the language itself just lends itself to robust, high performance software. Who knows.
I haven’t been here much longer. It’s been really cool seeing all of the communities pop up as users flood in.
A year ago, I viewed the Fediverse as an unnecessary, complicated framework created by a handful of well-intentioned individuals as a solution to a problem that wasn’t really there.
Today, I view it as a necessity.
This past year has been a hard lesson for me to stop placing trust in massive, centralized web services like Twitter and Reddit and to start federating more of my online activity. There’s going to be growing pains, but Lemmy has been pretty good so far and it’s definitely going to be worth it in the end.
Yep, same. For that reason I never really managed to get into mastodon, tried it for a bit and found the signup system too convoluted, then dropped it altogether. Though granted, I also never used Twitter, never understood why people liked it (and still don’t), so I tried mastodon out of curiosity, not actually looking for something.
With Lemmy it’s all different. I feel like I need to leave reddit and find a new community, so there’s an inherent desire to like it, which makes the adaptation way easier.
Yeah, I also made a Mastodon account during that big Twitter exodus a few months back, and admittedly haven’t used it that much either for the same reasons. I just never really have that many unprompted/creative things to say, which is kinda the primary use case for the Twitter/Mastodon genre of social media.
Reddit/Lemmy on the other hand is way more about the discussion, which is both way more interesting to consume as media and also way easier for me to get involved in.
For wide spread adoption there are a lot of issues with the fediverse. The main one is the home pages of fediverse instances or join-X.org sites immediately turn people away with their language, jargon and content. Nobody cares about the open source licence, or how it’s “federated” or what the developers can do, or that you can run your own server or what languages and frameworks it’s built on etc. These all will turn people away. Literally the first sentence on join-lemmy is “Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform”. Nobody wants to self host anything (well I do, but near to 100% of people don’t). Then there are screen shots of code diff’s and actual code, then a list of programming languages, then some Latin with hard to see ‘mod tools’, and then at the end back to self hosting “With Lemmy, you can easily host your own server, and all these servers are federated”. None of this is enticing people in. It’s turning people away.
These entrances to the fediverse should be about community, discussions, engagement etc. That’s what people want to sign up for and start participating. Just get them signed up. Once they’re in they can learn about the other benefits and that they can move the profile to different servers, or whathaveyou. Keep all the other bumf hidden away behind a “benefits” link.
Someone needs to come up with better terminology to fediverse and federated to avoid having to explain it all the time. It’s federated… You know… Like email. Well I’ve used email a long time and nobody has ever called it federated or used that term before when talking about any aspect of email - and I run my own email server.
Tl:dr: just cut the crap and make on-boarding easier. Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.
In general, it works pretty nice, but there are some limitations.
The biggest one for me is discoverability. The federation means that there is more fragmentation and it’s harder to find the right community for something.
For example, there are country/city communities for my country/city on multiple instances. And since it’s hard to find the “correct” one, it fragments out much harder than Reddit did. Combine that with generally lower attendance numbers and you get really tiny communities.
This is not aided by Jerboa, which doesn’t open internal links internally. So if someone posts a link to a community and I press it, it instead tries to open it with my email app.
The idea is outstanding. The parts of the UI that work are great. There’s much work to be done, especially with regard to subscription and discovery. The whole “copy/paste this into your server’s search bar” thing is… not great.
It feels like the start of something new, you know? Sort of exciting because coming from Reddit to Lemmy feels like taking a leap of faith as we are looking for this place to replace what we have lost. At the end of the day, communities are what make or break a platform and we have that going.
In terms of the platform itself, I am still trying to figure my way around here but the UI/UX feels easy to interact with. I guess I would love to have a mobile app for iOS down the line to replace my addiction to Apollo!
The apps need some work, but overall it’s “okay.” The rest of my gripes lie entirely around the lack of content, which can’t be helped
Just remember: Only You can prevent dead communities!
it can be helped!
I am on it for AI and GPT things, bringing over our content and will be posting more, going to setup bots to keep it flowing too!
I hate when threads automatically update, scrolling content down my browser.
I hate that when I hit back on my web browser, it doesn’t bring me back to where I was previously on the page. I have to scroll down all over again.
Lack of content or small communities don’t bother me. It just means more people need to contribute, myself included.
I love the concept of decentralization. Feels more like the internet of old.
I tried the fediverse with Mastodon to replace Twitter, but it didn’t work out. On Twitter, I was exclusively following accounts of personalities/organizations. As these accounts did not make the switch from Twitter to Mastodon, there was little use.
I feel like the fediverse works way better with content aggregation. I don’t really care who specifically is on Lemmy, as long as there is content and discussion. So far it’s been really nice.
The community, particularly Beehaw, is fantastic! I love it.
Lemmy itself needs a lot of work. It’s incredibly far behind, but my expectations are staying measured and I’m excited to see how it develops. Right now it’s not a case of me enjoying the platform itself, but more so ‘putting up’ with the limitations of the platform to access the nice community.
Jerboa is the mobile client I’m using currently, and it’s off to a good start but needs a lot of fixes to be fully usable. Such as sorting comments and searching. The ability to easily click a button to jump to the next comment thread is my most missed feature as well from clients such as Boost for Reddit.
Additionally, I still have issues signing into the mobile website. I can sign in through Jerboa or the Beehaw website on desktop, but not on mobile (or at least not always). So I’m often navigating content on the mobile website, then using Jerboa to comment on it. Most won’t deal with these issues, but I’m still holding out to see what comes from it all.
A couple of last side notes, it’s really annoying to need to click on the title, and not being able to click on the text of a post to navigate (mobile site) - and visually it needs some improvements to draw more people in. That last part seems minor, and for a large part of the existing community, myself included, it truly is minor - but for widespread adoption it needs a big revamp.
I’m enjoying it so far. I like that it’s not a direct one-for-one clone of reddit (not that it was intended to be). It feels like a combination of older reddit (> 10 years ago, when it wasn’t as active) and old school forums (like how older posts will bump if there’s activity). It makes me want to be more active vs being a lurker.
I have no intention of going back to reddit. I’ve already deleted RIF from my phone. The 3PA thing was the last straw for me, but I felt like reddit had been going downhill for a while and I think I had been looking for an excuse to fuck off but couldn’t quit cold turkey. Whatever good intentions that company might’ve started with, they’re just a greedy corporation now. They haven’t cared about their users for a while (which is interesting because their users are what create their content. Reddit itself doesn’t create anything).
I’m confused, but I’ve got the spirit. Reddit was confusing at first too, given I joined before it was mainstream popular. I figured it out, I’ll figure this out too. Looking forward to a restart and seeing this grow.
It desperately needs a compact, efficient UI similar to old.reddit’s design philosophy. Otherwise its not bad. The auto-refreshing front page is very frustrating to use. I want to click on an article, and between when I move the cursor and click, new articles have refreshed and the link I clicked was the wrong one
The UX is kinda rough around the edges, but it’s filling my scroll addiction while reddit takes a steaming dump on everyone.
