I honestly do not mind it one but. I quite like the interface. It’s minimal but there are some bugs to it which is to be expected. I really do like the overall design of it though. There isn’t too much going on. It’s like old Reddit which I am a big fan of
I really hate this. I used Reddit for 13 years as a news aggregator/internet 2.0. I don’t understand how this whole Lemmy/Kbin instance thing works, I just want to find the primary
subredditssigh, Communities for the things I’m interested in and have them aggregate the content… but now there’s all these separate ‘instances’ each with their ownsubreddits, and they’re all empty and I don’t know which ones to join to get content from…the communities tab gives you the option to click all and at the top the most active and populated communities of the entire network will appear.
To be fair, I get what they’re saying. It’s awkward to find and subscribe to communities. I can find them on the web UI, but I can’t seem to sub to them, I can’t really find them on the mobile app, but I can sub to them if I happen upon them.
Other than that awkwardness, I like it.
To sub to them on the web UI, you have to search for them on whatever instance you’re logged into (using !community@instance syntax), click into the community, and then hit subscribe from there. It took me a bit and some googling to figure out. Also there may be some instances that aren’t connected to each other or something. I don’t quite understand that part yet.
You can only sub to them from your home instance. So you have to go to the communities section of your instance then search for a community, click on it from there, go to the sidebar and subscribe.
Thanks, I do get that part of it, but the whole ‘Multiple websites’ thing really throws me off. Like, until I started looking into this thing, I didn’t even know you could have anything but a .com, .net or .org website ending, and here’s .world and 1000 other ones. I just want one large site, preferably a .com, with a centralized collection of pages and content, like… well, honestly like Reddit did.
Plus, there’s just no content here (or anywhere) because it’s all on Reddit. I know that if I just wait long enough, the content will fill in, but like… how long will that take? And people won’t just all move from Reddit to Lemmy, some will stick with Reddit, some will start their own competing sites, some will goto Kbin or whatever the others are, meaning a total loss of the collective knowledge that was aggregated into Reddit. It’s so sad to see the collective consciousness and critical mass of the internet being blown into the wind, I feel significantly lesser without having it around.
I’m not a creator, or even really a poster. I just want to consume the content, not have to work at creating it or maintaining it or anything.
This is the problem, you came too early. You’ll have to engage a bit more in conversation and carrying over things from Reddit. Think of it as an investment.
The beauty of Fediverse is that all these Lemmy and Kbin sites can talk to each other and you can participate in any of these Lemmy or Kbin instances by only signing into one, while with a centralized monolith platform like Reddit you are at the mercy of a single corporation which means they can pull the bullshit they are pulling right now. They feel empowered to do that because all of the useful information is in a single website. Fediverse solves that but it does add a little bit of complexity.
This instance is already becoming very big so feel free to participate only here, but you’re welcome to try other interesting communities in other instances without having to abandon yours. Go to the Communities tab and then click the All filter.
Lemmy as a whole is already reaching or upwards of 10000 people, that is a sizable critical mass to begin posting stuff. The power is in the hands of users here.
The semi-decentralised nature is part of the point of the service, you can join a small, local server and still subscribe to communities on larger instances and it (in theory) all syncs up and works.
multiple servers spreads the load, heck, you can host your own lemmy instance on your own hardware and still seamlessly communicate with large ones like lemmy.world once it synchronises.
Downside (apart from the inevitable shutdown of smaller servers without admins willing to put the time and money in leading to lost accounts) is that communities aren’t automatically fetched, so sometimes you need to paste the url into your instances search bar to get it to sync to your sever, then you can subscribe. I picked a medium size server on the other side of the world because I had no friggin idea what I was doing but now my feed is full of content from all of the big servers.
I think the slow and steady development from the last few years will now speed up a lot as more and more people use the service and find new limitations, new features, fixes and optimisations will come.
So far, it’s handled the massive influx of users very well.
aggregation feeds from multiple instances are a feature being looked at for the future.
For now, you’ve got to find them and subscribe to as much as possible, sometimes a community on another instance will need to be fetched (usually by pasting the URL into the search bar) before it will actually appear for you to subscribe to.
That’s a huge barrier to entry for most people, myself included. I don’t have time, or the interest, in subbing to multiple versions of the same community and figure out which one is the best one.
I honestly have no idea what is even meant by ‘having to fetch an instance’? If I can’t find it in the search already, how do I even know it exists, nevermind knowing what the url is to paste? Surely there is a list of all the instances and communities that have been created in Lemmy, so why isn’t that just used by the search?
I’m honestly not trying to be combative, I’m just really confused about all this, and I really don’t know if I even have the bandwidth to learn it at this point. I might just have to stick to Reddit because learning all this new shit is too stressful for me and it’s very frustrating for me.
It will get easier as the network grows, but for now it’s a bit of a mess.
lemmy.world that you are on is pretty good at fetching as it is a large, fast server with a lot of traffic, but you still might see someone try to link you do a small niche community, hosted on someones homelab garage server and if you try to get there using a link like https://lemmy.world/c/nichecommunity@pentium3server.butts it might give you a 404 because it hasn’t “federated” with you yet. if you paste that full URL into the search bar, or the !nichecommunity@buttsbuttsbutss it will kick the server into pulling the data for that and it will then show up but it’s all still a bit jank at the moment.
Thats the major downside at the moment, it is already getting better as more users from other instances joining other groups, forcing the servers to be more in sync.
I’m glad to hear this! I’m assuming it’ll be something similar to multi-reddits?