this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Technology

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A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

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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.

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[–] dvlsg@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Enjoying it, but wondering if I'm missing a way to work backwards to find communities.

I'll give an example - Sleep Token, a band I like, released an album not too long ago. If I Google "reddit sleep token", I can see a few communities like /r/metalcore and /r/progmetal discussing them, so I can guess I might want to join those communities.

If I Google for "lemmy sleep token", I get a bunch of random websites with articles about sleep token with links and quotes about motorhead.

Whats the strategy for working backwards like that on Lemmy? Is there one?

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[–] main_water@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like it and was able to adapt easily, but some of the UI is terrible (and I mean this in a constructive way), specifically:

  • Page weight is too high, when I use back/forward or switch tabs on mobile my browser has to do a full refresh. Tildes and kbin are very lightweight by comparison, not sure what the JS code of Lemmy/Beehaw are doing to cause this issue.
  • Adding new subs is confusing, but mostly because the “Subscribe” button is hidden by default when you visit a community on another instance.
  • The process of subscribing is convoluted You 1. visit an instance, 2. find a community, 3. copy the url,4. go back to your community, 5. past it, 6. open the search link in your instance, then 7. click subscribe and wait a little. It feels like that can be streamlined or something.
  • Loading “All” is slow, I understand why, but the UI should do something to explain it to me instead of popping in posts.

But, the discussion seems good, the actual UI is reminiscent of old reddit so I’m happy, and I’m surprised how easy it is to discuss things across instances.

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[–] sikhness@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's shaping up to be a very cool platform and I hope with time it gets bigger than Reddit. I find the UX to be a bit clunky and not visually appealing at the moment and also the way communities work are a little confusing. Because of federation, you can have duplicate community groups and that can make content a bit segregated.

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[–] Woozy@lemmy.fmhy.ml 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I'm very impressed. It just needs more 3rd party apps!

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[–] araly@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago

so far it's really nice, it's what I liked in reddit and before that forums, without being what reddit became.

the fediverse is hard though, but it kinda makes sense. I'll see if I get more used to it

[–] eleanorOpossum@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago

I like pretty well. I've been on reddit for over a decade now, and the UI on Lemmy is kinda like a combination of the good parts of old and new reddit to me.

People here are nice (maybe that's because my home instance is Beehaw...); and I like the small community.

[–] solarizde@feddit.de 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Still very new here and most problems I have is with filtering. No matter if Main page or in a post.

If you subscribed to a bunch of feeds it gets quickly very confusing to find things. You can choose top day or active, which is to long timeframe I would like to see some more customized preferences here like "Active but new 8h" or something.

Also big downside is that lemmy seems not take into account the strenght of single subs. So if I subscribe a big one like Technology my mainpage in active will 95% now only be this. It would be nice if the Active Filter also takes a bit diverse results into account and not only showing the most active sub.

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[–] Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 year ago (5 children)

coming along well, will take a while for users to spread out and not just mass on one large server, we need to spread out to keep this working and viable for the future.

To do that however, we need better ways to find communities on other instances, and more easily link to them with links that work on each users instance URLs. at the moment if I do !technology@beehaw.org or !technology@lemmy.ml those will take you off your current instance unless you are already on it, losing your login. The average user wont expect that and might not even notice they are on a totally different website and wonder why their logins don't work.

Apparently all of this as well as aggregated topic subscriptions (so you don't need to find and subscribe to 10 different communities for one topic) are being worked on, that will be very cool.

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[–] sprightlycompanion@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago

I still don't quite understand how it works, instances and all that.. but I'll figure it out, and I'm here for the cause.

[–] DEXSIC@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I personally think that this framework is better than what reddit currently has.

For example, a single instance dedicated to programming with its own various communities within it is a lot easier to manage and moderate than having all those communities (aka, subreddits) on the main reddit page itself. The fact that all these individual instances can interact with other instances (or not, if desired) makes this more robust. The fear a lot of people have right now with reddit is that the reddit staff will just kick out all the mods of the popular subreddits, instill mods that will obey them, and essentially perform a corporate overtake of all those individual communities. That doesn't seem like it would be a problem with lemmy.

I am excited to see how this all plays out long term.

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[–] Faydaikin@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago

I'm also testing out jerboa atm. And it's a bit rough around the edges, but gets the job done well enough. Still haven't explored too much of the Lemmyverse, but looking forward to digging in a bit deeper.

[–] mintiefresh@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So far pretty good. I like the idea of the fediverse, but I'm not sure if it will catch on.

Also, I hope some of the UI/UX stuff get ironed and are sharpened. I also miss old reddit.

But overall, it works and I am happy.

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[–] notexecutive@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I like it - I just want a few Reddit-ish features:

  1. Hiding reply chains for scrolling cleanliness in comments of a post
  2. Hiding posts on the main page should be easy to do (buttons unclear)
  3. Dedicated copy link button - so it's clear I'm copying the link to the page that is being spoken about in a post, rather than a link to the comments of the post itself.
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[–] iamliterallysatan@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I like it so far. However, I do have some questions.

  1. How do we handle "dupe" communities?
  2. What's the best way to find new communities?
  3. How are cross-posts handled across servers?
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[–] Nerdlinger@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As with other things in the fediverse, discoverability is pretty ass. It's a bit easier on Lemmy to find something you're looking for than it is, say, to find interesting people to follow on mastodon, but it's still not great. And often, you'll find multiple communities on the same topic and you have to try to figure out which one looks like it will be better down the road (communities are still pretty dead and empty, so you can't tell now which might be better). In addition to that, the interfaces for interacting with Lemmy are pretty rough at the moment, though that's not surprising.

So do I like it? Enh… I'd say it's a 4/10 right now with promise of getting better. Will it? Who knows?

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[–] bitseek@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

First impression is very good. But many instances do not allow the creation of new communities. Which brings me to all the little specialized subreddits that I used daily on Reddit are not on Lemmy. :-( Yeah general ones like Movies is there but I need my fix for r/Dune! :D

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[–] kalipike@lemmy.one 8 points 1 year ago

Overall it's pretty good! With more development on Jerboa and better backend performance and an influx of people, I think it'll be fantastic. I'm pretty pleased thus far!

[–] kemo@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

UX wise its okay, content wise, we are getting there. I am also happy its written in Rust, I am keen to contribute to the project in the future.

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[–] envio@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is my first post, so hello everyone! I do like a fresh start every now and again but it's a shame it's happened in these circumstances. As for lemmy, I'm enjoying it so far. I'm just learning about how it all hooks together. I really like the decentralised concept. In a way, Reddit doing what it's done may have been the catalyst to give this new framework what it needs to succeed. The UI is similar but feels cleaner than Reddit (which I found extremely sluggish). So far, so good!

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[–] Mewio@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I'd like to see more color settings. The default colors do not have enough contrast and are hard to read in some cases like the blue on gray.

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[–] s900mhz@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I love it so much that I started contributing to the project on GitHub

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[–] nowami@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What I'm really impressed by is being able to follow Lemmy communities from within Mastodon... e.g. by searching @technology@beehaw.org I can see threads and posts without leaving my Mastodon app of choice (Tusky). It's amazing how it just works.

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[–] yopla@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's interesting but I still think the federated universe still has too many quirks to be understandable by most people. To be honest, I haven't bothered documenting myself so I might say stupid things but I can't understand why identity is tied to a server, it seems like a terrible design mistake when it's obviously the first thing i'd want to decentralise. In short, I'm me, it shouldn't matter that I'm on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server. Huge mistake imho.

Then the content obviously needs a lot more contributors but many of the good reddit contributors where also mostly tech illiterate and I'm still worried that the high complexity to enter the fediverse will put off many people and keep it a fun, but somewhat boring, little niche.

[–] wiredfire@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Your ID doesn’t need to be tied to any given server. You can move around and change your “home” server at will. Or if preferred you could stand up your own server for your usage, hold your identify on there, and still engage with the rest of Lemmy / fediverse.

It’s less a design mistake and more a technical constraint. A users identify exists as, at a minimum, a database entry. That database needs to live somewhere that the various fediverse servers can talk to. But you have complete freedom in where that database entry is, and can change your mind later.

So it already doesn’t matter if you’re on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server - they all federate with each other (to varying degrees but that’s a slightly different conversation)

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[–] realitista@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The main thing I miss is being able to have things disappear from my front page after I press like or dislike on them.

[–] mxh@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Under settings, you can uncheck ”Show read posts”, hopefully it will help

[–] BrokenToshy@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

I know it's in its infancy but the great thing about Reddit was I could search any niche topic and guarantee there was a subreddit setup for it.

Obviously this is solved by more and more people using Lemmy but I personally can't see Lemmy appealing to the the masses. Depending how active the communities become I can see me using Lemmy going forward but I don't think it will be the "One site for everything" that Reddit has become but rather 1 of many sites I check going forward instead

[–] Gecko@feddit.de 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Compared to old.reddit + RES there's still some space for improvement in terms of UX for lemmy but overall, not too bad :P

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[–] carter@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It'll take a miracle for Lemmy to get anywhere near Reddit's active user count. Convincing users to migrate to a new platform is one thing, but getting them used to the concept of federation is the tricky part. I remember when I first signed up for Matrix, and being confused when picking the domain, authentication rules, etc. for the first time.

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[–] Gary@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago

It's great to see decentralization in action to foster a thriving community, not just to make/gamble money.

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