To follow-up on the Reddit thread yesterday, here are a few elements that can be interesting to discuss.

Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy

Just quoting “Lemmy” or pointing to join-lemmy.org can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance. Recent post by a new joiner 9 days ago, they had to change server 2 times to get a satisfying experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536.

Using something like

"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users

Feel free if you have any questions"

Can already point them in one direction, and avoid them getting lost in the too many options.

If people want to debate the choice of those two instances, I’ll add my thought process in the comments.

The Lemmy feed looks as depressing as Reddit’s All, and how to mitigate that

Some feedback I received when promoting Lemmy the way above

Just checked out lemmy to see if it’s different from reddit. Im very disappointed lmao.

First post I see is a comic about cultural appropriation with an ifunny watermark. Next are several posts about the proton vpn ceo “going full maga.” And finally a post I saw on Reddit days ago that is ragebait making fun of the cybertruck.

Yikes. It’s the same exact thing.

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Lemmy still has a pretty obnoxious tankie problem. Even if you block the .ml instance, pretty much every thread about US politics or world news on any major instance gets hijacked by the same handful of trolls and their associated vote bots. Hopefully this will become less of a problem as more sane people join, but just as a word of caution, be aware that you will be called western imperialist scum by a bunch of 14 year olds.

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Lemmy is utter rubbish, it’s as if their entire userbase consists of the top layer of scum carefully siphoned off from the Reddit cesspool. It got the worst of the annoying political echo chamber and “very smart” argumentative users from Reddit.

I just clicked on half a dozen random Lemmy servers, and all of them had at least one link about Trump in the top 5 posts. Even ones that seem like they’re supposed to be about tech.

Normal humans want the Reddit of 10+ years ago back. We don’t want to use a different site colonized by the same modern day Redditors we loathe interacting with.

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To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong. Open https://discuss.online/ , by default you’ll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.

What I try to do in such instances is to give something like

"While politics are important, you can still very much block them. Here are an example of some communities that can interest you:

I also wrote a long post about that issue that you can read here https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/

As a side note, I recently started a discussion on !fedigrow@lemm.ee about a potential political-free instance for new joiners, feel free to have a look: https://feddit.org/post/6819084

Lemmy is too small, 42k monthly active users is nothing

Discuit, the centralized alternative to Reddit, currently counts 181 weekly active commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/NlAdOWAp

You can also mention that NodeBB is now federating with Lemmy:

That’s all for now, happy to discuss in the comments.

Note: if you’re not interested in promoting Lemmy, feel free to hide this post, you are able to do this on specific posts if your instance is running 0.19.4 and newer

  • OpenStarsEnglish
    3·
    5 hours ago

    There is just an absolute ton of nuances involved.

    SOME types of Federation issues is due not to the local instance but rather Lemmy.World and overall lack of distribution of users and communities across the Fediverse (some of which is better now than the past, but not nearly enough).

    Other types involve the instance, and in turn its hardware and even more so its number and skill of admin support. Like if you have to wait several days for a manual sign-up procedure (people say quokk.au was this way, at least sometimes) then you may have already moved on elsewhere.

    Some of the issues have greatly improved - like I switched from Kbin.social to Star Trek.Website and for super frustrated with how often I would try to do something - like vote or comment - and so switched to discuss.online, which I have been exceedingly happy with. The thing is, Star Trek.Website’s technical issues got WAY better (still not perfect) in the past year, and also I still have had issues with discuss.online - again, most often I would guess that Lemmy.World’s lack of updates to the latest Lemmy software was to blame for that (even though I understand that there are a whole bunch of reasons for the delay).

    Yet people also report that Lemmy.World itself can be quite slow to access from some parts in the world like Australia and the USA. I don’t know how much that has to do with method of access like an app vs. the web UI, and even then, would an alternate front end app like https://photon.lemmy.world/ further affect the speed?

    A simple score isn’t going to come close to describing any of this. But if it would, uptime % might come the closest? Especially in conjunction with other factors like avoiding recommendation of an instance that has only a single admin.

    Discuss.online is tried and true, and I unreservedly recommend it. Anyone who likes can make an alt or two and see tor themselves how good the experience is in comparison between them. Also the admin is quite responsive, both in reacting to requests and remaining on the ball proactively before even being asked - see e.g. the pinned post on that instance.