I really want to like lemmy, but it’s difficult. I’m new to all this fediverse thingy, and I might just have old habits and perceptions how things should work but… I keep seeing the same posts more than once, iOS experience is not that good really, sometimes I see dead posts from 2 years ago for some reason, despite having subscribed to like 30 communities there aren’t that many new posts to read.

Part of it probably that subreddits had millions of people so a lot of posts every minute, but it still feels underwhelming.

It’s not as doomscrolly. Maybe I should find something else to waste my time on haha

What is your experience with lemmy? Maybe I just do things wrong. Let me know

  • dogmuffins@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example.

    I agree, to an extent. You’re right in that if you were part of the vibrant community of /r/piracy then it’s miserable to see it shatter here on lemmy. That said, this only applies if you’re expecting lemmy to be a 1 for 1 reddit replacement. For this type of community to remain cohesive, /r/piracy would have had to spin up their own instance and in /r/piracy direct everyone to lemmy.piracyinstance.whatever.

    You can’t really “fix” this in a central way because even if you did, it would be trivial to create an instance that would allow duplicate community names. Also, I can see a lot of use cases for lemmy which do not intend to be federated.

    That said, it’s not necessarily as big a problem as it appears, if you just accept that this is how the fediverse works. There’s no single source of control, so of course people can create 147 different /c/piracy communities if they wish to. Once you accept that, then it’s not really that difficult to subscribe to all the /c/piracy communities you can find.

    The problem itself could be diminished by a few new features which I feel certain will emerge in the future:

    • linked communities, where one communities content is syndicated to another. So if you post in !selfhosted@lemmy.world then you also post in !selfhosted@lemmy.ml. This would work differently to cross-posting, all comments would be reflected on both instances.
    • grouped communities, where you can subscribe to a group of /c/selfhosted communities with one click, so you see them all in your feed.
    • citizenpremier@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I think that makes a lot of sense. Reddit was also like that, I moderate /r/me_irl, rival of /r/meirl. But now you can also use the same names if you want.

      What about usernames though? Are they universal throughout Lemmy?

      • dogmuffins@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Usernames are only universal in the same way an email address is. Any instance can have an @citizenpremier but only you can be @citizenpremier@lemmy.ml.

        I don’t mean to be a douche about it but you’re still thinking about it in a very corporate-social kind of way. For something to be universal it requires a central point of control, which doesn’t exist in the fediverse.