& I’m doing pretty good! The wefwef app has done a great job of recreating the Apollo experience and has made it a lot easier to not want to go and download the Reddit app. The more active it gets here, the easier it’ll be. How are you guys doing so far? Have you found an App for Lemmy that you prefer the most yet?
As a new user, I’m finding it weird how everything seems so fragmented. Why join a […subreddit] (what are they called here?) on one channel/server rather than another? Surely it just breaks up the user base and makes it harder to have everyone in one place.
Also, I find it weird how everything is on different servers from a user point of view - where do I make my account? I made mine on Lemmy.world, but what if I should be somewhere else?
The apps help slightly, but there’s still confusion with local/all and seeing the server everything is hosted on.
I feel like it’s a difficult sell to the more casual user and will make it much harder to have Lemmy as a true successor to Reddit.
There needs to be a way to obfuscate this information to a casual user and have an account in one place, with ‘subreddits’ in one place, so Lemmy is just Lemmy and you only learn more about the infrastructure if you want to.
Not trying to sound trite, but you’ll get used to it fast. I’ve been here since the day the protests started and haven’t been back to Reddit since. Watching this community grow by leaps and bounds over 3 weeks has been amazing and wonderful.
Don’t worry about which instance you’re on, it’s largely unimportant except in extreme cases (such as the nazi edge lord instance that just got defederated from the lemmy.world instance).
Spend a few minutes going through the communities list and subscribe to everything that interests you even a little bit. Bam, there’s your front page. Now sit back and enjoy higher quality discussions and content than that other place has had in a while. And it gets better every day.
You’re not wrong, but as someone who has mostly adapted to the fediverse in the last 2 weeks after 15 years on Reddit, I remember a time when reddit was considered too complicated for the “casual” user. Lemmy is in its infancy right now and I think if one is the kind of person who is an early adopter, it will be very appealing to be in the first stages of the journey. I found my early years on Reddit to be much more rewarding and filled with joy than my later years because it felt more niche and close-knit in a way.
Also, subreddits are called communities here and you should join as many as are of interest! Just like a user could create multiple competing subreddits (looking at you /r/meirl, /r/me_irl, /r/2meirl4meirl), the good ones will take off and others may die off, or might just add additional content to the pool, which is a good thing.
This is the right answer. As long as your instance is federated, you can see all communities via All. Sub to all of them you want, and they all get shared between federated instances. Some will naturally grow and others will die, so don’t worry too much about duplication at first. It’s going to happen.
Instead try ADDING content. Don’t lurk. Engage and have actual conversations with people, even if you disagree. The hive mind here is much less ingrained, so the community is more open and accepting of all points of view. Enjoy it while it lasts!
I think that eventually there will be primary communities that get settled for major topics.
I don’t think we’re using Lemmy correctly right now, and there’s a shift in mindset that needs to happen before Lemmy really becomes great. People need to realize that smaller instances built around specific topics will be better than massive ones trying to span every topic.
It is not much different than having multiple subreddits on same topic which is extremely common. Eventually one of the multiple communites will become the biggest and New users will go to that without much confusion. However Lemmy has added benefit of having those different communities on same topic hosted by different people. So if one host starts doing things users disagree they can just move to another without much hussle
Instructions for casuals…
Yeah, personally I simply joined a small, more niche instance for my more niche interests, and then just browse through bigger instances when I want to see the general discussions.