I’m curious to get your thoughts on Lemmy. What is your impression so far? Are you enjoying it? What would you like to see different?
If you’re using Lemdit, then I’m really interested to get your feedback on what your experience is like. Is there anything we can improve? Any other suggestions or ideas?
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I realize I’m way late to the party, but I’ve just signed up earlier today and I’ve only now been able to browse lemmy (again).
lemmy
I think it’s great. While there are other reddit alternatives, I think I’m sticking with the decentralized stuff moving forward. I’ve always hated being powerless at the whims of corporate greed. The Fediverse may not be much, but it’s a step in the direction I’ve always supported.
I’ve also read the recent AMA of the devs, and I have to say I agree with a lot of their answers.
With that said, there are still lots of growing pains. My home instance, for example, was recently caught by a bug wherein our posts and comments wouldn’t federate (iirc it was a time stamp thing). It’s nothing major as the owner was able to immediately fix it, but that’s one of the things I’m looking forward to be improved on.
I wanted to have an instance - a 2nd home, if you will - that’s closer to me geographically. I realize lemmy will still have issues like I’ve mentioned earlier, so it seemed prudent to have 2 home instances. I don’t really like the larger ones since I do believe spreading out is the way to go, so I found lemdit.
I hope it’s okay that I’m not in your country, though…
Still, I like what I’m seeing so far. I just saw the post about lemmyworld vs hexbear, and I 101% agree with the comments there. I don’t want to get political, but I agree echo chambers aren’t really that helpful and we should have open minds about things (provided they’re legal, of course). Also read the
instance rules/descriptionlemdit ethos and I can say I’m more than okay with it. It seems femdit is also pretty stable (there was a hiccup that I saw but it’s reasonable), so I think I’ll be staying if you guys will have me. :)Hey, welcome to Lemdit!
I agree that there are still many growing pains that Lemmy has to overcome. As you say, the Fediverse may not be much yet, but at least it’s heading in the right direction.
Wanting to have a back-up instance makes sense. I’m glad you chose Lemdit and that you like what you see. You are more than welcome here, irrespective of where you’re from.
Enjoy!
I’ll probably be using lemdit as much as my other instance, tbh. I won’t call it a back up. :)
What made you start lemdit, if it’s okay to ask? Sorry, I’m just always curious. Lol. I understand you’re doing it alone and I know it can be quite a handful.
I don’t mind at all.
I love the idea of self-hosted services in general. It’s a fun hobby and hosting things that other people find useful makes me feel like I’m giving something back. Privacy is also something that is important to me on principle.
Before Lemmy I used to host a few public alternative front-ends for major platforms, such as Invidious for YouTube, Nitter for Twitter, or Libreddit for Reddit, etc. I’ve never been a massive Reddit user, in fact I never had a registered account, but I used Libreddit quite a bit. The changes Reddit was making to its API were also going to kill Libreddit, which is how I became aware of it.
Reddit was not alone in their crackdown either. YouTube recently threatened the devs of Invidious with legal action, Nitter is being chipped away at by Musk’s changes (but somehow keeps getting resurrected), etc. Alternative front-ends, while a very ingenious way to evade the dystopian tracking on these platforms, are a losing battle unfortunately. Federated services have the promise of something new entirely.
So I looked into Lemmy and it appeals to me a lot more than Mastodon ever did. I think it’s a format that works well as a federated platform (growing pains notwithstanding). So I decided to ditch my alternative privacy front ends and go all in on making the Fediverse work for everyone, in whatever small way I can.
So that’s how Lemdit was born. I already had the servers, the fast connectivity and the know-how, so it felt like the right thing to do.
My investment into Lemdit is mostly my time and effort, it otherwise doesn’t cost me very much to run. This makes Lemdit fairly sustainable, since I’m not fighting an ever increasing hosting bill every month like most other instances that host via VPS - this post explains more about our setup if you’re curious: https://lemdit.com/post/13
I honestly lol’d at the title. I’ll be sure to check the link.
But seriously, thank you for starting the instance and specially for being very open and transparent. I appreciate that you took the time to answer.
I’ve said this to my previous instance owner and I mean it - please do ask help/assistance if anything gets to be too much. Personally, I’d be glad to help out in any way I can.
Best of luck! And I hope this instance grows. It’d be great to be a part of it.
Edit: wow. That’s a pretty powerful potato!
No worries, and thank you for the offer to help, I will keep it in mind.
Thanks! I’m not advertising Lemdit at all, only those that discover it on their own stay and I like that, I think it mostly attracts quality people. Lemdit will never be a large instance, I think ~1k people is probably its workable ceiling before other problems start to emerge (admin related rather than hardware), but we’ll see what the future holds. We’re a long way from that right now.
Yes the potato is… a well grown one :)
I think it’s a bit weird to copy paste a link in order to subscribe to a community… Luckily I found a browser plugin that mitigates that. It’s the little details and usability improvements and performance optimizations that need to happen for Lemmy to really take off imo. As for Limdit, I like the theme, otherwise don’t have an opinion yet.
I completely agree, that bit is unintuitive and confuses everyone at first. What plugin are you using? It may be worth me linking to it somewhere for other to see if they don’t already know about it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-instance-assistant/ Is what I’ve been using.
I think it has been a great experience so far; I joined Lemmy.world after seeing it mentioned in comments on Reddit and after signing up, stopped all my usage of Reddit even before the API changes went into effect.
It took some work to find communities and block all the repost bots, as I think the bots just create spam without any user engagement.
I think some of the biggest improvements Lemmy can do now is:
- to fix the sorting algorithms. For example so that Hot is not bringing up 3 year old posts that got one or two comments, and instead highlights current content that users are engaging on
- maturity of mobile applications. Memmy and Mlem have seen rapid development and are becoming great apps already, but need some refining that will come with time and user feedback
Ah yes those blasted repost bots, I have yet to meet someone that values them! I agree that sorting still has a long way to go, it’s still quite rudimentary.
Have you tried Voyager? I think lemmy/world has their own instance: https://m.lemmy.world/
We do too: https://m.lemdit.com/
Voyager is still in early development too, but maybe you like it better.
Said it elsewhere, but I’m really impressed with both Lemdit and Voyager so far. Amazing work!
I found and appreciated the Lemdit settings for enabling endless scrolling and auto-load more. I think there was also a setting on (old?) Reddit to open a new tab when clicking on comments. Think we could maybe get that as well?
Hey, welcome to Lemdit!
Thanks for your feedback, I’m happy to hear you’re enjoying it so far!
I can’t take credit for the software itself as I’m just hosting it, but that’s a great suggestion and pretty easy to implement, I’ll submit a feature request for it.
Less low-effort memes and more discussion on community topics would improve the platform IMO
Agreed! As an instance admin, it also feels a bit wasteful that my server will now have to store GBs of reposted memes into perpertuity, but not everything will always be worth the disk space it’s stored on I guess.
It’s nice being able to reply to something or post something and an automod doesn’t remove my post on r/pics for posting a picture if you understand what I’m saying.
Reddits moderation rules were insanely tight. lots more leeway to act natural here and not overthink stuff.
Indeed, sane moderation is refreshing.
