I found it complicated at first (didn’t know which instance “will last”, where to register to not lose anything when instance admin decide to turn it down), but now it’s going good. We are missing mobile apps though.

What’s are your thoughts about Lemmy/kbin?

  • @[email protected]
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    612 years ago

    I think having your account tied to an instance without an option to move is a huge issue. Now I’m still dependent on the instance owners rules and willingness/ability to keep it up. Just like reddit oranzy other centralized network. Accounts need to be movable including history and linkage to posts. Same goes for communities. We are just hyper fragmenting now. Communities need to.be able to span instances tobincrease performance and uptime as well as resiliency.

    Jerboa works fine for me. The overall experience and peoeple are nice enough. We just have technicalities to iron out.

    • @Protegee9850
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      242 years ago

      Wait can you not easily migrate on Lemmy?? I’m coming from Mastodon and just assumed that data portability was part and parcel of the fediverse. That’sa huge problem that needs to be remedied.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        Not yet, at least. I’ve seen a few posts about it and I agree it’s an important feature. I hope the devs are seriously considering to add it.

    • @[email protected]
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      62 years ago

      Is there any information on this being a planned feature? That would make a huge difference for me personally. I don’t mind losing my posts but I’d rather be able to keep them through a migration

    • @deafboy
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      32 years ago

      There is a younger project called Nostr, that came up as a twitter / mastodon replacement. It deals with user identities in better, more sustainable way. Thle client generates a keypair for you locally (you can back it up and use it to “log in” with any other client). Then you choose relay server (or even multiple relays) that will save and forward your posts to others.

      Most of the client software resembles twitter UI, but there are some with more *chan/reddit like look.

      Since the Nostr protocol is built primarily by people around bitcoin related projects, there is software ready for the relay operators to accept payments. Most of them are currently free, but thanks to bitcoin lightnong network, paying for a relay is pretty fast, and trustles.

      • @[email protected]
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        82 years ago

        That’s why i chose the opportunity now, early in, to “move” to an instance in Germany. I still have to rely on the instance owner, but at least juristidiction is that same as where i live and GDPR/DSGVO is something i can somewhat count on. But in the end, it also is the question where the server is. Is the instance hosted on a QNAP NAS in someones basement or on an AWS instance in the US. That’s my biggest gripe when everyone in the privacy community recommends federated stuff. The notion that some dude in Iowa or such is more trustworthy than some corporation is pretty questionable if you ask me.

          • @JoeKrogan
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            2 years ago

            lemmy.world is hosted in finland as far as I know and it is covered by gdpr. We know for a fact the corporations are datamining us, and you can see in your browser all of the third party requests and tracking code embedded in the html. I have had 0 blocks from lemmy.world hit my dns blocker. Nor anything blocked by the browser as there is no incentive and we would leave in a heartbeat if that were the case. Also it is a public forum so it comes with the usual don’t put out what you don’t want people to see. You point about the skillset of the admins is valid to properly secure it. Hopefully we can get some community whitehats to have a look at instances and the code itself

      • @[email protected]
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        42 years ago

        Don’t reuse passwords, 2fa email, etc.

        But really how different is trusting some guy with a server from trusting some corporation with a server farm?

          • @[email protected]
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            42 years ago

            I dunno. I trust corps about as far as I can throw them - they’re not human or sentient and they’ll happily ruin you if it increases their profits by more than the amount they’ll pay in fines.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    Honestly, Jerboa in alpha is already better than the official reddit app for me. It’s no TPA reddit app, but the number of contributors (in github) has risen by a lot so I’m expecting/hoping development will pick up and it’ll get better fast.

    I appreciate the community the most in here. They’ve been very welcoming and minimal, if any, toxicity.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        Just got started an hour ago and loving it so far, as a boost user I felt right at home.

    • @sorenant
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      52 years ago

      I still haven’t figured out how to look up a community on Jerboa… The desktop site works well enough, though a little slow.

      • @MrE
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        72 years ago

        You can search via the hamburger icon in the bottom left, to the right of the home/house.

        • @sorenant
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          42 years ago

          Found it, thanks!

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    honestly, once I wrapped my head around the idea of federation (which is very easy given I’ve been active in the P2P torrent field before- federation is but a simple extension of that concept) lemmy has pretty easy to use. It’s simple. The interface is clean and has what I want right in front. I search what I want, deal with a couple minor bugs, and then look at what I want to look at.

    My only biggest concern with Lemmy longterm is community fragmentation. As more instances spin up with the user influx, and Lemmy being (currently) limited in horizontal scaling of individual instances, we are going to have cases of tens, maybe even hundreds, of instances all ending up with identical, but separate, communities. Federation of a single instance’s community can only work so well, if we’re expecting users in the millions, and such fragmented communities that may or may not end up federating with one another can artificially make the service feel a lot less active than it really is and/or potentially lead to a lot of content being missed by some users.

    • Joris
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      142 years ago

      Good point, valid concern! I hope existing (real) communities (from existing subreddits or elsewhere) can have leaders pointing users to a specific Feddit community. What would be even more awesome, is if communities could be merged: that way we could ‘repair’ in a sense, fragmentation that happened naturally without losing the users and content that one of the communities already amassed.

    • @[email protected]
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      142 years ago

      If something like multi-reddit comes about in Lemmy, I believe it could solve that issue. Just make a multi-reddit of what is the same community (roughly) over multiple servers. It won’t solve the problem of duplicate posts though. But Reddit had the same issue at times, where multiple subreddits for the same topic existed, although generally it merged down into a single subreddit that was actually useful.

    • @[email protected]
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      52 years ago

      Ah - interesting point. So you’re saying scaling limitations could arise if a particular community (akin to a Reddit ‘sub’) gets big enough to outgrow one instance. I wonder if multi-instance federated communities will become a possibility.

    • @[email protected]
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      42 years ago

      Isn’t this partially intentional? If you don’t like the moderation or community or one instance, you can join a community with the same name on a different instance. I don’t know how it works out in practice, but this should reduce the power of moderators who hang around forever without actually moderating.

      • @null_
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        62 years ago

        There are benefits to it, but it naturally limits maximum community size since it will be a problem if any community significantly outscales the instance it is from. I don’t see an easy way around it, it likely needs a better hosting/funding solution for the servers that support the “big” communities.

  • @deafboy
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    322 years ago

    I expect a small boom of loudly announced instances, that will be essentially unmaintained, half of them will silently disappear while taking users identities with them in less than a year, and the rest spliting the federation in half by implementing ideological blacklists, some properly shutting down when the money runs out, or lawsuits and takedown notices starts to flood in.

    Let’s hope I’m wrong.

    • ScottyB
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      312 years ago

      Every party needs a pooper. That’s why we invited you.

      • @deafboy
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        42 years ago

        Glad to be here! :)

  • @[email protected]M
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    2 years ago

    Lots of people here with the opposite opinion of me, which is that I like the website and not the mobile apps, but overall yeah I’m pretty convinced this format is probably the best poised alternative to replace Reddit for a lot of people. Maybe not everybody, but I am willing to “settle” for quality over quantity ;)

    • @deadcyclo
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      82 years ago

      I agree. I too prefer the website as a progressive web app. Though I’m playing with the idea of making a cross platform app highly inspired by relay for reddit. But with my history of procrastination that probably never will get finished.

      • @[email protected]
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        52 years ago

        I’d love to see some of the existing Reddit client apps pivot over to Lemmy.

        I’m a long-time user of Reddit is Fun and would love to continue using it!

      • @[email protected]
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        42 years ago

        Same. Much easier to use the progressive web app, and it seems to function better than Mlem.

        Once the mobile apps are more mature I’ll probably switch over, but for now the progressive web app works best for me

    • @[email protected]
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      42 years ago

      I’ve just been using the browser or a progressive web app on mobile so far. Seems to work more or less okay.

    • spaceghoti
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      192 years ago

      I’m reading this through Jerboa right now. It’s clearly new and not as mature as RiF (that I prefer) but it’s an excellent start. This platform and community has a lot of potential.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 years ago

      I’ll have to try Jerboa at some point, but just the mobile site alone works quite well.

      I haven’t used Mastodon, but does account exporting allow you to move subscriptions and other account info from one instance to another?

  • BlinkerFluid
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    212 years ago

    Lemmy.ml needs to lose “default” status. I changed servers due to their load and inability to deal with it. They’re practically unusable right now.

      • Illecors
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        2 years ago

        They have, but they’re also incredibly slow at adding new instances to that list. I’ve been waiting for lemmy.cafe to be added for a few days now. In the meantime more and more instances are getting overloaded.

  • @[email protected]
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    212 years ago

    I’ve been using the Jerboa android app today, it works pretty well. It reminds me of reddit mobile apps 10+ years ago, which isn’t a bad thing.

    I’m excited to see how it turns out though and what fediverse/social platform will end up being the most popular.

    • @[email protected]
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      52 years ago

      Same just wish there’s a way to jump to a person’s reply when viewing the reply in the messages area

      • @[email protected]
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        12 years ago

        Agreed, that would be a nice enhancement. I’m actually not sure if the desktop/web app has this feature. Unless I’m doing it wrong, it just takes me to the overall post instead of the specific thread or context.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          If you’re on the latest version (0.0.34), you’re able to do it by clicking the little link button between the downvote and mark as read.

          I think the F-Droid and Google Play versions are on version 0.0.33 for some reason, probably so they can get verified or something.

          GitHub and IzzyOnDroid have the latest version.

  • @[email protected]
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    202 years ago

    I am very happy to see people trying to use federated apps, it’s a movement back to the old days of internet, when communities and real people make things, not big corporate companies with ad based model bulding sites to collect massive amounts of data.

  • @MasterBlaster
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    192 years ago

    Jerboa is a good and rapidly improving android app for Lemmy.

    • @[email protected]
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      182 years ago

      It’s tough to find new communities on Jerboa, though. It doesn’t seem to have the capability to search for them. I keep having to go to the browser to do that.

      • @[email protected]
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        62 years ago

        I noticed that too. I ended up just subscribing in the browser, so that I can access it via the app. However, I do like the app. It loads images in a way better format/UI than the browser does, IMO at least.

        • @[email protected]
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          22 years ago

          Oh ya, other than that, I’ve actually been very pleased with Jerboa, once I lowered the font size a bit and put it in list view to condense things more into an RIF - like view.

      • @MasterBlaster
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        42 years ago

        This is true, though it is being updated rapidly. I expect it won’t be that long before you can. What I really would like to see is a way to consolidate duplicate communities.

        One problem with Federated systems is that he end up having to do design by committee, which takes a long time and sometimes requires compromises that in the end make things worse.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          I think something like multireddit would fix that. I’m not sure if that’s something that can be implemented from the app or browser level or is related to Lemmy and Activity Pub, but that would be great. I used that function a lot to create dashboards of associated subreddits.

      • @andMoonsValue
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        42 years ago

        Try using -

        https://browse.feddit.de/

        I used it to find all the instances I’m in and have found it really helpful in switching to Lemmy. Something built into the app would be nice though.

    • Confused Llama
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      22 years ago

      I wish it supported older Android versions. I really miss Infinity :(

  • @[email protected]
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    192 years ago

    I don’t care about what instance will last too much. I’m not that active contributor so if my comments/topics will disappear the world will not end. I always can create a new account on another server.

    I chose Lemmy for now because Kbin seems to be not mature enough. I don’t like some background of Lemmy devs that I was reading about, but I’m still not sure what make of it… Does it matter much? I support freedom of speech, and from my perspective people can have opinions very different from mine and still provide great value for community.

    I’m currently exploring available communities and subscribing to stuff that I was subscribed on Reddit. Considering creating some communities too, but not sure how that works yet and how much involvement it will need.

    Regarding software - using Jerboa. Overall very usable, but there are some UI issues that are irritating.

    • @[email protected]
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      62 years ago

      I don’t like some background of Lemmy devs that I was reading about, but I’m still not sure what make of it…

      @[email protected] – out of interest, what have you read? 👀

      • @[email protected]
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        62 years ago

        Lemmy developers have communist figures as avatars. They manage the lemmy.ml instance, which other instances tend to defederate.

        That should not prevent people from using a platform they don’t manage (Lemmy.world or Beehaw) and they can’t influence in anyway. The code is open source anyway.

      • @[email protected]
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        62 years ago

        Yup, that what other person replied. There was a post on r/privacy which I cannot look up today due to the boycott - it was about Lemmy developers being very radical communists.

        The software being open source makes this less concerning, but in case original devs start doing something crazy it will damage the project significantly.

  • sandblast
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    182 years ago

    Everything is great so far. The frontpage content is mostly tutorials for lemmy at the moment, which makes sense. It’s quite buggy but it’s still relatively new. People here are more friendly, more community oriented, and just generally more enjoyable to speak to. I just don’t like the idea of defederation. If a user wants to access another instance just let them.

    • BrainisfineIthink
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      112 years ago

      People here are more friendly, more community oriented, and just generally more enjoyable to speak to

      This is my biggest take away so far - been here about a week now. I know many ex-redditors probably didn’t use the platform long enough to remember this, but this is how Reddit used to be. I remember when you’d log in and there would be little/no movement in the top posts, it wasn’t the non-stop content it is now. The flip side to that is you could jump in the comments and have fun, amicable discussions with internet strangers. It wasn’t the constant bickering/non-stop arguments or copy/pasted bot fests you get today. Comments would spark entire sub-comment discussions with multiple users going back and forth like a real conversation. It was lovely!

        • BrainisfineIthink
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          22 years ago

          Yeah you are! I’m just getting the hang of this fediverse thing, but Mastadon still completely baffles me. I’ve never used Twitter at all, so the fact that there’s like a non-twitter Twitter that does non-twitter things but also twitters kind of breaks my brain, and I can’t have that because I JUST picked this username.

  • @DoakSteezy
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    162 years ago

    I like the idea and general functionality, my biggest concern is what happens if the owner of Lemmy.world gets hit by a bus? Eventually you’d lose your account, all your subs, etc. Same goes for any other instance really. It’s pretty much my only reservation at this point.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      Yeah I’d like to see a mechanism to move subs and accounts between instances at will. If that also includes the ability to merge subs it’ll fix 90% of the things everyone is worried about.

      There is an open issue for adding a mechanism to move instances, people should go vote for it

      https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3057

      • @[email protected]
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        42 years ago

        I don’t think merging subs is necessary, I would like to see a user based grouping function. That way you can add duplicate communities to one group and see them all while maintaining the benefits of decentralization (primarily redundancy whether through server issues or power hungry mods). Plus it would allow you to group any type of communites you see fit (gaming for multiple gaming subs, sports for multiple teams you follow, etc) without forcing it onto others

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          This would be especially great if apps like Jerboa allowed automating the grouping process (opt in by user maybe). Some sort of maintained lists of equivalent communities across instances, so the app can easily allow you to subscribe to one community or, in a more Reddity way, a federated set of communities with one tap.

      • @DoakSteezy
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        22 years ago

        Thanks for linking that issue, I’ve voted on it.

  • @[email protected]
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    152 years ago

    I’m in the same boat as you. Now that I’ve spent a day on Lemmy & Kbin I feel much better about using both sites and it’s been a fun experience learning something new.

    I personally am treating them as betas so I’m willing to forgive them not being as smooth experiences to browse as I’m used to on Reddit. Also because of this, I’m hesitant at this stage to suggest them to a lot of my friends until more kinks are sorted out.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      Actually, I think there is a a dedicated instance for the kinks and other NSFW communities lol