Question; cuz I’ve been using Memmy too, and I haven’t had a chance to read into it much. I don’t have the ability to upvote/downvote/reply to individual comments in the app. I’m not sure if it’s a bug on my end or if he just hasn’t had a chance to implement those features yet. Do you have that same issue with it?
That’s true, that’s why I didn’t file a report right away. I’m sure all of these devs are absolutely inundated with bug reports and feature requests right now.
Ah, you know what...(im still learning too). Apparently if you are viewing content from all instances (like those your account arent signed into), you cannot vote or comment in those posts.
From the outside looking in, the whole model seemed needlessly complicated. So it’s like there’s a LOT of reddit.coms over here? But they’re all the same? But also different? What’s the difference? Which one do I sign up on?
But then I get here and realized it doesn’t really matter that much, since you can more or less use all of them regardless of which one you sign up for.
Something about the way users try to communicate what Lemmy/Fediverse IS, is the complicated part. It’s like everyone wants to jump straight to the more technical details behind how the model works; which probably scares off a lot of the people who just want a place to pop in and talk about their hobbies.
I just told my fairly tech-unsavvy partner the email analogy:
You sign up on Google, I sign up on yahoo, my bro-in-law runs his own from a server in his house. We can all email each other and the email looks mostly the same no matter who reads it, but yahoo isn't Google isn't my bro-in-law. Lemmy = email in general, yahoo = lemmy.ml, Google = lemmy.world, etc.
She immediately got it and has an account on some instance and has subscribed to a bunch of places.
This is probably my favorite analogy for it so far, at least as a high level overview. I kind of made the same connection myself and that’s when it clicked for me.
Yeah, there should be simple "how and where do I sign up and find my favourite communities". I feel like there is lots of tech talk here because lots of tech stuff needs to happen before these sites are ready for the full moderation suit and for supporting the most basic aspects of Reddit communities (like flairs)...
Yeah I think it might be better to explain it like if anyone could boot up their own reddit and link to other people’s reddits. Some are popular, some aren’t, some don’t want to be huge because they want to be niche like some subreddits did. We may have subreddits with the same name but it’s ok because people can tell based on which Reddit it’s on. Also they’re called instances not reddits and communities not subreddits.
The thing that’s weird to me is that say I like football (soccer). I’m sure there are dozens of “instances” have a soccer community, but which one should I follow? It seems like this architecture fragments the user base too much.
I keep seeing people say this but honestly registering is really easy. It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to create an account after leaving reddit
I had heard about it for a week, but finally signed up when a mod I trusted on a reddit sub I used posted a sign-up link to lemmy.world. I'm somewhat tech proficient, but that extra step of figuring out a good instance to join was enough to stop me for a while. I didn't want to join a dud and have yet another dead login somewhere. YMMV, of course!
I disagree. At first I was frustrated that people were having so much difficulty with such a simple process, but after a while I adopted the mindset that if they're too stupid to figure out something so mundane then I don't want them here anyway. 🤷♂️
This is the important part. I’m part of the big homebrewing (beer) community on Reddit, as well as some local subs for my home area. I don’t think a ton of those users can figure it out as easily as someone like myself.
It doesn’t really require tech savvy, just a few minutes of reading. Anyone smart enough to have something interesting to add to a conversation can figure it out easily enough.
And sadly, the software seems to be little better than proof of concept quality. It seems poorly architected for functionality, usability and scalability.
Don't get me wrong - I think it is a good start, but there are some significant concerns:
My biggest UX complaint is that the method for connecting to a federated community is just....wrong. Do something completely unintuitive (paste a glyph / URL in search), get an error (not found), wait a while and hopefully it will start working. I can't fathom who thought this was a good idea, and I'm shocked that apparently Mastadon does it the same way. We're losing a lot of interested users at this step.
UX issue #2 - which may be fixed in .8, can't say - is that there is basically no error handling. Any server error or user error results in the spinning wheel of death. Sometimes refreshing fixes it, sometimes it doesn't. For example, did you know there is a 10k post limit? If your post exceeds 10k - you guessed it - spinning wheel of death. Try to sign up with a user ID that's already taken? Spinning wheel of death. Log in without verifying your e-mail? Spinning wheel of death. You get the idea.
I'm not an admin, but apparently that the software isn't really designed for cluster scaling. I think the assumption is that more instances solve scaling. It doesn't.
Functionality wise, there is very little control for mods. Pin, delete, ban. Edit the sidebar. That's it.
These are problems that can be solved, but the next step will be to see where development leadership steers the platform. It is how these problems are solved that will decide whether Lemmy or Kbin becomes the leading platform.
I keep seeing this said about lemmy but kbin was identical to any other site. So I looked up what the process is for lemmy and, aside from like 2 glitches to look out for it was exactly the same.
I think you're right insofar as onboarding is concerned. Once you've registered, though, Lemmy is relatively straightforward to use. Changing your user settings to display posts from ALL federated Lemmy instances on your front page helps with discoverability. That should be the default setting, but it isn't. That setting is associated with the "Type" parameter (found just below "Theme"). It isn't terribly obvious.
Agreed. The difficulty is in the initial discovery step. Early lemmy adopters will often refuse to recommend a specific instance to newcomers. But that confuses people. I know it confused the hell out of me.
My issue was I didn't know where to go to sign up. It took me a little time to understand the fediverse, then I had to figure out what instance I should sign up for. After that I started hearing some instances weren't accepting new accounts but didn't know if that was a thing everywhere or only one instance. I consider myself above average compared to the general public when it comes to my capabilities with the Internet and computer tech in general, it's never taken me days to understand stand how to sign up for a website like this before.
It does seem simple now that I'm here and understand things better. It's just a learning curve; this is unique to any website\forum\whatever I've played with before.
Good to see, but as with all posts like this, it’s important to note that the really important number is “Active Users” That number has gone up significantly as well, just not as fast as number of accounts.
From the docs: “Lemmy also shows counts of active users for your site, and its communities. These are counted within the last day, week, month, and half year, and are cached on starting up lemmy, and every hour.
An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame. For site counts, only local users are counted. For community counts, federated users are included.”
imo the servers have already been having trouble from time to time. Get all kinds of weird issues. Would be very willing to see like a monthly donation goal in a sidebar or something
<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">Donations
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the mastodon.world donation URLs:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> https://patreon.com/mastodonworld
</span>
Today I’ve started a recurring $5/month donation to lemmy.world. Scaling up infrastructure to meet demand is expensive, and they need as much help as they can get to offset their costs. I’ll most likely bump it up to $10 a month if the software continues to improve the UX and performance. I encourage everyone that has the means to, to even make a one time small donation to your local instance (if possible), as these first couple months will be critical in the growth and sustainability of this federated community.
This all reminds me of the big Digg migration. Reddit likes to think that people chose it because it was special. For a good majority of us, especially the 10+ year accounts, it was Digg's terrible redesign and very poor product decisions. The nail in the coffin was not understanding its core content producing users willingness to move. History repeats itself.
My oldest cat (13) is a long cat. When she was 6 months I adopted her she still had the kitten belly and retained it for it a good while. Because she’s so long her stomach bulge was in the middle of her body instead of near her hind legs which is hilarious. Because of that her nickname was always Bean/Beanie because she was shaped like a green bean.
Anyway. When Disenchantment came out I had a huge soft spot for it because of Princess Bean.
lemmy.world
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