Asklemmy

Using lemmy zoomed it in my phone is a nice experience. I see everything. Looks good on my desktop also. Still trying to get a feel for this place

Support for GIFs is a bit lacking but otherwise its going great :-)

There's not a single middle eastern sub, and I doubt there ever will be😞

I'm a reddit user hoping to transition to Lemmy. I couldn't sign up on lemmy.ml, so I signed up on SDF.

There was a tiny bit of learning to do with figuring out this whole communities and servers thing, but its nice here. Not sure if there already is something but a UI similar to old Reddit would be nice. Still this is for sure a good Reddit alternative.

I personally still don't understand the point behind instances. It seems to just introduce confusion about the sign-up process, and also makes usage unrealiable. I don't understand why it can't just be one large decentralized instance, in a similar (though obviously not exact) way as blockchains were distributed account systems.

All these introduced technical details are deterrance for non-technical users. I would consider myself a very tech savvy user and still have been offput by both Mastodon and Lemmy, but have still pushed myself to both due to their recent corporate counterparts going to shit.

So far I like it. It was a little odd signing up because I would find an instance to sign up on and kept scrolling until I found a join button which looped me back to the list of instances. Or I would click on the "you must log in or sign up to comment " message on a thread hoping I could sign up that way and getting sent to the instance lists. I didn't understand to join the instance I needed to hit join from a drop down menu at the top of the page, until I tried looking there since the other options didn't work.

I was doing that through the website on mobile browser. Now that I have an account I am running it through Jerboa. It works well so far, I'm just learning how to find communities to subscribe to, and I'm not sure if when I search from the search options in Jerboa if I'm getting all possible results or just certain ones my instance is somehow connected to? From other comments it sounds like it's the latter and I'm not sure how to get around that.

Other than the learning curve I like it so far. I'm trying to migrate here from Reddit and someone there recommended I try this.

the android app is useless

edit: it is now useful

Literally just got here, but I'm finding it easier to get started than Mastodon, since communities are easy to find.

However I'm wondering if there is a bunch of communities I have yet to discover, and no idea how to discover them.

Honestly im loving the experience and even though its getting big because of all the reddit drama, im loving the small communities feel that it has for now. I have to say though that navigation cross instances its being a bit of a headache and i hope it gets better, much better. At least it should notify me that i am not able to see the rest of the comments on a post because of some settings of the instances / my account no? Or am i missing something?

It was a bit confusing, I'm still a little confused on why I would choose one instance over another (I kinda just picked one?) And then there's the communities within the instances, I see some that are duplicates between instances and I'm not sure if I should just subscribe to the one on my instance or can I subscribe to the others? Are the vibes different? I'm sure I'll get used to it, I just haven't had to be an internet pioneer in many years.

I think it does federation better than Mastodon. I think confusion comes from the way ActivityPub decides to do things

Couple of nit-picky things that I'd love to see changed.

This comment box. There's nothing to visually divide it from the original post. I got it figured out, but my brain is still resisting it as bad UX.

On the home feed, the group an article comes from is tiny and not obvious. My eye is constantly jumping back and forth from subject to group, group to subject, and it's fatiguing. The subject is only half of what describes the post: what group that subject belongs to is the other.

On the home feed, I have to click Subscribed for my feed. Setting and getting a cookie is at most two lines of code each in vanilla javascript, seems to me that'd be an easy choice to remember.

It's gonna take a while for the chaos of everyone migrating from Reddit to die down and for the place to become useable.

Also, Lemmy seems to have the same annoying friction Masto has where it's too easy to get redirected to another instance's webpage. You suddenly can't comment, like, or basically do anything and it's not immediately obvious why.

Once again suggesting federated social media start using a centralized frontend on one single website and just let the servers themselves be federated. You would go to the same one website, ex lemmy.com and log into your chosen instance, staying logged in even if you visit another instance.