• Comtief@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    Been a rocky road for me, more than a year ago I created a lemm.ee account, even used that for a few weeks later, but got a bit bored because I felt there was not enough diversity in here. And then lemm.ee was taken down. Kind of a double whammy.

    Yesterday someone in reddit brought up a discussion how signing up and using lemmy should be simplified, they had a link, clicked it and simply registered a new account there without even checking what instance it was (I simply can’t be bothered to do the research again), so I ended up with a thelemmy.club account. Then someone promoted piefed.social, said its easy, so I created an account for that too, so here I am.

    Then I found out piefed.social has a philosophy to not show downvotes or upvote downvote percentages, I kind of like checking downvotes too, I mean its not youtube (yes, shots fired) so I tried to get out of that quite quickly. Luckily phtn.app supports piefed.social and looks nice, while on phone I already had Summit installed from lemm.ee times and that supports piefed.social too, even though its not a lemmy system or what you call it.

    Right now I’m working through these 300 subscriptions that piefed suggested me, deleting some i don’t like, then i’ll probably read feed for All for a while to discover new communities. Let’s see how long I last on this fediverse thing this time.

    I also have mastodon on my phone, but I was never into instagram / twitter etc, so im not very into that too and its kind of a ghost town. Same goes for pixelfed. I also have a Loops account (even though I’ve never used tiktok either), thats starting to look better, but still needs more people, I think.

    • Puddinghelmet@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      Just use lemmy.world and another server more locally from your own country or smthing, a local lemmy server, and mastodon.social for a twitter and instagram alternative

    • imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 hours ago

      Easy access, mainstream app that is good, word of mouth. Master all 3 and Lemmy will be a great rival to Reddit.

      I been feeling that Lemmy is quite active as of late. Nice to be here. I dropped scrolling Reddit at work and since recent, trying to stay in Lemmy on my phone too.

  • Flauschige_Lemmata@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I only joined a few days ago. And I was positively surprised by the guest mode that boost provides. It already has a bunch of default subscriptions. Although a first run wizard would have been even better.

    I was a bit disappointed when I created an account and the feed was suddenly completely empty.

    I also would like to see a smarter home feed. Cluster algorithms and engagement tracking could help some. But I’m currently missing a way more basic feature. Please don’t show me the same posts over and over again, every time I open the app!

  • Nangijala@feddit.dk
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    1 day ago

    I’m dumb as a fucking brick and yet here I am.

    There literally is no excuse if I can figure it out. The only excuse I see is that people just don’t want to leave the comfort of reddit and go here and actually put in the effort to build this place. Which btw isn’t super hard either. You can make or comment on posts of you’re a tech retard like I am. That is a way to keep the pulse of this place alive.

    I think people would do themselves a favor if they just admitted that they don’t want to change because of the comfort of the big tech platforms and how they feed you endless entertainment without you having to make any effort.

    If I feel Lemmy is dull, it is my own fault for not adding to it. If I don’t have anything to add, I’ll have to deal with Lemmy being boring for a day or two and in the meantime I do something else.

    I think the scariest part about mainstream social media and part of why I cut the chord, was because it turns you into a mindless zombie. I still deal woth someone of the effects of it. The fear of boredom. It’s such a destructive thing I allowed to do to my brain and it’ll take me a minute to learn to be bored again. Already much better now than I used to be, but fuck. The level of lazy social media lures you into is scary.

    • Furbag@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I actually kind of like a slight amount of friction to signing up. Making a lemmy account takes almost no technical effort. Being able to understand what an instance is and which one is suitable for an individual user can be easily demystified with a cursory Google search, or even asking a shitty AI chatbot.

      The only excuse is that it’s harder to do that than it is to make an account on reddit or tiktok or whatever.

      A big part of what made web 1.0 special, imo, is that everyone had a baseline technical competency in order to access the web and understand what they needed to do to visit certain websites. It wasn’t an extreme barrier, and someone who was determined could parse out the steps required with no formal instructions whatsoever. But the app economy ruined all of that and made everything ultra-accessible. Social media just preyed on that lazy mindset to keep users engaged with their algorithms forever.

  • wltr@discuss.tchncs.de
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    2 days ago

    I had some doubts about Lemmy, thinking nobody uses it. Postponed registering for years, but I abandoned Reddit anyway.

    Turned out, it’s quality over quantity, and having less people is not the issue, but rather the opposite. I’m genuinely impressed how good it is. Also, using iOS, Mlem is a wonderful piece of software. The interface is much better than Reddit! It feels like a very solid upgrade.

    • Comtief@piefed.social
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      1 day ago

      I definitely felt the lemmy community as a whole was a lot more repetitive compared to reddit when i was scrolling it like half a year ago. Also lacking more specialized communities. Trying it again now.

  • Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works
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    2 hours ago

    The only thing missing on Lemmy is specialised communities. For everything about news and memes it’s actually much more dynamic and interesting to interact here. Other than that, Reddit is basically only outrage and fake karma stories now.

    • Squizzy@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Ah no the historic amound of random celebrity tits too. If I want to see a naked celeb its reddit. Truly a wonder of humanity.

        • Squizzy@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          Yeah, its the love of the game though. Watch an old movie, type the actresses name and boom nudes. Also some posts are single vote counts, some guys ae at this day in ad day out with no praise.

    • discocactus@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      And arguably time will fix that. Or like. Reddit pre 2020 as an encyclopedia type thing. Maybe am archived copy with Wikipedia type editing or something. Idk. It’s absolutely dead now. Lemmy already “feels” better. And I was hopeful about Digg but it just feels like a facade so far. We’ll see. Improvise, adapt, overcome.

      • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        It needs to grow for that. Right now Lemmy is just a news feed for me. Every small community I’ve found in areas that interest me is just too small to work. People barely post or comment at all, so they’re mostly ghost towns.

        The strength of Reddit is all its small hobby communities that are quite active but quite low on the outrage and viciousness. I still use Reddit for those because their Lemmy counterparts are not ready yet. I don’t use large subreddits and haven’t in over a decade, due to all the outrage and viciousness.

  • meerstyler @lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    I just left reddit and registered lemmy. Did it all on a train ride. It felt pretty easy. Had to search two things: which app do I use for lemmy? And: how do I register for lemmy? Other than that: effortless.

    • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      Wow, so you found the tankie-leninist-communist server in one go ☺️. /s

      It is quite easy to move though.

    • cabbage@piefed.social
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      2 days ago

      Welcome!

      I hate to say it though, but Lemmy.ml is a sketchy instance. So there is a point to it not being as easy as it should be—it’s hard to see the pitfall of the instance run by the developers being a Russia friendly mess.

      • DaMummy@hilariouschaos.com
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        1 day ago

        And lemmy.world seems to be an Israel supremacist instance. But instance hopping is easy, and you don’t really lose anything since karma isn’t a thing.

    • cupcakearmy@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      Same, also, which instance? I know that the whole idea is that it kinda doesn’t matter, but still it’s nice to have a big instance. And it would be amazing having an easy resource to list the biggest communities. But all in all it was a 5 min thing, search for the Reddit equivalent of my most communities and let’s go :)

      • cabbage@piefed.social
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        2 days ago

        If you want a big instance I recommend switching to something like lemmy.zip.

        Lemmy.ml unfortunately has very questionable moderation. I’m thrilled you guys are here, but the fact that you ended up on that instance is proof that we have ways to go as a platform.

        • cupcakearmy@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          I wanted to go with lemmy.world and then realised I already had an account there, so did not bother creating a new one . But thanks for the recommendation

        • blackn1ght@feddit.uk
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          2 days ago

          Recommending lemmy.zip itself is problematic because it’s blocking UK users.

          • cabbage@piefed.social
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            2 days ago

            Ah, right.

            I guess it does prove the point that there is still friction in instance selection. I guess I can partly sympathize with those who get so overwhelmed at this point that they just decide it’s all too difficult. People are not used to making their own choices any more.

            • Scrollone@feddit.it
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              1 day ago

              I think that if English is not your first language, you should find an instance in your language. Way less instances to choose from, and you also get to see many communities in your language

            • Ashtear@piefed.social
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              2 days ago

              The good news is instance hopping is pretty easy. I’ve already done it twice now.

              The “It’s like email” comparison is cliche for the Fediverse at this point, but it really is. Most people are gonna switch eventually for some reason or another.

      • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        honestly, i’m on my way over to a piefed server soon. i’d head there. your instance more or less doesn’t affect much, we’re all interacting on the same posts.

  • cabbage@piefed.social
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    2 days ago

    It seems part of the problem is that a lot of people from here want to explain Reddit users why federated platforms are the only viable options, and the Reddit users misunderstand this explanation of how the platforms work and why they have to work that way as an explanation of how to use them.

    Using Lemmy or Piefed is not hard. Understanding why centralized alternatives is not an alternative at all, now that requires you to be interested and understand some things. But we don’t really need people to understand that. We just need them to sign up for some instance or another. Preferably not a tankie one.

  • macniel@feddit.org
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    2 days ago

    Mhm when I joined lemmy I simply search for a german lemmy server and found feddit.de registered and I’m using lemmy ever since. I really don’t get how those redditors think its that hard.

    That point with the federation, you really don’t need to grasp it when you are a new user, you can learn the intricacies of it later on.

    • Cherry@piefed.social
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      2 days ago

      I think other place have over a number of years narrowed in on what a user wants to see and delivered that. Lemmy/piefed don’t do that natively so when people first arrive they see everthing in terms of feed and nothing in terms of customisation/personalisation. That can feel overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time.

      It is a learning curve so I think it could help if that’s explained and support/guidance. Or at least it’s explained take your time and learn how to make it work for you.

  • Nadru@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    The best strategy I found is to tell Reddit users to use both platforms. Lemmy doesn’t need to be the perfect alternative right away. They just need to test and see that the fediverse is not that hard to understand.

  • linule@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    It felt effortless to me. It might need a bit more polished user interface on web, but other than that it feels like a good, user friendly app. What it needs rather is more visibility.

    • Ofiuco@piefed.ca
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      2 days ago

      To me it took a while to settle for a better instance (fhmy, then db0, then lemmynsfw, then cafe and I was happy-ish there, still have my account I think) and ended up leaving lemmy for piefed.

      Creating an account is easy, being ready to abandon your account while looking for the right instance is hard and even then I still struggle to find anything interesting.

  • Ech@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    it needs to feel effortless

    What an entitled take. No community worth its space is “effortless”. Building an actual, worthwhile community takes care and time, and that need never ends.

    But what people really want in these hollow comparisons to Reddit is an infinite content machine - a place to go for an endless stream of mindless content that requires no effort on their part. It’s purely selfish, and if people like that are turned away by the “effort” demanded here, then good. Users like that are, at best, a burden, and more likely to sway these spaces into directions they’re better off not headed.

    • eta@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      They’re looking at it from todays reddit perspective which is much different to when reddit first started growing. I joined reddit about 10 years ago and it was still a little awkward to get into. But people got used to it and the platform evolved and it seems like most of todays redditors were not around at that time. Lemmy today feels more like reddit 10 years ago so it just does not appeal to many modern redditors.

  • rose56@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    The thing is yes we need people, but we need people to understand the concept and build new instances, whether this is for personal use or to accept new users.
    Also I don’t get why this guy is trying to sell lemmy to users reddit. Lemmy is supposed to be a different, better than reddit in other ways, why change it? Don’t forget that the creators of lemmy, need $$$$ per month, and features are not 100% doable.

    People also say we don’t have user base! We have, but they are here only for politics.

    Also, joining to lemmy, it can be done ether by joining an instance or making an instance. And don’t forget the main point, for lemmy to survive and work correct, lots instances need to exist.

  • Fedditor385@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    It can’t feel effortless and it never will. Why? Because Reddit is like having every person in your telehone book, easy to find and communicate with. And Lemmy and fediverse in general are like phone numbers without a phone book. You and someone else might both have telephones, but unless you meet in person or another way to exchange contact details, you can’t communicate with each other.

    So, people need to put a bit more effort in it to understand it, or we need a fediverse telephone book.