TLDR: the article says , lemmy is confusing , too broken and kinda unusable coz servers run on whims.
While I have been active here since a month now , I have had nothing but only a positive experience on lemmy , what about you guys ?
Lemmy seems fine to me SDF.org really knows where its towel is at
Oh no, a new discussion board is neither as robust nor as polished as one with over a decade of use and revision.
Most of the complaints are just whining that Lemmy isn’t a perfect drop-in replacement for his love of endless, constant time wasting on Reddit. OTOH, the issue of multiple, nominally identical communities on Lemmy is a true weakness of the platform (imho, of course).
The multiple communities doesn’t bother me, I just join both and usually don’t notice the difference. It’s a better problem than all the communities being on lemmy.world which defeats the point of federation.
My issue is that it’s an inefficient use of human resources because it clutters the interface. If you’re looking for the answer to a question, you have to post in multiple places and/or search/review multiple communities to see if the question has already been answered. For low-traffic communities the replies get split, suppressing topic participation. For high traffic communities, stories/links that get posted to the “same” community on multiple instances clog up personal home pages and - in the case of large participation - clog up the top feed.
Again, imho, there should be a way for communities to aggregate or sync across instances and be shown as a single feed, like a symlink to multiple folders that is treated as a single location for end users. I realize this causes moderation concerns. I still think its better for the participants.
One person posting the same thing to multiple communities is bad etiquette, whether the stated purpose of those communities is the same or not. Anyone who does this should be shamed, blocked and banned. Find the biggest and most relevant community and post it there, don’t spam.
I focus on comments rather than posts, but if you care about finding new links then I agree that duplicate communities is a problem. But it’s not the biggest problem on the platform, and obviously while instances are independent there’s no way to force a solution. Communities have merged, but it’s usually small communities on small instances dying as their users move to a large community on a large instances. This is a disaster for decentralization, everything needs to be as spread out as possible across instances.
I joined Reddit in 2016 or so and I found it confusing at first. You get used to the quirks. Also, I get yelled at a lot which you don’t have here.
WATCHA LOOKIN AT, MATE?!?
I was introduced to reddit via the Relay for Reddit app by an MKBHD video. For me relay was reddit. Couple of years later I found Reddit has a website and an official app. I took a look. ALL MY FAITH WAS LOST IN UI DESIGN & MY EYES WERE BURNING.
While I do agree lemmy adds a layer or two of complexity compared to the simple “plug-and-play” reddit model, the article comes across as blaming all of the author’s lemmy-related issues on the software rather than admitting he just doesn’t understand how to use it.
Unlike Reddit’s approach of categorization using subreddits, Lemmy instances are mostly entire servers that act as catch-all versions of subreddits.
This is one example. Subreddits =/= instances. A more apt comparison would be communities, and then he can point out how communities are hosted by different instances. I mean, how did he miss that?
Another one is when he said there was no visual representation of “All” and “Local”. Just one look at an instance’s page shows you those options quite clearly.
Try as I might, I missed the curation and consolidation of Reddit, where content is batched up into similar topics.
Wait… What? That’s kind of exactly what’s happening in lemmy communities.
I may be biased, but despite lemmy’s many shortcomings/growing pains I feel the author should have acquired at least a basic understanding of how all this works before writing an article that points out “problems” when there is none.
Edit: I’m on mobile so it’s hard to quote every single line. But there were more than a few mistakes there.
I mean… What? That’s kind of exactly what’s happening in lemmy communities
Indeed I can understand this one. I’m really liking Lemmy but discoverability is pretty bad, add the fact the ranking is shit and pretty useless in suggesting interesting content and you will understand his point.
Reddit has both much more content and not only a better ranking system but also a functioning personalized algorithm, if you want to use it.
To this day, all of the non mainstream Lemmy communities I’m following it’s because I’ve used to follow the subreddit and it migrated here.
Oh definitely. There are many things that lemmy needs to work on. It’s nowhere near as stable as reddit as it stands.
But the author was pointing out how reddit is better since it sorts topics by subreddits, implying that lemmy doesn’t do that (which is absolutely false).
As far as discovery and amount of content, I fully agree. Reddit just has much more users than lemmy. There’s no argument. Discoverability is also another aspect I’d love to be improved on in lemmy. If you’re in a small/new instance, you probably won’t see a ton of communities compared to a bigger one.
I’m pretty optimistic, though. I think we’re just getting started.
I think we’re just getting started.
Yeah of course, we need to remember Lemmy is not even out of beta yet. But people don’t really care, they try it once and if the user experience isn’t at the level of competitors they simply won’t use it unless there’s a philosophical rationale (for example decentralization, but many don’t care at all). That’s why I’m so happy many developers with great UX experience like Sync are approaching the platform
Well Reddit also has the advantage of a lot of years fine-tuning itself.
Thats exactly what I thought , there are a bun of me issues with the author and seems like he has not even tried to get to understand lemmy,
Feel rage. It’s FUD.
I always thought Android Authority was a somewhat decent site. Are they owned by Conde Nast by any chance?
No idea. It just that the article looks so targeted…
Yeah looks like they got paid to write that ! Although this is an opinion piece !
Gaming journalists can’t game, tech journalists can’t tech. Nothing but a skill issue like usual.
Yup, if they could tech, they’d be working in the field instead
The comment section of the article pretty much disagree completely. You can add your opinion there too. 👌
Ah ! I have content blockers enabled those disable comments too 😅
New to Lemmy and not a huge reddit user in the past and to me both are exactly the same amount of confusing (i.e. a bit).
I havent been a reddit user in the past , except lemmy is much more positive i felt
UI is still a bit weird. I enjoy Lemmy but linking or getting back to the context of a comment is still not possible (on Firefox/Chrome)
A lot of the time when I write a post and hit submit it just won’t submit, which is annoying. But it doesn’t bother me enough to go back to Reddit.
Switch to another instance and you’ll not have that problem
How do I do that
Sign up at another instance (Lemmy server) and use that account
The many instances and multiples of the same communities across all instances would absolutely be confusing to your average joe. But, once you start using Lemmy you realize understanding all that doesn’t matter and it just works. As for the stability thing… A fediverse of new communities based on open source software has growing pains? Gasp… The article reads like that person is truly unaware of how software works in the beginning.
Servers having different admins is definitely a plus over the Reddit model. If I don’t like the admins, I can go to another instance, and if the mods of a board/sublemmit get power hungry people can easily move the bulk of users to a different instance with the same name and other mods.
Reddit was really starting to suffer under admin and mod abuse, even before the API changes.
My experience has been great, even with the lemmy.world outages. A couple of my favourite niche communities are now coming to life and I now post more here now than I do on reddit. Of course there are still glitches and bugs and it is more confusing than reddit for new users, but all that will resolve itself over time. Reddit has had well over a decade to fine tune itself whereas the fediverse is only a couple of years old and has only really in the last couple of months seen a massive influx of new users that have tested its infrastructure to its limits and sometimes beyond
How is lemmy confusing? Unless they mean how it works, it looks to me like a standard interface. Sounds like they don’t really know what it is.
There are teachers that are trying to find what you know, and those that are trying to prove that you don’t know.
Second kind is not my favourite.
While technically true, article is missing the point and is not showing good sides.
But it might be good, if someone comes here expecting complicated technical experience, it might keep them around. At least they are acknowledging lemmy exist.
