r/Lemmy right now is full of posts basically talking about how bad Lemmy is handling right now.
It’s a bad look and will probably hurt the migration.
I know we are moving off of Reddit but the Lemmy subreddit needs some positivity for people looking to migrate
I don’t get the migration issues, at all.
I’m literally an idiot and all I did was type ‘Lemmy World’ into Google, clicked the top result, created an account, and selected 50 or so communities to follow. Then I started posting.
I don’t know what the Fediverse is or other instances or how it all works (and I don’t really care).
This was dumb-shit easy to figure out - as easy as Facebook or Twitter or… Reddit.
Source: am dumb shit.
don’t be surprised if it gets astroturfed with anti-Lemmy content by the admins. They are not above that level of fuckery. And in fact I would outright expect it.
check the accounts of people posting negative about it- default name_name<number> schemas and account ages of less than 10 days all scream astroturf accounts.
Someone has already been astroturing subs like r/programming with antiblackout AI generated spam. If they did it before they will do it again if migration starts having a major impact on the userbase.
Here are a few tips for spotting bots:
- default usernames
- accounts may be ~100 days old when the start posting at times, but are always completly inactive during this “aging”.
- Post/comment history unrelated to the topic, if it exists is nearly always generic freekarma4you type posts or reposted memes.
- In the case of using posts for astroturfing, or meme reposting, bots will often coment on each others posts, this is a good way to find a lot quickly.
- Comments made are super repetitive, often using the exact same wording. (this might be less common/blatant with newer LLM based bots, but wad the case with the shitcoin astroturfing bots a while back)
I disagree.
Realism is better.
Nothing worse than positivity “switch to Linux - you can do anything you like” gets followed up with “Now I installed it, and I can’t make it do anything I want” leading to anger.
Just invite folks to join, and patiently explain how stuff works…
Better still, have a direct link to threads on Lemmy.
In the midst of wading through a sea of people talking about Lemmy admins being tankies and other (mostly untrue) propaganda about the platform, the most legit criticism I’ve heard about Lemmy has honestly been from my older brother.
We had a conversation about Reddit alternatives given the recent news, and his honest take was “I don’t give a fuck about federation. Just give me something that works!”
This is very much one of the biggest problems with Lemmy. Most people don’t want to figure out federation and how it works before they make an account. Part of the reason Lemmy.world is so popular is that it’s presented as the default in a lot of places, and most people don’t want to deviate from the defaults
That’s pretty much how I wound up here. In the initial phase of googling, I didn’t find a very good breakdown of which instances of communities were good candidates for a new user, so I went with the popular one.
I made a kbin as well, but I can’t log into Jerboa with that.
It’d be helpful if there was a flow chart or something directing new users, starting with pointing then toward things like Lemmy vs Mastodon vs Beehaw etc and ending with a specific instance that aligns with that user’s interests.
The official Lemmy website is a pile of steaming poo too, which is the first thing I looked at. It looks amateur and the way the recommended instances list reads and looks isn’t very reassuring at all.
It looks like they’ve made some changes but it still looks like an impenetrable thing for nerds rather than the new wave of social media.
ending with a specific instance that aligns with that user’s interests
Uh oh. The guides I read said the instance doesn’t matter, just pick one! Then you subscribe to communities from any instance you stumble across to build up your “page” of stuff to consume. Is that not what we’re doing? I thought I had this worked out haha
Yeah that was the advice I found too, but from what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think I agree with it. My initial fed account was on kbin, and I very quickly ran into the issue that I couldn’t use Jerboa because of that, cuz Jerboa is made specifically for Lemmy and requires a Lemmy login.
There was some drama going on with an instance called exploding.heads right when I joined – apparently they were a bunch of neonazis and Lemmy (or kbin? idr) decided to defederate with them, cuz fuck Nazis. So, definitely glad I didn’t just random click over there initially and start my account there.
There’s also lemmygrad.ml, which from what I’ve seen so far are a bunch of Putin apologists. Unsure if they’re defederated - feel like I saw them a lot initially and not so much anymore, but they’re basically the left wing equivalent to exploding.heads.
There’s a NSFW instance, there’s a bunch of language-specific instance, …you get the point.
Where you start your account will 100% influence your experience with the fediverse, and that isn’t very well acknowledged on any guides I saw for new user orientation.
What they need isn’t positivity, what they need is a tutorial. Right now, the barriers of entry for lemmy (and kbin and mastodon and other fediverse places) are too high for the common layman. They just want something that they can throw their names in and it just works. They don’t want to know about federation and instances and how the fediverse works. They don’t want to have to research the differences between instances and pick one that seems best for them, they are just going to pick a random one and expect it to see everything.
I want to share my first experience with the Fediverse. During the Twitter Exodus, I heard about Mastodon and, being curious, decided to give it a go. I installed the Mastodon app and tried to sign up, and I had no idea what the Fediverse is or what these instances are. I was expecting a simple signup process like Twitter. I was confused through the signup process, wondering why do I need to “pick an instance”, what’s the difference, what am I doing. Even after I picked an instance and got in, I had no clue how to find people to follow, how to see everybody’s posts (didn’t help that I barely used Twitter in the first place and thus was unfamiliar with this sort of place), why is my feed full of devs and programmers (I accidentally picked a tech industry themed instance randomly). It took too much time and effort to learn (and I wasn’t committed or interested enough), so I eventually abandoned it.
Nowadays, I have a much better understanding of all this, lemmy is more comfortable for me, and thus I am having a much better experience. But for many who have no experience with the Fediverse, all of this is a lot, and it may be too much effort for them to dig in and learn how all this works. The general UX of lemmy needs to be streamlined and made, if not easier, then more approchable. Only then will more and more people be willing to join and participate in the Fediverse.
This might be a hot take but I’m okay with having some barriers to entry that demonstrate patience, understanding, and hope.
Yup. What made me decide to leave is the fact that I’m going to a place full of people who don’t agree with Reddit’s policies, and who are willing to fight a modest learning curve to join a more future-proof community. I’d rather be with people who care about that kind of thing and are kind of nerds about it, even if it doesn’t have as much content as Reddit in its early days. It’s making me nostalgic for Reddit 12 years ago anyway.
I would updoot that line of thinking, and award you Lemmy Gold.
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r/Lemmy is basically the inverse of the various communities here shitting on Reddit, aka a place for people to get shit off their chest. There’s been fuck Linux forums, websites and all sorts of things forever and none of it matters at all.
Honestly who cares? We’re not on Reddit. This is a different place.
Of course it will hurt the migration. Lemmy.world should’ve halted open registration and directed folks elsewhere until they were able to get their house in order.
Instead, a migrant’s experience was as follows:
“I can’t create an account, the site won’t load”.
“Okay, now I have an account, but I browse anything because the site won’t load.”
“Okay, now I can browse, but I can’t make posts or comments because the site won’t load”.
“The site’s been wishy-washy for 5 days, I guess it’s always like this”.Most don’t understand they should’ve joined a different instance. But hey, this QoL stuff affects all Lemmings, because the biggest communities are in the affected instances.
So instead of a great Reddit alternative, migrants got a product that didn’t work as advertised. And a message board, no less - a technology that’s existed since the dawn of the internet.
So, I get it. But I’m not upset because I understand Lemmy is an emerging technology that’ll require a little patience. Replacing one of the biggest websites of all time is not going to be easy.
r/Lemmy is going to reflect the layman. We should listen to their feedback, help them out and take criticism seriously. I’m of the camp that Lemmy needs as few barriers to entry as possible - which is why I’m loving the progress of some of these mobile apps. Some (like Memmy) have an onboarding guide for new users. We need more of that.
At least the issues with lemmy.world seem to have been resolved. While I’m sure some folks were put off by the challenges, I don’t think that the migration is anywhere close to finished. What’s key now is to ensure that Lemmy has good engagement and content for people to interact with. From what I’ve seen, a lot of users here were lurkers primarily on Reddit, but are contributing more here in order to help get things off to a good start. If we keep that energy and keep improving the experience, then it’s entirely possible that Lemmy can be seen at a minimum as a viable alternative to Reddit for folks who don’t like what they’ve got going on over there.
Just took at some of those threads. IMHO, some of them are pretty fair.
The top thread is asking Ruud to pause lemmy.world signups to encourage people to use other instances. That doesn’t sound unreasonable.
Took a gander and it seems it’s mostly from people having issues with lemmy.world and not knowing about the others you could join. I made my first account there too so I know their frustration. Made a new one on blahaj and it’s been smooth sailing since.
I want to help all these people migrate and I have been doing that all through June, but I’ve committed to never posting or commenting on my account ever again, so unfortunately the remaining Redditors aren’t going to get any more help from me.
I understand, me too. But maybe in this case we should help them for the greater good.
I’m loving it. Feels raw, the glitches aren’t too frustrating compared to having content aggregated again without having to go to Reddit, digg, or fark
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Be together, not the same
