Today the first of Feb is Global Switch day, Spread awareness of the Fediverse in your communities.
Do you really want the world to join here? I don’t think you do. A lot of the world is anti trans, anti woke or whatever they want to call it. I’m pretty open minded but the Marxist purists who continuously shout down differing opinions get really old sometimes.
Isn’t lemmy the reddit of the fediverse?
For things that you’re using by yourself, sure, it’s doable. However, for content creation, it’s pretty hard. Some of those alternatives just don’t have the critical mass yet. Maybe it would be an option to do both in parallel for some time before switching completely, but might not work for everybody.
Practical example: I’m a hobbyist photographer. Small timer, less than 1000 followers. My livelihood doesn’t depend on this, but I’m still serious about it. I mainly do concerts and sport events (so a lot of things involving other people) and my main outlets are Facebook and Instagram. Switching to something else would mean either 1) that no one will see my work or 2) that people will see my photos on the alternative place, they’ll copy them over and they’ll still end up on Facebook and Instagram, but this time without my creative control (thus badly cropped and recompressed several times - so even if I pay special attention to those things when publishing by myself, the effort goes down the drain when someone else does it).
Lol, posting Piefed as an alternative to reddit to Lemmy…
Also, PeerTube is super obtuse to get an account and has almost no reach. You almost have to personally know someone who has a server or host your own. There’s a reason why video hosting has gotten so corporatized: it’s expensive. That said, almost “no one” used Mastodon for nearly a decade and it’s finally starting to take off, so maybe it just needs another decade or two.
Really wish Loops had an Android app.
What’s a good peertube instance that federates with a lot? I tried tldvids but its got like 2 regular uploaders and i cant find most channels I search for.
Lets make February a switch month. It is impossible to switch in one day
Please add chess.com → lichess
It’s honestly bonkers to have a community hosted on Lemmy this hostile to Lemmy as software and the developers.
Because so many keep getting told it’s by tankies and stop thinking immediately after that
Is this bait? There is hardly any hostility here towards the software and the Lemmy devs want to push the world towards being an authoritarian hellscape. If anything they dont get enough shit.
Are you referring to [email protected]? This wasn’t posted by the mods.
This comm is often full of comments pushing lemmy alternatives, with PieFed being the new frontrunner.
You’d think the post here would include Lemmy, which I believe is still the most active platform
People on Lemmy don’t need to be told about Lemmy though?
But it’s the same platform! They all interoperate!
Yeah I agree, its all the same TBH.
Piefed sometimes makes it hard to interoperate: https://communick.news/comment/8015757
I understand, but most of us are here from the efforts of all those who built Lemmy and it was deliberately left off here as an alternative
Deb’s a tankie with the most bullshit oppinions ever seen on earth.
Not true.
Demonstrably true. Try saying anything contrary to a tankie talking point on .ml and see how long before you get banned. May I suggest “Russia was wrong for invading Ukraine” for starters, or “China committed unjustifiable atrocities against peaceful protestors”.
Russia was wrong for invading Ukraine.
In fact, Russia is an expansionist state with rampant nationalism and homophobia and led by an obvious fascist. I support the political autonomy of Ukrainians.
Catch me in the modlogs.
Now, I believe all of that, but I can also believe that there are geopolitical forces making the situation more nuanced and complex
You’re replying to one of the Lemmy devs. Hearing them say it’s not true when they literally run .ml as a tankie community is hilarious.
Who is deb?
Developer
I am unreasonably angry about the stretched icons.
Some icons are stretched and some aren’t. Double infuriating
Hey, hey you.
Get some.
Much better!
It makes it look like a shitpost at a glance lol
I’ll join you. 😡
:3
Maybe add Matrix as a Discord alternative?
Last time I checked theirs still no channels ? Discoverability is not really their ethier only active one I really found was the monero one
It now has workspaces (it’s called servers in Discord) and there you can have chats, which are basically channels like in Discord.
The Element application is solid now. Still I think it’d be a rough transition for most discord users. But more users probably means more potential for developer interest
The Element application is solid now.
Eh, kind of. I have almost 300 unread message notifications I cannot get rid of. I have scrolled up as far as I can then slowly back down. I have gone into threads and done the same.
Revolt (now known as Stoat) isn’t federated though.
Is there a federated version, either in the works or planned? Because otherwise, Stoat is the only option.
Yes
Matrix
Matrix just isn’t up to it. It doesn’t feel like Discord at all. It hasn’t taken off in any meaningful way.
None of those really “feel like” the things they’re replacing. I don’t really even think that should be the goal. They occupy the same space, though, and the infographic would look stupid if it showed all the options in some category, so they just picked a popular proprietary/centralized one, and a popular federated alternative in the same category. In this case discord is a popular chat app, and the most popular federa chat app afaict is matrix.
True, Matrix is going to win currently by default of there being no other alternative, but it just isn’t being used in the way Discord is even if you assume a smaller scale.
No.
Other alternatives are Root, not federated.
There’s also Roomy in development which is federated, and will tie into Bluesky.
Links?
Thank you.
Roomy says they plan to integrate federation in the future, though it doesn’t have it now.
Well damn, I need to update the pic I guess. I didn’t make it, just saved it some months ago
Fair point,
I omitted Facebook in my image because fuck that kind of social media (my opinion)
I picked PieFed over Lemmy because UX is everything and currently PieFed has much better UX.
Fuck that kind of social media but tiktok and Instagram are better???
Should be Lemmy over piefed.
I’ve seen the Reddit users be more receptive of PieFed over Lemmy. In a post suggesting Lemmy, the Reddit users will just comment that it looks ugly, it’s confusing, devs are tankies, etc. Posts suggesting PieFed get less complaints and more signups.
Also I think the instance choice is easier for PieFed compared to Lemmy. If you tell people to use Lemmy, they’ll probably end up on lemmy.world which is overpopulated, or lemmy.ml…
Instead of recommending Lemmy in general, you should recommend a specific instance which matches the audience. For example someone posted about piefed.ca in /r/BuyCanadian. Or you can link to a different frontend like vger.app.
I did make a redesign to join-lemmy.org recently so that new users can reach the registration page with a single click. I am also curious about any suggestions you have to improve the onboarding.
join-lemmy.org looks much improved now! And yes linking directly to an instance is the way to go, I would’ve put URLs in this promotional image instead of just names
I’m not sure if I have any specific ideas at the moment. It’s possible Lemmy has just reached a saturation point with Reddit where the people still on Reddit are the ones who bounced off Lemmy before, so they won’t give it another chance anytime soon, but they haven’t tried PieFed yet. Maybe the optimal strategy is to cycle between the recommendations to catch everyone with whatever suits them best. I think we should also try changing out the Mastodon recommendation and see if something else catches people who haven’t already switched to Fediverse microblogging.
I think PieFed’s idea of asking new users what they want/don’t want to see is a good idea.
I made a couple of “Help Design Lemmy” posts in [email protected] recently to get feedback and ideas, which was very helpful. I will continue to make such posts to improve join-lemmy.org, and also Lemmy itself.
Had a look at the Piefed signup now, choosing categories like that is a good idea. But the question is how these categories get curated. We have something similar with the instance topics on join-lemmy.org but no one is really helping to maintain them. So for community categories it would probably similar. In 1.0 we will have some improvements for discovery, like multi-communities and a “suggested communities” collection which can be set by local admins.
For the Mastodon recommendation there isnt any good alternative software that I can see. So its probably best to recommend a single Mastodon instance, depending on the target audience.
That person was me.
I’ve promoted Lemmy in the past only to be met with comments complaining about the ‘dogshit UX’ and tankeis.
So I switched to promoting PieFed instead, and have had no such complaints.
And so you decided to spread that misinformation further, instead of simply replying that it is wrong? I’m also very curious in what ways you consider Piefed’s UI better than Lemmy.
Good UX is all about removing friction and making users have to click less and think less.
Users these days are expect their hands to be held and things to just work, that sadly is just the reality.
Let me start off with saying, I started on Lemmy and even donated to Lemmy, PieFed can only grow because it’s standing on the shoulders of giants (lemmy)
My alt is AnonomousWolf, you can look it up, since I joined I complained about bat UX, but people told me to GTFO. PieFed fixes many of those issues I complained about.
Let me do a quick test and walk you through my thought possesses and UX. I’ll make 2 comments in this post, one for lemmy.ml one for piefed.social
Review of the two experiences:
With PieFed I can just keep scrolling without needing to click. Things just work and are where I expect them to be (based on pas UX experiences (reddit)) I can see way more content without ever getting confused or needing to click or make decisions, making me stay curious and engaged. Where as with Lemmy I very quickly got frustrated and confused, making me want to abandon ship and do something else, and I’m way way way more resilient than the vast majority of users
Not everyone likes infinite scroll, but some apps such as vger.app offer it.
– open https://piefed.social/ – met with some interesting image from c/selfhosted
–keep scrolling – some news articles, not really my vibe– keep scrolling – cut cat picture from c/cat – keep scrolling
– some meme about cars and fuck Trump, cool – keep scrolling – more memes and cats, keep scrolling – this keeps happening, doezens of more memes and cats – repeat
– bunch of posts I don’t have to click to open, I can see the image clearly and what’s happening
– interesting but I can just keep scrolling – bottom of the pace, have to click next– more semi interseting things
– keep scrolling, click next again– eventually find something interesting enough to interact with and leave a comment, of move on.
– open https://lemmy.ml/
– met with a list of posts, most images too small for me to see or read.
– click on first post so that I can see the image - https://lemmy.ml/post/42503928 – taken to a page where I still can’t see the image I clicked to see – Click on the image, now I can see it.– See some comments
– now I need to click back to continue– see another interesting post, image to small, can’t see so I have to click – https://lemmy.ml/post/42501566
– Still can’t see image so I click on the image – now I’m taken to https://mecha.so/comet#overview
– WTF, why am I on a different site? Why am I here,where are the comments – Realisze I can’t distinguish between Image posts and Links to a different site. – Why is this so confusing to browse?Sounds like you are specifically looking for a client focused on image browsing. In that case I would suggest linking to vger.app, phtn.app or blorp which I linked in another comment. Lemmy 1.0 will also have a card view which admins can set as default, where images are already expanded.
see another interesting post, image to small, can’t see so I have to click – https://lemmy.ml/post/42501566
This is only the link preview (indicated by the arrow icon), not an image post. Is the icon too small?
This is why I stopped promoting Lemmy and switched to PieFed.
UX is everything, and Lemmy UX sucked. The default UX (for your average user) is dog shit.
People want ‘it just works’ and PieFed offers that more than Lemmy does.
Thanks! I personally think as long as people land in the fediverse, its going to be ok. But its cool to give some highlights to piefed.
Also congrats on making a “controversial” post! Thats how you know its good :D
Yeah but this is like when Disney makes star wars tv shows. Ignore what the current audience likes and use the show as a vehicle to try and tell them what they should like.
I didnt think they could do worse than Discovery but the Academy is incredibly bad. On the plus side, Im rewatching Deep Space Nine again.
And BlueSky over Mastodon
I’ve been using lemmy.world with the boost app. Should I look into piefed? Am I missing anything? I mean I’m happy with what I got, but is the grass any greener?
There’s been some controversy recently about censorship hardcoded into Piefed’s backend. Basically it gives people a “social credit score” based on how they post.
Yuck. Do you have any evidence?
Here’s the writeup about it, going around
So it basically is a worse version of Reddit’s karma.
Essentially, yes. And maybe that’s part of why people jumping from reddit like it so much, but personally, I don’t think the things like this that Piefied is doing are good for the fediverse ecosystem
I can understand where the reputation comes from - spammers and trolls will do everything they can to shit all over everything. Maybe this isn’t the best way to address that problem, but I definitely understand the desire.
I run a forum for a very specific model of RV, and fucking spammers came in so often that I shut off registration and register everyone manually after they send me an email. It raises the bar just enough. Every now and then someone will whine about it, and I’m like, I hear you but this is much easier than cleaning the mess the spammers always leave.
props to you for running such a niche forum! That kind of thing is rare online nowadays
Some of the code snippets are cringe. Ew…
Lmao that “AI filter” would destroy me. Let me have my goddamn em dashes goddamn it
To be fair, it only sends a ping to admins. And it only does it for new accounts.
Thanks. Disgusting
deleted by creator
It has a lot of cool features, I’m almost tempted to switch but am waiting on the app I use to finish supporting it first.
FTFY
I’ve tried to promote Lemmy on Reddit in the past, only to be met with people complaining about the really old UI and bad UX, they also complain about tankies.
PieFed doesn’t have that bad rep, so I’ve found it easier to promote, both lead to the Fedivers so either is a win.
PieFed has its own share of dodgy stuff:
For different UI you can linnk people to blorp, vger.app or phtn.app. There are also a lot of mobile apps.
UX/UI are only as bad as the client is. For me, Lemmy is indistinguishable from reddit (if you don’t look at numbers of comments), because I use Lemmy Sync, as I used Reddit Sync before
I used Lemmy for months, mostly in the browser and my UX was absolutely horrible.
The default browser UI sucks.
I had to try many different settings and eventually through a lot of effort found the Photon UI, which is nice.
The vast majority of users just won’t go through that effort. PieFed’s default UI is quite clean and modern and much nicer to use, which is why I promote it instead
In what ways does the Lemmy UI suck? I would appreciate feedback in order to improve it. For what its worth I only use the default UI on desktop and mobile, and like it a lot.
Any actions you need to take that could have been avoided = bad UX.
Any time you need to think and not immediately know what to do next = bad UX.
Sadly we’re in a time where users expect their hand to be held the whole time and where they expect zero effort to be put in and everything to just work.
For me the biggest issue with default Lemmy is, why do I have to click on a image post to view the image, when it could just have defaulted to a bigger size?
But I don’t want a bunch of huge images in my face. Isn’t that what pixelfed and Instagramy things are for? I only want to click on the things I’m interested in, not be shown an ugly frustrating stream of giant, semi-traumatic political pictures one after the other. Thumbnails exist for a reason and claiming they’re bad UX is incorrect, it’s the industry standard design pattern for any control that allows a user to browse quickly through multiple images or to provide an impression to a user before they decide whether or not to open the full content.
Lemmie/piefed is more about text and conversations so titles should always be the largest clearest part so you can read them quickly to know whether you want to engage with the post or not. Otherwise, how is it different from pixelfed? Likes vs upvotes is not a big difference.
I don’t understand your problem. Can’t you just tap the image to see it larger? I don’t have to click an image post like you claim to.
They seem to want new reddit ui and not understand most hate that ui/ux
I used Lemmy for months, mostly in the browser and my UX was absolutely horrible.
The default browser UI sucks.
How long ago? It was a bit flaky a couple of years ago but for me now it’s perfect - like Reddit UI before it enshittified.
I’m sorry but the default Lemmy UI is objectively bad, it breaks so many UX principles.
Photon is good, but go to Lemmy.world and it looks like a website built in the early 90’s
If it looks like anything of the past then it looks like the web from 10-15 years ago pre-mass-enshittification, maybe people have forgotten what non user hostile websites look like.
Photon has infinite scrolling, which is horrible.
Infinite scrolling is optional and also a feature the majority of users (not hyper specific tech nerds) want. If we are to have any hope of bringing the average social media user onto these platforms, we have to design it for them. Most of the addictiveness comes from the algorithm (lemmy lacks a personalized one), not necessarily the infinite scrolling itself
Yes there’s been enshitification, but not everything has gotten worse. UI’s are much better than the past.
Why is infinite scrolling a bad UX? It saves the user from clicking next-page
You could argue that it’s dark-ux, but it’s not bad-ux
I use the the apk called “Thunder” and it does a fantastic job. Much better than just using the website of here or reddit.
I honestly use the Voyager web client in my desktop PC, it works pretty well.
I tried out a handful of Lemmy apps and Thunder is what I used for most of it but then switched to Summit. There’s aspects I like about both and aspects I dislike about both, but they don’t have a bad UI.
Okay then recommend Lemmy with PhotonUI?
Too much friction, and that’s really bad UX.
And now you have to explain to people why the default UI sucks. I tried to promote https://p.lemmy.world/ to people, and they tell me to get lost with that dodgy virus link.
Don’t link p.lemmy.world. it’s well over a year out of date.
phtn.app probably looks a bit less suspicious, and also lets you use any Lemmy/Piefed instance.
You could say it as “phtn.app is a web portal for the fediverse” or something like that because the concept of web apps is confusing to many
People are very sensitive and suspect of dodgy links.
If you tell someone ‘hey checkout lemmy, PS the default UI sucks so actually go to phtn.app’
they simply don’t click and think you’re trying to scam them
That’s just fine. Don’t worry yourself too much. I don’t know about everyone else, but I only want the people open to making a switch here. If you’re so put off by trying something new that you aren’t willing to give it a chance, then I’m not going to be begging for you to join my community.
i recommend trying out thunder, I just switched from sync.
It’s foss and actively developed
I’m checking in with voyager here, and I came from the reddit Apollo app and I feel the same.
It was practically seamless, though I’ve considered switching to try out other clients.
Tried Piefed and find it clunky with my current level of familiarity
“Complain about tankies” it’s the same fediverse… With the same content…
Sure but PieFed doesn’t seem to have a tankie problem. They’re blocked from what I’ve seen.
Even if that wasn’t the case, PieFed doesn’t have a reputation for having a tankie problem.
The bottom line is when I promote PieFed I don’t get people on reddit telling me the UI sucked and that it’s flooded with pro-russia propaganda.
So I find it more efficient to promote PieFed
PieFed literally uses a social credit score system and it gets lowered if you post content the Dev doesn’t like. It’s shit. And it’s ugly, people who want a low density enshittified web app interface should be actively filtered out.
It’s a shame to see that people think of Lemmy creators as some sort of villains.
I created my account on .ml before the Reddit blackout, but there wasn’t much content there, so I didn’t use it much. I properly started using it after the “Reddit blackout,” and that’s when I learned about the so-called “tankie problem.” I’ve met people with weird opinions, but the developers and Marxists in general aren’t bad people. People just usually make a strawmen to argue against.
Anyway, none of their opinions are reflected in the software. Lemmy is done in a truly democratic and user-oriented way, and I respect them for it.
Those guys aren’t Marxists, they’re mentally unstable Americans with a fetish authoritarianism.
The Lemmy devs? I’d suggest to read what they actually write. They are good guys.
I also don’t think it matters. For example, I don’t really like the behavior of the Duckstation dev. It’s a PS1 emulator. But I don’t have to agree with him in order to use it.
Anyone can instance can defederate from any other instance in Lemmy, not that hard to understand.
I agree, and I think it’s a shame it has gotten to this point, but I understand his viewpoint completely and have seen the interactions myself. At this point it’s simply more efficient to promote Piefed on Reddit instead of Lemmy, because you want the absolute least amount of friction for potential new users. Literally any single minor inconvenience/negative thing will cause people to not even consider trying it out. Lemmy has unfortunately already accumulated a reputation, and if you promote it you are very likely to run into comments about tankies which is typically enough to scare potential new users away.
At the end of the day it shouldn’t matter to us which software people use, as long as we get more new users into the ecosystem.
People will always find some excuse to do nothing and stay on Reddit. Whether its Lemmy or Piefed you will only ever get a few people to switch.
Sadly piefed isnt innocent either, they are trying to poison the AP protocol: https://communick.news/comment/8015757
Piefed starts out with poisoning the ecosystem, as linked here quite a few times by redwizard.
I hear that, but the thing is anyone can block whatever/whoever they feel the need to in the fediverse. I truly believe server admins should federate across the board, as it’s a disservice to end users only allowing federation with certain servers based on admin preference.
As far as UI and UX go, Lemmy’s devs are some of the biggest players in the overall fediverse functionality. So while the UI/UX could use some more attention in select areas, being able to interact with the other platforms is a much bigger aspect to the appeal of the fediverse! The Lemmy devs really do deserve a lot more credit for their work, regardless on their opinions or how
thethey approach discussing them.Lemmy doesn’t truly block stuff and the devs refuse to fix that
Really? Huh, I have a decent amount of communities blocked and I’ve never seen a single post from anyone of them after implementing the block
User level community and instance blocks will stop you from seeing posts from those places, but it does not block their users or their comments, so you’d still be able to see them around in non-blocked communities.
You can also establish a user block though too, so if their comments in unblocked communities are making your experience less than ideal, just block that user.
That’s not a terribly good user experience if a user doesn’t want to interact with or see any comments from users of a particular instance, as then it would require the user to manually block hundreds of users over a long span of time.
I’m assuming they mean it isn’t a two way block. Blocked users can still interact with your posts/comments, you just can’t see them. I personally think that should be how it works, but I’ve seen a lot of arguments for the Reddit-style blocking where they can’t interact with you anymore.
Granted I browse Lemmy via voyager on Mobile, and Alexandrite on desktop, but this has never been an issue. I find it incredibly easy to block stuff, and curate what I want to see
