this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
418 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37750 readers
361 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Tbh, Lemmy is much more difficult to get into. I wouldn't be here if I wasn't somewhat dogmatically against reddit's shenanigans. My buddy who uses the official app doesn't really care about any of this stuff. Even I feel a bit alienated by Lemmy because it feels so dominated by tech workers. Your average meme-enjoyer is going to see multiple instances, buggy apps, none of their favorite communities and they're going to bounce off it. I like Lemmy but we need to be realistic about how palatable it is.
It's gotten a lot better in a few weeks.
There's a lot that can be improved, and people are working on it. It just needs more time as things settle
Yeah, when Digg did the dumb thing all those years ago Reddit didn't start eclipsing it for another two or three years. This feels very similar to that time tbh. Lemmy will get there, but I imagine it'll take longer due to its fragmented nature scaring some non-techies so I'd guess four years and we'll see numbers to rival Reddit. If you care about that, I kind of like the smaller communities, honestly.
Too bad there's not a RemindMe Bot on Lemmy yet, this would be perfect for that lol
I think you can use the remindme bot on mastodon, although I'll have to check the syntax. Saw someone use it in another thread
I also like the smaller communities in some cases. It's a lot easier to participate and have replies to your questions/comments.
For a few communities though they're still too small to be sustainable and useful. Need more time for those ones. Say LegalAdvice, communities for sales / discounts, or local ones for schools and cities.
Exactly, the only subreddit I still visit is for my local city/metroplex and even then I've set it up as an RSS feed so I don't need to actually go to Reddit. Once enough neighbors are here that RSS feed will be getting cut most likely though. Or until Reddit shuts down the RSS feature.
There is! I don’t remember the name right now, but I remember someone having used it…
EDIT: Not Lemmy, but mastodon - @remindme@mstsn.social
As someone in tech since 2004 I'm so very confused to have zero idea what digg was... Completely missed the boat on that one.
It was just another link aggregation site like Reddit, you didn't miss too much tbh
You're not wrong, but it is definitely getting better. I think the organization of Lemmy takes some getting used to, and as well, I think finding new places to look on Lemmy isn't quite as easy as Reddit is, which might be an area that the software could improve a bit.
Is Reddit easy to explore for new places? Maybe it got better in the new UI, but search was historically bad and discovering relevant subs was pretty difficult. I sort of think people dipping their toes in fediverse waters forget how rough around the edges Reddit was/is. I agree that lemmy and its ilk have a lot of room to improve on usability, but the bar doesn't seem exceptionally high.
It's an early adopter problem, and it could be much worse (looking at you, Tildes, where I swear I was one of less than 10 users who were not either well compensated professionals (tech or otherwise), or in school at the time to become one, at least before the latest Reddit exodus. At least most of the Lemmy instances, while tech heavy, don't have the same smugness that a lot of nearly-exclusively highly compensated white collar worker spaces do. (Not that Tildes is unique in that space in the least, Hacker News is utterly insufferable, and the personalfinance and povertyfinance subreddit split arose for the same reasons)
Luckily I think Lemmy has more potential to get more early adopters who don't work with tech professionally, especially on an instance like Beehaw. I haven't felt like some kind of lower class interloper (as someone who is in lower level retail management for work) here, unlike many other super techy spaces.
I'm a tech worker and sometimes shitposter.