I know that the purpose of Lemmy is to be split into instances and stuff to stay independent or whatever, but - imo - if it really wants to become a true alternative for Reddit it needs one place for users to land. Something like “LEMMY.COM” where you can see all instances + all communities, where you can log into your instance, maybe even log into more than one instance at once (let’s be honest, who doesn’t have a separate porn account these days lul)
The thing is, most of us used Reddit until now instead of Lemmy because Reddit did the overall browsing experience a lot better. Yeah it needed the help of third party apps for that, true, but I could just open reddit, look at r/all or my subscribed subreddits and be done with it. Being on Lemmy feels like “oh yeah, this is a great idea, but wow it is very inconvenient to look through this place”
(Btw, I LOVE the lemmy logo!)
Here’s my take.
Don’t worry about the Reddit people. Don’t think you, we, have to make Lemmy into something because Reddit still exists and we want all those people to come over here. Don’t try to make this place a ‘better Reddit’. Let it be Lemmy. Let all that handle itself.
When Felon screwed up Twitter, Mastodon bent over backwards in the attempt to lift and shift Twitter people over to Mastodon, but the people who loved Twitter really didn’t stick, because they needed the artificially driven engagement and numbers that were blown out of proportion by bot and NPC participation. They went over to Mastodon and were like ‘uh, this ain’t it’ and they went on their way – and that was a feature, not a bug. The ones who stayed, stayed because Mastodon was different from Twitter – and we loved the differences once we got used to them. That was also a feature, not a bug.
There will likely be several platforms, open source, closed source, volunteer led or corporate, who try to capture Reddit emigres. People will end up picking the one they like best because they like it best. For me, as someone who has been on Reddit since the very early days, there was a lot to like there and also a lot to dislike. And to me, there were a lot of people in Reddit who I’d just as soon found a different home that suited their likes and dislikes instead of having a huge captive population lift and shift over here and spend the next god knows how long trying to turn Lemmy into what Reddit was. If this place never get 20% the size of Reddit, but you end up getting more meaningful engagement here the way one does at Mastodon vis a vis Twitter, to me that’s not just a win but a big win.
Two cents, yours to keep.
This is an absolute fair take. The question is to ask is “what does Lemmy want to be”
If they want to be the “new” Reddit, some changes need to be made (again, imo)
If they want to be themselves no matter what, it’s okay to keep it like it is and see if it sticks with people or not.
I am brutally honest here - I want it to be Reddit, just better. Reddit, but without the same old mistakes. It’s the best Reddit alternative I see so far so I would hope that it would take the spot and make the changes to be that beautiful Reddit experience but improved.
Who is Lemmy though? Because it’s like asking what does human kind want to be or what do the collective children of Indonesia want to be when they grow up. Lemmy isn’t an entity, it’s decentralized and it is many things and it’s definitely not Reddit lol. So there’s no asking what Lemmy wants to be because everyone wants something different and that’s why I think lemmy is great because someone can set up their own instance and make it whatever they want.
Personally I think https://join-lemmy.org/ is the best way to do this.
Yes. I thought this was already the default “home page” to send people to. It might also be nice or have a quick sign up option where a new user is randomly assigned to an available instance instead of them having to go through and research which one they should join. This would keep things distributed (which is the whole point of using not-super-user-friendly lemmy) instead of everyone just signing up on the same instance.
The closest thing to that right now is lemmy.directory. It federates with “every” instance.
It won’t ever be like you describe, but there are some talks to add better discoverability features to Lemmy. Once that happens, and you can subscribe to different instances from other instances (i.e. not yours), lemmy.directory will likely end up being a landing page of sorts. Currently you have to subscribe manually.
@ComputerSagtNein One thing that could be made a lot easier on Fedi in general is browsing posts on remote instances. I don’t understand why there isn’t an easier method than going to the remote instances web page, copy pasting URLs etc. It seems very inconvenient
This is true, or at least the bug where you need to select “All” in the search dropdown should be fixed. Automatically pulling results from any other instance that hasn’t been federated could be problematic though, quite an easy way for malicious actors to fool users.
@mikehunt how could it fool users you mean?
The problem is, that if you have an account at InstanceX, and you are browsing the website of InstanceY, InstanceY doesn’t know where your account is. I think to solve this problem, there would need to be a browser extension that knows where your account is (you configure it) and that converts Lemmy addresses to point to your instance.
From any of the big instances, the ‘all’ tab already does that, or am I missing something?
If you’re looking for a go-to site then join-lemmy.org has links and everything.
I am maybe describing it badly, but I mean something instance independent. A hub of sort. Something that is “the frontpage of Lemmy” so to speak.
I dont wan’t to change any of the core functions of Lemmy, like what I think would still include all the instances and stuff, but it could all be accessed from that main hub as well.
Maybe you could compare it to an app that lets you switch between several accounts for the same service. Or even connect several accounts for the same service.
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Exactly
Nope that’s the idea. You make your own front page.
IMO just make the “All” button really be some kind of “ALL to the best ability” mastadons works well but ive noticed lemmy’s seems to be almost identical to my subscriptions list. maybe a sync issue?
