And to those that have been here for a while, how has your experience changed over the year(s)?
What has worked for you?
What do you see needs improvement in your chosen platform?
I don’t understand the politics. .ml, hexbear, etc. It’s like going to Christmas dinner with your girlfriend’s family for the first time.
I don’t understand the broader structure, something about Mastodon being part of all this? How everything interconnects, etc.
I’m happy enough here, I read, I make comments, I move on. Just like I did on Reddit. It’s a bit empty, so many of the communities are ghost towns. I get that I’m supposed to help with that, but I’m not much of a poster.
Learning recently that apparently anyone can track my upvote/downvote stats was offputting. I’m going to stop upvoting and downvoting now, I don’t want people making inferences from that, but I’m fine with what I write, because there I always say what I mean.
Votes technically being public and viewable however does mitigate voting manipulation and brigading and overall keeps the fediverse more honest and transparent.
That we still can’t use a single account to comment and post outside of our home instance is the most frustrating part of the fediverse and the main contradiction to “you just need one sign up”.
I am posting outside of my instance right now by replying to you
I guess i butchered my complaint. I was thinking of migrating accounts or one account for all instances or something like that. Multiple signups are still a bitcannoying. Although it only matters for defederation corner cases and instances closing up.
Hello from wherever the fuck I am.
You can definitely do that lol
Ok i butchered it.
I was thinking of federated accounts, not participating in posts across the fediverse.
when you want to migrate instances, its annoying to create the same account name again and again.
I’ve been here for a few weeks now, and I’ve already grown very fond of it. I love the decentralized approach and how things are managed here. It’s the best alternative to today’s mainstream social media platforms. Hopefully this project has a long life ahead of it
I hope so too. I’ve been trying to engage with communites I’m interested in like coffee, and tea.
I joined a month ago, and I like Lemmy much much more than Reddit. The federation makes it visible that you’re part of a large community, there’s no advertising, and I find the discussion to be of a generally higher quality. I also like that one can see upvotes and downvotes. Not sure whether it needs to be fuzzified or embargoed to fight abuse in future, but either way, it’s nice.
I’m absolutely sold on Lemmy vs Reddit. I dumped Twitter when Musk took over, and by then I was already on Mastodon, but I don’t actually use it much. Didn’t use Twitter much either. Any comments on Mastodon vs Bluesky?
I’ve been on Mastodon for almost a month, I enjoy it. I started in the mastodon.social instance then moved to mstdn.plus. I’m still trying to get a hold of Piefed, but it has been good.
I’m a redfugee came with the big exit about a year ago. I post prolificaly, comment sporadically and have a couple of comms. I love it, it feels more like the olden days of the Internet when everything was smaller and you knew people. I sometimes idly scroll Reddit but not even once a week, it’s fucking dire and atmosphere is shit. Insta I’m on a few times a day for memes and Reels.
Long live the fediverse!
Been on here since August and I like it. Left Reddit after I got a permaban for expressing how much I’d love to see the death of billionaires so I came here. Haven’t had to worry about a ban for things I say and haven’t been banned from groups cause I commented on other groups (I don’t know what they’re called and I don’t want to call them subs). I’m still getting messages from mods of subreddits saying I’ve been banned cause I commented on an anti-Nintendo sub despite my profile being perma-banned from the site.
Welcome! They’re called communities! /c/
I’m still getting messages from mods of subreddits
Some of them are fucking bots.
I am only on lemmy.world so far
I like the people and moderation much more than Reddit. I’ve had a couple interactions with mods, and it’s so weird, it was like they are actually people or something. Very reasonable comparatively.
No advertisements for Jesus is pleasant, also. Thanks!
Honestly not great. I was permanently banned from Reddit and the admins wouldn’t tell me what I did. I came to Lemmy thinking it was a better alternative to Reddit, only to find out how toxic Lemmy is. It’s even worse than Reddit in terms of toxicity.
Really? That is surprising. I don’t find lemmy to be toxic.
Look at some of the more political threads and you’ll see what I mean. They have a serious problem with ideological absolutism. You’re either with them 100%, or you’re the enemy. No room for nuance.
Oh, I like that! They’re funny and have provided me with a lot of laughter
My main issue is that only the political subs are active
I’ve had the same experience. Everywhere else is a bit of a ghost town.
If you like coffee and tea I found those groups are quite active if you make a thread.
I switched from Reddit a few years ago to give Facebook another try. Not with pride but Reddit just got too political without an account and all I needed was to scroll for a few minutes to see cats and other nonesense and only some news once in a while. Then some guy threatened the EU with war if we don’t hand over Greenland or Iceland and that was it for me after years of trying to not mind the bad guys.
The biggest problem with lemmy was and still is the hideous UI/UX. It sucks on desktop but even more on mobile (try looking for new communities, only usable in horizontal). I tried to look into “the” code to find a way to add another theme or whatever goes into that direction (Mastodon seems to have a custom CSS field for users, and it looks bad aswell) but since I’m not yet into Rust and because of parallel personal issues I chose to accept it.
But the problems remain: not having an account means you see Trump in 70% of the threads. The other 30% are usually technological subjects that are driven my Musk and/or the Slop. Getting an account means to solve a damn complicated Captcha. And even though I try to cross out the politics I see them for like 20% in technology or shitposts if I remembered to switch once again to the subscibed feed. And that’s okay in my view, noone should post less. Quite the opposite to get things going here (shame on me tough, I’ll probably stay a lurker). But I’d appreciate something more diverting from the daily doom news.
A few weeks passed now only going to lemmy when I fancied a scroll and it was quite okay. Then I found something I wanted to share with my online friends I rarely talk to and alas, there are none in the Fediverse. Pixelfed could be the right thing for it but I’m just not into the Instagram stuff and there wouldn’t be anyone I know anyway. Perhaps I’ll give it a try later but not for now.
So it’s not a total replacement for leisure time. There is still the occasional need to buy stuff on Amazon. I still need to increasingly use Microsoft for work. And for events and news of a wider friends circle there is the need to go to ol’ Facebook. But my account is no longer in the daily users statistics. It’s a marathon… so thanks for being here :)
It gets better the more familiar you become with it. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone in real life. There are parts that are just way too jarring.
I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone in real life. There are parts that are just way too jarring.
Ugh, this. And I hate that it’s like that.
Like, I used to have my instance open to whoever to sign up. My guiding principle was to have a place that wasn’t overrun with [parts that are just way too jarring]. Holy shit was that an impossible goal to do alone so I shuttered it up and now it’s just a private instance / testbed for Tesseract.
My friends knew I was active on Reddit, and that was fine. But I wouldn’t tell them I spend any amount of time here because what they would see going to almost any random instance will
probablydefinitely not look good on me by association despite that I’m nowhere near that.So if anyone shares this desire, I am open to un-mothballing my instance, rebranding, and taking on new admins and re-opening to users who also want a place like that.
i mean, how many of your IRL friends are furries who use Linux on their home PCs?
Ok so wtf is everyone talking about jarring parts
furries. linux supremacists. extremist left-wingers of various flavors and identity groups. fetishists of every variety and their weird SFW quasi pornography.
not sure how you aren’t seeing any of that. i see it on a daily basis and to not see it i have to block dozens of communities. at one point on lemmy i had something like 60 communities blocked and 100s of users.
Oh, I love that shit. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure…
I mean I see it but it’s the internet… do people really not expect them to be posting?
nothing wrong with them posting and doing their thing, but in fediverse that stuff hits general feeds and going to be incredibly alienating to a non-fetishist userbase. if the fediverse wants to grow it needs to keep controversial content away from the front page.
personally i know furries and I don’t really care, but I’m a weirdo. Yet I still don’t really want weird furry shit that I don’t care about constantly showing up in my feed.
Average people are FREAKED OUT by furries, even pro-queer progressives: https://slate.com/advice/2026/02/parent-advice-son-hobby-community-furry.html
Oh well yeah I mean furry content isn’t the same as furry porn. I immediately blocked the nsfw instances from my feed. Idk why that isn’t done by default
i think some instances do, some don’t.
but some content is not porn, but very much like porn, like a lot of the furry meme stuff
No idea. Maybe they’re still federated with Lemmygrad and Hexbear for some odd reason?
My confusion is in no way lessened
They’re particularly toxic tankie servers on Lemmy
lemmy.ml is still rife with crazy tankies who go into other instances and harass the crap out of people.
I recently had an argument here that lasted some weeks.
The poster insisted that “tankie” means “peaceful negotiator”. Chef’s kiss
Ok I guess the only thing I have left to google is tankie lol
Maybe all the ”what the fuck we just made another-moe" communities?
I swear I used to block three every week, until I figured out it was just a few users who didn’t know how to use content warning tags, and then I just blocked those users.
100% same here. used to be every few weeks, now it’s every other day. and it does help to block certain accounts, but it’s still way more prolific and hard to filter out than it was 6 months ago
I find it hard to believe you have any friends, pat
Lmfao he definitely does okay, some that are cool enough to know he’s active on reddit and nobody who’s cool enough to know about the lemmy
I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone irl either, mostly because the community is so small that they’d inevitably find one of my posts haha
I’ve been on the Fediverse since mid-2023, and I’m sticking around!
I bailed on Reddit, FB, and IG, and I’m only on Mastodon and Piefed now. I find that not being on algorithm-driven social media makes me less angry, and I have a much easier time avoiding getting caught up in a mindless scrolling marathon.
I like the ability to filter out by keywords, it makes for a much more pleasant experience
As far as improvements, my main complaint is that I wish there were more people and that the people who are here comment more. Bigger isn’t necessarily better, but there are a lot of communities that just don’t have enough people posting and commenting to make things feel lively yet.
i have been here a similar time and as it’s grow it’s only gotten worse IMO. a year ago I didn’t have to block/ban people calling me names multiple times a day. it happened like a few times a week. my experience is more and more frustrating and the signal to noise ratio is far worse than it was last year or in 2024.
i still see some really great comments and really interesting things, but less and less of it. and i see a lot of the content I enjoy being banned by mods and the people posting it getting harassed by other users because it doesn’t fit it offends them for not being an incredibly crude and simplistic take.
I agree with everything you say here. I would say even some kind of consolidation for communities might be needed as a lot are defunct but I don’t know if that will work or is possible.
I like the ability to filter out by keywords, it makes for a much more pleasant experience
This is one if the most useful features and I think more people should customise Lemmy/Mastodon to their needs.
I’ve only been on the fediverse for a total of like 10 minutes, but it seems so far like a perfectly viable alternative to big tech’s data collection schemes disguised as websites.
Welcome!
I’m not new as such. I joined up on kbin initially and tried to establish my communities on there, but kbin kinda collapsed. Then I gave up for a while.
When I came back, I moved to lemm.ee and set up television and obscuremusic and got them going (the former especially) and then unfortunately lemm.ee shut down and then I moved to Piefed and rebuilt it all over again.
i miss kbin.
Thank you for sticking with it!
Thank you for helping build this place!
I’m new here and it’s quite a relaxed experience. I think there are more friendly and reflected people. It’s like people here are able to criticise properly and take criticism and also encourage and praise a little. I thought this was lost since early internet. But also very political / activist. I feel like in a bubble of people who want to change things for the sake of people and not capital. As much as I like it we’re not enough. I don’t care there are not many comments. Less comments, less fomo.
I think there are some people here like that, and they are great.
But there are fewer and fewer of them as they get drowned out by the angry miserable people who are only here to harass and grief others who they disagree with. Huge uptick in that type of behavior the past few months, as the politics in the USA has gotten a lot of reddit people banned there and they came here. I have been called more names in the past three months on lemmy that I ever got in the previous 2-3 years I have been using fediverse
Welcome!
