Unhappy with Lemmy
I'm really not happy with Lemmy so far. Its a great community and a cool concept, but the amount of bugs I am experiencing is really starting to put me off.
The site constantly updates / glitches, when I try click on something it moves just before I click so I end up clicking on something else. If I open a post, as soon as I go back the entire home feed is different and my sorting preferences have been reset.
As someone coming from the refinement from Apollo this really is offputting and makes me want to use Lemmy even less.
The people here are great, the federation is cool and I like how decentralized it is, but I think I'm going to log off now and I don't expect to be back anytime soon.
Ps. A functioning app I can download directly from the app store would be great. I'm not interested in progressive web apps or testflight betas, I want something that just works and is well refined.
Edit: I understand its early days, I'm not faulting devs for not being able to keep up, all I am doing here is expressing my opinion. I'm also sad about losing Apollo so that definitely adds to my disappointment quite a bit if I'm being honest.
If you expected someone's fledgling project that's just getting started to be as polished and refined as something that's had thousands of dev hours over the last 5-10 years then that's just bad expectations management. It will get better.
I understand its early days, not faulting the devs here, I'm just expressing how I feel
You should give kbin.social a shot. It works better than lemmy currently. I made an account on lemmy.world and kbin.social and end up spending my time on kbin. Even on mobile with no app, I find the user experience better. I am sure it will get better for all instances with time.
kbin isn't bad, but it's been plagued with 500 errors - probably due to the massive influx of new users/instances.
Someone on the Discord told me KBin gained 30000 users in the last 24 hours.
Over the past few days, I've had waves where kbin.social gets really hammered, but then it performs fine after that. Someone suggested that it might be when users here in the US have their peak activity times, that it's getting hit much harder then.
Makes sense that kbin works better as kbin actually let me register I had trouble even trying to register on 3 different instances before someone recommended kbin because, and I quote, "it just works."
Kbin definitely has the better front page algorithms atm.
Kbin is lacking the filtering for NSFW content though and there's a lot of sketch making it into the frontpage on kbin is very noticeable so for now I have an account here and on a Lemmy instance and I use Lemmy more. Kbin is for when I can be more careful with my scrolling.
Isn't there a setting in your profile to block NSFW? Or is not working fully?
Take this with a grain of salt, but I think the issue is that some content isn't tagged as NSFW, so even if it's from an NSFW community, Kbin won't block it unless it's tagged as such.
I don't think that that's it. I'm on kbin, and at least some of the images that some people were complaining about on kbin were blurred, so there must have been some sort of NSFW indication associated with them.
It works. It's just that not everyone is using the tags correctly.
There is a box you can check or uncheck. It comes checked by default and you have to actively undo it in order to get NSFW. You dirty dog
This is also my fediverse origin story.
Yeah I definitely prefer kbin, and it has an app which is overall pretty good even on my janky ass unihertz phone.
Wait, there's an app?
Not the original commenter, but @hariette is developing an app at the moment. There's an official kbin magazine (/m/Kmoon, or [email protected])
There's also a Discord server.
I now can't find the link but I don't think its on the play store. But yes there is an app
https://tinypic.host/i/oe6Stx
What app?
Not the original commenter, but @hariette is developing an app at the moment. There's an official kbin magazine (/m/Kmoon, or [email protected])
There's also a Discord server.
I’m not sure if you will find much sympathy here. Many people (myself included) left Reddit because their policies and ethics now outweigh the benefits of a refined, smooth experience. Although, even that may be gone now if you’re switching from Apollo to the default Reddit app…
The communities here have made any occasional glitches worth it for me.
P.S. you can set your sorting preference under Settings.
Yup. It's buggy and the native apps are pretty rough. I'm trying to give it a chance. I suspect the original Reddit was pretty rough too.
The original Reddit was definitely rough. But it was also an open source project and grew with time, until the company closed-sourced it in 2017 and went with the new redesign (which remains controversial with older redditors even now).
Tbf the fediverse (and Lemmy & Kbin as Reddit alternatives) is in a very impressive state for something that has been fairly small scale up to now. It'll improve faster given the increased interest and as new devs decide to pitch in. Early reddit was exciting and chaotic; its a good time to be on a site like this.
Agreed, the original reddit was rough, definitely much worse than Lemmy currently is now. For the amount of growth Lemmy has seen its holding up well, I just wish it was better. Maybe I'm impatient..
Christ, was it that long ago? I am old.
it was pretty bad. I used it a bit before everyone left digg and it took a good while after that for it to feel "polished".
Kbin I'm trying out too and seems little better. Even newer project though
I understand you but...
pls be patient, stay with us.
Many skilled (and less skilled) people are working hard and cooperating to make Lemmy better week are week.
(Pretty sure Aaron Swartz would have loved that)
Love the project 😎
Found u/Spez
/s
Most have been here less than a week. It will take time. The Fediverse was not created with the intention of toppling Reddit in one week. Many of the bugs that people have been complaining about are being fixed in the next release.
100% agree. I will deal with bugs today because I can see the benefits of decentralization. Yes it's buggy, but I know that we, the community, are fixing it. And that we are making the service better as users and not in some top-down decision making way.
Also maybe it's just me but I find people's lack of patience to deal with a few bugs really strange. Yes I've come across bugs and intermittent connection issues but it's not really the end of the world and knowing that the Devs and admins of each instance are working hard to keep things turning over is enough for me... I'll just do something else for a bit. It was the same when Reddit would go down or what ever.
I guess I don't notice any of this because I'm on jerboa. Haven't had complaints with the app.
It's so close to the reddit apps It's throwing me a loop. But yeah. Other than the hot feed bug It's been 'good' for me
I'm actually having the opposite peoblem. Jerboa sometimes refuses to load communities citing java exceptions, and loading up a thread takes a long time. Browsing on PC has been fantastic, on the other hand.
Jerboa has been very good for me.
Give it time, but don’t stop giving feedback. Every platform is buggy in the beginning.
It’s very early. There are a lot of great ideas here, but also a lot of details yet to be worked out. Also lots of bugs.
I wasn’t on Reddit in the early days, but I expect it had problems too. I know twitter did.
If you’re a developer or have any skill in that area, I’d encourage you to contribute. If not, I’d ask for 2 things:
This is your chance to help make “Thing n+1” better than “Thing n”. Chances like that don’t come around very often.
I'm using jerboa. It's very similar to rif. I had zero expectations coming in. And that's probably a big part of why I like it.
It's definitely buggy. Clunky. Etc. But I'm here for it, and I'm curious what becomes of it. It's actually pretty intuitive, and the bugs will be ironed out as we go. It's kind of like everything in life. It's what we make it. And I really vibe with that.
Tbh I don't need perfect or easy. It's home brew decentralized version of reddit. I can deal. But I understand your concerns and agree with all of them, but I'm just kind of enjoying the journey and viewing it as it's own experience.
+1 for the jerboa app. I'm finding myself searching around and engaging on the fediverse a lot more now because of it.
95% of the time I spent on reddit was through the Relay app. Jerboa has definitely filled that void for me on the fediverse.
Lemmy is very new software currently only at v0.17.4
If you're here then you're getting the real Early Adopter experience. That isn't for everybody.
So they drove a bunch of people into a public beta software. Do developers need free beta testing?
While it is okay to not be a fan of being someone's unpaid tester, you have to recognize that the developers of Lemmy are giving it away for free under the GPL, and letting people run in on their own hardware. This is extremely generous, and there is no incentive to actually use the software beyond the demand and goodwill that people have for a place to talk on the internet that isn't actively hostile towards them.
They? Spez did xD
It just happened that quite a few redditors found that the experience using Lemmy was already good enough and started suggesting it.
And here we are :shrug:
Btw considering that Lemmy is open source, yes, they do need free beta testing. They even need more contributors to handle the development and bug fixing.
I was using the official reddit app (gasp) before this, using Jerboa now and it feels just as smooth if not smoother?
I'm on iOS so Jerboa isnt an option :(
Did you try Mlem?
My condolences to your past self and congratulations to your current self!
The sorting bug definitely needs fixed ASAP. Hot is stale, top posts somehow start sending new posts, and posts from other instances are often slow.
Yes this is exactly what I am experiencing as well
It'll get better with time but yeah I agree it's clunky and buggy at the moment. Kbin (kbin.social or fedia.io) seems to be a more stable alternative but have their own bugs and issues.
I'm not sure I'd give up on it though; maybe come back and forth and see how it gets on. It isn't meant to be an instant Reddit replacement, but the increased interest will spur more people to help with development and some communities seem to be reaching critical mass to be sustainable.
My big issue is that I haven't found a good setting for my home feed that consistently updates. I've had the same posts at the top of hot/all and active/all since I started, it's difficult to find posts that have any activity that aren't multiple days old because of this
I sort all/new or subscribed/new and just scroll. I'm subbing to a vast array of communities I wouldn't have otherwise and I've found a number of really good reads and discussions. If there was a way to hide already viewed threads it would make the experience much better, but I can live with it for now.
This is also how I do it. My homepage is set to subscribed/hot(bc my local is Polish lol), but for more content I'll go all/new or subscribed/new.
They're changing how it sorts in v0.18
I believe the current setting was configured with the old less active community in mind.
Now with more users and posts things will have to change.
Yeah the hot/active algorithm just doesnt work anymore. It worked fine the first week i was here but ever since lemmy blew up its shown the same threads at the top which kinda sucks
It's a known bug that the next version will address. I have been using "top of the day" and "new." New has been a great way for me to find new communities.
Browse through the communities here, subscribe to a decent amount of them, and then set your home page to subscriptions and sort by new.
I'm sour about losing Sync, but have you tried Jerboa? It's absolutely not as feature-complete yet as any of the big 3rd party reddit clients were, but it feels totally familiar and I've been happy using it so far.
You can't really expect an amateur project led by 2 people (or 1 in case of kbin) to be comparable to a decade of reddit development. Even the Apollo app, that just built in top of other tech instead of having to reinvent the wheel, is at least 5 years old by now afaik.
If you just care about convenience then reddit is still your best bet. If you have other concerns then you need to weight which one matters more.
I'm not using an app, but rather the site directly on a PC. I've been pretty happy with the experience so far, and it's become something that I check regularly now. I'm looking forward to the communities becoming larger and having more content.
Of course, I'm also looking forward to the mobile experience improving for others, too.
Not trying to be rude or anything but, if you are trying to replace reddit with another reddit this won't work out for you. Lemmy is not and will never be Reddit. It will never have the same functions and bugs will show up sometimes, why?, because this project is funded by normal people, they aren't making any money at all.
I'm not saying that you should be ashamed of expressing your opinion, but please keep in mind that this project is fueled by passion and love. You could focus your time in trying to make it better rather than just pointing out problems that people are actively trying to solve.
I'm extremely happy with Lemmy and I actually think the bugs give it charm. It make it feel more like home. No big corporations. I'm fine with limited content and problems for the time being. I'll take it over Reddit any day.
It's really not any buggier than trying to use reddit
Incorrect. Have you tried any third party apps for reddit?
Yes, but there's no point in comparing ourselves to those now that they're going away...
Why would I need to? I only use old.reddit at my desktop
I don't ever browse reddit at a desktop, so yes I need third party apps
Yeah that's fair. I think I tried using the reddit app once.
I'm mostly just getting a few bugs on sh.itjust.works and I've got no idea where to get support from here. I'm sure it'll all get sorted in time.
Jerboa for Lemmy (the app) is pretty good though mostly. It's no RedditIsFun but it's functional enough.
The real solution is for the developer of apollo to make it work as a lemmy client. You should probably let him know.
FWIW most of the glitches are in the official web UI, so using another UI (e.g. Jerboa on Android) fixes most of the issues.
Yeah. I'm using the app it doesn't have that updating issue. App is missing some features that the web has so I jump back and forth.
lol you should have seen what reddit was like 15 years ago.
Understandable, maybe you can come back in the future when hopefully some of these bugs are ironed out and apps like Mlem are out of alpha.
How much are you willing to pay for this?
I do have quite a laundry list of remarks for Lemmy too. The bugginess and lack of features is understandable. But it is quite centralized and I see a future where it will be more centralized the more users will join due to a bit of a fundemental flaw of federation.
Maybe these problems will be fixable. I hope so, because I think it is a really cool concept. But I am not sure if I agree with the execution of it. I would love to contribute to this project if these problems are fixable.
From appolo to jarboa, idk if it's a fair comparison. Even the browser has its perks compared to jarboa but I still use it, i will do the same thing I did with the Reddit app all those years ago, give it a chance, use it, report buggs, give feedback, enjoy the updates.
Running any kind of social network / website (or whatever you call it) is messy.
Content, traffic, servers and users - everyone knows the best.
So I respect anyone who runs any instance and I don't mind bugs etc. Twitter, FB, reddit they were also buggy and full of backend mess.
So just don't be upset because of bugs. Take it like a price for freedom for tech corp(s).
OT: I'm paying for own email, vpn and others stuff every month so big techs have minimum info about me ... I also have 6 browser and every single of them is for something.
Just try kbin.social instead. I much prefer it currently vs lemmy's frontend.
I’m confused; isn’t this kbin.social?
It is for you.
You have an account at kbin.social. That's a single fediverse instance. When you log in, you see content and are able to interact with users from every fediverse instance, because they all sync with each other (so to speak, I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but that's the basic gist). There are a few exceptions, I am aware that beehaw has decided to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.it, and that kbin.social had federation turned off for a bit while ernest was dealing with server load issues. There may be other defed choices made by instances in the future, there may be other times when all federation has to be turned off temporarily on some instance or another for technical reasons, but at the moment, those are exceptions and not the rule.
The url from kbin is https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/37881/Unhappy-with-Lemmy
So it's federated, you just have to check the url. It's already confused me once - something kbin could improve on.
@Jitzilla Others have mentioned how to tell that this post is federated from elsewhere to kbin. The question of why you are seeing it here on kbin is another thing... I think it's because you were likely on the home page of kbin with the filter set to "all" so that you are effectively seeing a stream of content from anywhere in the fediverse — sort of like being on r/all. i.e. no one specifically reposted it here. It just, idk, had enough traffic to show up high enough for you to come across it.
You're reading this on kbin.social but if you look at your address bar it'll say m/[email protected] which means its an sh.itjust.works instance.
You are probably viewing a post from itjustworks on kbin.
The #federated posts show up in your feed like they're supposed to. Hover over the post's author @darkstar and you will see where he posted from.
I was also really unhappy with it. Then I tried kbin.social. It's not a lemmy instance, but also uses the fediverse so you can still see and interact with posts from other lemmy instances.
The fediverse thing makes me feel like I'm in the dust. I thought Kbin was its own federated thing, separate from Lemmy. Like there are decentralized federated Kbin nodes as its own thing, and decentralized Lemmy nodes as its own thing. But Lemmy and Kbin intermingle?
I feel like I need something like that old UK/GreatBritain/British Isles infographic, but for Kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, and whatever else springs up.
It's less of a "UK/GreatBritain/British Isles" thing and more of a "You can have gmail/hotmail/outlook/etc and all have 'email'" kind of thing.
All of them are speaking the same language/protocol so they all talk to each other even if they do things differently
Mastodon is probably the most different since it's trying to be Twitter which is a very different "thing" than Reddit.
It's been three days since I've been unable to log in to a Lemmy.world account I also opened along with this Kbin one. I get the prompt, fill the username / password, click the button... and it spins and spins and keeps on spinning, nothing happens.
Did I get banned? Is it a bug? Some snafu on my end?
Kbin has been much more stable and usable so far.
I'm having the same issue. :/
Out of curiosity:
In both cases with me, it's Brave browser on iPad.
EDIT: Just noticed I can log in to Lemmy.world with the Mlem app, so it's not a ban, it's definitely a glitch.
I've had issues with logging into both sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world using Firefox Mobile. Chrome mobile seems to work.
I mean, you know where the door is.
Jeez, i like the site but fair criticism is allowed
This isnt yelp. Nobody needs or wants a 4 day old account expressing all their gripes with a service that is in its infancy, or that they won't be coming back anytime soon. Cool you don't like the coffee here. Go to someone else's coffee shop, don't stand there yelling about it to all the people enjoying their coffee.
The man is providing feedback, that's valuable data for devs. If nobody says anything, nothing will change for the better.
The same kind of valuable feedback a two year provides when he wants ice cream for dinner and doesn't want to go to bed yet.
Why so hostile? Can you explain exactly what makes you so angry?
There's nothing hostile about saying he's welcome to stop using the product if he's unhappy with said product. You're the one taking it defensively.
I really don't think you get the point of that post. It's a feedback and he is certainly not the only one thinking that. As a Dev myself I can tell you that having this kind of people is more than helpful. They say what they think you are more aware of what the community is asking. When you are alone on a project, you most of the time miss what real issues it have
A coffee shop doesn't have a voting system
You literally vote with your wallet.
Everyone here needs to take a shower. It Smells like poop
Ma'am, this is a Wendy's.