I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:

• The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I’m aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that’s less than ideal)
• The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I’m aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it’s vital to the success of Lemmy.

Echoing many things that other users are saying already:

Signing up/choosing a home instance is confusing. I don’t think it’s very confusing conceptually, but it is confusing from a UX/UI perspective. Subscribing to outside communities was the toughest part, I had to find them through a different instance using a search engine, then manually paste the community-specific URL into my home instance search, wait several seconds, then click into the community home page and finally click “subscribe.”

Not something a casual user is going to want or even figure out to do. I trust that many of these growing pains will be fixed in the coming weeks/months. I just hope that it’s not all a flash in the pan and then fizzles out totally.

Once using it though, I like the general feel of it. Better themes and some cleaner UI choices and it will be really nice imo. People are friendly so far and that’s worth a ton right there.

People are much friendlier here, so far.

I like the concept
But it feels very much like its been designed by nerdy developers and has had little to no-input on user friendly design.

The federated idea can work but it needs to be more seemless than this.

1. Communities with the same name should be merged when viewing it from any instance, so you can see all the posts from these communities, they can be moderated seperatley and for advanced users you should be able to select which communities make up the merged community.
2. By default you should see all of the merged communities in a central place and be able to subscribe to them easily, at the moment its handled different per instance but you have to seek out these communities to subscribe or follow them.
3. I strongly believe there should be a centralised log-in system, so you can log into any instance with an account from another instance, this means if your instance goes down your account is centralised and is safe.

There’s a learning curve with “how do I know which instance to join?” and then “how do I find communities from other instances?” But I’m getting the hang of it.

What it needs most is a UI overhaul. If Apollo came to the fediverse it would be a game changer.

It’s giving me some early reddit days vibes. I remember searching for communities that fit my interests, it felt less based on recommendations and more ‘pick your content yourself’. never felt the urge to post much myself on reddit, this feels like a place I would though.

Biggest downside I see right now is user base size and UI of mobile apps. Have only tested Jerboa right now, which feels like a very basic app (still working fine though!). once I get some customization capabilities back on mobile I’ll be happy!

And the user base will grow, the fediverse approach feels kinda nice.

Feels like this might be the fediverse flavor that sticks with me. I tried mastodon and diaspora, but they didn’t stick. Didn’t help that I hated Twitter and Facebook.

This feels chill so far. I like it

Not a fan of Jerboa, but I realize that it’s early days. Hopefully we can get some of the UI people from the 3rd party reddit apps on here to develop a better client.

I will make this my first ever Lemmy post:

Overall, this definitely feels like a promising alternative with some growing pains. The bigger communities are decently active but the decentralized nature of Lemmy carries the risk of some communities becoming too fragmented where communities are duplicated in different instances. As some other users have suggested, This could be remedied by creating “Super communities” spanning the Fediverse which could help with growing to a scale large enough to rival Reddit and incentivise even more Redditors to make the switch.

I’m still a little confused but it’s sinking in. The difference between an instance and a “sub”, as well as how to join or interact with other “subs” without having to join each individual instance, was the part that was toughest to adapt to. I love it, though. Lemmy is giving me the feeling Reddit did when I first joined it a long, long time ago on my first ever account. It feels organic.

It’s pretty nice. I do hope it picks up more activity of course, but it’s just been a chill and low key sorta thing for me so far. Way less toxic than most other sites I’ve used.

I’m enjoying the concept behind the fediverse, and while communities are small right now, they’re eventually gonna get bigger and be more centralized.

I think the UI/UX does need a little more work, but that’ll come with time.

Confusing. There are communities I can’t subscribe to because I can’t access them from my instance, and I have no idea why that is. The experience has been interesting so far, and growing the network is going to be something I’ll be keeping an eye on. For now, though, I’ll have to wait until someone creates the communities I was a part of on Reddit.

Edit: It seems a community won’t show up on your instance’s community list unless someone in that instance is subscribed to it.

I am enjoying it so far. I usually tend to lurk but the community is, as many have said, very welcoming and it creates an atmosphere where it encourages you to contribute (not just with up/downvotes but also comments).

So far so good - sh.itjust.works was showing off a solid looking infrastructure (which is so far seamless), so I joined there.

It feels a lot like 2010 era reddit in terms of content, with a whole bunch of people trying to resurrect memes and communities that grew up organically on reddit. I’m not sure if it’ll work that way, because there’s a natural difference in userbase, but best of luck to them. I worry that the difficulty of getting NSFW content online is going to give reddit a perpetual competitive edge, but totally appreciate the legal/moral difficulties wherein.

It took a bit to figure out how to sub to new communities, and along with a lot of other newbs, I’m hoping that that’s something that can be tightened up. Like, a browser extension or something that could recognise you’re logged into some instance, and then create a subscribe link on the page rather than the weird copy-paste-into-searchbar dance that seems to be the standard at the moment.

Overall, great to see that this works and grows. My thanks to the instance hosts and mods.