gemini://moddedbear.xyz/logs/2021-03-25-first-impressions-of-lemmy.gmi

Due to recent events at Reddit, I'm now taking a closer look at alternatives than before. Here are my initial thoughts on Lemmy.

Creating an account on lemmy.ml was mostly straightforward. Provide a username, password, an optional email, and you're off -- but not before completing one of those old captchas where they warp a bunch of random letters and numbers and laugh at you as you strain your eyes and repeatedly make incorrect guesses. I completed mine in only three attempts which I'm sure is a personal best.

Unlike Reddit, you're only subscribed to one default community when you start out: the official announcements community. I'm not sure if the lack of default communities is intentional or if they're just waiting on more communities to mature. Either way, I don't mind building my own list of subscribed communities from scratch.

Account settings are pretty bare but don't have any glaring omissions. There are plenty of different site themes to choose from, you can upload an avatar and profile banner image, and you can change default sorting behavior. You can even link a Matrix account, but it's not clear how this is used.

The site is incredibly light and fast compared to Reddit. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise when Reddit's site is so slow and user hostile it makes me want to use it as little as possible.

Other than that it feels just like browsing Reddit. Everything is familiarly laid out and if you're coming from Reddit you'll feel at home.

The feed sorting options are even the same as Reddit with one addition: Active. This sorting option is similar to hot, but instead of using the score and post creation time it uses the score and most recent comment time. I definitely like this as an option and think it'll be great for communities that are more discussion focused, but I still prefer sorting by hot on my main feed.

The biggest challenge for any Reddit alternative is building up lots of good communities. One issue that a lot of them struggle with is that many of their early adopters are far right refugees that have been turned away from other platforms. A bunch of people aren't going to want to join a platform where most of the discussion is a political echo chamber for the far right, so adopting a bigger, more diverse userbase starts to become a real challenge for the platform.

The good news is that Lemmy doesn't have that problem. The bad news is that it suffers from a different problem that could hurt user adoption and diversity in a very similar way.

Nearly every single one of the popular communities on lemmy.ml has some sort of connection to FOSS, Linux, or programming. What does Lemmy have for those that don't want to be part of the FOSS echo chamber, or simply want to discuss something other than tech? There are hardly any communities with general appeal, and you can forget about finding active niche communities outside the FOSS bubble.

I know, I know. Classic chicken and egg problem. The best thing that can be done is for existing users to create and promote communities for topics other than FOSS, which to be fair a lot of users have already done. The issue is that these communities at best only have a few hundred members, a dozen of which are active a month if you're lucky. Hopefully this is something that will sort itself out as Lemmy continues to grow a more diverse userbase. But as of right now, this is where things are at.

Now that that's out of the way, communities are basically exactly the same as a subreddit on Reddit. My only gripe is that they can have a display name which is entirely too verbose or which doesn't match the community's identifier at all. Here are a few offenders I noticed while browsing the community list.

a community for the podcast chapo trap house - !chapotraphouse (I know it's a community, I'm browsing the community list)

A place for everything about math - !math (Just call it "Math")

Privacy is a right. Learn about how you can best protect your privacy in this channel - !vpn (Come on, this one just sounds like a Youtube sponsor segment)

I also spent some time with the official Lemmy Android app, Lemmur (get it from Fdroid instead of Google Play -- Google has a long history of taking down fediverse apps).

For how early this app is, I'm impressed. The design is pretty solid and could only use a few minor tweaks. Functionality also seems pretty good and doesn't seem to lack anything from the site as far as I can tell. Scrolling is pretty laggy though which gets annoying quick. Overall not a bad way to browse and it'll probably only get better with time. I haven't tested out the mobile site yet though and might end up preferring that if scrolling is smoother.

Lemmy as it is right now won't be a drop-in Reddit replacement for anyone unless all you browse are tech communities. I'll still have to resort to Reddit for a few niche topics (can you believe there's not a single VR community on lemmy.ml?), but I'm definitely going to be keeping Lemmy around and using it instead of Reddit where I can. I guess I'll have to focus on helping some of the smaller communities get active and even create a community or two.

First Impressions of Lemmy

Account Creation

Experience

Communities

Lemmur

Conclusion

Links