Mostly just talked about Mastodon. And the researcher thinks Bluesky is on the same path as Twitter, given its venture capital investors.
Analogy he used was comparing fediverse to e-mail, and how successful that was.
“Poorly”
Is that what they say or what you’re saying?
Me. You can’t deny that lemmy and mastodon feel shoddy compared to the big names. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t use the other motherfuckers, but there are tons of times where I reload my feed and it errors or is empty.
Just the nature of running your own services, and I accept it.
But still, anyone coming from Reddit is going to 100% say it feels shoddy.
Just saw the other day that the Pixelfed developer pushed out a new feature pretty quickly and it reminded me of how much faster you can push new features out when you’re working on a small team with very few developers.
Then I realised that… At the place I work at (an app most likely installed on your phone) - well every change will have a huge impact. If 0.05% of the users’ performance is degraded - that’s a shit ton of users. So we have processes in place. We test on all kinds of devices before releasing.
Running a high quality service at scale is hard and it’s expensive and it’s not always fun because you have to leave your cowboy developer guns at home and do the homework before pushing to production.
Brother I feel that. Half the incidents over the past month have been p90 latency issues because someone pushed a bad query to prod.
That’s why I’m not interested in running any fediverse stuff; maybe a few years ago it would have been fun, but I’m just not in the mood to do work and then do unpaid work.
I will say the Pixelfed app feels pretty damn nice, though.
You mean networks dont just manage themselves?
Crazy right? I’m sure AI will solve this for us this year 🥴
Lemmy on Voyager is flawless as fuck.
In fact I have been lately on Bluesky and spending much more time there these days, since people who I respect say “it’s an open standard” and “a true bulwark to the next Musk or whoever wants to buy it”, but I regularly find myself wondering, “what am I looking for here [on Bluesky]?”
The anonymity of reddit type platforms, of which Lemmy is the most future proof, is highly preferable. Bluesky (Twitter/Xitter, etc) feels lie a bunch of ‘identities’ wanting on some level to get the karma their post deserves plus the karma their identity ‘deserves’
I came from Reddit, strong disagree. I think the lemmy UI is far cleaner than reddit. Bluesky is way better than twitter and is technically decentralized.
Mastodon, for sure is a bit shitty with little thought put into discovery.
Agreed. I don’t use Bluesky much either but when I do it’s always leagues better than Mastadon. I get the issues but from an ease-of-use view it’s clearly superior. It’s time we stop seeing mastadon as the flagship software of the fediverse. Realistically it’s going to be pixelfed or maybe Loops, with Lemmy being a bit more niche. Which I think is fine and to be expected given the format and traits transactional as a second tier in mass appeal.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. You’re spot on
I mean sure maybe some of the huger instances have more hardware behind em. Mine works well most of the time, but I do run into issues often enough that I feel like we aren’t on par with Reddit.
And I don’t expect it to be, and I’m fine with it. My admin is running it himself for free (to me) afaik, and I like the guy, so I ain’t complaining.
The UX of lemmy on the whole is also worse; seeing the same post fifteen times because someone blasted it to multiple instances and communities does get old.
Guess I’m not allowed to be critical even though I literally said I’m fine with it all. 🤷🏻♀️
People place convenience too high on their priority list when figuring out what services to use.
Yeah, the biggest issue to me is users. It is still pretty quiet in the niche communities where in reddit you’d have a lot of eyes for even the most obscure topics
You didn’t ten years ago. Give it time. Be the change.
For sure. I am starting communities on stuff I want to talk about.
I mostly only use Lemmy but my instance has great up time and running out of new posts is not a bad thing to me considering how addicted I was to reddit (and admittedly now to Lemmy.
I have a Mastadon account but considering I lost interest in Twitter ~15 years ago I’m just not into the format.
I would disagree. The default UI might feel shoddy, but using apps and custom UIs like tesseract or photon and it really doesn’t look shoddy at all.
Running Sync for Lemmy against sh.itjust.works gives me an almost identical experience to Reddit.
Except for the content. Lemmy doesn’t have enough people posting and has an exceedingly narrow Overton window (for example).
I want Lemmy to succeed, but we really need to retain users.
but there are tons of times where I reload my feed and it errors or is empty.
Sounds like your server or your app is an issue.
A few years in and I haven’t seen that except for just straight up downtime (planned or otherwise).
But still, anyone coming from Reddit is going to 100% say it feels shoddy.
I didn’t 😎
Where are you getting errors in your feeds? A specific app? Never had issues on Lemmy with Voyager or the website.
I use the boost mobile app exclusively to browse lemmy. Does a great job, it’s identical to reddit except with so few people my stupid comments actually get attention
Saying it runs poorly is a huge reach. Lemmy runs great and gives me 75% of what I wanted from Reddit.
as an instance admin I will let you know that lemmy (the software) runs very very poorly.
You guys had very bad luck with the database, but other instances didn’t have such problems.
I don’t have the same experience, for me it’s been quite rock solid for the past year or a little more. I have seen mabe two or three downtime for maintenance on lemme.ca and have used my other account on .world while it came back. So no real downtime given one server down does not mean all servers down. I have had wayyyy more issues with Reddit.
I have used “Connect” for most of the time and am currently trying out “Summit”. Both apps are great. I do like “Summit” a little more for now but have been using it for just 2 days.
But still, anyone coming from Reddit is going to 100% say it feels shoddy.
What makes you say that?
Reddit/Twitter have had years of development and tons of funding. you’re comparing Applesnto oranges. give the little guys (Lemmy/Mastodon) some time to catch up? that they already work as well as they do compared to massive corporations is pretty impressive. And just to counter your experience, I’ve had zero issues with Mastodon. Lemmy has a few minor UX bugs that will eventually get ironed out.
