Honestly I'm kind of struggling with the concept. I'm using the connect android app but it's just not clicking for me.. how do I know if I've found the right community? On Reddit there was only one /r/gaming but when i search on lemmy I get lots of small communities all for the same thing across different instances. Am I misunderstanding how this works? This must be how my parents felt when i first tried explaining Reddit to them 5 years ago

It seems fine, with a few concerns.

The federated nature could become confusing, especially for new users. For example, I'm not sure how a new user is supposed to distinguish between: Games@sh.itjust.works and Games@lemmy.world This seems like a potentially worse version of reddit's games vs gaming vs truegaming.

Also the lack of filtering options. Until I build up a reasonable amount of communities I'm subscribed to, I suspect I'll be using All more, which doesn't seem to have a simple way to do things like filter out all memes or just focus on text.

I really like it generally. I mostly only miss some of the more niche subreddits I belonged to. There are equivalents for some of them here, but it doesn't seem like there's a large enough user base yet to have the active engagement and frequent new content the ones on Reddit have. Other than that I just miss the features of Reddit Enhancement Suite, When I'm browsing on desktop I try to drag-to-zoom some image or another at least three or four times a session, and I really miss continuous scrolling.

Feeling good. It's early, and I know we need to keep that in mind. That said, more of the communities I used to follow have started setting up shop here and that is a good feeling. Now with Memmy on the App-store I feel at home and don't have much if any real reason to go back to Reddit.

It feels like 20 years ago migrating from large chatrooms to bulletin board forums with a smaller more specialized community like setup. Posts and threads don't instantly get buried, and there don't seem to be as many assholes looking to pick a fight.

I see that by scaling down, some of the the more niche forums don't get the traffic, but that will likely change over time. I'm digging the integration with Mastodon so links to people and articles don't have to flow through Twitter. It minimizes having to sift through tons of ads to read what I want.

I also like the region based instances like lemmy.ca and midwest.social having communities and news that is of interest to those regions. It would be cool once more countries have their instances / communities.

Reddit had a good idea with having subs, but many of them got too big to be able to have meaningful discussion for many people. What is the point of trying to comment and engage in a topic that has 5000 posts? Lemmy hopefully can solve that by having the same community in different instances to keep the size where more people can discuss topics in a smaller more engaging setting.

I like it. Unlike a lot of comments I see, I don't want hordes of people to come here from Reddit - I prefer to keep it smaller. Yes, it sucks that super niche communities are hard to get without tens of millions of people, but the drop in overall quality isn't worth it.

After the recent performance upgrades its working great and I am finding it to be a great general replacement for my time on Reddit. All I am hoping for now is for the fediverse to become a bit more populated so that niche communities can develop and get a bit more activity.

Been here for a month, I've noticed that my anxiety levels have dropped significantly. I think it's because I am not an American and on Reddit I didn't realize how much American politics I was consuming just reading comments. Here I just haven't subscribed to American focused subs. It's nice.

I like how default sort for comments is active instead of best, which was just top rated comments

that way, I see recent comments where conversation is still happening and I can participate, gives a better feeling

I quite like it, I generally like how it looks, and there was less of a learning curve than I expected there to be. Things mostly work without needing you to know HOW they work (though that is fun too). I am sure it will get more active as more people move over, but it's actually the perfect amount of activity for me right now. I can check in and there is usually some new stuff without worrying about things moving so fast that my voice gets lost in the noise.

Big plus is I can be fairly open about my leftist politics, at least around here, and not be downvoted into oblivion. Nor does everything thread even tangentially related to China devolve into racism within five posts.

Are there a couple niche communities I miss? Sure, I might recreate them myself honestly, somebody has to. Otherwise, I don't miss much.

It's neat. I see a lot of potential in the platform. I look forward to seeing how it evolves.

Since I switched to Connect for Lemmy, I'm really liking it. I found Jerboa to be a bit unintuitive, which is a reminder of how much a third-party app can mean for the enjoyment of a platform and why people have so strong feelings about their Reddit app of choice that they're willing to leave the platform if that app doesn't work anymore. I don't know if I'd have kept trying to get into Lemmy if I hadn't found Connect.

Lemmy scratches the Reddit itch for me. It doesn't have all my old niche communities yet, but it's got enough for me to log on and see what's happening in the Internet.

Also, I haven't been pestered to use an app since I got here, which is so nice. Reddit was getting more and more aggressive about that before I quit.

It's probably the closest thing to reddit right now (even down to the shitposting memes unfortunately) but I wouldn't say it has the same feel quite yet. I still find the distributed nature confusing (am I in the lemmy.world's technology community, or lemmy.ml's? How do I get to beehaws instance?) and navigating between instances is a chore. I realize though that situation is very fluid and if users can get over the hump and start investing into their communities and lemmy as a technology it can get better.

Also I rely on mobile apps to navigate the majority of the time. There are some decent ones out there now, like Connect for Android. But it definitely is still buggy, and is not as fluid as my experience with Relay for reddit. But again, nothing that can't be fixed.

Some of my favorite subreddits still hasn't shown up yet as communities in any of the major lemmy instances, and I honestly feel it's going to take a very long time for that to happen for some of the more niche ones. The user base I honestly believe will never reach even close to reddit's numbers.

So in a nutshell, good promise, closest thing to reddit, but still has a long way to go.

I've gone cold turkey from Reddit and I'm loving it. My one complaint about Lemmy, that I haven't figured out if this is setting for, is when logging on you always see the most active posts from your specific instance. I would like to see instead the top post from all instances by default

I'm enjoying the hell out of it. Could be the novelty of everything, but I'm liking it more than Reddit. And like I've seen many here say, I tend to respond and have conversations here more often.

Plus, Connect for Lemmy is very nice on my Android phone. I was waiting for Sync of Lemmy to arrive, but I'm not so sure I'll switch.

I think I like more than I liked reddit.

But my NSFW needs are not met yet, reddit have way more fap fuel.

A little intimidating at first but after finding a decent mobile app (connect) and following a few communities I think I'm getting it. The whole federation and indexing is really interesting to me and eventually I could see myself hosting a small instance.

It might be a tiny bit rough around the edges here and there, but the QoL features more than makes up for those.

I already prefer it to reddit tbh.

I've been a lurker.. I believe this is my first comment. I'm enjoying it so far and staying patient as I've seen significant progress over the past week alone. The app im using has improved as well 👍👍

It feels like home! I didn't think it would, but I've settled in. I like that it's a smaller community as I feel my comments count for more somehow. I also like that we're all (or at least a large proportion of us) just a little bit clueless about what's going on or how stuff works round here - we're muddling along together as best we can and it's lovely.

It feels a lot like Reddit did back in the early days before it got popular, in fact. And I think the existence of multiple instances as opposed to one site has the potential to keep it that way - if your instance gets too big or too busy for your taste, migrate somewhere quieter or even create your own.

Not enough content yet but I'm contributing what I can and if everyone keeps getting their friends on Lemmy it will be amazing.

Noticing a lack of communities that cater to specific interests, like ones for specific video games. Most of the content I see is either porn or shitposting/memes. Hoping it continues to grow.

One of the things I greatly disliked about reddit was the hivemind that formed a couple years after it launched, which has only gotten worse as time passed. Anywhere posts and comments are driven by upvote or engagement algorithms is going to create an echo chamber, but I was curious to see if the decentralized aspect of this place might tone that down a bit. It's hard to tell right now because my feed is filled with some of the most indignant, extremist people from other platforms who are here as a form of protest.

Feature-wise, this place is functional and not too hard to navigate, but finding and subscribing to communities was pretty confusing and it's lacking a lot of QoL stuff that reddit has. I don't expect it to be a 1:1 clone but I sure would like notifications when someone responds to one of my posts. Or maybe the notifications just aren't working properly for me? I dunno.

upvoting things on the main lemmy.ml page spins forever.

Missing some of the communities I used to browse. On the other hand I can see porn on my feed again so that's nice.

I love it. I'm just really hoping the sports communities take off. Following and commenting in game threads had become a big part of how I enjoy watching sports and I really want that again.

Loving it. Reminds me of the olden days of Reddit where the communities were smaller but everyone was contributing more.

The bugs and the issues help sell the fact that it's a smaller community so even those don't bother me so much.

honestly I just want boost for lemmy to come out sooner so I can mindlessly scroll lemmy instead of reddit, been figuring the place out just fine

I've noticed that I come across the same posts more frequently on my front page here than on Reddit. Perhaps it would be solved as the userbase continues to grow. Other than that, I have no complaints. This platform is a perfect substitute for Reddit, if not better.

Growing pains for sure. The power of reddit is it's ubiquity - communities on reddit can be very granular because the critical mass has been reached for it to still function. I dont want the homepage of reddit, the social network black hole of endless scrolling, I want conversations about things I can't discuss anywhere else. Home assistant yaml tips and the best builds in Path of Exile and whatnot. While I like the long-term implication a of lemmy, right now it's specicially the worst part of reddit.

It's aight. I just want to see all the billionaire bastards burn

I really like it, except I'm still constantly getting "network error" messages. Not sure if it's a Jerboa app glitch or if the networks are still incredibly overloaded.

For example, every comment I post will buffer for a bit then tell me there's a network error, as if my comment didn't get posted. But if I refresh the post, my comment shows up. It's going to happen this time, too.