Dropped Reddit a month ago after 12 years of daily use and while it was tough in the initial days Lemmy/Kbin activity has really picked up and is beginning to absolutely fill the gap. Just need the apps and a bit more stability and think it's going to be a proper successor.
When the protest started I poked around the Fediverse and it was a ghost town and was a little concerned that Reddit might not have any competition. But since the end of June posts and content have been going way up, and the quality of the posts is way better than Reddit, even before spez fucked things up.
Yeah I think a lot of people were skeptical if Reddit would actually follow through initially... I know I was. I thought they would back pedal, but realized shortly after Spez's disastrous AMA that wasn't gonna happen. Someone else mentioned Lemmy in a different thread and that's how I first heard of it.
After some research to learn about the fediverse and ActivityPub, badda-bing, badda-boom, I'm here and haven't looked back.
There are a few (very few) communities I am still waiting to become active and useful here but Reddit has been moved to page 4 or my social media folder and I rarely ever scroll to it.
Good riddance too. The move to Lemmy/Kbin also pushed me back onto Mastodon and I could not be happier.
Edit: just realized kbin isnt on there. Kbin is another Lemmy-affiliated site, but it also lets you see mastodon posts. You need a seperate kbin login to use it, but the site looks similar and behaves similarly to any Lemmy instance.
I think a big help will be creating a streamlined sign-up process in the apps themselves. Menus to pick a server and create an account. Maybe tell the user which servers are biggest/ask if they wanna browse servers by specific content leanings. That way it’s not intimidating. I’m a tech guy and even I was a bit perplexed in the beginning and that will keep anyone with a non-technical background away: we tech nerds forget that things not “just working” isn’t a feature in the eyes of a majority of people. (For better or for worse.)
I have been using Kbin exclusively while waiting for the Artemis app to be released but I decided to Memmy for Lemmy to see what the hype was all about. Well I’m loving Memmy, it does exactly what you discussed. The app makes it super easy choose an instance and create an account. Does the app need some work? Yes but it’s leaps and bounds better than browsing through a mobile web browser.
Yeah I spent 2 weeks on Jerboa unable to post, comment, subscribed etc because the instance I joined was not yet a login option on the app. Still have that issue with every other app.
You can tell the devs are working hard on these apps though. It's a race to get a polished app released before people lose interest in leaving reddit.
Indeed. I've seen the rate of app updates pick up recently, and I feel it's noticeably smoother than a couple weeks ago. Great effort is being done and I'm grateful towards the devs for that.
Just in case you don't already know: On most apps you can type in your instance instead of selecting one from the drop down menu. Im on a small instance too and it took me a week or so to figure it out last month lol
I look forward to talking about my first few weeks on Lemmy in years to come: "Back then I had to use an app that was in alpha and wait ten minutes to load a page full of bean memes! And then we got hacked!"
Same, a little bit of added qol to Memmy as well as some content on some of the more niche communities I used to frequent and Reddit will be solely used for searching obscure problems in the future if even that.
/r/heat was a big loss for me. But /c/nba is actually nice, since everyone has been respectful. I avoided /r/nba since everyone was so hostile to each other and it contributed so much to me hating most fanbases.