I'm trying really hard to like Lemmy, but whenever I'm reading through posts on "active", "hot", etc. it will initially load with the correct content. But then, I get about 10 seconds before the entire list frantically reflows and fills with brand new posts from all over the place. Extraordinarily annoying. I get that creating a new post is itself "activity" which is probably why it does that, I don't think posts of that nature meet the description of "hot".

Maybe I just need to be going by Top->Day

I look at the subscribed communities I am part of. I find that just looking at all communities a little overwhelming.

I used to primarily browse /r/all because I like to see when niche communities produce things exceptional enough to hit it (and I'd just filter subreddits I didn't want)

Especially now, there are a -lot- of new Lemmy communities popping up so I like to be able to see that kind of activity.

This has to be a bug, right? I experience the same thing and just wrote it off as broken, deciding to try again in a few days when they figure things out.

I believe hot is currently bugged, I use recent comments as sorting and I find that nice.

I just tried that. 2 of the top 6 posts that popped up had zero comments. Within a few seconds, brand new posts (with no engagement) starting filling in from the stop.

It seems like the content algorithm is fundamentally broken right now.

I think that just got fixed in the newest version, but it'll take a bit for instances to update.

They switched from using websockets with a constant feed of new posts, to just normal http.

The current sorting algo is sorta not great. An instance i'm on that forked, and then unforked recently is dealing with this right now. We had our own react frontend with really nice custom themes, but in order to federate we had to go back to the main codebase.

It's not great but it will hopefully improve. A lot of growing pains but overall its a really exciting time.

So long as it's a known thing, I trust it will improve. It's just unfortunate that it had to be this broken during Lemmy's most opportune moment to capture new users.

That, among other things, is creating a lot of friction for new users at the moment though.

Yeah, I've been urging patience to a few folks who seem frustrated by the change. IIRC its not a big team working on lemmy, and then you have many different teams deploying their instances, adding custom features, etc.

It's certainly improved a lot over time, but the reddit exodus wasn't really planned. I'm sure the lemmy devs are feeling the pressure.

Apparently they’re removing it.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1357

This is a bug, and should be fixed in the next version. It happens in Top Day too sometimes.

A simple trick is to browse page 0 instead of page 1, by editing the URL.

Funny enough, I just tried editing the url and the first post on the resultant page was https://lemmy.world/post/433283 (a post in the Fediverse community asking why they keep seeing new posts show up in all sorting types)

I will say that doing so on the "new comments" sorting type did still yield a good number of no-comment posts.

I also had trouble with Lemmy's UI and made a different frontend for myself. Here's some screenshots.

1. https://postimg.cc/PPRMGw7k

2. https://postimg.cc/mcNMrzmk

3. https://postimg.cc/7CVG4vLT

I was thinking of making it more widely available but didn't know if there'd be enough users to make it worthwhile and if interest in Lemmy would last.

I've been sorting by "new comments" -- which brings us squarely back to the "bump old threads" style phpbb forums. Which I suppose is okay.

I would sign up for lemmy but it requires an email

Did you manage to sign up for reddit without one?

You used to be able to do this, but e-mail has been required for some time.

Over on Lemmy, it is the instance operator's choice whether or not to require e-mail, but most instances currently do as a measure to mitigate bot signups.

At least on old reddit, you can click "next" when it asks you for your email to skip that step.

Yeah, unfortunately, it only works on old reddit. It's quite amusing to see how they treat old and new reddit as entirely different platforms.

My experience has been your account will quickly get shadowbanned if you don't provide email.

I've even used burner emails and have been shadowbanned. email-less account definitely wouldn't get traction.

This was also my experience when I tried to register a custom domain. The only thing that worked for me was using a Gmail account that I had used with other, older, accounts.

You can leave the field empty during signup.

Yes, this used to be a feature of Reddit, not sure if it still is.

It used to be a feature of the entire internet, really. Email based signups weren't common in the infancy.

Yeah, I remember. I was born in the eighties. In my opinion this should still be a feature of the internet, remembering your username and password should be enough for a lot of things. Protection against bots can be achieved in any number of ways and there already exists ways to use temporary emails so I don't really get why most places still require you to use an email.

Edit: I mean, I do get it, I just don't like it.

I feel you. Things were nice and easy back then, before the greater population came and made everything terrible and spammed the daylights out of everything.

spam/bots grew out of control. You need to do something to curtail that, and email verification seems to be the most seemless solution.

That said, I've had a burner email for as long as my personal email for this very reason. I even have 2 burner gmails. It's not exactly a huge invasive measure like a phone number (which I'd never give to a site that isn't trying to take payments. Hell, still haven't given Amazon my phone number).

I agree with you, just was an observation about how things changed.

Yes I have many reddit accounts without an associated email.

Yes, it still is last I checked you just have to dodge a (mild) dark pattern they added suggesting otherwise.

I am unavailable to sign up on lemmy.world; the websocket connection closes and reconnects, no error, any ideas?

What browser/OS? Maybe try a different combination.

I am using Google Chrome on Mac, and it literally crashes when I click on the submit button, so I assumed the server crashes. Tried about 5 times across multiple days, and I have never been able to sign up.

It's tough to read as a lurker. The page keeps scrolling around and re-rendering. I think the "realtime" promise is pretty misguided.

It’s known and this “feature” will be removed in an update.

It seems to be down right now. It grew 50% from yesterday to today, so... well, growing pains.

Moving entire communities there is going to be challenging

I don't really think anybody expects that to happen. As long as a large enough number of people move, it can succeed.

But people don’t care. Homelab subreddit created a forum and after 5 days, the number of registered users on that forum is 18. Selfhosted subreddit did the same thing and activity on their forum is similarly low. If people on “selfhosted” subreddit don’t want to move to a selfhosted alternative, I don’t know if there is any hope for other communities.

The selfhosted community on Lemmy (https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted) is up to 12.5k subscribers and seems fairly active so it's possible there might be enough people who care this time for it to work.

These things tend to not work until all of a sudden they do.

I think the communities would benefit from becoming smaller. I avoided any large subreddits because the noise ratio was awful. The smaller ones were much better.

The trick is to both (1) promote equivalent communitie to existing Reddits - let them know there are alternaives to being a serf -- and (2) start posting on there. Be the change you want to see!

The federated future for social is coming, albeit slowly in fits and starts. What is nice is that many of the communities on these two are shared because it is the fediverse.

EDIT: Downvoted why?

What about migrating historic data from Reddit ? Is that possible?

From a technical standpoint: Archive.org is archiving Reddit data. So someone just needs to write an importer for that data. I would have suggested reading from Reddit's APIs directly but they are shutting those down.

From a legal standpoint: I am unsure.

Do they archive nsfw too?

Edit: I checked, and Archive.org seems to be snapshotting once per quarter or less. Not a realistic strategy for any sub with even modest traffic.

Or legal?

I'm certain you got downvoted over the word 'serf'. I upvoted because my reaction to that framing is more positive, but it's not a framing I would use, myself, because I would expect to get some flak for it.

Doesn't support Safari.

Which one? I use Lemmy.world from Safari successfully.

Feature, not a bug.

I am going to try and use lemmy, but it's tough giving up old content in Reddit.

I guess we can start posting old content.

What are the differences? Who runs these instances? Is there any moderation, or is it just the messy wild west?

An instance is a server. Server administrators set the policy for creating new user accounts and new communities. This is the equivalent of a Reddit admin.

Since it's part of the Fediverse, a user on one instance/server can subscribe to a community on any federated instance, and make posts/comments/etc. You don't need a separate account on every instance.

Communities are typically moderated by the user(s) who created them, much like moderators of a specific subreddit.

Can someone explain why all of these federated services are so left-wing? Don't these people have enough of the normie internet catering to them already?

Left leaning people are more open to new experiences and thus are often early technology adopters just like they are often early social practice early adopters.

Citation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00926...

Fear center is bigger in right leaning folks.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5793824/

In Lemmy's case, it may be because the creators were banned from the left wing Reddit communities for genocide denial and promoting neonazi literature. It's a textbook case of horseshoe theory, and I won't go near that service with a 10 foot stick. By all accounts they seem to be awful people.

A really nice instance that might be interesting to people here is http://programming.dev

I think these instances that serve a "family" of topics has a great chance of shining within fediverse. I'm rooting for programming.dev to bring together the programming community.