I’ve seen many comments and posts regarding the API fiasco on Reddit, with the claim that there will be a huge influx of users when that happens. I’m all for it, but I find it hard to believe that the average or even above average user will make the effort to switch.
I’ll be directing all of my users in Sync to lemmy.world tomorrow.
Wow this is actually the dev of Sync! Guys this is big! Thank you, this will be huge, hope it her dev will follow.
Loved sync, hope that the Apollo dev does this too.
Very exciting! And Sync for Lemmy is even more exciting! Question, do you plan on adding Kbin support in the future? Maybe when their API is released?
He has said he plans to support kbin in the future. But he is working on a MVP minimum viable product right now to get something that works out asap and then start addressing things like kbin support down the road. He just needs time and the support of the community. You can follow the project at !lemmy.world/c/syncforlemmy (hopefully I did that right…)
just curious…
how many users would that be?
roughly
It’s had over a million downloads and 70k reviews. So, a few.
Gotta be at least 5. Minimum!
I’m one of them and I’m here now! Only 4 more to go… but seriously I hope there’s a ton more to follow.
I’m so excited for you! Sorry Reddit just disregarded third party app developers like you guys were nothing, absolutely disgraceful. Without your app, my SO & I have no desire to browse the site for fun anymore. Thanks for aiding in hours of fun for us!
king
Not gonna be a sudden exodus.
More that Reddit’s entered a slow death spiral. Redditors will start seeing an upsurge in toxicity, since mods will have left, been replaced with stooges, had their tools taken away, and most of the good mods will have abandoned ship.
Some may come here. Some may move on to Discord or other social media. Some will stick it out on Reddit, but notice that bots and trolls are taking over, whatever moderators are left can’t or won’t keep up, and the admins are seemingly asleep at the switch.
In a few months, discourse there will have assumed Youtube quality, with bots shouting down human discourse, and trolls scaring anyone remotely normal away. They’ll limp along like that for years.
Like Twitter.
And eventually it’ll end up like 4Chan, only technically still existing.
Nobody knows the future, but speaking as an instance admin, the ideal scenario would be a continued steady growth and not a huge sudden influx 😅
I think it is great here on Lemmy but tbh, the content is limited. My enjoyment here is partly watching it develop. Im like 1 week in and I can see it growing day by day. I don’t think that is what most eventual users want to experience. They want it all set up with the party in full swing.
I love the conversations here. It’s just normal people talking. No amateur comedians at the top of threads with their crappy jokes. It’s so nice.
It honestly took me a moment to get used to such a high percentage of civil discourse.
Thank you for your service. Would you be interested in testing my modern UI theme for Lemmy on your instance? It works with Lemmy 0.17 and 0.18.0. You can get the CSS files from the releases page.
Hey! I have had a few questions about themes. At this point, I am asking users to apply non-mainlined themes through userscripts - I am wary of taking on extra responsibilities in maintaining compatibility for additional themes. Sorry about that!
But all themes that get added to the main lemmy-ui repo will always be available out of the box on lemm.ee as well. The repo is open to contributions, so you could have a look at that option if that’s something you’re interested in.
I already made a proposal to improve the default theme, but my issue was closed without any response from the developers. The required changes were small on purpose and should be easy to implement for anyone already familiar with the code. So it seems that UI is not a priority to Lemmy developers. That’s why I had to develop my addon, which I then also turned into a theme. I hope that one day Lemmy instances will start using some kind of modern theme (doesn’t have to be mine), so that my addon is no longer needed.
My theme is just a small amount of styles applied on top of the default litely and darkly themes, which should make maintenance easier. Unlike an addon, a theme doesn’t need to support multiple versions of Lemmy at the same time, so we could simplify it even more. Lemmy 0.18 uses CSS variables now, so that also makes things easier.
Something needs to be done about Lemmy’s outdated UI and I’m not sure if the current approach of developing multiple userscripts and addons is efficient. I understand if you think this might cause too much work for you though.
I already made a proposal to improve the default theme, but my issue was closed without any response from the developers.
You’re misinterpreting what happened there - the issue was not closed to shut it down, it was actually converted into a discussion to make it easier to track: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/discussions/1503
It wasn’t exactly one specific issue that could be fixed, it was a longer discussion with a bunch of branches. For such things, the discussions format is much more usable.
So it seems that UI is not a priority to Lemmy developers.
I just want to point out that there has been a massive amount of UI improvements in 0.18 and 0.18.1 (just take a look at all the changes by @jsit for example: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Ajsit+). In addition, new themes are being created directly for the lemmy-ui repo as well, for example: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1682
I don’t know the developer’s exact intentions, but my issue was a specific, easy to implement proposal. It wasn’t meant to be a discussion.
There have been UI improvements, but the design is still outdated. The theme you linked to is also not a modern design. What we need the most is an improved default theme, so that everyone could enjoy an easy to read website.
I dunno, but the fact that I’m browsing a post with 118 comments using a skin that looks a lot like Apollo tells that things are going in a good direction.
Using WefWef too and I’m surprised how good it is for a PWA. Only thing I miss is haptic feedback.
Ugh, I will implement haptics literally the second Apple gives PWAs installed to home screen an api for that.
I think it depends in part on whether there are some good, short (!) tutorials on how to use Lemmy on Reddit.
People who just want to continue to browse content will be deterred from walls of text with technical details about the Fediverse and how Lemmy works. It should really be a step-by-step instruction… ideally offering a few instances to choose from at the start. So that the few biggest instances don’t break down from the influx and people leave again.
From my experience with unexperienced users, they will drop Lemmy like hot potatoes when they run into the first problem or broken down server.
Doubtful, to be honest.
Most who have used 3rd Party apps have already migrated or found some other solution. Those who don’t care are still using the official app, and, to be frank, despite what everyone says, the quality content hasn’t decreased by that much.
It’s still half Twitter and TikTok reposts, and one-fourth ‘advice subs’ (creative writing), like it’s been for several years before this debacle.
Hell, maybe this is a good thing in some ways, where that kind of content can hopefully fall by the wayside over here, instead of choking communities out like it does in Reddit. (I have over 50 popular subreddits on Boost filtered out to avoid this stuff, and it’s still not enough to get rid of all of it)
Maybe a bit but it won’t be a tsunami, most Redditors don’t care about the Reddit backend or mods or api changes. Don’t forget we’re just a vocal minority.
As much as I’m enjoying Lemmy, I don’t see the vast majority of Reddit users making the switch to anything. Mastodon, Lemmy, and kbin are far too obscure, and most people use Reddit for pino and memes. People just aren’t very technologically inclined and Reddit satisfies the dopamine fix for most regular visitors.
If these means we’ll be able to have intelligent conversations like the old days of Reddit. I’m all for it. I posted more here than in my 9 years in Reddit. Karma destroyed conversations.
Yes
I already switched over. But I guess majority of 3rd party app users are still waiting for the last moment.
I’m guessing a good chunk of people will be split between creating an account on Lemmy/kbin, raddle, squabbles and possibly tildes. One of the alternatives will most likely win out for users switching from Reddit, I hope it is Lemmy but who knows.
Raddle? They’re still kicking?
I imagine there will be a big uptick in the number of new users but it won’t be a huge wave, not initially. Human nature being what it is, users will switch to the official app, mods will try and muddle through with a more limited toolbox and, slowly, the wheels will fall off as people find that the user experience has been degraded, leading to a fairly steady flow of people moving over (and a decent number moving on as Lemmy likely isn’t ready for primetime just yet). I think what will be key is whether the most experienced moderators and most active posters make the jump - without them the site is a hollow shell as it is largely built on their disproportionate contribution. That might speed up Reddit’s downfall.
The best thing we can do is make their landing as soft as possible.
- Make sure there are welcome posts in each instances main communities.
- Keep an eye on Reddit for people asking how to make the move.
- Keep an eye on the relevant communities here for anyone struggling.
- Get equivalents to the subs set up.
- List these on sub.rehab and similar directories.
- Don’t panic! Perhaps this should have gone first.
a guide on how to use Lemmy would also be nice. I’m a former reddit user and I still haven’t figured out how to edit comments or block users.
I’ll look around for a decent guide or two but, in the web interface, click the three vertical dots on the right under the post.
yeah I think the apps just aren’t there yet. I used connect for lemmy and today I’ve installed lemming which has the edit and block functions but looks clunky. can’t have it all I suppose.
They’re coming but the fact that Jerboa is sending out error pop-ups if the instance isn’t running Lemmy 18.0 isn’t going to help.
I might be alone, but I don’t want or need a huge amount of users. I’d rather discuss the subjects I want to talk about with a smaller group of users. It would be nice to have some familiarity in the comments as well. On the big subreddits, your comment was practically guaranteed to be lost in the sea of thousands of comments unless you were the first to comment, or had bots upvoting you. If I want my comments to be lost, I’ll comment on a Tiktok video.
It’ll be just like Reddit, if you want to avoid the huge mega popular communities you absolutely can. And the smaller more specific communities that you want to interact with won’t have the annoying traffic you’re talking about.
