I’ve heard for a lot of time about these federated social media (lemmy, mastodon…) and I really like it. The interface is not bloated, no bullshit notifications, no ads, no damn algorithms that try so hard to spoonfeed me taking 60% of my feed, taking place for the communities I am actually interested into.
If I could put it into words, lemmy feels a lot like early 2010’s social media, fewer people, less stakes, just a bunch of people enjoying some topic (it is ironic, since I started to use Reddit because it seemed to be the only mainstream place left where you can talk with real people). Anyways, I am enjoying it, more than “What would Reddit need to do to get you back?” I would prefer more posts like “What should Lemmy improve to keep you here?”.
A little bit worried. I am a recent migrator myself so this may a bit hypocritical, but I feel a lot of people will want to “redditize” here, just like how people tried with mastodon a couple months ago or (in a larger level), how people want Linux to become “another Windows”.
These are not replicas, Lemmy doesn’t work like Reddit, neither does it try to be, and that is by design, not a flaw. Things work differently, over and under the rug, and I think users should be entitled to doing some small effort to readjusting and have an open mind.
I’m all for UI/UX improvements, like most community projects, the front design part is more of an afterthought, and in that matter Lemmy has a lot to improve, but always keeping in mind what it is aiming to be.
For example, I am thinking in working on some simple browser extension to rearrange the UI in a way similar to Reddit’s (nothing fancy, the upvote/downvote and collapse buttons locations, simple things). Maybe even some redirecting magic so if you open a link to another instance’s community, it instead opens it in your current one, so you can still interact without having to go to your instance and search this one.
If anything, as a FOSS and federated content advocate, I wish this project nothing but the best so that one day we can escape the clutches of greedy companies.