I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
It’s not bad, but there are a couple of issues that concern me. One is that communities are fractured - that is, that communities about the same topics exist on different instances and don’t connect with each other.
So I’m subscribed to a Books community on one instance, but that doesn’t mean I’ll see any of the posts on the same topic on other instances unless I subscribe to each of them. The total community of users on Lemmy who are interested in books are split up into small groups on different instances.
That’s very limiting.
Of course there’s also the issue of the relatively small user base overall. For some purposes a small community may be preferable, but for many others you really need a large user base. Looking for gamers for a face to face tabletop RPG, for example. Without a large user base, the odds of finding people within a reasonable real world distance of you is virtually nil.
I’m new and could be wildly wrong, but it seems like an improved UI could consolidate multiple communities into one “this is my <hobby> feed” so you can participate in all of them. If one dies, you don’t lose everything.
Yeah, if a community is a “magazine” on here it’d be really nice to collate a number of magazines I’m interested in into a “rack” similar to a multireddit.
@StrictMachine Dunno if it would even be possible, but it would be cool to be able to somehow be able to categorize each instance/magazine with a limited amount of tags - like each book- or literature-related instance could have a “Book” or “Literature” tag that would basically add it to a view of every single instance with the tag in it, so users could look up tags versus looking up specific instances.
@hllywluis @BobQuasit @MentallyExhausted