I don’t know about you but I was just waiting for an excuse. I ain’t ever going back. It’s a brave new world for me, part of shifting my whole suite to FOSS. Leaving the old internet behind me.
In 2022 I was Windows + Twitter + Reddit. In 2023 I’m full-time Linux + Mastodon + Lemmy.
Nice change you made!!
I’ve rid myself of reddit (never used Twitter thank God) but I’m still on windows. I just got a steam deck though and I’m loving the Linux desktop mode. What branch of Linux does the deck use? I know I could do a quick Google to find out but damn I love how well it runs. Linux isn’t nearly as scary as I thought
I’ll disagree with Taiyang about Manjaro; I think it diverges too much form Arch and much prefer EndeavourOS (which is what I’m using at the moment).
With that said, I wouldn’t recommend anything Arch-based for a first timer. Quick sidebar: in Linux the “distribution” (the OS, basically - the variant of Linux) is separate from the desktop environment (the GUI). SteamOS uses the KDE desktop. If you like that, I think I’d recommend Kubuntu as a good Linux distro to start with. It’s Ubuntu with KDE instead of the default Ubuntu desktop, so there’s a ton of documentation and pretty much every app will work on it.
!linux@lemmy.ml is very active and a great place to ask questions and/or read up, or feel free to DM me!
I would absolutely recommend KDE Neon distribution as it comes with current, stable KDE. https://neon.kde.org . It is a Ubuntu LTS as well.
Oh, you’re like me! I did the dive into Linux, SteamOS is a fork of Arch Linux which is super not newbie friendly.
Manjaro is a good Arch Linux fork that works well for gamers, though. Still not idiot proof, as I can atest to breaking it several times, but that’s the deal when you remove the training wheels off your OS.
Lucky it’s easy to reinstall from a USB. A little less if you insist on a duel boot like me, but that’s mostly Windows being a jerk.
Steam deck runs SteamOS, a custom distro built by steam specifically. You can download it here
Try manjaro, and hear me out here:
Manjaro is actually the only distro that I would recommend to a beginner, actual beginner in this case is someone that should not be running a single terminal command to get their system to work (which is what people are expecting to do when they tell you to use Endevour or CachyOS lol)
WIth ubuntu/debian based distros you will either have to deal with installing flatpaks/snaps, which come with their own set of issues like not following the system theme, using the wrong system font, issues accesing the internet, issues accesing the home directory (yeah steam flatpak can’t be placed in the home directory lol).
You could try adding PPAs which is not something I would recommend a beginner to do.
Also some games like BeamNG hate having irqbalance, which usually comes by default on debian based distros.
On the other hand Manjaro already ships with pamac which is their GUI store that supports everything, including Aur packages which means 0 issues having to deal with broken permissions or theming if you want to install apps that are usually not found in the official repos.
Their own official repo even includes brave-browser and fastfetch, two apps that I use that are usually very hard to find in other distros.
It is SteamOS based on Gentoo.
Steamos 3 (the steam deck) is based on arch. They moved off of gentoo
welcome home
Same
I ditched Windows because I could not stand them restarting my PC without my permission after an update. And ads! Fucking ads on my start menu.
Linux is a hell of a drug
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Same, I didn’t know which server suited me so I created three accounts on various Lemmy servers and also one on kbin, but now I’m exclusively using just this account.
Same here
Well said
I wasn’t really looking for a replacement, just wanted to break my reddit addiction which was hampering my productivity. Lemmy isn’t a replacement in the sense, but a nice change and something new to try.
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FOSS
Same. I adopted a google account a long time ago, but I’ve finally hit my limit on what they’ve been doing with youtube and everything. Free and open source alternatives are the way to go, it may take a while to catch on or may never fully, but who cares. Switching to linux recently was the best thing I’ve ever done.
For anyone panicking, this is exactly like what happened with the transition from ICQ to AOL messenger, from MySpace to Facebook, from 9gag/etc to Reddit, and so on.
Website makes a mistake, some people leave. Makes another, more leave. Each time this happens, more ‘main’ people of said website leave. Hell, I already saw PoppinKREAM here, so that’s a great start.
So this is exactly how it always goes. The fact it is still here means it’s staying. Look at Threads, or Metaverse, whatever those things are. All dying or dead, barely lasted. Lemmy is still here, people are still posting, so just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s already working.
Think it really was PoppinKREAM?! Love to read them again.
Them and Portarossa
Oh I was planning to check for Portarossa, one of the few usernames I recognize
On mastodon or Lemmy?
Lemmy for me, I never used Twitter, so I don’t use Mastodon either
If it wasn’t, it was a damn good imitator.
This is why Mastodon is so populated compared to lemmy. Elon just keeps making more and more mistakes.
It’s like a ratcheting effect. Every time schmeddit fucks up, we gain a few more. And if you can count on Spez for one thing, it’s that he’ll reliably fuck up on the regular.
What this shows us is that more people are joining lemmy, but even more people are either leaving or going into lurker mode, as Lemmy only counts people who have commented or posted in that time period as active users, whereas most social media counts any activity while logged in as active. You have to realize that people who use reddit as Google search results don’t usually interact with the content there and most won’t even make an account.
On the upside, with fewer people, it’s easy to get noticed here just by contributing good content since you don’t really get drowned out here because of the democratic upvote based sorting instead of black box personalized recommendation algorithms. So with relatively low amount of effort, you can make sure your content is being seen instead of relying on analytics and metrics.
The last thing to in mind that Lemmy is only one aspect of ActivityPub, and Mastodon’s growth is currently the highest right now because of the ecosystem created by the whale fall of Twitter, which indirectly grows Lemmy as Mastodon users can post directly to federated Lemmy communities.
thanks margot robbie
That’s esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
Diane Diane what now??
I just got recommended this site after posting on reddit re: predatory algos and the necessary regulations needed to protect people and how algos have manipulated the UX so much its disrupted the originally intended purposes; ie insta has effectively become a marketing and advertising platform.
So in response someone suggested finding alternatives to the popular social media sites and used Lemmy as an example.
I have been loving it thus far - its old school reddit.
this is my first comment on lemmy!
Welcome! So far, in my experience, this is a much friendlier community that… many of the alternatives.
Welcome! So far, in my experience, this is a much friendlier community that… many of the alternatives.
Usually. There’s definitely some who want to take their pound of flesh out of you when you disagree with them on something, but overall not so bad.
I disagree strongly with that opinion but respect you as a lemming
Fair enough. My perspective in the last day or two tells me otherwise, but I’m glad you’re having a great experience.
There’re always going to be hotheads and bad faith actors in any platform, but I have noticed it is much more rare here on Lemmy. Much less vitriol as well.
Agreed on it being old school reddit! There are some UI wrappers that make it look and feel like old school reddit that I use and love you might enjoy. The wrapper is called mlmym and is open source. There are a few hosts you can use, I use this one: https://o.opnxng.com
A direct link for your lemmy instance would be https://o.opnxng.com/lemmy.world
OMG thank you so much! holy amazing.
Check out https:old.lemmy.world for an old reddit lime experience.
https://old.lemmy.world is like old reddit.
Fuck you! Hello.
halfyear includes people trying out different instances; monthly shows just the one(s) they settled on
Damn, I’d better keep commenting, I usually just lurk/vote
FWIW Lemmy has fully replaced Reddit as my go-to toilet reading material, and I’m sure there are many other lurkers around here who don’t post much and thus don’t show up in these stats. The more niche communities are still lacking in content, yes, but these things are best left to grow organically over a long period of time to maintain quality. It was the same on Reddit too before the enshittification escalated.
i comment more than monthly on lemmy
This is my first comment in months. I’ve been lurking and reading.
doubt ;)
I like that I can somewhat recognize usernames across all the lemmy post I comment in. Im not sure if anyone really notices me or recognizes my username and goes ‘Oh hey its smokeydope again’ but I do that for some other active lemmy users and it starts to feel like we are all acquaintances working together to make an interesting experience for eachother and not just competing for attention without adknowledging eachother.
Oh hey it’s dopeysmoke again.
Oh I see you all the time, you’re something of a local legend around here.
Yeah… and sometimes you find some uttery shitty people who use multiple account to comment shame you or think they are better than you while having a self conversation on your post ! Uhhhg !
I think it would be wise for us to adopt a hashtag system so you can search by topic as opposed to by community. We’re so segmented into smaller sub communities and different servers that it’s difficult to find what you want to read.
Wouldn’t Mastodon just be that? Lemmy and Mastodon federate - and you can see one in the other.
Twitter-likes are tag based. Reddit-likes are community based? I think it’s fine and good if communities merge or get subsumed by an equivalent on another instance.
Yes and no, ideally we would also still have communities. You can imagine how a topic like Henry Kissinger’s death could be talked about in both of a politics sub, and noncredibledefence esque military based sub.
The point is basically to give better search functionality and bridge these communities by topic in a way.
For now, search does work pretty well instead of tags, you can just search for the keyword
Weird, because I feel like it is more populated that it was after the huge influx of users because of the APIcalypse.
Lemmy is one of the healthiest fediverse communities. It’s starting to get to the point where it can emulate the hours of infinite scrolling people do on reddit. Whether that is a good thing is debatable.
It’s starting to get to the point where it can emulate the hours of infinite scrolling people do on reddit.
That is the case for me since Sync for Lemmy popped out.
Whether that is a good thing is debatable.
This reminds me of my mom watching TV novels back in the days when they aired daily, and now she watches the same novels but through streaming… Ahh some things never change
The people who are here are more willing to post. So less of us overall but also less lurkers.
Yeah, it seems like the most logical assumption, anyway I’m happy here, hopefully it would not take too long for more niche stuff to kick in!
Depends on how niche. Some stuff unfortunately only comes from truly large user bases. At a guess, the further you go from a tech/liberal core and overlapping hobbies, the longer it will take for the content to emerge.
Depends on how niche
Well, for me it would be sufficient for some communities about specific videogames or tv shows/anime :)
I lurked for months because of lemmy.world’s policy of only allowing real email accounts for registration. Reddit allowed anonymous accounts for years which encouraged easy participation at the cost of bots.
I don’t care I’m here to stay. Only community I miss is formuladank for F1 shitposting. Been trying to get it going here but no traction yet. Everything else, Lemmy 4 life.
F1
No traction
Nice
So dank!
Bwoah
Zoomed out graph including some months before the join wave
Users/month are relatively stable now at 33x users/month compared to pre join wave (users/month is people who have posted or commented)
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I gotta be honest…I am hanging on by a threat. The communities that I was engaged with on Reddit before the Snoopacolypse were pretty niche. I wasn’t there for r/funny or r/videos, etc. I found similar communities on Lemmy, but they have soooooo little activity. I have to modify my sort just to see content, as its so old. When there are posts, they typically get very little discussion.
I am on Lem.ee, and I have the hardest time posting anything from mobile. It looks like it fails, and if I sort by new, it isn’t there and never shows up - HOWEVER, I start getting replies, so someone is seeing it somehow.
I detest what reddit did and is still doing - but Lemmy is not filling that void for me, and its frustrating.
Try fiddling around with your language settings maybe? Sometimes the language filter can hide posts in a weird way.
Ultimately, if your only interest is in a handful of niche communities, then Lemmy isn’t quite there yet, I agree. I am also missing a bunch of niche communities, but I enjoy most of the popular content that’s on Lemmy anyhow, so I’m not too bothered by the loss of the niche stuff for now.
I feel you. The Network Effect is real, and the niche subreddits need a HUGE overall userbase to work at all.
The total population of Lemmy + Kbin is about the size of a medium size city subreddit.
I’m staying here for now. I sometimes cheat and browse reddit not-logged-in. I don’t know what the answer is.
I think it’s fair to reply to niche-sub threads with a little PS:
BTW, I’ve recently shifted my online engagement to Lemmy, as I find it aligns more with my values and the way I like to share content. The community there is very welcoming, and they’d be incredibly receptive to the insights shared in this thread. Hope to seeing you there!
Good idea
Same for me. I browsed Reddit exclusively for a bunch of small but active communities about books and niche games or shows. Most of those either don’t have a place on Lemmy, or the place they have is a ghost town. Too little posts, and even fewer engagement. I frequently see posts with upvotes in the single digits and zero comments.
I don’t plan on going back to Reddit, but at the same time I don’t think that Lemmy is a valid substitute yet. Maybe it’s also a problem of discoverability? Like, I heard of Lemmy during the APIcalypse, but I’ve never seen it mentioned anywhere else, and I don’t know how a normal person looking for a community online is supposed to find Lemmy, or even learn the existence of it.
I’m contributing because I’m a bit of a meme repository and I get a more positive reception here than I do on Reddit.
Lemmy is in a healthy state.
The actual content is way better now than it was the first couple of months after the Reddit thing. Initially a lot of the comments were either Reddit related or people trying to force communities that didn’t necessarily have the population to survive, yet. That’s all fallen away now and the content feels much more organic. Someone opening a Lemmy instance for the first time is going to find today’s front page much more engaging than what it looked like in June/July.
Lemmy is becoming its own thing rather than a reflection of Reddit.
In some ways a lot more responsive as well. The news that Kissinger died was all over Lemmy for hours before I noticed one post about it crack the front page of Reddit, for example.
I’m finding the opposite…
Lots of posts made by bots, with majority top level comments being short quips and attempts at jokes as opposed to discussion. So many discussions devolve into ad hominems almost immediately.
Just like Reddit.
It’s a social media phenomenon I think. The lowest common denominator will always dominate unless communities push against it.
I’ve found myself getting frustrated with the number of lemmy communities that are essentially just bots mirroring the respective reddit sub.
The lemmit.online bot specifically mirrors a lot of reddit, block that one account and the bot content drops significantly.
I feel dumb for having to ask but what exactly is “active users half year” vs “active uses monthly”?
Is half year just mean one or more comments/upvotes in the last 6months?
I believe the chart is if you are looking at last activity date.
Was this persons’ last activity date in the last 6 months? Last 1 month?
Not sure how they are actually measuring that activity - whether that’s logins or posts?
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I’m surprised it’s such a small number but very happy to be one of them :)