Sphere

I think these are “nice to have” features rather than absolutely essential, but:

For 1. I could deal with just being able to download my list of subscriptions and upload it to another server. That’s the only bit that’s really slow to copy over by hand.

For 2. I think the main thing that really would benefit is the ability to search all active communities on all servers. The way it is now is alright if there are only half a dozen really active instances whose communities I might be interested in, but it doesn’t scale if there are hundreds of servers to check out. Probably the more important of the two IMHO in the long run.

I think having already used Mastodon, albeit mostly as a lurker, helped, but I didn’t find it difficult at all to get up and running on Lemmy and subscribe to a bunch of communities.

On the desktop version, thanks to not having loads of useless scripts, ads and other “stuff” on the page like Reddit does, Lemmy’s interface loads quicker in my browser than Reddit’s and is more responsive. I have had a few hiccups with Jerboa logging me out of my account and images appearing too small to view, but in general, it works well - fast, clean interface, no distractions.

The one downside really is that the content that was (is, but not accessible) on Reddit is not here yet, but that will change with time. Still, the atmosphere is much better, and I feel much more inclined to post here as there aren’t the hordes of people waiting to tear someone down who has a different opinion (cough, Reddit…) So overall, pretty good and glad I finally stumbled upon Lemmy.

Google has been doing this for a long time now, nothing really new here. What’s disappointing is that they’re not using AI to crack down on fake reviews, including those generated by ChatGPT. There are reviews on Amazon that say (verbatim) “As an AI language model…” as the intro to the review, so clearly any effort to remove these is minimal.

I’ve checked both Reddit and Lemmy since I created my Lemmy account yesterday. Reddit has lost a number of subreddits I used to read and the feed seems decidedly less interesting overall. Although the equivalents to all the subreddits I used don’t necessarily exist here, there is some good information here (particularly IT-related) and I think the overall feel of the community here is better - people seem (so far at least) largely pretty reasonable and there aren’t the armies of contrarians or downvoters just wanting to spread their anger at the world to everyone else. So, overall, win some, lose some, and if I end up just here instead of Reddit, I think any losses there will be offset by gains here. Which if you think about it makes Lemmy look pretty good, given that it is (a) relatively new; (b) volunteer-run and funded; © much, much smaller than Reddit.

Tapping on a Reddit link from mobile has mostly been pretty similar to this already for me. They have had an issue with DDG mobile browser for ages, refused to show more than a page of content and kept prompting me to “get the app”, which didn’t seem to recognise my third-party Reddit app… So I just hit the back button. Just recently, oddly, I noticed it had started working, but I’m in the habit of ignoring Reddit links on mobile anyway now so almost never go there whether it works or not.

No to anything by Meta/Facebook. The platform that refused to show me what I subscribed to and tried to constantly jam pointless political rubbish down my throat, then effectively disabled my account when I removed my data.

I’m also blocking them if they appear in my Mastodon feed.