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!
I’ll be honest. While I like the idea of decentralized social stiff, its also a huge issue. First you have to choose an instance, which isn’t too bad, but you can’t move. I hear Lemmy.ml being under pressure and I want to move somewhere else to help.with that. My account is 4 years old though and I can take nothing with me. Additionally this means all my content is on one instance. If that ever goes down, the network as a whole my keep existing, but my user and all I’ve put into Lemmy will be gone. And while I trust Lemmy instances more than reddit in terms of privacy, I’m not so sure when it comes to uptime and longevity. Finally, the whole concept of decentralized is hard to wrap my head around. My instance being separate from others but still being subscribed to communities of other instances feels unintuitive. Its the she issue I have with mastodon. I keep loosing track of instances, communities, apps etc. All with different names and logins etc.
For now, I’m trying to get used to Lemmy and just search for communities I’m subscribed to on reddit and see how it goes. It definitely works well enough. Just some conceptual issues I might have to get used to.
Yes. To add to this, if an instance suddenly changes its rules (e.g. in response to the influx of new users), I have to either adhere to those rules, or abandon my old account. I think allowing migration should be a priority.
There’s an open issue for migration (export/import) so it’s on the roadmap. But looks like it hasn’t been high priority yet
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/506
Couldn’t you just make a new account on another instance and link to it on your old profile? Perhaps a feature to subscribe to export/import your subscribed communities would be nice.
It really would be. This seems like such a glaring issue for a decentralised/federalised system like lemmy.
Better miragtion tools are now becoming higher in the priority list of stuff to do. I’d expect something (even if basic at first) popping up this summer.