28 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
28 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Lemmy: 4 weeks in"
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date: 2023-08-22T08:33:50
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slug: lemmy-4-weeks-in
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tags: [fediverse]
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---
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So it's been long enough since [I decided to try out using Lemmy](https://lewisdale.dev/post/trying-out-lemmy-as-a-reddit-alternative/) that I think I can give a fair summary of how I feel about it as a service.
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TL;DR it's good, has it's issues (mostly moderation), but once you start using it properly it gets better.
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## The good
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The good part about Lemmy is that, quite simply, it does what it says on the tin. There are quite a few high-subscriber communities, with a lot of activity. There's generally plenty to read, and now I've got a decent amount of federated communities I'm not finding myself coming across the same groups of posts on repeat.
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I've not posted or commented a great deal on there, but the few times I have the interactions have been pretty pleasant. Much like I used Reddit, though, I'm largely an observer rather than an interactor.
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## The bad
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As with any community, the hardest part is moderation. And Lemmy is obviously no different. I've had a fair few instances of bot-produced spam posts filling up my feed that have been federated from other instances. Even the larger instances will still struggle with getting bots in check, because it's a hard problem to solve. Luckily I'm the admin of my instance, so any spam user I see is banned & purged, but it's still frustrating to need to do that frequently. I think it's more noticable because there are fewer posts than on Reddit.
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And then the second point is... well, there are fewer posts than on Reddit. I'm not really found any active communities for some of my more niche hobbies (read: cycling). Communities exist, but there's not a lot of posting on them.
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## Using it on a single-user instance
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Things have gotten better recently after I found out about [LCS - Lemmy Community Seeder](https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs). It's a tool that runs as a background user and quietly subscribes to the popular communities from other instances, so that they get federated to the server. The result is that my instance now knows about quite a few other communities and the posts get federated to it.
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Now, if I scroll the `All` feed, I see quite a lot of posts that I otherwise wouldn't, which makes for a much more fulfilling browsing experience.
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