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  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • I had a bit of a rocky start, but I picked up the concepts fairly quickly.

    The Good:

    • The discussion threads here remind me of what Reddit’s discussions were like about five years ago.
    • Comments feel more meaningful and thought-provoking as opposed to a race to “craft the wittiest meme.”
    • The community here seems to be relatively friendly and welcoming.

    The Less Good:

    • I find the mobile experience quite clunky at the moment. For the site, there seem to be some random overflow issues, and the interface and UI elements feel a bit too small for a mobile experience. The lack of polished, dedicated apps is somewhat of a bummer, but I’m hopeful the community will fill these gaps over time with dedicated applications.
    • The onboarding process is somewhat lackluster. It seems more geared towards an audience that is already familiar with federated services. I feel most new users will default to lemmy.ml out of an unwarranted sense of FOMO for not being a direct member of the largest instance, simply due to a lack of understanding of how federated apps work.
    • Redundant communities across multiple instances could become problematic over time. Personally, I would like to see something like user (or even mod) specified mono-communities, grouping multiple communities across multiple instances into a single thread. For example, if a user went to m/movies, whoever runs that mono could add movie-specific feeds from places like lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.
    • We need to have a serious discussion about generating funds for instances. Dedicated servers with high traffic can get incredibly expensive. I fear that many smaller instances will eventually go dark due to escalating operational costs. Ko-Fi donations will only go so far. We, as a community, need to start thinking of more sustainable alternatives that align with the community’s core values.
    • The documentation for the JS SDK could use some TLC. Thankfully, it’s fully typed with Typescript ❤️, so it’s not too cumbersome to work out what everything does, but more code examples and descriptions for all the various methods would be a welcome change.

    All in all, I’m happy with my decision to check this place out and am hopeful more people will come aboard in time. It’s already become a part of my daily routine.