this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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Just my guesses though, but like any social media it really depends on if big creators will switch and if users stick with it over time
This.
Discovery and user abstraction are Lemmy's biggest issues and we are not addressing them to the degree we should.
I know there's some stuff on all those centralized platforms that's way over the top, but most of it is actually pretty helpful. And you'll miss it once you switch here.
Discovery? Interesting thought.
I tried out pixelfed and the pixelix app for the past couple weeks.
The "discovery" page on the official app is worse than useless. It shows almost nobody with over 10 followers, highlighting one person with 50-100 followers, then shows "popular on the fediverse" which are thumbnails of posts of the people it just recommended. It always recommends at least 5 of the same people day after day, week after week, even people you already follow.
The official app can't even show a global feed so it is literally impossible to discover new people unless you know their name and specifically search for them, or they are recommended by luck on the discover page (of which there are multiple repeats per day, so not likely)
Pixelix at least allows you to view a global feed though. Definitely a better experience, but Lemmy discovery is not any worse than that.
The Discovery section in Pixelfed definitely needs work, but the ability to follow hashtags offsets that somewhat. I’ve found loads of great photographers to follow off the back of following hashtags that I’m interested in.
What do you mean by user abstraction? First I've seen this mentioned, or put this way.
Relates to what server an account is on and how it affects the experience. Most people don’t want to know/care
Oh thanks for giving me a proper term to use when pointing at my biggest problem with the Fediverse.
Has it ever been discussed by any developers? Is it technically possible for ActivityPub? Would the costs be exorbitant?
There are different options to solve this. The current “solve” is to dump everyone on one big server. Mastodon.social, lemmy.world, etc.
Another solution might be a button that sends you to a random top10 instance. Might work for mastodon but lemmy servers defederate like hell and some of the biggest instances are .ml, hexbear, etc.
XMPP has this tiered list https://providers.xmpp.net/ but it’s the same problem of expecting users to care what a server is
I don’t have solution, and if you do then I’m not the person you should be telling :)
Absolutely agree with this.
It's hard to discover something new, sometimes.
Is the iPhone app still missing darkmode?
What about Android? I don't see dark mode in options.
Dang for some reason I thought Android had it.
yup… (at least in the stable channel)
what’s most infuriating is that it used to have it but at some point they redesigned the app and made it worse…?
you don’t have to imitate instagram that much, dansup
I think it was more that he wanted to open source the app but had built it while he was learning so it was pretty messy and he felt insecure about it. So he rebuilt the app from scratch and open-sourced it. It just isn't quite at feature parity to the old app yet. Pretty sure dark mode is coming in the next update though.
oooh, yea that’s a good point
and, I mean, the app was in beta, sudden changes are to be expected
but still, I feel like the app was so much better before… its kinda frustrating
Agreed. It immediately went from being maybe the best app in the Fediverse to the 3rd best for its own service. I stopped using Pixelfed altogether until Pixelix got good enough to be a replacement.
I honestly don't understand how getting the new app to feature parity with the old wasn't maximum priority. It at least seems like it's going to get there pretty soon.
I don't think Mastodon was really competing with Bluesky. Bluesky is way ahead while Fediverse fanboys thought people would somehow just learn to use Mastodon. (while they wouldn't shut up about Bluesky)