Been a Reddit is Fun good user for over a decade. Is by far been my most used app. Earlier editions had the little alien in the corner, and I have three phones with that logo burned into the screen. I really have been enjoying the growth of Lemmy/Fediverse, and it reminds me honestly of early Reddit. But still it's bittersweet losing RiF and how drastically the community of Reddit has changed over the last few months
I never even heard of reddit when I was introduced to rif. Only reddit I know. I didn't really try others, didn't need to. It was perfectly simple. Thank you and now on to new and better things, hopefully
I already couldn’t imagine paying a subscription for an app, but for that money to be going to reddit after the shit they pulled is unthinkable. I’m surprised users even want to support it at all. I do wish them well though, as Narwhal served me well for years.
I don't even remember buying premium for it it was so long ago and its been my go fo app forever. I miss it but I just have to remember spez killed it not the devs.
That seems to be what basically every person is doing lately. They act like there is no difference between Lemmy and Reddit. Sure, signing up is easy. But understanding subscriptions is a different situation entirely.
I suspect in the next 6 months or so Lemmy is going to see a bunch of UI improvements as more open source devs learn about the project. It’s similar to the UI of Reddit 7-8 years ago, but I’m in the minority of remembering what Reddit was before it became https://old.
It feels unrealistic to expect a small platform that blew up, not ready to scale to be as polished as something built by a large paid organization right of the bat.
It isn't hard to sign up for. No one is saying that is the case. It gets confusing when people start talking about adding subscriptions from other instances and how you can copy and paste the link and subscribe. That right there is where 95% of the people on the internet stop caring.
If the developers of Lemmy and the wider Fediverse ever get that fleshed out in an intuitive way I think popularity will go pretty fast.
That and long term if there is a way for information to be collectively backed up so that if some owner shuts down an instance everything isn't gone.
Agreed. It still is a pain to follow subs on other instances, especially within Jeroba. I know you're supposed to copy the !sub into the search field, but it never comes up.
You don't need to do that if that community is already federating with your instance. If its not, it might take a little while for the federation to actually start after you make the search (based on the server infrastructure of your instance and the remaining queue). Try searching again after a bit and it should be there. These quriks should be solved as instances become more stable, and Lemmy/kbin gets further developed.
For Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to that community on your instance you have to copy the entire URL. E.g. you need to search for https://instance.social/c/sub in order to find !sub.
Once one person on your instance searches for it, then you can find it by searching !sub.
I don't know why Lemmy works like that. Kbin doesn't have the problem; you can find things by searching @sub@instance.social no matter what.
@sota2077 When I first came over to Kbin that's the thing I got hung up on, everything else I got used to quickly. There's plenty of smart people in the Fediverse, I'm sure someone will come up with a solution.
The question everyone was really asking was if will they will be able to make these quality of life changes before the Reddit API changes come into effect. The answer seems to be "no" unfortunately. It's a huge missed opportunity that may never come again.
Oh I have all the faith in the world that someone will come up with a solution eventually. I just assume it was never a major priority because of the userbase. With an explosion of users I'm sure they have a 100 things they want to improve and it is just a matter of time.
This can be alleviated a bit. If one person searches for an other-instance community by URL, it will become available for all other users through a normal search. So over time this becomes less of an issue, particularly if someone takes out some time to seed a bunch of these for their instance.
The first step is completely different from anything else you've ever done
"Pick an instance to sign up for"
This does not compute. What is an instance? Why do I have to pick? Which one should I pick? Compared to
"Create an account at reddit.com" makes sense and is something everyone has done before.
It doesn't matter how simple the answers to those questions are, the fact that the very first step requires multiple explanations is huge, and will always be a barrier to entry.
The first step is completely different from anything else you've ever done
This isn't really true, you already had to do this for email. Never heard of that being a barrier of entry.
My parents prefer to opt for local privacy/security focused email providers, while I go with gmail for the feature set and design. But I used to try out a few different ones to figure out which one works best for me. Still use a hotmail email for my Windows account.
I fail to see how this is different to the situation with lemmy/kbin instances.
What is this about having to copy and paste a link to find subscriptions from other instances? I literally just pull up the community browser and set it to "all" and then search.
Just be careful. That only works because your instance already knows about those other instances because someone already interacted with them. If you ever want to join a community on a non-popular instance, you might have to be the first person to search for it by copying and pasting.
Yes, that will show you all the communities/magazines that your instance has already discovered and have started federating with. But if it is a community that hasn't been discovered by your instance yet, you will need to search with the link for it to start federating. And once even a single user from an instance does that, the community will be visible to everyone else as well.
Yeah. Really, new admins should understand that they should be seeding their new instance, but the last couple of weeks have been... Kinda nuts? So, this won't really be an issue for most users long term. It'll be a thing for admins on small or niche sites that want to ensure they're discoverable and that their users can access the best communities.
On Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to a community on your instance, it doesn't appear in that view.
In order for it to appear, someone with an account has to go to the search bar at the top right of the page and type in the URL to the community manually. Then it'll appear after an initial search.
On large instances like Lemmy.world, you can almost guarantee someone has already done this for most popular communities - but newer/smaller communities may not appear because nobody on your instance has searched for them yet.
For smaller instances, there are likely multiple communities missing and you'd have no idea until you went to look for them.
That's cause over time people have added communities to your instances repitoire over time. Network effect, essentially, making it easier for each new user. Tbh, if new users are on a bigger instance this should be a non issue.
This is so sad for me. RIF was the first app for mobile for me. I ended up going with Apollo eventually but why did either of these awesome apps have to die? I can't believe they are willing to throw away everything they promised for money. I won't stand for corporate greed. I used Reddit to fight against that behavior and they literally became the exact thing I hate the most.
Rif was reddit for me. It was how I accessed it 99.9% of the time. By far the most used app on all my phones for more than a decade. I'm extremely sad that this is how it dies, but all things must end, it seems. Rest in peace old friend. And rot in pieces reddit, for killing the best goddamned app I've ever used...
FTFY. The only time I didn't, was when I was accessing it for work, or when somebody sent me a Reddit link after the company started infesting all mobile web users with that app-only bullshit. :(
I'm sure I had it many years before this image from 2016 - it's always had a place on my home screen since the original Galaxy Tab 1. (which is still going today as an SMS device at a radio station.)
Same for me. I originally downloaded some rage comics app on a Galaxy Gio which basically just pulled from f7u12 (remember those days lol). I kept seeing references to reddit and went and downloaded the first app I could find. 11 years later RIF has been my most used app on every device and I'm gonna miss it
As soon as I heard RIF was shutting down I left reddit altogether. I don't have strong feelings about the official app one way or the other but the way in which the execs at reddit decided to handle this situation was more than enough to get me to move.
100% agree. It was the only way I viewed Reddit for 11 years.
The day that pop-up appeared saying it was shutting down I set all the (small) subs I moderated to private, deleted my account, and came on over here. What a fucking shame.
Yes, I'm sure Apollo was great, but I never even knew it existed until this whole fiasco, because I jumped to RIF when it was still "Reddit Is Fun" and never looked back, because it did everything I needed, perfectly.
I used RIF, Boost, and Apollo. Whatever. I'll try anything once.
We didn't hear from RIF or Boost as much because I think they thought reddit was negotiating in good faith, and they would come to a compromise that didn't shut down their app. That was never in the plan for reddit, and they lost a few weeks of talking to people about what was happening.
I used Apollo the last years, but I had an Android before that and used RiF, I‘m sad about both and sad about the death of all the others I never used too. Reddit has lost me as a user forever and hope they enjoy their corporate curated ad experience over there. Goodbye to all the talented devs, may their next projects be even more successful.
I’ve used both RIF (10-15 years ago) and Apollo (last 8 years or so). They are and were light years ahead of the official app. At this point I’m just like, “OK, bye bitch” with Reddit.
Word. As an Android user, Apollo wasn't on my radar. Christian certainly made a name for himself throughout all of this - he was a phenomenal David against Reddit's Goliath, but I RiF was the backbone of my Reddit experience and will be dearly missed. Excited to see what apps for kbin rise from the ashes of Reddit.
In addition to the learning curve and the minor bugginess of Lemmy and Kbin, I feel like there may be some cognitive dissonance going on for users that are on the fence on whether they want to switch. To resolve the dissonance, one could either change their behavior (switch to Lemmy or kbin) or change their cognition (rationalize why they do not want to switch; for example by thinking that Lemmy or Kbin is too hard to use). Changing behavior can be hard especially if it is a habit built over a long period of time, so coming up with excuses for why one doesn't want to switch would be the easier thing to do.
I agree, and that is part of the cognitive dissonance between enjoying reddit for what it provided and wanting to switch to an alternative. However, if one is searching for a reddit alternative and will not switch to anything exactly like it, why should one even be looking for an alternative?
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