I would not know - I still don’t have an account!:-P

It’s great fun watching them on !loops@midwest.social though.

As Janeway famously told to both Tuvix and Harry Kim,

Tangentially, there is also !loops@lemmy.world, although that is dedicated to discussing the Loops platform, not for sharing the actual content.

I thought that most people were still not able to get accounts on Loops, like weren’t they still rate-limiting to sth like 1 account per day recently - has that changed?

I mostly agree with you on so much of this - like perhaps the main reason that hobbyists don’t use Lemmy rather than Reddit is that we have no actual “content” that they would like (politics + Linux just isn’t everyone’s thing). Which in turn relates to people not being here, which in turn relates to still other things. One chief among the latter issues is the overall lack of moderation, which in turn relates to the overall suckiness of existing moderation tools (reputedly?), especially across instances that do not currently receive reports (one Lemmy dev, Nutomic, has added that to the Roadmap, but not until ~0.20, and while the current version is 0.19.7, Lemmy.World is still rocking 0.19.3, so this does seem like the work of the better part of a year to get fully deployed to ~80% of the users on the Fediverse?).

However, and unfortunately I am not joking, fully 100% of the people that I have recommended Lemmy to have turned around and actively chided me for having recommended it to them. Obviously the big 3 tankie instances (lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml) can be quite toxic hellholes - I almost quit the Fediverse myself after mistakingly making a couple of comment over on those, and receiving replies for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, each - but even so I could not quite understand the vehemence of the response for the longest time. Until I put myself in their shoes: did you know that (1) a Google (not DuckDuckGo, but which one are mainstream normies going to use!?) search pulls up lemmy.ml as the top instance for “Lemmy”; (2) the default sort method there is set to Local, not All; (3) that instance is chock-full of content that makes fun of people in Western nations, particular Americans but also Europeans too. NO WONDER!?!?!

And related, so many Lemmy instances (such as lemm.ee the #3 one overall, after lemmy.world and lemmynsfw.com) still federate with hexbear.net and even lemmygrad.ml - as I mentioned earlier, I almost left the Fediverse myself after being trolled by them. They can do whatever they want, but so too can I, and why would I desire to expose myself to that?

So I would argue that the top issues with Lemmy relate more to lack of content, presence of toxicity, lack of mod tools, and in particular lack of “niche” interests that make people feel welcomed. To help with that, I petitioned my instance Discuss.Online to defederate from hexbear.net (it was) and created !AskUSA@Discuss.Online. We already have the likes of e.g. !asklemmy@lemmy.world, !asklemmy@sh.itjust.works, !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world, !showerthoughts@lemmy.world, !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world, etc. - but this makes people, particularly Americans from Reddit, feel more welcomed when there is a space particularly suited for them (actually: us, as I am one of 'em!:-). I hope more people do more activities such as this. Also, check out https://piefed.social/ - it’s not quite ready for the masses yet as it lacks many features, but damn it is so welcoming and friendly and fills me with hope for our future when I see those.

All that said, yes a snazzy UI will profoundly help as well - not in isolation of but in combination with all the rest of the work that we need to do in order to grow this wonderful place that we like to call our own:-).

People have said that Sync and Connect can do it. I’ve never tried either so ymmv.

PieFed can definitely do it I know - I’ve blocked all users from Lemmy.ml that way:-).

Otherwise, you have to just do it one-by-one the old-fashioned way, or rely on a site admin to do the work for you (additional details in this post).

Certain upgrades can cause that. Delete the site data / cookies and log in again. See e.g. https://startrek.website/post/5654827.

I primarily use PieFed, which has a wonderful if not entirely finished web UI. It has so many features that Lemmy lacks, like categories of communities, hashtags, YouTube embeds, and shows the sidebar content (though down below) for every single post - e.g. you wouldn’t make a comment in ChapoTrapHouse so readily without knowing what it is, oh and similarly it puts messages for certain instances like Beehaw.org warning you that their standards differ, which is quite welcoming b/c it allows the instance owners to state in their own words what that message is.

But it also lacks some features that Lemmy has, like many times Notifications don’t work (pointing to collapsed, deleted, blocked, or whatever I don’t even know sometimes content), and user tagging isn’t implemented yet, plus I’m constantly wanting to upvote someone, only to realize that I must have done so already but since it wasn’t showing the indicator properly that I had just removed it, and have to hit it again to restore.

So it’s a great idea of something that will eventually come, if not quite fully here now (for the masses). That said, it uses ~1/25th the amount of data that Lemmy does, which is REALLY something! See this post, specifically the 3rd link to “Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed”, and my comment there:

And uses less data - helpful for using a mobile data plan. Those numbers shown in the article are all the more impressive even for sending 5x more posts on the home screen than Lemmy’s default, even while still sending >4/5 less data - i.e. it’s more like sending roughly only 1/25th the data per post, if I’m reading that right.

On Lemmy I likewise always used the web UI - it’s not perfect but it’s fairly good. One thing I despise is how you cannot see both up- and down-votes for something… except you can (only from mobile) though you can’t (from desktop). So like if you get a +1 total, is that like no votes at all, or equal up- & down-votes - those are very different scenarios, the latter being far more “active”.

I’ve tried the Voyager app but had lots of technical problems with it - like I’d make a comment, but I’d have to force-quit and re-open the app for it to show up. Apparently that’s really odd so it could somehow be due to my own set-up, not something that most people would see. Voyager doesn’t work with PieFed btw - this is for the Lemmy instance Discuss.Online.

I thought about trying Thunder but haven’t yet.

It was all a simple misunderstanding you see!

Oh good, finally he can “relax”!

No way that he’d go for that - it’s not nearly as much suffering as his normal days at DS9!

-source credit for images

Q: what’s wrong, Troi? Ever since “the incident” you’ve never acted quite the same to me?

Troi:

Q: Cathryn (deliberately misspelling her name… despite how it’s literally impossible for her to read spelling ⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️ hey that’s just how good a troll I am you know!?), don’t tell me that all this time you were just using me for my body😱?"

Sh… (they don’t know yet it was him!)

“No”