I don’t know about you but I was just waiting for an excuse. I ain’t ever going back. It’s a brave new world for me, part of shifting my whole suite to FOSS. Leaving the old internet behind me.
In 2022 I was Windows + Twitter + Reddit. In 2023 I’m full-time Linux + Mastodon + Lemmy.
I’ve rid myself of reddit (never used Twitter thank God) but I’m still on windows. I just got a steam deck though and I’m loving the Linux desktop mode. What branch of Linux does the deck use? I know I could do a quick Google to find out but damn I love how well it runs. Linux isn’t nearly as scary as I thought
I’ll disagree with Taiyang about Manjaro; I think it diverges too much form Arch and much prefer EndeavourOS (which is what I’m using at the moment).
With that said, I wouldn’t recommend anything Arch-based for a first timer. Quick sidebar: in Linux the “distribution” (the OS, basically - the variant of Linux) is separate from the desktop environment (the GUI). SteamOS uses the KDE desktop. If you like that, I think I’d recommend Kubuntu as a good Linux distro to start with. It’s Ubuntu with KDE instead of the default Ubuntu desktop, so there’s a ton of documentation and pretty much every app will work on it.
!linux@lemmy.ml is very active and a great place to ask questions and/or read up, or feel free to DM me!
I would absolutely recommend KDE Neon distribution as it comes with current, stable KDE. https://neon.kde.org . It is a Ubuntu LTS as well.
Like taiyang said, SteamOS is based on Arch which is super not newbie friendly, but the desktop modes “desktop environment” is KDE which available on pretty much any Linux distro, including beginner friendly ones like (K)Ubuntu and Fedora (although I’m not sure how beginner friendly Fedora is, regarding proprietary drivers and codecs)
Oh, you’re like me! I did the dive into Linux, SteamOS is a fork of Arch Linux which is super not newbie friendly.
Manjaro is a good Arch Linux fork that works well for gamers, though. Still not idiot proof, as I can atest to breaking it several times, but that’s the deal when you remove the training wheels off your OS.
Lucky it’s easy to reinstall from a USB. A little less if you insist on a duel boot like me, but that’s mostly Windows being a jerk.
Steam deck runs SteamOS, a custom distro built by steam specifically. You can download it here
It is SteamOS based on Gentoo.
Steamos 3 (the steam deck) is based on arch. They moved off of gentoo
Try manjaro, and hear me out here:
Manjaro is actually the only distro that I would recommend to a beginner, actual beginner in this case is someone that should not be running a single terminal command to get their system to work (which is what people are expecting to do when they tell you to use Endevour or CachyOS lol)
WIth ubuntu/debian based distros you will either have to deal with installing flatpaks/snaps, which come with their own set of issues like not following the system theme, using the wrong system font, issues accesing the internet, issues accesing the home directory (yeah steam flatpak can’t be placed in the home directory lol).
You could try adding PPAs which is not something I would recommend a beginner to do.
Also some games like BeamNG hate having irqbalance, which usually comes by default on debian based distros.
On the other hand Manjaro already ships with pamac which is their GUI store that supports everything, including Aur packages which means 0 issues having to deal with broken permissions or theming if you want to install apps that are usually not found in the official repos.
Their own official repo even includes brave-browser and fastfetch, two apps that I use that are usually very hard to find in other distros.
AUR isnt widely recommended in manjaro
As long as you only keep the Manjaro repos in your system, it is like using it on Arch, which even you Arch the Aur isn’t perfect.
Because the Manjaro repos don’t sync at the same time with the Arch repos, you might not be able to install/update some Aur packages as the version of X dependency might not match during that time.
But literary, Manjaro has been the most stable distro I’ve run, even more stable than Arch that recently broke on my system and required manual intervention because of their recent changes on their repo migration.
Nice change you made!!
Linux is a hell of a drug
welcome home
I ditched Windows because I could not stand them restarting my PC without my permission after an update. And ads! Fucking ads on my start menu.
Same
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Same, I didn’t know which server suited me so I created three accounts on various Lemmy servers and also one on kbin, but now I’m exclusively using just this account.
I wasn’t really looking for a replacement, just wanted to break my reddit addiction which was hampering my productivity. Lemmy isn’t a replacement in the sense, but a nice change and something new to try.
FOSS
Same. I adopted a google account a long time ago, but I’ve finally hit my limit on what they’ve been doing with youtube and everything. Free and open source alternatives are the way to go, it may take a while to catch on or may never fully, but who cares. Switching to linux recently was the best thing I’ve ever done.
Same here
Well said
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What this shows us is that more people are joining lemmy, but even more people are either leaving or going into lurker mode, as Lemmy only counts people who have commented or posted in that time period as active users, whereas most social media counts any activity while logged in as active. You have to realize that people who use reddit as Google search results don’t usually interact with the content there and most won’t even make an account.
On the upside, with fewer people, it’s easy to get noticed here just by contributing good content since you don’t really get drowned out here because of the democratic upvote based sorting instead of black box personalized recommendation algorithms. So with relatively low amount of effort, you can make sure your content is being seen instead of relying on analytics and metrics.
The last thing to in mind that Lemmy is only one aspect of ActivityPub, and Mastodon’s growth is currently the highest right now because of the ecosystem created by the whale fall of Twitter, which indirectly grows Lemmy as Mastodon users can post directly to federated Lemmy communities.
I just got recommended this site after posting on reddit re: predatory algos and the necessary regulations needed to protect people and how algos have manipulated the UX so much its disrupted the originally intended purposes; ie insta has effectively become a marketing and advertising platform.
So in response someone suggested finding alternatives to the popular social media sites and used Lemmy as an example.
I have been loving it thus far - its old school reddit.
this is my first comment on lemmy!
Welcome! So far, in my experience, this is a much friendlier community that… many of the alternatives.
Welcome! So far, in my experience, this is a much friendlier community that… many of the alternatives.
Usually. There’s definitely some who want to take their pound of flesh out of you when you disagree with them on something, but overall not so bad.
I disagree strongly with that opinion but respect you as a lemming
Fair enough. My perspective in the last day or two tells me otherwise, but I’m glad you’re having a great experience.
There’re always going to be hotheads and bad faith actors in any platform, but I have noticed it is much more rare here on Lemmy. Much less vitriol as well.
Agreed on it being old school reddit! There are some UI wrappers that make it look and feel like old school reddit that I use and love you might enjoy. The wrapper is called mlmym and is open source. There are a few hosts you can use, I use this one: https://o.opnxng.com
A direct link for your lemmy instance would be https://o.opnxng.com/lemmy.world
OMG thank you so much! holy amazing.
Check out https:old.lemmy.world for an old reddit lime experience.
https://old.lemmy.world is like old reddit.
Fuck you! Hello.
There seemed to be an influx of reddit users but probably didn’t like Lemmy’s own distinct user base (*nix users for example)
I am kind of glad it settled down because I much prefer Lemmy over reddit
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What did you call me???
That you are a magnificent bastard!!
We can be if it makes your experience better!! Watch!
Dizzirron I bet you don’t even use Linux!
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r/all is literally astroturfed hate every other post for multiple years at this point, and its not going to be moderated any time soon
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*dissent
😉
thanks margot robbie
That’s esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
Diane Diane what now??
Damn, I’d better keep commenting, I usually just lurk/vote
Someone posted metrics for how many users vote. 131k.
halfyear includes people trying out different instances; monthly shows just the one(s) they settled on
For anyone panicking, this is exactly like what happened with the transition from ICQ to AOL messenger, from MySpace to Facebook, from 9gag/etc to Reddit, and so on.
Website makes a mistake, some people leave. Makes another, more leave. Each time this happens, more ‘main’ people of said website leave. Hell, I already saw PoppinKREAM here, so that’s a great start.
So this is exactly how it always goes. The fact it is still here means it’s staying. Look at Threads, or Metaverse, whatever those things are. All dying or dead, barely lasted. Lemmy is still here, people are still posting, so just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s already working.
It’s like a ratcheting effect. Every time schmeddit fucks up, we gain a few more. And if you can count on Spez for one thing, it’s that he’ll reliably fuck up on the regular.
This is why Mastodon is so populated compared to lemmy. Elon just keeps making more and more mistakes.
Think it really was PoppinKREAM?! Love to read them again.
Them and Portarossa
Oh I was planning to check for Portarossa, one of the few usernames I recognize
On mastodon or Lemmy?
Lemmy for me, I never used Twitter, so I don’t use Mastodon either
If it wasn’t, it was a damn good imitator.
Aw man. ICQ. I miss those times.
So much happiness in this little sound.
Not clicking that. The sound is the thing I miss the least. It was enough to hear it in my head when I saw the comment.
I still have my UIN 8833052 :)
Mine was 6 digits. Good ole days of synchronous whiteboards. 🥲
You must have gotten one in the first week. I got mine in the rist month
Man, those days were awesome. You’d browse the list of online people to find someone to talk to. A lot of the times there’d be no communication possible, but sometimes you’d get to know a little bit about the life of someone in a radically different culture. What a time to be alive.
Sure, you miss it now.
I don’t care that the fediverse has a ton of traffic. It may not have the most users, but it definitely has the best
*tips hat
Lem’my
Very true. I’m still amazed how good lemmy is considering how small we still are.
100% agree. Have encountered a few jerkwads on Lemmy but hey, blocking works. The overall vibe here is 100x better than schmeddit.
Quick question regards blocking - how does it work exactly?
When I block someone, I can still see their message. Just won’t get a notification. I thought, it would be blocked entirely - so I’m a bit confused.
Might depend on the instance or client. I’m using Liftoff. They cease to exist for me.
When a blocked user replies to my message I get no notification and might just see “1 more reply” or something like that but when I click it it wont load. Only when I sign out can I read it. However I believe that the blocked users can still see my messages just fine. Same with bans. I can see all posts from lemmy.ml but they can’t see mine.
I much much prefer the niche community here. Much less shit to have to wade through (see: came here to say this x 100000 per post) to get to the good comments and posts
@Pregnenolone yeah I haven’t seen a single “this is the way” comment chain since I got here.
I’ve seen a few but fortunately they’re rare and they are often downvoted or ignored
tries to resist urge, fails
Came here to say this!
Lemmy doesn’t have boosting. …I should check out KBin sometime, also because of the better Mastodon integration
I’d highly recommend it. The dev has been on an #improvement rampage lately. The future of the project seems bright.
This.
Exactly. I don’t need the most users. The internet was better back when it wasn’t everybody.
All the people returning and forgetting what reddit did and will continue to do. Then the next time reddit messes up, they will come back. 😔
Edit: other stats seem pretty good though! Unless i am misunderstanding them.
The blue one doesn’t reset count every mount so it’s cululative. It means people come and go. There was a big Reddit rush and some people went back others got annoyed with the growing pains and went elsewhere. But the fact that it’s slowing down means it’s stabilizing to a dedicated community.
I would prefer to use Lemmy, but it simply doesn’t have some things that reddit currently has. It could in the future, but it doesn’t have the user base yet.
The half year probably still includes all the Reddit refugees, maybe that’s why it hadn’t fallen yet
This graph is much more reassuring:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
We are stable, even slightly growing in the last few days.
It’s really painful that these graphs don’t start at zero. Hard to see if that growth is as dynamic as it looks
The average comments is far more interesting. Constant growth. Active accounts is skewed by all the alts new people make.
Good point, but I feel like alts haven’t been used that much lately as instances have been stables for weeks now
What the heck happened on Nov. 3rd?
New Reddit UI for some users I think
Lurker here. Just writing this as my first ever comment to push those numbers.
I dont get the hysteria, personally.
I came here to escape the crowds, not migrate with them.
What hysteria?
so there was a wave of sign ups with the Reddit drama, and then people got bored. the graph looks about right to me.
Uh-huh
Still, Lemmy probably ended up with more people than before. Also, hey, I came from Reddit drama
I came over from the Reddit drama as well.
I also came from reddit during the drama.
Cows are underrated! Got any cool cow facts?
(I also emerged as a result of the reddit drama.)
Cows can poop up to 15 times a day, which equals to 29.5kg of poop every day.
Yo same!
Yep. Makes sense
Here’s the thing though… I’ve been on Reddit for over a decade before Lemmy, and whilst there may be less interaction the interactions themselves have been far more sincere. People are more willing to engage, and even with this random comment there’s a chance someone would comment below.
The community feel of Lemmy is something, at least I’ve found, Reddit had lost a very long time ago.
Sort of a quality Vs quantity thing I guess?
It doesn’t matter. I get all my news here and I can comment if I want. That’s enough
Zoomed out graph including some months before the join wave
Users/month are relatively stable now at 33x users/month compared to pre join wave (users/month is people who have posted or commented)
For anybody interested, the monthly active users including voters is
131,150
(131k)The one in the graph only takes into account people who have made a post or comment
Edit: The halfyear active users including voters is
253,166
(253k)FWIW Lemmy has fully replaced Reddit as my go-to toilet reading material, and I’m sure there are many other lurkers around here who don’t post much and thus don’t show up in these stats. The more niche communities are still lacking in content, yes, but these things are best left to grow organically over a long period of time to maintain quality. It was the same on Reddit too before the enshittification escalated.
For whatever anecdotal observations are worth, I’ve recently been seeing a huge uptick in activity from the userbase that is here. Maybe it’s been driven by posts like this one or memes about growing Lemmy, but people seem to be posting and commenting more than usual.
If lemmy has 100 users I’m one of them
If lemmy has 1 user it’s me
If lemmy has no users I’m dead
I don’t know about huge but the data on the same page supports the observation on post quantity. It’s still steadily increasing.
Comments might be currently on a stable trend.
It’s also a common finding from those comparing replies to the same posts on Twitter and mastodon: fewer but better replies on mastodon.
I’ve been trying to post as much as I find it possible and engaging.
It’s anecdotal. It’s not worth anything.