It’s no secret that Lemmy is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Reddit. The issue it faces however is that it’s still relatively niche and not many people know about it. I propose that we change this. By contacting the mods of large subreddits and asking them to make and promote relevant Lemmy communities we could substantially increase the amount of people who discover the fediverse. What’s more, I don’t think this is would be a hard sell considering many mods are already pissed off with Reddit due to their API changes. I believe that this is the time to act, so this is a call to arms, to help grow the fediverse into the future of social media!
Have a look at this post, we had a similar discussion there: https://lemmy.world/post/3074361
Long story short, the platform still needs a bit of work before being able to really move communities. Some examples exist (lemdro.id, piracy, startrek) but those are tech savvy audiences, there would be a lot more friction with more generalist communities
I fully agree with you. And I want to emphasize that the main issue is that if you start advertising Lemmy like OP suggest before it’s “fully ready” to give the best experience to this people, they will decide now that lemmy is not for them and after that it’s very difficult to make they try again and change their mind.
Exactly the mistake threads just made, trying to capitalize on twitter’s rate limiting fiasco. The “general public” is extremely fickle, and Reddit will give us more opportunities.
Server issues and quits need to be addressed, and mobile apps Ned to be polished. If the UX isn’t at least on par with Reddit, then it will only hurt to advertise now to the general public.
One thing that annoys me coming from Reddit is, that there isn’t just one group of each theme. You have for example gaming groups on several instances and you can either chose to subscribe to a number of those or chose the one you like.
But in the end, one will be the go-to group, and wouldn’t that centralize the most popular groups?
(Honest question, I’m new to Lemmy and the thoughts behind it)
instances are like countries with their own constitution (rules) and police (mods). This means that two communities in different instances may seem the same, but they are not, because they have to follow the rules and culture of their instance.
Just like a Technology club in Japan will not be the same as the Technology club in the US because they will be culturally different. I think it will take some time for the Fediverse to think this way.
For me, this is better. Instead of having one giant technology community where your comments and posts are drowned out, we can have different technology communities with their own culture and norms, just like we visit different countries. Your comment and posts will be not drowned out.
It is a different paradigm to the centralised one of Reddit.
Yep, if you’re not from the US, instances are vastly superior.
Imagine all the times people from around the world asked for plumbing help on Reddit and got hit with “that ain’t up to code, buddy, get to ass down to Howm Deeepo” 😂
Americans do tend to assume the internet revolves around them, as they’re a bit insular and don’t see that it really, really, really doesn’t
A lot of that is social media/algorithmic too. It wasn’t until I start migrating to Lemmy (specifically lemm.ee) that I started seeing a lot of varied content.
Seriously? Aren’t the anti-USA comments getting a bit tired by now?
This is not an anti-American comment, but a fact. The USA is a superpower and a big country. As a superpower, americans don’t need to be informed about what happens in the world because it doesn’t affect them. Their country is the source of world power. And Americans tend to travel within their country because it’s big and full of tourist attractions.
Compare that with Canada, which has 40 million people. We need to be aware of every single decision the US makes so that the country can adapt. There is a famous quote from Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
Hmm, you know how the Tarrifs are limiting trade? I don’t want to get political, but when trade slows, that is when it becomes obvious that USA is NOT immune to whatever happens to the rest of the world.
Every pyramid has a foundation.
Yes, the USA is a big country and a superpower.
But things that happen in the world do have major impact on the country and all of its citizens. The need to be up to date and aware of world events is critical. Everyone should be educated. It is the only way to make informed decisions.
You may not have meant it as an anti-American trope but it came off that way. Even the comment you attribute to Trudeau is a thinly veiled insult to our country. That is not lost on me or others here in the fediverse or other American citizens. The anti-USA bashing has become hackneyed and decidedly juvenile.
I expect better from you.
Mirror for that lemmy.world post since they’re currently down…
The fact that large instances hit more downtime than something like reddit will always be a detriment.
lemmy.world really needs to close signups and the creation of new communities, until they can improve their uptime
or they should at least be removed from https://join-lemmy.org/instances maybe it could track the uptime and use that to build the list?
but Reddit actually does go down pretty often too
They said themselves the issue isn’t signups or server capacity, it’s that they’ve been under multiple rounds of DDoS attacks.
Why are they being DDoS’d though? I thought it was because they’re the biggest instance and thus shutting down still helps
Thanks!
I predict it will be the mobile apps that get us over that hump
Definitely. Sync and Boost will bring the largest users influx
I do agree, however I would argue that an increased user base would help accelerate progress on improving lemmy
To be honest, people who are tech savvy and bug tolerant enough to be on Lemmy are probably already here. There were quite a few discussions about it (and still now on Reddit)
Yeah, people say we should use small instances to keep things spread out but two of the ones I tried have major posting issues that stop comments working, We really need to stress test and big squish before we really push it to everyone, some of the issues I’ve seen have been fixed and on general it’s very stable so I don’t think it’s got far to go
Which were those, out of curiosity?
Discuss.online and slrpnk both good communities but issues with syncing
Thanks!
Have had absolutely zero issues on slrpnk even after the big Reddit migrations.
It also needs about 1000% less hostility when it comes to anything beyond superficial discussion. Basically every news thread just gets brigaded by idiots trolling with pictures of pig shit. I get it, internet is not serious business, but in terms of actual discourse at the moment, this place is worse than Facebook.
Wow, my experience is very opposite this. It sounds like you’re describing reddit to me honestly. I’ve seen way less hostility here compared with Reddit
It depends on what content you consume I guess. On Reddit, news subs generally enforce decorum pretty strongly which really eliminates outright trolling. On lemmy there is the opposite of this in many places - lemmygrad and hexbear openly state that it is their goal to shit up threads to deny “shit libs” a platform, and the mods on several major instances seem to openly allow it.
So if you never consume that kind of content on either platform, you’d never notice the relative toxicity of lemmy.
Wait, do you any links to them admitting that? I believe you, but it’s a good idea to have that saved.
Agree with Blaze, they probably remember too when Reddit was in its infancy, it was unappealing to your average netizen, the same as Lemmy is now
Remember that 90% of Reddit is now ex-Tumblr and Facebook people; they would come to lemmy, see it’s a bit clunky, and go tell a hundred others on Reddit how bad an experience it was for them
Next thing lemmy has a reputation like Tesla that isn’t going to shake off any time soon
From what I’ve seen on reddit, this is sort of already happening. Lemmy’s name isn’t mud yet, but it’s being spoken of like most of the alternatives over there: not good enough or flawed in some way. Lack of content and users is the main one that gets said about all of them, but beyond that, the negative things I see said about Lemmy most often are: “scatter-brained”, “unintuitive”, “tanky”, “messy”, “not respecting user privacy”, “admins defederating and shadow banning”, “having to apply to instances”, “federated content not appearing the same on each instance”, “lack of mod tools”, “need a third party site to help find communities”, etc.
And it should be said that many of the most common negative things I’ve seen said about Lemmy on Reddit are being addressed, but some are not. Privacy (public voting) and issues with admins erecting invisible walls in the federation through various means are not being seriously addressed as far as I’ve seen.
I think the main issue that will ultimately hurt Lemmy versus any other platform that comes along is that Lemmy’s selling point of defederation is only a selling point to some people. Most people on Reddit don’t care about centralization, they just want a platform like reddit. They’ll come here and put up with it if they have too, but they will scamper off for a centralized site the moment one starts gaining traction unless Lemmy finds some way to provide something equally as unified, simple, and easy to use.
Maybe a frontend or app that just shows you everything and allows you to interact easily without worrying about logins or urls for instances, and pushes the federation aspect “behind the scenes”.
I think the main issue that will ultimately hurt Lemmy versus any other platform that comes along is that Lemmy’s selling point of defederation is only a selling point to some people.
I agree, and that’s why I think in a few weeks/months people here will realize we can only have so many active communities at the same time.
We’ll probably gather around a few core communities, and that would be it.
Lemmy is the Linux of the link aggregators, and as we all know, Linux desktop year is next year
I think some really general-purpose communities like films or books are good to be one per large instance, as they’ll be busy enough to have plenty of content without them getting so big you have that Reddit thing where it feels pointless trying to contribute unless you’re early.
Smaller, more niche communities definitely are harmed by being spread out as they get too quiet to survive.
in fairness, most of the whining about defederated instances is coming from the same people who turned reddit into a cesspit.
It’s unfortunate people want centralization and seem openly hostile when discussions are had about ways to encourage decentralization. When reddit goes down, you can’t use reddit. When a lemmy instance goes down, you can simply go on other lemmy instances. That’s a major issue with lemmy.world right now and it being seen as the “default” instance
No. Most large Reddit communities are toxic, both on the user and mod end. Let Lemmy grow at its own pace without repeating the same mistakes Reddit made.
This is the best take. I’d rather organic growth, here people come here for actual content, than just shove a bunch of redditors over and repost reddit content
In some communities they’re already doing exactly that.
Right now lemmy feels more toxic to me than reddit in many ways. I’ve never been on a reddit news thread where people were openly trolling and posting pictures of pig shit in response to comments they don’t like.
Those get autodeleted, or are on instances that are explicitly been defederated across most instances outside of lemmy.ml
I might have a controversial question: but why? Do we really want this mass exodus to the Lemmy community? I think we have a nice little thing here. People will keep coming anyway, slowly, if they really are interested in what this is about
I agree with this. The fedi communities as they exist appear to be happy with the niche. We don’t need to be the replacement of a corporate owned social network. Nor should we be.
Places like mastodon or lemmy should grow organically over time if we all want a healthier online culture.
It’s a nice little thing, but there so much to miss compared to Reddit. Sure, we have memes, technology and news. But there is very little other discussion going on, even for big things like food, sports, finance and relationships (picked some on the top of my mind). Huge communities on Reddit. Barely anything here.
Overall Lemmy is very much a disappointment when it comes to “niche” communities, if you can even call those large subjects that. But it’s even worse for smaller subjects.
I don’t want them here. I continue to promote Lemmy on a one-to-one basis. No mass-market appeal, no calls for the masses. Don’t poison the well.
You mean you don’t want communities infested with bots promoting thinly veiled advertisements and reposting crusty old content to farm upvotes to make their accounts look more legitimate?
Exactly, I enjoy the high quality discussion currently found on Lemmy and I feel the masses would only bring the average IQ down.
We aren’t going to get mods to promote us. That is just silly.
We should buy advertising though, definitely.
IMO the biggest thing Lemmy needs is a better onboarding experience and an official page that recommends mobile apps/alternate front-ends. One of the Lemmy devs said they wanted to overhaul https://join-lemmy.org/ and it’s on their list, which is a good first step. Until then I think it’s best to wait before trying to capture the average audience and have them leave in confusion.
Yes I never thought plastering it with screenshots of your rust codebase made a good first impression. I get it, open source is awesome, but come on guys. That shouldn’t be the first description of your product that people see.
Lemmy was a personal project for the devs before the reddit exodus. They didn’t really expect it to blow up
I think something we could do as a community is to make resources that help make understanding things happening here easier, like rapidly updated community guides to the available apps with screen shots showing features.
Really what we need is independent and community development of cool new things that you can’t get anywhere else, a real reason to actually come here over all the other similar choices - ideally things that corporate sites would avoid because they’re focusing on profit.
One tool I’m going to be working on is having an instance/community that makes it easy for people to work on collaborative design - ideally it’ll be a pipeline where idea get refined into design briefs then fact finding tasks split from that and eventually it all boils up into a series of implementation tasks, testing and documentation then finally actually gets turned into an open source product or a piece of creative commons media.
Is there somewhere you can point me to with more information on this idea? I’m intrigued and would like to participate in this type of community.
I’m just researching and working things out so far, will let you know if I get anything properly written up.
Much the popular posts in lemmy are memes, shitpostings, or politics/technology news which we can easily obtain from other media. The way I see it, lemmy lacks experts, scientists, doctors etc that that can bring interest and credibility to the posts or threads. They can help generate quality contents, what lemmy lacks till now.
fr, the best part of reddit were the ultra talented people, storywriters, artists etc. Don’t forget the most popular post on reddit is “The senate” and a picture of palpatine
I think stuff like this needs to happen organically, otherwise you’ll have people who hate it, complain about it, and give it a bad rep, hindering its growth
No matter what you do people will hate it, complain about it, and give it a bad rep.
I think right now, any publicity good, bad, or upside down will help.
Do we actually care about “beating” Reddit? As long as a friendly & knowledgeable community exists on Lemmy, do we really care about also being the largest?
I would argue we should wait until the software we’re on does not feel like an alpha release. This is not some window of opportunity that will close soon, we have no strong incentive to rush this process.
Removed by mod
I agree. It’s better to not grow the community too much in the beginning, specially since everyone pointed all users to Lemmy world and now we are centralized, more or less.
I don’t think it will be a very interesting Lemmy fediverse if we don’t grow many instances, and many communities, across the fediverse.
Your best bet will probably be r/redditalternatives. That community already promotes Lemmy and Squabble, a few others that I’m not remembering.
You are asking a moderator of subreddit to destroy that subreddit. Why would they do that?
Because Reddit sucks, and moderators know that better than the average user.
Plus, if they’re the ones that can make their communities on Lemmy or Kbin, they wouldn’t lose their power, just the majority of their subscribers.
That last reason is why most will say no. Still it’s worth an effort I thinkThose moderators that know, left already. I mean, just google Reddit alternative and leave. Those who stay want to continue.
Most Reddit mods love their little artificial power bubbles too much.
That’s why most of them quickly opened shop back up when Reddit threatened to de-mod them.
They’re not going to give it up to run /c’s here that are 10% the size (or smaller).
In my experience, reddit mods are completely hopeless
