When the API changes came in on Reddit it appeared to cause quite a few people to shift to Lemmy, but not that many. I’ve said this before in other posts but the onboarding experience for Lemmy is awful for your average joe. From what I’ve read it was the same situation for Mastodon and that is why Bluesky took off instead.
There needs to be a clear concise point of entry for new users to the Fediverse that empowers users to quickly customise what they want to see. Most people don’t care about how the Fediverse works and its benefits, they just want to consume content.
If I were technically capable and had the drive to do so I’d create a single onboarding site that would ask the user a few preference defining questions, chuck them on an instance that is relevant and apply some filters so they don’t get spammed with anime posts if that isn’t their thing. Oh and maybe show a couple of mobile apps.
Can’t state it better than what you have said. Keep it simple! Lemmy has a better chance of been the new silkroad than Reddit. The appeal of Reddit is that it is the general populace equivalence of an ever updating Library of Congress. What will stop Lemmy from becoming that is the lack thereof for ease of onboarding.
I wouldn’t be surprised more silly moderation tools by reddit admin in the name of reducing spam wil drive users out, Lemmy fediverse should use the tech knowledge they have to set up such funnel.Else, competitors will swoop in to take it’s place.
Reddit is a website. Twitter is a website. Bluesky is a wrbsite.
Lemmy and Mastodon are not websites. They are webserver platforms. They’re like WordPress or Joomla. Imagine trying to treat “WordPress” like a singular place on the Internet.
People keep trying to sell technology to people who are looking for a location, and it’s fucking imfuriating.
Yeah but Lemmy instances are interconnected to a certain degree. Wordpress instances are not. Key difference…
Lemmy instances are interconnected to a certain degree
And? This is treated as the only selling point of the technology, and is a significant part of the confusion. Lemmy isn’t a place you can go to on the Internet. Having to go into a 10 minute long explanation of ActivityPub doesn’t help sell the social web. Not that people using it would be able to; most fediverse users still don’t seem to know even the basics of how it works. People still ask about logging into different instances with the same credentials.
Wordpress instances are not.
Some of them are. Not that that’s the point.
Lemmy is something you use to create a social content aggregation website. It also happens to network with other, similar websites. But we want to treat them as access points some imagined whole, which A) they are not, and B) raises this problem of choice paralysis around which server to use, because they’re discussed and treated as dumb terminals, rather than websites.
You definitely know what you’re talking about. I have no idea how federated shit works. As far as I can understand each instance hosts its own content, but connects to other instances and fetches their content too. So, yeah, they’re all different sites, but they’re adhering to one “federation standard” (like an API response format for a post or a list of posts or whatever). How far off am I?
Imagine trying to treat “WordPress” like a singular place on the Internet.
Yeah imagine being wp engine lol
I largely agree - the fediverse needs less friction if it wants widespread adoption. That’s part of the reason why I wound up on .world. It was easy. I suspect I’m not alone here.
The other bit challenge is that each instance can have identically named communities, which drives fragmentation and makes each community seem less active. I dabble in photography, so I’ll use some examples from that.
Reddit has this problem too, but there can only be one /r/photography. There are derivative communities like /r/streetphotography and /r/askphotography, but the original sub is unlikely to move/change.
By design the fediverse can have many /c/photography communities. In the case of photography there are three or four “big” ones and a bunch of smaller ones. There are also all the derivative communities, some of which are doing better than the ‘root’ community. One example of this is !superbowl@lemmy.world.
I’m not sure what a good solution is, especially when you start talking about “the same” community on multi-inatance. One of the design goals of the fediverse was to enable that should some instance go off the rails.
Yea I tried to create an account on another instance when I started, and never heard back. Then I went to Lemm.ee and it was quick and easy.
That said I kinda like how each one is run a bit different. It’s nice to not have a top down structure but more of a terrorist cells situation.
It’s already run by a far right billionaire, there was an exodus, but a lot of people stayed and backed out on the protests, just caving in instead.
It depends on what changes they made. Reddit is fairly left-leaning so if they start seeing more right-wing content or racist crap being allowed on the site, it might happen.
People quit X because it allowed notorious racists and neo-Nazis back on the site, and also did dumb stuff like not allowing people to unfollow Elon Musk (it will automatically re-follow him after some time). It also prioritised and propagated right-wing content which, shockingly, left-wing users didn’t like.
What Musk did is roughly the Reddit-equivalent of reinstating t_d and auto-subscribing everybody.
If that happened, yeah, folks would leave in rather large numbers.
Reddit is fairly left-leaning
Anything left of Biden/Harris is met with a torrent of abuse. If anything, Reddit is split between centrists and fascists. And some of the mods will ban anyone who’s active and doesn’t agree with their politics.
Au contraire, mon amis.
From an American perspective, Reddit is split between liberals and progressives with a minority of socialists and conservatives.
No. Most of Reddit’s population has proven they don’t care about changes that much more directly affect their user experience. I can’t see a significant portion of them caring about who owns the platform if they don’t care about that.
Most of them keep upvoting and commenting the same bot posts that get reposted monthly without even noticing the pattern. Ironically they don’t seem to pay attention to what they’re reading because there is just so much of it.
spez can destroy reddit well enough on his own. He’s a Musk brown noser.
Reddit is mostly ChatGPT bots talking to each other these days.
I get that people don’t like Reddit but to claim it’s “mostly bots” is almost certainly false.
Nah, take a look at the top comments in any of the default subreddits. They’re either copy/pastes of the top comment from the last time the same meme was posted, or they’re very clearly LLM-generated. Most of the big subs are absolutely loaded with bot activity these days.
I went thru the profiles of 10 different users whose comments were on top of the most popular subreddits and none of them seemed like bot profiles. I’m quite confident in my original statement.
So you did a reverse search of their comments? Because they take actual comments from real people the first time a post is created, and then they post that persons comment any time that post is created again. They wont seem like bots because theyre directly quoting actual conversations that real people had about a decade ago.
One of the most insideous and common bot karma farming techniques is to “replay” a historical post.
They’ll look at a post and comments from like 8 years ago, and have one account make the post, and then have other bots copy the original top comments. Then have another set of bots post the original responses to those comments.
As a result, none of the bots look like bots… Because they’re actually more accurately “ghosts” of other real human users.
So when people are talking about bots, it’s not just LLMs. It’s also accounts which “fill out” the space, but which are actually just airing re-runs.
The only thing I really miss about Reddit is subredditsimulator. At least then, you know for a fact that it’s all bots, and is to be consulted sheerly for entertainment value.
The copy/paste thing has been true for years even before the Reddit API exodus. Also bot-farms have been active for quite some time as well.
There’s a big difference between the default subs and the niche subs. There’s bots all over the default subs, especially the news/politics ones. But like, the stardew valley memes sub, for example? I don’t think there’s a whole lot of russian bot activity going on there.
Not even hyperbole. One of the shitty meme subreddits with 20+ million subscribers I saw ban bots. Activity dropped off instantly to almost nothing. It was so disturbing I deleted my account.
Reddit will be a Frankenstein like Facebook and will refuse to die. They will find a way to monetize it while also forcing right wing engagement. Right wingers will be thrilled for some time thinking they are now the “cool reddit people”(lol) while never realizing everyone stopped caring.
Individual subs will still be as active as they always were. Mod support will wane. At the end of maybe year 5 you’ll look at the site and it will be unrecognizable. Just another captured audience too entrenched to ever leave the platform.
None of this should worry you. Reddit isn’t popular because a left wing person owns it. It’s political lean is entirely from its users. Changing who owns the space doesn’t erase left leaning people. They just go somewhere else. After having used lemmy for some time, I’m fairly confident it will be here. Even if not, wherever it is will be new and cool and away from right wing shit bags. It’s almost exciting to think about having a new space to explore.
Reddit isn’t popular because a left wing person owns it.
Extra true because Spez would absolutely slob Elon’s knob given the opportunity.
Reddit is a Nazi site. Musk being worshipped religiously was a whole thing on there. They’d be happy, and I’d hope so–anything to keep conservatism off of Lemmy, and the rest of the fediverse.
Reddit is a lot of things, but to call it Nazi devalues the word. Shame on you.
Outside Musk subs like /r/elonmusk, /r/Tesla and /r/spacex, Elon is widely mocked across reddit.
Reddit is a shithole but let’s be real here.
Aye, as evidenced by the entire site getting him on a PewDiePie meme review.
There will only be an exodus if there is a better alternative than Lemmy/kbin. Remember that twitter was still going strong despite mastodon existing until bluesky won the race and became the new twitter. If reddit somehow manages to collapse one day, most of the people won’t go to lemmy because it’s already been shown it’s not an attractive or equivalent replacement for it, so either something new reddit-like appears or nothing changes.
Nope, Lemmy is similar to Mastodon where the average person finds instances too confusing
A specific chunk of people would for sure move over to Lemmy, and there would be a lot of angry uses, but just because people get angry doesn’t mean they’ll move over. They’ll whine about it but in the end they’ll stay on Reddit.
Personal experience, I tried to move over to Lemmy but when I’m searching for something specific I’ll still look at reddit a lot of the time, just because of the sheer mass of material there is. But I refuse to post on reddit anymore since I don’t want to contribute to it. I’m trying to post more on Lemmy now though, because “be the change you want to see” etc etc.
I know I’m still giving reddit views, which ultimately adds to their revenue through ads. I’m not happy about that. But if I’m having a computer problem, or want to find out why my peace lily plant is dying, I can pretty much always find the answer on reddit. Lemmy isn’t there yet. (Not even close tbh.)
But for the things that are on Lemmy, the quality of discussion is much higher. 99% of reddit comments on the bigger subs are jokes. Funny ones maybe, but not provocative or though-inducing.
tl;dr a lot of people would talk about migrating but it’d blow over and only a minority would follow through.
Reddit already saw the effects of letting rampant political content run wild in the 2016 election, people will comment in subs that do not want their political opinion and engagement becomes very negative fast.
The few open ones try to present themselves as moderate when possible, even if they are anything but.
No
I cut the umbilicus after getting banned on fake pretexts from rightwing mods. Fuck 'em. And fuck Spez.
I was a highly involved redditor, but now I realize I was being suckered into engagement by ragebait. Now I use Lemmy a bit, and have reclaimed my leisure time to walk, cycle, go to the pub, play music and hang out with family and friends.
Lemmy is not ready for a more mainstream user base.
Only because of networking effects. The software itself is suitable, but people don’t mass migrate to another platform until a critical mass has moved there first.
The network effect is definitely at play. But the usability is not really there yet. Just finding communities through the app I’m using is not always working right.
