I was looking for a Reddit alternative for years. I would have been cool with anything non-corporate, but figured it would take ages to build.
It’s incredible what Lemmy has turned into so quickly. A Reddit alternative went from being impossible to actually existing within a matter of weeks.
As much as that makes a great story… The groundwork for lemmy goes back years. It’s true that lots of issues were addressed and client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill, but a ton of work was done beforehand to make that all possible.
client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill
For me, this can’t be overstated. I don’t work in an office/at a stationary computer and 99.9% of my Reddit time was mobile. I checked out the “mobile apps” for Lemmy, and hated them. I probably wouldn’t be active here at all if it wasn’t for good dedicated apps like Sync.
I haven’t used Reddit since the blackout. Thankfully Sync for Lemmy was out within a few weeks. Sort by TopDay and there’s enough content on here to scratch my itch.
Boost for Lemmy as well
Damn straight. I tried out Jerboa and was so disappointed that until Lemmy Sync was announced I just assumed I would no longer have a Reddit style app for a while.
Voyager for Lemmy is really good and open source. You should try it, might get a better mobile experience.
Will do, thanks!
You can also have a look at https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/
There should be one that you’ll like
Lurks in sync
Well said
Work started on lemmy way back before lemmy could be a good alternative to Reddit
I agree with you on the technology part of it, but I’m wondering if OP meant “existing” as in how relevant of a social media platform it becomes.
The software existed for years, but yes the instances that popped up and the dev work to make it actually sorta stable at scale did happen quite quick.
It’s incredible what Lemmy has turned into so quickly.
This couldn’t have been possible without the help of Spez and all the board responsible for the APIcalypse, thank you very much!
What if he was secretly a good guy?
Spez being wholesome? The plot twist of the year.
Directed by M. Night Shamalyan
It’s what makes me want to donate to keep my home server alive. It’s the first open source thing that I’ve ever donated to, and I now have a monthly donation to help try to keep this alive since Lemmy is the alternative we all deserve.
Impossible? The only moat with Reddit was the userbase, the site is just a link sharing site with nested comments…
I know this comment could receive some negative feedback, but Lemmy lacks diversity in its userbase, compared to Reddit (or Tumblr in the old times). It’s just a feeling, when I scroll through comments and posts on Lemmy, I picture most of the users as 16-46 yo white males.
EDIT: changed “45” to “46”, see comment below.
That’s the vibe I always got from Reddit. But yeah, the vibe I get from Lemmy is that there are two demographics.
19-45 white male tech enthusiast and 19-45 white trans female tech enthusiast.
I’m not sure yet which one I am ಠ_ಠ
Oh damn, your certification ran out?
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cmon dont call me out like that :3
Which is interesting. On the early days of Digg it was the same demographic, although more politically center. Then in the early days of reddit the same thing happened. It was mostly Linux and tech. So having the same starting demo is not a bad thing, but the question is, will it grow to adopt others
I think Lemmy skews towards the younger end though. Of course I could be very mistaken as this impression is entirely unscientific and is based solely on the levels of knowledge and general discourse that are prevalent on Lemmy.
To my eye, a large percentage of Lemmy’s users are both relatively low-information and lacking in real life experience. They also tend to be very ideological which in my experience is something that tends to diminish with age.
Again, I could be very wrong about this.
There’s also the leftists who decide very narrowly what opinions will be tolerated! Don’t forget them!
Hey that’s me :D
It’s such a hilariously leftist trope to fuck up your own community’s growth with purity tests
Eh, some communities are more/less leftist than others. There’ll always be a cutoff point of course, and that’s necessary.
News and World News are my two main communities. Those are communities that, in any serious community-building sense, should be heavily moderated so as not to alienate normals.
Right? With friends like these…
The only material I’ve seen heavily moderated by leftists is misinformation, regardless of political orientation (although American conservatism is more heavily moderated since much of it IS demonstrably misinformation currently).
I’m willing to be proven wrong if you have any examples you could recommend.
I just wish the rules were clearer. I’ve posted memes that I thought were in good taste but if the content has to do with a minority group then you better be fanatically praising them. That’s one of the reasons I stopped posting to !memes@lemmy.ml .
although i’m a white male in the age group i am neither of these… i know you didn’t say everyone is in these groups, just here to represent us anti trans folks who don’t know shit about computers. And they say commenting helps lemmy grow, so i’m doing that too.
“anti trans”
You mean “non trans” (‘cis’ being the technical term), right? “anti trans” implies hostility towards trans folk
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Check some recent comments, they used the correct term to describe themselves.
i believe this to be satire… i hope
That’s how Reddit was for a long time too, and Reddit still is more like that than the other social networks. For whatever reasons that demo is more likely to be early adopters of this kind of platform. Diversity comes with growth.
Because Reddit was made for nerds, until more recently it didn’t try to attract the mass with shiny interfaces and promises of social recognition like FB and Instagram.
This is where the major problem is. Most people simply don’t care about anonymously discussing stuff. It’s always about status. You simply have to show off your flashy avatar and your NFTs.
I like how reddit thought NFTs were going to save them
I think you’re right, maybe I’m just being impatient. I just appreciate the mix of points of view, I think it helps to see things differently.
I mean the whole concept of the fediverse is inherently going to attract the more paranoid of people who don’t want to have big tech down their throat 24/7. The people most aware of this are those that work in/adjacent to big tech, and have enough understanding to be genuinely concerned about the state of the internet. Not that you have to be in tech to use/enjoy the Fediverse, but Lemmy is inherently inconvenient and less content rich than Reddit so it’s going to create more niche/less diverse communities who have common interests.
Tech also has a very large trans demographic compared to the general population, and you can see that reflected on Lemmy too. The whole platform is largely going to reflect tech demographics until it is well known by the general public.
I’m just glad most people here are nice and willing to have open discussions. I’ve seen more threads of people disagreeing and reaching common ground than anywhere else.
I also don’t really want Lemmy to get as big or have the same exact demographic as Reddit. I do want it to get bigger and more diverse than it currently is since there’s still not enough activity (although it’s way way better than it was) and not enough niches. There are only so many star Trek memes I want to see.
One issue with Lemmy is that it’s too anonymous that it doesn’t really support content creators who actually want to be known. I know influencer is a bad word, but platforms do need people to share original content, and there’s less motivation to do really high effort, high quality content when you can’t verify yourself. Lemmy has no lack of memes but nobody is using it as a platform for quality OC that takes more than a few minutes to create. I think that could be fixed by there being an instance dedicated to hosting verified users for people who want a non anonymous account, so when you see a user is from that instance, you know they’re the real deal, and that would encourage content creators to establish a presence. Right now, how am I supposed to know a handle is legit when there are thousands of instances that can have the same usernames, and people can even create their own instance?
Diversity doesn’t come when the userbase is outright hostile to outsider POV.
Why does it feel like every pocket of the Internet is a separate echo chamber these days. I just want to hear nuanced opinions that aren’t on either extreme of the political spectrum.
I get more of an impression that lemmy is full of far left leaning programmers. I think that is a good subset of people to have on a social media platform. But if we had more subs on other topics it should bring in other types of people.
The reason you don’t get many “normal” people here is that the community is absurdly hostile to anyone on the “normal person” spectrum.
If you’re not a software-pirating techbro obsessed with “privacy,” a leftist, or a furry, this place generally shits on you.
I very frequently post incredibly lukewarm takes for any mainstream community, and literally get called a Nazi. I have stalkers lol.
I, personally, tend to have “normal” views but significantly more resilience to online communities than “normal” people - which is why I still come here. Most normal people left back before this place even defederated from Hexbear. They ain’t coming back.
Until mods of what are essentially “default” communities get serious about growth instead of wanting “their” spaces, Lemmy is never going to grow. Most people don’t find getting blasted with piss-takes by Marxists funny the way I do.
Case-in-point from this thread
https://lemmy.world/comment/6400270
Oh and one directed at me, right on schedule.
Posted the bigot using the device created and coded by nerds. Do you fail to realize that “nerd” is what idiots call the smart kids? Of course you do.
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There’s a reason why quite a few instances have blocked hexbear.
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Dude made a simple joke in the same vein as the other joke and was downvoted because it didn’t “toe the line” so yes it’s exactly what I wanted to link.
If you can’t shitpost, there’s another huge chunk of people gone.
Bro a “your black certification ran out” joke is miles different than a “white to black trans” “joke”. Aside from being inappropriate, it’s also just unfunny, and so wildly out of left field, it screams “I’m doing a bigotry reference to be edgy/for attention”. It deserves downvotes for those reasons alone.
I don’t disagree with your point that Lemmy in it’s current state isn’t the most casual/normie friendly place. But if you think trans “jokes” are what will make Lemmy more approachable, you and I have very different casual audiences in mind.
It’s not out of left field. Read the user names.
The dude who says “I’m not sure which one I am” has the username “Certified Black Guy” which is why the joke was made. They’re all replying to this
19-45 white male tech enthusiast and 19-45 white trans female tech enthusiast.
It’s a play on how the expectation was that the trans reference was between gender. Twist-on-expectation is a core conceit of many jokes.
You don’t have to think it’s a funny joke. It’s a hip shot, a shitpost.
I read the thread, the “joke” is bad.
You don’t have to think it’s a funny joke. It’s a hip shot, a shitpost.
Isn’t the whole point of a shitpost to garner downvotes? Mission accomplished I guess. Point still stands, it’s deserving of downvotes.
Again, I don’t disagree that Lemmy is not very casual friendly at the moment. But let me reiterate, “more trans jokes/shitposts/whatever you want to call it” isn’t going to attract the types of “casuals” that I (or most people on Lemmy, I’d assume) want to interact with.
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I’m defending that person’s joke.
Read the screen names involved. It’s a decent hip-fire joke, but people took it the wrong way and downvote-spammed him
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I block those people all the time here and it’s made the experience very enjoyable. It’s a small enough community where blocking is highly effective.
I’ll have to review who sh.itjust.works has defederated.
I browse All’s top posts without blocking anyone, and my biggest comment would be duplicate news stories.
If you care about downvotes, then I could see your point about the Fediverse being hostile to some more mainstream opinions. I’ve made some pretty vanilla comments about markets/politics that have gotten downvoted for not being left-wing, but I don’t really care about that.
I’ve never been called a “nazi”, but I don’t go out of my way to antagonize anyone and try to add to the conversation and if my reply is something along the lines of “socialism sucks and you suck” then I don’t post it.
I think what it comes down to though is that the fediverse experience requires some curation and restraint compared to other larger platforms where you can go pretty much unoticed and can pretty much always find a group of people of similarly ideologically minds
If you care about downvotes, then I could see your point about the Fediverse being hostile to some more mainstream opinions.
I don’t - that’s why I’m still here. Most people do.
I regularly get called a Nazi just for saying Israel is demonstrably either not committing genocide or is so laughably bad at genocide that the claim is irrelevant.
30k people dying is bad, and the war is especially brutal, but the US killed nearly that many civilians in Mosul, and that wasn’t genocide - the topic was never even broached. Modern war is horrific for civilians. That’s why war is not seen as a good thing.
That take will absolutely get you called a Nazi if you post it in Politics or News/World News. This is a very normal position to have, and a significant majority of people will agree with everything above in the real world - these people aren’t going to hang out here.
I think what it comes down to though is that the fediverse experience requires some curation and restraint compared to other larger platforms
Yes, this is why it will stay small and insular until changes are made, which is what I’m advocating for.
With sensitive, charged, and tragic topics such as the Israel-Hamas war; that same vitriol is going to be thrown on any platform. And in my experience is worse on other platforms like tik tok and Reddit.
There is discussion to be had on the topic but probably not on social media. Politics and News communities typically have to be heavily moderated. Even on old school forums the politics thread/board is usually just as vitriolic. I usually don’t participate in those threads anywhere.
I feel like more of the stuff that is egregious is commenting or posting something along the lines of “I like cars” or “I like my job” and someone comes from the All feed with a “fuckcars” or “antiwork” reply. The unnecessary antagonism outside of their community is what bothers me. But even then, those are easy to ignore.
Politics and News communities typically have to be heavily moderated
Strong agree, and I also agree that things will be tense and some leeway should be given. That’s not the line we’re walking here, though.
I regularly get called a Nazi just for saying Israel is demonstrably either not committing genocide or is so laughably bad at genocide that the claim is irrelevant.
This being the internet, you might be simply being downvoted because you are wrong. As the old adage goes, the easiest way to
raise engagementfind the answer to a question on the internet is not to post the question, but to post a wrong answer.That might be relevant if my point wasn’t the hostility, rather than the disagreement. I don’t give a shit if you disagree with me - you’re allowed to believe whatever you want.
The hostility costs this place users, and this is a thread about advertising for more users.
Perhaps consider reading the entire comment before posting.
Lemme cap this: showing a defensive (or counteroffensive) posture against people who sport passive support for genocide “costs users”… and not wanting those users is somehow bad?
Sounds quite simple math to me: while we could mayhap be advertising for more users, we don’t need to cater to everyone.
Getting down voted for saying disagreement isn’t tolerated on this site. You can’t make this shit up lol
Maybe you should try jumping on Truth Social and suggesting they’d have a larger userbase if they’re were more tolerant of left wing views?
Why is it always “leftists” who are supposed to welcome any and all political views with a warm mouth?
What exactly are you offering in return besides entitled posts complaining “these people I’m stereotyping with open contempt weren’t nice enough when they replied to my unsolicited opinion with opinions of their own”?
It doesn’t appear to be posts, moderation, money, code or insight.
Maybe you should try jumping on Truth Social and suggesting they’d have a larger userbase if they’re were more tolerant of left wing views?
Does Truth Social have threads about wanting more people to join Truth Social? Because this is a thread about advertising for lemmy.
Why is it always “leftists” who are supposed to welcome any and all political views with a warm mouth?
Hexbear exists and you can join it.
What exactly are you offering in return
Growth. The thing this thread is about.
Does Truth Social have threads about wanting more people to join Truth Social? Because this is a thread about advertising for lemmy.
Yes. Brainstorming how to “redpill” people is one of the far-rights favourite past times, right up there with using slurs and obsessing about strangers having the correct opinons about their own genitals.
Did you very carefully dodge using the word “discussion” in your reply? Because this is a thread discussing the growth of Lemmy but it looks like we were supposed to just grovel at the feet of your opinion.
Hexbear exists and you can join it.
Have you forgotten which one of us was having a big teary about not feeling welcome because this thread right here was too left wing? I’m fine where I am thanks.
Growth. The thing this thread is about.
Yep. Growth and growth only. The user count goes up by one and we can pretend “bigger number means better” like we’re sad little middle managers.
My contribution to this discussion is making it clear just how little genuine value there is caving to your slimy little guilt trip.
Yes. Brainstorming how to “redpill” people is one of the far-rights favourite past times, right up there with using slurs and obsessing about strangers having the correct opinons about their own genitals.
Cool then yes, if I could tolerate those people as much as I tolerate leftists, and thus hang out with them, I would make these same posts. I struggle to do that because when they speak I want to put a hammer through my skull.
Have you forgotten which one of us was having a big teary about not feeling welcome because this thread right here was too left wing? I’m fine where I am thanks.
You still seem to think this is about me, and it is not.
Yep. Growth and growth only. The user count goes up by one and we can pretend “bigger number means better”
It literally does. I support the fediverse and thus want it to grow. If you need a place just for you, you can find one that aligns with you or create your own.
You still seem to think this is about me, and it is not.
The longest paragraph in your comment literally starts with “I, personally”.
Scattered around that are your opinions about why Lemmy isn’t bigger, that you’re insisting this thread was created to solicit.
But the moment someone does the same thing, in the same thread, but disagreeing with you about the reasons? “This thread isn’t about that”.
We can play the game if you want though. Was reddits growth – literally the measuring stick in the discussion – thanks to it peppering the centre right with gentle kisses every time they blessed the site with a visit?
Nope. It was about as left-wing as Lemmy and if you said something that was demonstrably bullshit, 8 different people would tell you to fuck off.
The reality is that it became a centralised location for memes and pornography.
Whatever “growth” it saw by giving brave little conservatives a place to call their own had to be repeatedly undone because they just couldn’t stop using slurs, brigading threads and advocating terrorism.
So they moved to Voat instead, instantly turning it into a cesspit of mask off neonazim and “not technically child pornography but we’re going to use it as child pornography anyway”.
How did that “growth” work out for them? Oh right, terminally.
It literally does. I support the fediverse and thus want it to grow. If you need a place just for you, you can find one that aligns with you or create your own.
Yet your solution wasn’t “someone should make a center-right server that is more tolerant to our completely reasonable views and harmless slurs”, it was “all these perverts and nerds should be nicer to us”.
You know, that exact thing I mentioned. You’ve just made it clearer that your take genuinely is “this platform is overrun by leftists who need to be nicer to us poor oppressed conservatives and if they’re don’t like it, they can create their own space just for themselves”.
I assume the next step is that you join that new instance, complain it’s full of leftists and insist they go somewhere else.
You hit the nail on the head.
Honestly, I couldn’t even recommend it to anyone in its current state to normal everyday people.
If you have normal, moderate political positions you will get shit on constantly here. Doesn’t help that everything needs to be political on Lemmy.
Meme communities are like 50% “hurr durr normies bad” or “everyone nazi”
Add the Linux circlejerk and that’s about 90% of the content I see on here. I don’t care to engage a lot with that and I just hope more normal people migrate…
But if we had more subs on other topics it should bring in other types of people.
Is that actually desirable or just growth for growths sake? Rage comics and lolcats brought huge numbers of new users to reddit and the quality of content immediately began to decay.
Maybe a social media site that runs out of content is a good thing.
Is that actually desirable or just growth for growths sake?
It’s actually desirable. Without subs on more topics (which should also mean people discussing those topics), Lemmy is not a viable alternative for the people who want to focus on content. And this is particularly relevant for more niche subjects because of how the scale of conversation works. I should know. I created two communities (technically magazines on kbin, but same idea) but until people come to them, I’m
mostlyfully just waiting there, fingling fingers.Well, I figure “growth” in this case means increased diversity in communities and users. Maybe it’s a double-edged sword, maybe the quality decay is avoidable - maybe not, idk.
I just think it’d be cool to see things other than linux, lefty, & star trek memes on here sometimes.
I just think it’d be cool to see things other than linux, lefty, & star trek memes on here sometimes
If you’re not happy with what you’re being spoonfed, there’s an entire world of content out there waiting for you.
Millions of songs, books, comics, movies, short films, podcasts, video games, board games, documentaries and every other kind of content. Much of it available for free or pocket change.
My favourite books and bands have zero mentions on reddit. I didn’t learn about them from social media, so I inherently learned about them while not scrolling social media.
And of course don’t forget you can build things too. I’ve made some games that do turn up on reddit occasionally and while it’s pretty cool to connect with fans and read the discussions, none of the knowledge, inspiration, connections or thoughts that went into them came passively from social media.
What do you actually want to see/feel/discuss? Because it might not be a thing you can find on social media, sandwiched between memes and Overwatch pornography, no matter how many people use the site.
I don’t need to be “spoonfed” anything, and it’s a little weird for you to assume so. I interact with all of that media, watch film & anime, read books, watch documentaries, etc. on other platforms. I share my music and artwork, I write video games as well. This isn’t about what I am up to.
Lemmy is a discussion site. I just think it’d be cool if we discussed more than what we currently discuss here. I think other prospective users might want to discuss other things than the current fare, and yeah - when it’s not here, when wanting to discuss it is dismissed essentially as entitlement & wanting to be “spoonfed”, they’ll do it elsewhere: reddit.
Yeah that’s fair. Sorry. I was pretty burned out on comments saying “there’s not enough content, we need to shove more content into this one place, more and more content forever so we can be more like that other site with all the content in one place only we hate it”.
But thank you for elaborating on what content you actually want. There are niche communities that aren’t very well served on Lemmy, but I never found them all that valuable on reddit either, often being overrun with low effort memes, “look at this photo of a 3080/PS5/whatever I bought” and a daily posting of questions like “how can I program an MMO”.
Chasing some vague, unconditional “growth” just seems like people are rushing to recreate the worst parts of reddit.
Not much we can do about that. That’s just the demographic an experimental decentralized platform like Lemmy attracts.
This comment will also receive some negative feedback but I don’t care about diversity in my social media platform. I actually want people to enjoy the same things I do, like Linux, technology, geek jokes, etc.
That’s the opposite of diversity I guess. More like a community where people have similar interests. That’s what I like about it.
Eh, that is kinda the appeal of Reddit, and its alternatives. Finding smaller communities of likeminded individuals that you can group into a tailored feed.
I always say the magic of this model is that it’s not just a firehose of every possible interest, it’s more like a shower of dozens of tiny handpicked jets. It just happens that on Lemmy, the “All” feed is still reasonably tailored to the main demographic here. That being tech nerds who dislike Reddit’s recent decisions enough to make a change.
Finding smaller communities of likeminded individuals that you can group into a tailored feed. the main demographic here. That being tech nerds who dislike Reddit’s recent decisions enough to make a change.
That’s exactly why I simply cannot not go back to reddit from time to time. Lemmy is nice and all but all communities that are not focused on tech stuff are complete ghost towns. Sure, one could say, that I should create the content and post it here. But I’m simply not that kind of person. I seldom come up with interesting stuff to share, but enjoy interacting with the posts of other people, writing a comment here and there. And I’d say many if not most others are similar.
Um, that isn’t the definition of diversity being used here. They were suggesting some demographic diversity not interest diversity. Unless you are suggesting only young white males are into Linux, technology, geek jokes, etc. In which case, fuck off with that bigotry.
No, only a subset of young white males are into linux if you exclude trans women
And there is the bigotry I smelled.
Haha it would be hard to know what everyone looks like behind the keyboards and I don’t care whatsoever. One of the best things about tech culture is that you are judged by what you actually know and how well you can work with others. :)
Ah, so it was simple bigotry. Great, now kindly fuck off.
Do fledgling communities typically START diversified? I would imagine it always starts this way. You invent the thing. You send it to your like minded friends, they send it to their like minded friends, etc. I feel like diversity inevitably requires time and numbers.
Yep, and in lemmy’s case, it was created by FOSS enthusiasts. And then it’s run on servers administrated by similar enthusiasts.
there’s no way you could even guess the skin color of a person by reading their comment. i could be a 70-year old asian man for all you care.
maybe because “race” just isn’t discussed as much because it’s also basically a social construct besides minor evolutionary differences.
People of different background have more chance to have a bigger diversity of point of view. You may not be able to guess the background of a single commenter, but you can spot things missing. Also, I wasn’t actually thinking about race, but gender identities and sexual orientations as well.
Well then you’re nutso because. Blahaj and such have a huge smattering
A ‘smattering’ is a small amount of something. You’ve described a huge small amount.
A ginormous smidgen. A massive skosh. An anemic plenitude.
A large boulder the size of a small boulder.
Ah “skosh”…I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it in writing, but my first mentor at my first career job used it all the time. Every amount of distance under a foot (in a structural discipline) was a skosh of some sort.
Just a bit of a skosh, a slight skosh…a good healthy skosh…
Brought back a good memory there.
Fun fact, “skosh” comes from the occupation of Japan after WWII, from Japanese “sukoshi” ‘a little bit’.
Race is a social construct that impacts so many people in a very real way. The race that you’re sorted into affects so much of where you can go, what you can do, and how the government treats you.
Jesus dude what country do you live in? That sounds terrible
Yeah there is not nearly as much to be learned here which is the major appeal of reddit to me. I already know what the comments will say before I open a lemmy post
I agree completely.
I don’t have examples at hand now, but I feel like I see so much like minorly-sexist talk. Or at least the stuff I only imagined horny men write, in so many threads.
Reddit was the same like ~10 years ago and I don’t miss that part of it.
I don’t feel like we’re ever going to get past that until we can make the sign up process very nearly effortless. Reading about signing up for an account on the fediverse can be a lot of new info. Choosing an instance can feel like a lot when new to the fediverse and at the point that it becomes something difficult or confusing, a lot of people just lose interest.
I agree. I am a techie, have been following Lemmy for quite a while before the Reddit exodus. When I made my account, first I had to understand that each instance manages its own accounts and there are many instances. My initial thought was to look for one of the higher population instances, but I read that this was not necessarily the best idea. Then I searched out why its better to pick an instance outside the high population ones and that whatever instance I picked, I could view/comment/vote on posts from other instances. I don’t have a problem doing research, but I don’t know anyone who is not a techie that would continue past my first question, and that is a serious problem for adoption.
Looks like we made the same choice! It’s blazing fast too.
And then the smaller community that you created an account if defederates from a large part of the fediverse, forcing you to make a new account
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It definitely lacks diversity. But at the same time it reminds me of the early internet where we had dedicated forums like IGN. Most people weren’t on these forums nor cared to be there. The problem here is sometimes Lemmy is not welcoming because of the way it is designed. You have to host and run your own instance or join someone else’s instance. That is good because we, the users of Lemmy, own it but bad because we become very protectionists. We want to protect our instance from bad actors but some users take it to the extreme and protect the instance from people who aren’t like them and think differently.
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I totally agree with you. Feels like 4chan.
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Reddit has that AND the 16-45 days old repost spam bot base covered.
Youngin’s.
Younger for me. They’re either pro Palestine or really pro Palestine, which to me is the idealism of youth. I’d say mainly 16-30 first world or equivalent males.
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You can’t say “Hamas are terrorists and Israel isn’t committing genocide” without 3-6 days of some nerd calling you a Nazi, which means your average joe has no interest in being here, because that’s the opinion of the majority of people and the majority of people are not, in fact, nazis.
Posted the bigot using the device created and coded by nerds. Do you fail to realize that “nerd” is what idiots call the smart kids? Of course you do.
Took less than 2 hours lol
Strange take tbh. The non-idealistic view is they both shitty (evil Jews vs evil Muslim terrorists), with normal people paying the toll as per the norm.
No one is justified in any of this carnage.
So far from what I’ve seen in a year is that anyone who points out racism gets downvoted
It’s worth stepping back a moment to appreciate that it’s actually worked. Whether it will continue is another story, but Lemmy became a successful and viable alternative to Reddit. That’s worthy of praise and celebration, and it couldn’t be done without the admins and mods of .world who’ve made this place into what it is.
Lemmy is like 1/2 of what reddit was able to do for me. I haven’t gone back to reddit since the exodus, I deleted all my posts and my account and never went back. But even now when I need information on anything from a community it’s always reddit that pops up with the information that I need. I understand this is because of userbase and interacting with it but lemmy has not been able to do that effectively yet.
Granted I did post about a fish for my fishtank here and it was answered actually pretty quickly.
I think I’m just not understanding what instances and the feddiverse is. Most posts I’m interested in have like 1 or 2 comments, and half the time they’re not useful interactions. It just feels kind of dead here. And again I understand it’s because of the lack of interaction and userbase. But to say it’s better than reddit or the best alternative is being a little frivolous.
It isn’t about “winning”. Lemmy can coexist with any Fediverse application, and that’s the beauty of it. Everyone on the Fediverse wins.
Not every “Reddit alternative” is on the Fediverse.
Honestly in the current landscape, any alternative to an already popular platform that isn’t federated in some way is doomed from the start.
True even for megacorps for Facebook; hence why Threads is federating.
To the people who want Lemmy to be more active, if you want that, you have to be part of it.
The internet adage is that on any forum 10% of users comment, and 1% post. Lemmy needs to break out of that paradigm, and users should be disproportionately active compared to user/activity on Reddit.
People like posting in places where other people are already posting. It’s a snowball effect. That’s why meme communities have managed to take off; the 1% of users can pump out a huge amount of memes in a short time and make the place feel more lively than it actually is, which in turn kickstarts it and makes it lively for memes.
I make posts mostly in non-meme communities because I think Lemmy should have that too. Some posts are just links but a lot of them are original content. I think it adds value but I simply cannot, as one person, post the kind of volume that memeposters can. These more niche communities need people to post.
If you are subscribed to an interest community, I strongly encourage posting new threads there.
TLDR:
This “the alternatives are great” gaslighting stuff has got to stop. We’ve all tried it and we’re all still here, for good reason. Reddit sucks but the fediverse sucks even more.
Oh the irony in this comment… The only person being gaslit is yourself.
And secondly - a lot of people don’t know that you can now block instances individually and that defederation/blocking is not really that big of a deal anymore.
Reading the comments in that thread made me realise how little I miss Reddit. The sub is RedditAlternatives and there’s a whole lot of people in there whinging that people are talking about alternatives to Reddit. Lemmy has it’s problems, but Reddit is toxic AF.
I guess you could say the people who actually moved away from Reddit aren’t on /r/RedditAlteratives anymore
if you think fediverse is worse than reddit you have issue
There’s a certain demographic of people who crave a constant flow of outrage to fuel their social media addiction. I know because I’ve struggled with this myself.
Reddit has a slew of bots and artificially promoted posts to provide this to increase engagement.
I guess we have bots here too, but it’s trivial to block them, and obvious spam/ads tend to be removed on sight.
There’s far less outrage fuel here than on reddit, and also the comparatively slower flow of content encourages actual engagement and participation vs. merely consuming.
I can see why someone who’s balls deep in reddit might be disappointed here.
I may also be completely wrong about some of this, but that’s my observational take.
As someone who went from a daily user of reddit for a decade and now hasn’t used reddit basically since the app’s red wedding, I really don’t think this is it. As much as I hope the fediverse and Lemmy take off, currently I’m extremely pessimistic about that because if anything the problem is the reverse of what you describe. My current front page on Lemmy (all/active):
- an article whining about Elon
- an article about Fox News/trump
- a post complaining about charging for XBL/PSN
- an article about Tesla being banned from driving schools
- an article complaining about DoorDash
and so on. And to get to this great non-rage bait content, I had to go through the trouble of even figuring out how to use the fediverse and which instance to sign up for (and then still hop instances a few times) and spend my first week just blocking like I was getting paid for it because language settings on this site mean nothing, more or less, and there are a few “communities” that pop up here that provide all of the intellectual stimulation of jamming a q-tip too far in your ear.
And if those posts alone don’t paint a clear picture about who the user base is here, heading to the comments will. Most of the comments read like they’re posted by “lefty white linux bro” or “communist trans linux they/them” who have decided that those are their entire identity/personality. While none of those things are bad and I tick a lot of those boxes myself, it creates a real echo chamber that borders on hostile to anyone that isn’t in that category. The other side effect I’ve seen on this is that this place can offer up some real doozies of takes in a way that is likely to make anyone who actually knows anything just up and leave. I saw one the other day that was talking about greatest people in the FOSS space and uncritically lists RMS that was heavily upvoted. At least someone brought up why that’s problematic in the comments, but imagine hopping over to the mainstream sites and talking about best musicians and seeing R Kelly on the list…
Anyway, while I don’t mind an echo chamber now and then, if Lemmy in particular is to grow and be useful for anyone outside of this base, I’d suggest the community adopt something closer akin to “reddiquette” which is probably the main reason why reddit was able to get somewhat past this in the early days, and some of the “niche” communities were able to grow. I put niche in quotes here, because as it stands now Lemmy doesn’t have even very vibrant communities for fairly mainstream things (music and TV, movies, etc.)
So while I personally choose to spend my time here instead of on reddit, that’s mostly an ideological choice and I view as a sacrifice because I’m missing out on tons of other content that I enjoy. Even your post is a form of this – “reddit bad” (sure) “because of bots” (also sure) “and Lemmy has less outrage content and fuels engagement” (uh, no.) Lemmy has as much or more, and it’s only fueling engagement on those that don’t immediately bounce off, but since you posted “their team bad, our team good” you’re getting upvotes and probably will continue to.
That you accuse leftists and marginalized groups of “mAkInG iT ThEiR wHoLe IdEnTiTy” tells me everything I need to know about your privilege and worldview, and explains immediately why you’d prefer reddit, a notorious alt-right platform.
We’re generally not welcome on reddit, so the fact that bigots and transphobes or right-wingers get immediately dunked on here is actually a good feature, and makes this far less toxic overall.
FYI I’ve blocked you, so I won’t see any further hot takes from you and therefore won’t respond. My time and sanity are far too valuable to waste on someone like you.
Ah perfect. Sets up a strawman, completely misses the point of my post, says one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard (reddit being an alt-right website*) and then immediately moves to block in response to me saying this place is a hostile echo chamber. 10/10, no notes, illustrates the point I was trying to make better than I did.
Just to be clear for other readers, I was not saying that any of those things are bad I was saying that this place has a purity test that borders on stupidity which this post illustrates well.
* just how does one come to this conclusion? It’s less lefty than Lemmy, but not by much. It’s alt-right communities are usually either banned, quarantined, and regardless of the technicals of the website or how the admins run it, they’ve always been outcast and if you say “vote for trump” in any but the clearly right echo chambers, you’re going to get downvoted to hell.
It’s fine for actual bigots to get dunked on. But Lemmy users will dunk on you: literally for liking the “wrong” piece of software. The echo chamber is real.
I’ve not noticed. Can you provide an example? You mean Chrome?
Honestly, I wish more people would switch to Firefox, but I’d never dunk on someone for Chrome. I might try to talk them out of it though lol
You perfectly illustrated the point
The “point”
“But I like my corporate cage 😭😭😭”
I don’t know what current Reddit looks like but old reddit is still irreplaceable so far.
People on Reddit are simply too addicted to the content. That’s the only real reason I can see what could bind someone to the platform. It all boils down to that - content. (And you probably don’t need me to repeat the usual “for more content we need more users” lol)
The old reddit is purely a technical thing at this point. I believe in the popular opinion that it’s a matter of time before it gets shut down.
I’ve personally been a user of it on Apollo and Relay and to me it was the way to use it. Rarely have I interacted with the website. So I imagine it’s a similar thing with the old mode users.
a lot of people don’t know that you can now block instances individually and that defederation/blocking is not really that big of a deal anymore.
I’ll reshare my thoughts on this from a comment I left in a completely different context a few days ago:
My question about that option is: what effect does it have? My understanding is that if we defederate, they can see our content and reply to it, but only other users on their instance will see those replies.
Does an individual blocking them do the same thing? If so, perfect.
But if, as I suspect, it still allows them to see and reply to comments and everyone else in the fediverse can see it, I cannot support it as a solution to dealing with the kind of bad faith interactions which would make me want to block or defederate an instance. It allows them to continue peddling their rubbish without even enabling the person they’re cribbing off of to respond.
Yeah, I’m so weary of this argument but you’re dead right.
If I and all my neighbours close our curtains then we won’t see all the garbage, rats, dead bodies, and other refuse piling up in our street, and then congratulate ourselves at the lovely community we share.
It’s absurd. As though everyone expects that corporate encroachment into the fediverse is going to come with a big sign that says “threads” or some such.
Some of the people in that reddit thread are unreasonably angry that some people moved to Lemmy.
I’ll never understand loving a company so much that anyone who doesn’t like it is automatically deemed a bad person. Why is a stranger’s choice of social media so personal to some of these people? Why are they so livid?
I’m not even going to quote the specific comments I’m referring to just in case I get banned. One of them was comparing the entire lemmyverse to the subreddits that were banned over explicitly only having content about hating strangers for existing.
I’m happy I left if that what I’m “missing out” on.
Honestly, there’s a reason hype has died down. The site has all the same problems as other alternatives.
After the initial hype, it’s only as big as a reasonably large individual subreddit. In fact, here are the top weekly posts of lemmy’s federation partners and T_D’s exodus site. The latter edges out the former slightly in upvotes and much more substantially in comments, and it’s just a single community. Even in the fairly small category of “biggest extant reddit alternative”, lemmy doesn’t take first prize.
Same content problem as all the others: roughly half of the posts are politics of a uniform orientation, and the other half are reposted facebook memes.
Reddit’s killer app is the presence of a sizable community for every little niche thing, and that’s not there. Unless your only interests are politics (within roughly .3 standard deviations of the median Huffpo writer) or Facebook memes, it’s not a viable alternative.
Competition: Sure, it’s federated in theory, but the block-happy, drama-centric culture means that, if an alternative were to pop up with the userbase of 2012 Reddit (or even 2018 Reddit), it’d get defederated almost immediately. Open federation solves the “dozens of sites competing for the same thousand-or-so people” problem. Closed federation just pretends to do so.
This is basically all the same issue: not enough users. It’s so dumb. “Lemmy isn’t as good as Reddit because everyone isn’t there yet. But ya, Reddit sucks.” /face-palm Then come over and get users to come over instead of saying there’s not enough people.
Hey, it’s not all politics! Star Trek is doing great here! I just saw a post about how the Bell Riots are going to…wait…
Lemmy right now actually feels like it’s the same size as when I started using Reddit, before the Digg migration. It was so much better then.
well it doesnt necessarily need to be politics, the biggest subgroup for lemmy users are usually people into tech (a lot of tech and tech adjacent communities are fairly sized on lemmy) as they are the ones more likely to make the jump. Easiest way to tell is to go to the communities page, sort by all communities and count the number, or even just get an eyeballs search to know that a common thread between many communities is either memes or tech
Not only not enough users, but there are certain users on here that are generating constant spam and/or propaganda. That becomes half the feed if you don’t block them.
Fair enough. But thats also understandable since there’s no single entity moderating. I think we should accept to get wet when showering.
I‘m pretty sure we can use blocklists for instances that suck like mastodon. Its very easy although masto doesnt do a good job yet to promote blocklists.
Which means that when more people come in here, there will be more spam and more propaganda, reaching the feed more often. And you won’t really stop people like that, they’ll simply go to a different instance and do the exact same thing.
Well, the same as always. They evolve, we evolve. Its an arms race.
Its already way past that as well. Bans of the largest instances federate through to smaller instances. So if you manage to get banned on instances I federate with, I don’t see your stuff either.
Works pretty well already.
That’s Reddit, too. World News there is basically all Israeli propaganda right now. It becomes a lot more diluted with more users.
Everyone in that thread has Stockholm syndrome. They’re so used to being force fed shit that they couldn’t possibly believe that an online platform could be run any differently than Reddit.
And, everyones total misunderstanding of the fediverse. Yea, no wonder it’s all tech people here, dumbass
When I was recruiting people during r/place and the protests, I found most of the issue being proper user guides to get people to sign up. Lemmy may be pretty confusing, especially to non-techies.
I still don’t really get what people find so difficult about picking an instance. Most people seem to manage getting an email account, which requires picking an email provider like Gmail, Outlook, etc. Joining Lemmy isn’t that much different.
picking an instance
I’d hazard a guess and suggest the word “instance” confuses most and puts them off.
Could continue with the email analogy and call it “provider”?
I suspect that would help
A Lemmy provider. Haha, guess that works
It is like picking an email provider, but it’s like picking an email provider in the early days when there were no big players. People are more comfortable picking a provider that has a big name backing it. You even just mentioned providers from Google and Microsoft. No such options exist for Lemmy so people see all the instances and get overwhelmed. Personally it doesn’t bother me because I don’t care that much about my account history, but if you’re a content creator you don’t want to lose your account so it can be a deterrence, and other people may worry more about picking the wrong instance. I think it’s also not very straightforward what the implications of picking an instance is and a lot of instances don’t do a good job explaining their policies.
I think the issue is mentioning lemmy being federated and having instances in the first place, even as a tech user a senior software developer I had to learn about how it works does stuff sync up etc.
Now imagine a non techie user.
And that doesn’t even mention stuff like instances being defederared from each other.
I remember trying Mastodon first, and my first reaction was, “What the fuck? I have to choose a specific sub/server?”, and as I read through the list of each server that said things like “This is a community for camping enthusiasts”, I found myself extremely off put, as I don’t believe (at the time anyway) that anything said the server didn’t matter and I would still have full access to the other boards. It sounded as though I would have to pick explicitly between a camping-centric community, a tech-centric community, a car-centric community, etc.
Lemmy was a little easier to grasp, though I did gravitate straight to Lemmy.ca because that sounded like the most practical option given what I wanted to access and where I live. But the setup process was definitely a learning curve. Eventually I wound up really liking it, but it didn’t truly fall into place until Sync dropped. Now my experience is nearly indistinguishable from my past ten years on reddit, minus the constant angst, hostility, and doom scrolling.
I tried to get my tech-savvy brother on here to no avail. He showed up when a bunch of servers were being defederated and I guess he thought it was setting a bad precedent right off the bat. I’m assuming he was unknowingly on one of the bad servers and was being exposed to their bitching and complaining without realizing what was really going on with them.
We need a service called LemmyIn that does everything for you and places you in every available instance it can find, save for anything inherently bad or controversial.
It’s because, like with email, the average person doesn’t give a fuck what provider they choose. They want to use “Lemmy”, they don’t care if it’s lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, etc.
It matters even less than with email, if they’re using a third-party app like Sync, because it’s not like they’ll ever look at the instance their name is hosted on.
Because people don’t explain it with good analogies like that. That’s the first I heard it put that way, and I found it helpful.
One thing I had an issue with when I migrated was actually understanding the differences between instances. A few aren’t obvious as to their purpose. If you randomly pick the wrong one to look at first, you may get a negative impression of the fediverse because of it.
What was your negative experience?
I would say my hardest thing onboarding was actually understanding what each instance was really about. Your pretty much presented with endless choices seemingly and you can’t really weigh every option.
Yeah that’s what you said in the comment I replied to. Was wondering what that negative experience you had was. Other then them defederating, shutting down, or having overall crappy uptime there’s not a whole lot of differences when using Lemmy.
For newcomers it’s not clear what the significance of choosing an instance is, so that makes it hard to choose, and those potential downsides of choosing the wrong instance are actually pretty significant, or at least pretty annoying.
Yes I understand this. I’m just trying to open up the conversation on what those negatives are for people to see.
I see. There aren’t other major negatives that come to mind, but those ones are very important.
Oh I see what you were getting at. The second half of my message talking about getting a negative impression was more so speculation on how someone might react to joining one of the more politically charged instances like lemmygrad or hexbear. Which could give a new user the impression that the fediverse was all like that.
I think they made it easier by having a suggested instances category at the top. And even back then, you could see the description of every instance listed. I think the main issue is having to submit the application, even though I know it doesn’t have to be long and that it’s necessary in this situation.
Getting banned from ML for saying that Russia is commiting war crimes in Ukraine. And then again for saying that the US revolution didn’t generally involve mass rape. And then again for calling an obvious troll out.
This last time, the ban reason was literally “Socsa.” Which I guess is flattering, but being put on a short leash for not breaking any rules, while tankies are free to troll threads with pig shit gifs is not a positive experience.
The stuff you’re talking about is why a lot of people are turned off period. Which people have already made that point in this thread.
You’ll get banned on ML for much of anything. I’m banned in the memes community of all places. This is not dependent on the instance you decided to use.
There needs to be groups of communities you can block or subscribe to. I couldn’t give two shits about Linux or sports teams or gross anime porno. Seeing all that will put off most casual visitors. After 6 months of blocking communities I have a fairly decent front page but still block weird anime shit daily. 99.999% of people will just flounce.
This is where the real problem is. Lemmy users act like there’s no issue, because you can block anyone you like, but to most users exploring the platform, that’s not helpful at all.
People generally don’t want to have to spend an hour making the feed into something useable, much less 6 months. What will draw people in is a feed that is already interesting and useful, which they can customize as they go.
I think the solution would be a set of default subscriptions, and even a default block list. Something that instance admins can curate themselves for the new user experience, but users can still customize as they see fit as they get to know the platform and communities
Absolutely. Even just blocking languages you can’t speak would help.
I’m still confused by the need for blocking communities. Maybe it’s because I use Sync, but I only subscribe to communities I’m interested in, and I use trending/new community pages to find new ones to subscribe to. My front page is my subscribed communities, so I am never subjected to all the other content I don’t care about
I browse everything and block things I don’t like. That way I get an endless scroll, like reddit, and don’t have 5 posts from my subscribed list. That let’s me see everything and I can subscribe to things I might otherwise never see. Just a different approach. There is a metric fuck-ton of dreck though.
This is a symptom of the problem, I think. The idea of a social media platform being confusing enough to even need a new user guide will be enough to put people off.
I think the conversation needs to be framed differently. Most new users aren’t going to care about federation or decentralization when they first look at the platform. Don’t tell people to choose an instance, just recommend one that you think is good. At that point, the only thing that will draw people in is to see interesting conversations and communities when they visit.
To me, that means feeds that aren’t dominated by niche interests by default. Don’t get me wrong, I love Star Trek and I appreciate Linux for what it’s good at. But if I wasn’t into those things, I would think those are the only communities being represented here.
In that respect, the sorting algorithm needs work. The votes are a good way to start, but it’s become pretty clear that in the new user feed, some communities need to be weighted differently than others. The initial experience should probably show more actual conversations, and fewer communities that live off bot posts.
People were really excited about being able to make bots that repost entire rss feeds or repost other site content into everyone’s Lemmy front page, and those are fun projects to work on. But those need to have a lot smaller impact on the default feed that instances show
Yeah, lets wait til the bugs in 0.19.1 are ironed out too please 😌 (well, the big federation bug at least).
With over a million users, I personally don’t feel an overwhelming urge to make more people come here, I prefer a more organic growth, but that’s maybe only me.
Good. It should be difficult. Means it keeps out the smartphone influencer types. Make this place too accessible, it’ll be ruined. Guaranteed.
Like I do want everyone to be able to use the internet, but I do want a space that requires some minimum level of technical competency. It’s a very easy filter to find people more like myself.
I agree. Let the people who want to use their phones to access twitter / instagram whatever. I don’t want this place opening up and exploding into popularity, that’s when shit is going to go downhill fast.
I feel all you guys, but, if it ever reaches the stage where it’s mainstream, we could all move to a more techie instance amongst ourselves.
I always have to laugh when I see an ostensibly pro-lemmy comment that says:
“Reddit mods are out of control”
Do these people understand that basically the whole idea behind a Federated system is that community owners have significantly more moderation power than they do on commercial platforms? If someone’s main problem with Reddit was unchecked mod power, I have some bad news for them…
I mean the sentiment in the comments in that thread is not at all positive. The damage the tankies/hexbear/lemmygrad has done to the reputation of lemmy is not negligible.
imho It’s important to help people stear away from those places when they join lemmy except if that is their intention.
Lemmy went stronger when center-left people joined the platform. .ml and Lemmygrad will remain far-left. There are many server available to suit their needs. I was once on .ml until I joined the server set by people who were active on r/piracy before.
What about the spam and propaganda generated by users on lemmy.world? We have so much of it here lemmy becomes either empty or unusable depending on if you block them.
propaganda
This would be ”making you look at the shit Israel has been doing", right?
or “people don’t believe that communism would work”
The straight from highly biased often misinformation websites, yes it’s propaganda. The fact that lemmy is being flooded in it by a few select individuals makes it propaganda. The straight up lies being told around here makes it propaganda.
Leaving reddit was a good idea, joining Lemmy, I’m not so sure anymore.
The userbase here is not really diverse in itself, so the whole platform gets this large echo chamber vibe. And with “not diverse” I don’t mean hostile or anything, just very homogeneous. Overwhelmingly left and far left on the political spectrum, embracing all things LGBT+, high nerd & tech factor; and if you don’t belong to or identify with either of those factions, you get downvoted to oblivion, and worse yet, mod removed and banned for no factual reason.
What made reddit strong as a platform was that you had the right kind of diversity and a big enough userbase to not spiral out of control, unless the top management fucked up.
On Lemmy, instance admins are (or become) often the worst offenders, making any interactions with users on their instance tiresome, unless you regurgitate the same stuff that has been said there over and over and over again.
While Lemmy is gradually growing and the whole federation is a pretty good concept too I have one question about lemmy and it’s future.
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Since it’s just two devs maintaining the whole project (I know there are many open source contributors but the project is on them right?) what if they get tired of the project or go MIA? Can a fork be made and that can be maintained as a replacement of lemmy?
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How are and will be the SEO of the lemmy’s instances? Reddit reached a wide audience due to that. It’s nice to have a niche set of audience at the start but that should not be the case forever right?
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