A little history on Reddit. From the politics subreddit with just 85,678 users in 2008 to 500 million active users today. Lemmy/Kbin will follow the same path.
This is going to be a short and sweet little history of Reddit. Reddit was founded in 2005.
Take a look at what Reddit looked like in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20061206235353/http://reddit.com/
Note that it didn't have subreddits back then because the user base was too small.
Look at Reddit in 2008 (December 31): https://web.archive.org/web/20081231080128/http://www.reddit.com/reddits/
Politics had just 72,314 subscribers. Technology had 85,678 subscribers, and the "Nicher" Food subreddit had only 4,438 subscribers.
Lemmy/Kbin follows the same path. Initially, generalist communities like Politics and Technology will have the most momentum and gain subscribers, just like Reddit did back then. As the user base grows, "niche" communities will be able to sustain themselves.
Let's not think about the Reddit of today, let's think about Reddit of old. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Yeah. Eventually there’ll be another meltdown. There always is. At that point , it’d be great to have established structures, a simplified onboarding and a compelling app ecosystem.
Biggest problems I see with Lemmy right now is servers going down, defederation for petty reasons, and duplicated communities fracturing a user base. I’ve also noticed users with the same name on different instances but it’s not always clear if that’s the same user or a clone. i basically quit Reddit cold Turkey when I lost use of Apollo and I’d been there since well before the Digg migration. I’m looking forward to seeing how the Lemmy community resolves the issues I noted, no doubt they will.
you can't be mad at both subreddits being too large and controlled by a few power mods, and lemmy having too many duplicate communities all run by different mods.
it is the core virtue of the federation model in the first place, in that if a community on an instance goes down, you have the others as backup.
past a certain size, the content that comes through subs/comms passes by too fast to be digested in time, and other content gets buried, so smaller communities should be more digestable.
as for cross-platform user verification check, lemmy can implement mastodon's method of instance A giving you a secret to be put to instance B, and if it sees that secret from B, then it knows the user at B is you.
I’m not mad, I’m just noting issues that are confusing for new users. Duplicate communities don’t serve as backups. They are distinct from each other. A community going down just means it is gone, for practical purposes. Ive noticed that usually just one community of a given name has any active participation, the rest are placeholders with a post or two. Worse than creating communities as placeholders are Reddit mirror communities that are just populated by bot posts.
The other two are being worked on but onboarding will always be tricky as people have to get their head around instances. It's not too tricky but still a hurdle.
The join a server page could do with an improvement - perhaps let people add their location and interests and offer them a more filtered list with some data like active users and uptime.
i got on lemmy without understanding how instances work, and even now, after 2 months and +100 comments, i know very little
I take this as a big point for "see how well you can do without caring about it". And think talking about it should be kept to a minimum during onboarding. Although it's understandable why pages like https://join-lemmy.org/ talk so much about it, even about hosting your own server!
This is from nerds to nerds, in a wholesome way. But most people aren't nerds, and as you prove, don't need to get into the details to use it, enjoy it, participate and contribute.
My vision is: Hide all the tech talk in 'advanced signup' and make the default signup process as quick and easy as possible.
Absolutely! I love the steps Mastodon is taking. Basically when you click join from the main page you get an account on mastodon.social and it just works. You really need to dig around to find other instances.
I'm hoping there's an instance that figures out how to become popular and financially sustainable enough to be able to support that scale. Maybe it's lemmy.world or maybe it's another one in the future.
I agree, you want bums in seats as quickly and effortless as possible. Your average user coming from reddit just wants an "all" feed they can use to curate their own front page, they don't really know, care, or want to learn about the plumbing underneath. The ones that do care will figure it out as theres plenty of resources available.
Knowing very little about the technical side - and speaking only from my experience trying to get my own account set up - I almost think the fediverse need a dedicated, standalone sign up instance (or series of instances) that has no posting enabled, but is automatically federated to the X most popular instances - so that apps and web interfaces can create simple default sign ups for new users without them needing to understand what instances even are.
Something like "lemmy.gateway" that can act as a home for the user account that then looks at the instances where the content actually happens, that can have high availability and redundancy in the event of server load on the popular instances, and that "just works" for your average reddit migrant so they don't have to go diving into instance details to dip their toe in the water. That way your "content instances" can go up or down without impacting new user signups, your apps can work to load popular posts even if what would normally be your home instance is down, and you can decouple things a bit - maybe your "gateway" lemmy instance can drop some code to run leaner since it doesn't have to worry about posting content.
To fund it you'd need some selfless souls, or perhaps agreement between major instances to shell out some revenue to host the sign up instance network, with the idea that getting users in to the fediverse generically is just as important as getting them on specific instances.
I have no idea if this is even possible but from a new user flow, if the intent is to maximise active users, you just want to get people "in" so they can eyeball, vote and post - then let learn how lemmy is different. Not the other way around.
That's quite good going - although it could be that,.unless you run an instance, there isn't actually much to know and the little you know is all you need to know. It's a hurdle, but a low one.
I kinda wish the Fediverse took an SSO approach to instance sign-in, where you can log into your account that's on your instance, from any instance that is federated with yours.
The sign in would be handled entirely by your instance, and it would then give something like a JWT token to the federated instance to certify that you are signed in.
There is a difference already tho.
Early reddit didn't have a gigantic metric fuckload of meme and shitpost users. We do now.
Fragmentation will be a huge problem if we want Lemmy and Kbin to succeed. We can't have 45000 technology communities with 45000 duplicate posts with 45000 different discussions under these posts. We need a way to unify all this in the clients and that, to me, seems like a pretty big issue as you can't just get all the posts and merge them without ddosing all the Lemmy instances or without other unwanted side effects
I'm not saying Lemmy/Kbin are perfect but fragmentation is a red herring. Reddit has a HUGE degree of fragmentation, look at how many news subs there are or wrestling versus squaredcircle ect. It's not really an issue either, take the wildly different approaches Games takes to Gaming; each community serves a related, but unique purpose.
The true battle here is userbase and thankfully those numbers are climbing at a sustainable rate. If we ever get into the hundreds of millions of users it won't matter how many cooking subs there are, there would be enough unique and viable ones that everyone would have just the one they were looking for.
There was always a main one though, the others were splinters that happened after the main one succeeded. The problem here is they are all small, all the same name, and competing with each other to become the main one.
You can have /r/technology and /r/tech and /r/technews etc...
It's a problem that resolves itself. One community or the other will "win".
And if not, whatever. On Reddit, my home city has two subreddits. The content between them is slightly different (different mod teams) and the comments on duplicate posts are different. I subscribed to both to see slightly different opinions and avoid echo chamber.
It doesn't help when the same user posts the same thing over a bunch of instances. It's obnoxious.
This is what drives me crazy. Just pick an instance to post on.
I disagree. To me, 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 PS5 club in Germany will not be the same as the PS5 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.
I saw an issue that would allow admins to just point a sub to another server, if that community grows more. seems like a reasonable idea.
Users will only subscribe to a couple of those though, so It’ll be a competition amongst them all. Collections with the best content, discussions, and moderation will win.
why can’t we?
I hope it's not the same toxification path at least.
It’s 100% going to be.
Lemmy isn’t “special”. I’ve already seen hot takes and other things to get people riled up on Lemmy.
So far on Lemmy, whenever I see someone comment this, it's because they're mad Reddit got "toxic towards my free speech to stupid ass MAGA nonsense". Is that what you mean by Reddit being "toxified"?
No, but your comment immediately assuming out of nowhere that everyone is a MAGAta*d is. Just holy cow, go outside and breathe man.
I think there's a lot of people who desire free speech outside of MAGA people.
But I even believe they should have free speech too. Free speech is the most important element of our society imo.
We’re going to need a bigger boat
Nah just spread the load over bunch smaller boats, a few dinghys and a couple of cruise ships to keep it going in the right direction.
This so much. The fediverse is young, and still in its early stages, still ironing out a bunch of bugs and issues. It's only growing so well because the reddit admins keep finding more feet to shoot themselves in
True. I think it is important to understand the social media landscape is much different now. 2008 was when Facebook was getting started too.
We don't need to become Reddit
I can agree with this to a degree, but can't we just not think of reddit? I mean, back then, I don't recall redditors obsessing over other sites as much as I have seen on lemmy. Digg was the top dog, and I don't recall daily threads about reddit's numbers or how it wasn't matching up.
It was just it's own thing and not constantly comparing itself to it's alleged competition. I feel like that helped it grow into it's own thing, and we should give lemmy a chance to do the same instead of trying to turn it into reddit 2.0. That said, I might just be forgetting—there could've been constant 'sky-is-falling-because-we-aren't-Digg' posts—but I just don't recall them.
Digg refugee from back then. The amount of people coming over wasn't as significant as we see today. But yes there were lots of posts about how to use Reddit, tools to make Reddit look prettier or more like Digg. Diggers found the subreddit subscription confusing. Literally all the posts we see today from Redditors coming to Lemmy.
2008? Jesus I was a b/tard old-fag in those days and the hate for reddit was unreal. I had no idea it was the 9gag of its day.