How can we boost Lemmy membership?

Spasmolytic@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 470 points –

Since my favorite reddit app came to Lemmy I'm really keen on getting more people into the fediverse to pump up the volume of content around here. Are there any initiatives that we can assist to get folks onboard?

I had my wife join, and she likes it, but laments the slow pace of new material in the communities.

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laments the slow pace of new material in the communities.

Participation. We need more of it. Like...a lot more of it.

Lurkers shouldn't lurk, and people should give others the benefit of the doubt far more often than they ever did on Reddit, if they ever did at all. Make Lemmy a community where engagement is valuable and fun and actually useful.

Artificial engagement only gets you so far.

I only say something when I have something to say. If I don't, then it becomes a chore.

I try to say it when I have something to say though. I didn't always bother on Reddit.

Mostly this

On Reddit I usually didn't comment anything, even if I had something to say. I do comment here, and a big part is that more people actually engage here.

Oh, right. The poison. The poison for Kuzco, the poison chosen especially to kill Kuzco, Kuzco's poison.

To add to this, artificial engagement is disingenuous. It's akin to corporate-owned comment sections inviting people to "speak their mind" which, of course, no one does.

It's a balance that should be kept: being willing to contribute, but not feeling forced to contribute. Quality begets quality, and if we compromise on quality chasing quantity, we would end up copying the worst of Reddit.

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OC brings people. Adopt a community you wish was bigger and make a personal commitment to post to it daily.

For bonus points convince two other people to adopt their own community. We'll pyramid scheme this sucker with content.

That's what I did over on kbin. I'm responsible for posting 95+% of pro wrestling news on Lemmy/kbin, and another person sets up most of the discussions. The community wasn't picking up speed back during the early redditpocalypse. Now we're getting tons of activity.

So I was wishing that r/korea woukd be a thing on lemmy, I found an instance hosted in Korea and subscribed. I started posting, now after like 3 month it's full of only my own posts, each gets 3-7 upvotes and every 5th gets a comment from someone outside of Korea ^^.

I feel that if I'm the only one posting anyway I perhaps should bring it to my own instance which I have controll over and could moderate if it became necessary. I have no idea who is the admin of that one.

!korea@lemmy.funami.tech

The instance is a little small and the community doesn't have many users. It could help advertising it a little so interested people find out about it. Looks like someone even made a post after your comment.

This is a community I help with, but there are others like it: !communitypromo@lemmy.ca

perhaps should bring it to my own instance which I have controll over and could moderate if it became necessary. I have no idea who is the admin of that one.

I agree. I've been shying away from some instances. Since that community is small anyway, you could make it on your own / find a different instance for it.

MLMEMMY LEMLMY MLEMMYM

I dunno which one works, but the only way we’ll get enough Huns to pull this off is with a solid tagline.

Maybe something like, “Upvote your down line, lest ye receive downvotes from your up line.”

Lurkers gonna lurk.

Is that true though? I used to be a major lurker, but now I post relatively often. I think having other people post about stuff you care about, rather than just screenshots of other websites, can be a big factor.

It took a serious change in attitude for me to not become a lurker anymore. I always figured that if I have nothing interesting to say, I should just be quiet.
Eventually I realized that people are often happy to just get some feedback and interaction, even if it isn't the most interesting or original response. As long as it's done in a positive and friendly manner, you're creating a sense of community.

Very much this. Every time you see something interesting make a post about it please. It doesn't need to be polished. You don't need to worry about it.

Save hot takes and negativity for posts made by bots. Pay attention to who is posting what, because the poster has to see that negativity and it is not sustainable. You are making every comment to a person. When you bitch about a title or article, it is going to a person that gets a notification and has to see it. Everyone that has tried to do this regularly with the goal of just making regular posts has quit, myself included. It is straight up unhealthy from a mental health perspective to have to read or see what the bottom 5% sludge post. This is one reason why we have so many bots and memes.

The single biggest change that would make this place better would be a negativity filter to wreck the few mental health patients that are always on here down voting every new post. Simply filter for the 0.01% of users with abnormal negativity and sandbox them so they are the only ones that see their own negativity. Posting something here for the first time and seeing this kind of response right away is totally disenfranchising. People that troll the world like this belong in little sandboxes of their own sadistic self gratification. I think down votes are useful and important, but their abuse should be eliminated systematically.

Sometimes (probably most times) people don't have anything to add to a conversation. In these moments it's better not to comment at all. Just look at how shitty reddit is with dozens of people making the same stupid joke in the comments on any popular post. Quality is better than quantity.

I think giving the benefit of doubt is extremely important. Being welcoming to newcomers, slowly integrating them into the different culture here, will help a lot (FTR I'm new myself, only been here a few months).

That's not to say we should give every jackass a soapbox to stand on, but at least learn if they're willing to converse in good faith before shouting them down.

I'm a lurker, but want to contribute. It took a lot to get an account (and then got a bunch of hate because I picked lemmy.world), but I can't find any guidance on how to create a new sub. Is there any advice on that?

got a bunch of hate because I picked lemmy.world

That was rude of them. I usually recommend people start with lemmy.world, and then move to something else if they want to, once they get a feel for what they want.

Is there any advice on that?

I'll see if I can find a guide, but it's fairly simple. On desktop, you click on "Create Community" at the top. This will create a community (the equivalent of a subreddit) (for you it will be on lemmy.world). After that, you should pick a good name since you can't change that (it's the thing that goes in the url, like if you did cats: lemmy.ca/c/cats. Everything else you can change up later on. I found it easier to learn by doing.

If you want to make a community on a different instance, you will need to create an account on that instance, make the community the same way, and then add your original account as a moderator. This is more annoying, so I'd recommend just making communities on your home instance for now.

Yes. I have this issue in a new subs that people want to lurk but not post. Really hard to keep posting.

Stay strong, it's the hardest phase. After a while, other people will post too.

Also, take breaks if you need to.

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I actually think Lemmy needs more work before it grows much bigger. The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit.

It's tough to sell some of the niche communities without proper spoiler tagging, too. Need something easier to use that works on all platforms.

Proper spoiler tagging is important

I Jerboa uses this format

: : : spoiler Title

Without the spaces between the colons, this is just to show what it looks like.

: : :

::: spoiler Title

This is with the spaces removed

:::

Lemmy in general uses this but a lot of mobile UI's don't have proper implementations (or at least they didn't for a while). I'm not sure if liftoff is still in development but the reason I switched back to Jerboa was because spoiler support was finally added

I completely agree. I'm personally holding off on heavy promotion of this platform until we hit 1.0. If people join too early and are turned off by the lack of polish, they may not come back after it's fixed.

Yes. Besides, there isn't any profit being made, is there? I mean, today, more users just means more cost.

Well in theory, more users do mean more donations.

They need to add paid awards with some split for Lemmy development and the instance. That was the reason people bought into Reddit gold. It was a good faith, fund the platform thing.

Awards would only work for people on your own instance though. Pushing them across instances is difficult. If they're free, they become worthless and defeat the purpose. And passing money between instances is stupidly complicated. I guess you'd have to go to the instance in order to buy the award there. Which gives people an incentive to run their own instance. I'd hope that wouldn't make servers too small. As much as people seem to like the idea of many, many small instances federated, I think the system works best with several large instances than a million small ones.

I guess it's complicated.

today, more users just means more cost

Not if they're setting up their own servers. This kind of horizontal growth is the healthiest way to grow a federated network, and something we can do that centralised platforms can't.

All I want is the ability to block inbox replies when I say something controversial.

That would be nice, but for now you could just mark all as read without reading them.

I have actually found that people don't respond to me at all when I say something they feel is controversial. I get a ton of downvotes and maybe once out of every 5 or so times I get one really persistent person who won't let it go. But that's it.

The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit

Fair point. The same was said of Mastodon many moons ago. A lot of people put a lot of time and energy into detailed feature requests, describing the problem to be solved, and exactly how their proposed solution would work.

Given that I've also seen the same complaint about apps in other federated networks like matrix, maybe what's needed is a general solution? A website where experienced mods describe the problems they strike, and how social software developers could help them with mod features.

We need a better site to link to than join-lemmy.org. It should concisely pitch lemmy to everyday users and suggest an instance for them to sign up at. Don't get into the weeds about federation or choosing instances or selecting apps. Just select a sane default and point people to it. Rotate defaults to avoid overloading a given instance or making it too powerful.

It's not only the "base" instance IMO, most servers have wildly different communities.

There should IMO be some way to search for communitues from any server (and subscribe to them, which is a real hassle especially if your base server doesn't yet know about them). I like the endless flow of memes as much as the next person, but what I really want is a bunch of communities I'm interested in so that I can lurk, ask questions and eventually create some hi quality content.

Sounds like you're looking for a different client. Connect has a perfectly functional search bar.

When I search for a community in Connect it only shows me communities my home sever knows about.

But if your server doesn't know about them then wouldn't you be unable to connect to them anyway?

Yeah that's like the problem I'm trying to point out :-)

An indexer or Lemmy-crawler that indexes all the descriptions and stuff (maybe messages?) and make it searchable could be a road to check out.

https://pangora.social/join

I like the design, but the categories are all wacky, if your in the know about fedi stuffs.

The instance finder is built to encourage the use of topic specific instances rather than general use ones so that communities are grouped together better in the same site. The site can then manage all the communities effectively and have the site customized to accomodate them better (and make it feel more like a home for what you like looking at and discussion with others rather than one of many reddit clones)

Categories are mainly so that people are sent to a topic instance that matches their interests. Science goes to mander, programming to p.d, sports to fanaticus, gaming to lemmy.zip, etc.

If youve got some suggestions on how to improve it though let me know, still in progress

Sure! Maybe move Lemmy.World to general? I know we're kind of a catch all instance. Other then that, great stuff.

lemmy.world is in general. Just instances appear in more than one spot (and some general communities appear for a category if they have the largest community for that category and theres no topic specific instances for it). For example of multiple spots lemmy.db.zer0 is in A.I., anarchist, and a couple others since it has those topics in it

  1. We need to cut back the bot traffic a touch. All new people coming and see are a million posts with no participation. It's good to have the content but we're kind of lacking in curation and a lot of what's coming over is not stuff we're interested in commenting on. As long as we just keep carbon copying Reddit and Twitter and the Verge and hundreds of other places, we're going to have a lot of empty post sitting around.

  2. Actual discourse and discussion needs to happen. We're fairly low on trolls currently, which is a fantastic thing. But we also don't have a lot of spicy takes either.

  3. More moderation, administration tools, better filters, easier ways to shut out bad actors. Right now the best we can do is defederate when somebody can't manage their clientele. And we're still way too bot-able.

  4. More migration tools something I can to what mastodon does if you need to move instances.

#1: Absolutely.

#2: I've seen some spicy takes, at least in the politics communities. Others, people are generally just more chill. I consider that a feature.

#3: The upcoming 0.19.0 will let users block instances as well as users/communities. Filters are unfortunately a client-specific feature right now, but fortunately there are a lot of clients to choose from now.

#4: 0.19.0 has this. Users can export their profile settings data (including subscriptions and blocklists) and import those elsewhere.

The upcoming 0.19.0 will let users block instances as well as users/communities

Oh hell yeah! Finally!

I just block the bots, I want to see what real people care enough to post.

That's what I'm doing too. But trying to bring people in and saying oh just block all the bots as the default is not optimal.

Welcome to the new web. Nothing is optimal, it's a good intro for people. The setting is there and that's what matters.

You can also turn off the Lemmy option to see bot posts, and then just manage bot-like humans.

That's what I meant, but appreciate the clarification.

Where do you see bot traffic? From my observations, Lemmy has the opposite problem than what you describe in your point 1: all threads I see do get plenty of comments (not as many as reddit, but still plenty), but we get relatively few new threads. Or does that only happen in specific communities? I don't look at communities I'm not subscribed to, maybe that is why.

Go hit up lemmyworld, hit all hit new.

Every sport, every team, every game as a post. Every verge article ends up on every copy of technology on every service.

wow ok I hadn't realised. I only ever see the lemmit.online bot posts which kinda make me rage.

If there's multiple bots posting this spam then it's not really a single-bot problem.

‘New’ is a bot orgy, which is a real shame because quality posts get lost in it and it’s harder for them to gain visibility and traction in the wider instance. If you stick to subscribed communities you won’t notice, but for new users who haven’t curated their communities yet (or people like me who just like discovering stuff I wouldn’t think to seek out specifically), browsing the general aggregate can be a great way to discover content and communities to follow.

Or it would be, if it wasn’t bot bot bot bot bot bot thread, bot bot bot bot bot bot thread, bot bot thread, bot bot thread, bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot, wait a minute, thread!

Make valuable original content here that's not found elsewhere, post and comment thoughtfully as much as possible(No. Pun. Chains). Don't try to turn this place into reddit, be better than reddit.

People who are on reddit that wanted to come here right now has already done so, so it's important to drew in people who has never used reddit before here instead of always waiting for reddit to do something stupid.

Also less celeb gossip please, need a place where I can get away from that on the Internet.

the last point should be ignored, the whole point of lemmy is to have as many communties as possible and subscribe to the ones you like. you can defederate ones you dont like

I respectfully disagree. The goal should always be to foster high quality discussion over raw quantity of comment and artificial engagement and the devs have said as much in their documentation of Lemmy's design.

Otherwise, this place would be no different from 9gag or imgur comment sections, much less reddit.

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Also less celeb gossip please, need a place where I can get away from that on the Internet.

You get celeb gossip? I believe I'm somehow connected to the sewage hose that's Elon Musk posts. I'd love for some more varied content instead of "[rich idiot] said [something incredibly stupid]"

https://lemmy.world/post/5253369

😔

What I like about your username, other than reminding me of an actress I like, is that you could really be here, but no one would think that she would (1) be on lemm.ee and (2) she would use her actual name and photo for her account.

It would be pretty clever, right?

Also, that profile picture is AI generated. :)

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Don't focus on looking for ways to find new members. Focus on ways to make people who find the fediverse want to stay. Accomplish that by putting something here that they like to see and want to see again.

When they join the Fediverse, or when they come to visit and consider joining, they're going to search for the stuff they want to see. They might look for memes, but more likely, they're going to look for their hobbies. If the only hobbies reflected here are gaming and programming and the fediverse itself, most people are not going to want to stay, the userbase is going to develop an even heavier bias towards certain types of people, it will become more alienating to other types of people, and it will stagnate.

Make an effort to post about and comment about other things. Cooking, movies, TV, sports, fashion, hair, plants, decor, architecture, history, religion, travel, a nearby city or town. Join those communities. Remember, when you see a cool article about nutrition, or a cool video guide to Copenhagen that you think people will enjoy, share it here. Post it, even if the community is small and you don't think people will care, because we need to seed communities with something. This is what I've been doing in a few communities, but mostly in !malefashionadvice. It's been frustrating, I haven't really been able to build the community up yet, but it's okay.

While we're at it, don't alienate people by posting, commenting about, or upvoting things that... suck. Keep all forms of bigotry at the door. If you're a hardcore libertarian or tankie or militant atheist... I'm not going to tell you to stop believing what you believe, but try to cool it, like 10%? Please? Nobody wants you breathing down their throats with extremism.

And... I've done this too, but let's make sure that we're not focusing too much on meta posts. They can be worthwhile, but they also are not what new people want to see.

I dig. I'll make an effort to post in my hobby subs (woodworking and 3d printing) to get some good shit in there. 😉

Good comments in here about the need for better mod tools etc. Not something I normally think about myself.

Couldn't agree more. A focus on new members is a terrible idea. Just focus on making Lemmy better.

Eh. I do also want to see lemmy grow, but it has to grow through different communities, if the only active community is 196 then it's going to grow in a very shitty direction. If it grows through hobby communities, it will slowly capture the charm and power of the Reddit network—as a place you can go to talk about anything and have any problem solved.

Totally agree this is the way, and I just subscribed to !malefashionadvice Found fashion subs on reddit pretty standoffish and not helpful, so going to give this a try.

Definitely. Saw another one of your posts on MFA, thanks for your work there

CW: Unpopular opinion?

I've looked back at a few reddit threads, and I'm thankful most of those users aren't coming here. I'm alright with the current level of content and participation. What little there is here is still better than most of what's on r/all, and it's not like we want to attract advertisers and self-promoting accounts.

I agree with you, I like that it feels more cozy and there are way fewer trolls/devil's advocate types that I've run into here. And that's from my multiple different accounts that I've test drived on different instances. I personally think that lemmy is too confusing for people to settle into due to the nature of federation and such so its only gonna be people really committed to getting away from mainstream social media that will come over long term.

The discourse I've observed thus far has felt more honest, less pugnacious than on Reddit. Obviously I've seen a drop in the bucket, but anyway, it's good so far.

For the most part, yeah. I feel like it's much better overall.

I sort by all and new when I want fresh content, and there's plenty, although it depends on how much your instance members are subbed to.

There's also https://lemmyverse.net/

Well yes, but do you want to maintain that ambience or attract more users? IMO these objectives are in conflict.

You're probably right, but ultimately I think the vast amount of niche content around so many different hobbies is the most valuable thing, even if it comes with a bit of... human toxicity.

Sadly, I just can't imagine how you get the former while really effectively suppressing the latter.

Yes. I already see too much semblance of Reddit and i read this post and facepalmed.

In general, I agree with you, where the quality of posts and comments on Lenny appear to be of much higher quality than Reddit used to be. At the same time though, I miss even some of the not-so-niche big communities that were engaging and kept me addicted to Reddit - like r/formula1. The community is too small here too sustain that interest

Yeah, I understand why you feel that way. I'm finding that how I interact with Lemmy is much different than reddit. On reddit, I often felt compelled to browse and post. Here, it feels more like a conscious choice, something I do because I see it as a good use of my time.

Not-so-secret of Reddit success (vs other link aggregators) was that they allowed NSFW content. Set up a separate opt-in corner of Fediverse to post that stuff and a big chunk of reddit will migrate over.

That's lemmynsfw.com

Fortinet at my corp just banned the whole thing.

You shouldn't browse porn at your company anyway lmao

But then how do I assert my dominance at meetings? By having hentai on when plugging in the projector?

I was shooting the breeze with a fellow Team Lead (automotive manufacturing), when I noticed that he was browsing Indeed, on our workstation. He didn’t care if they noticed; he knows he is indispensable.

If they're smart, they're working to make him less indispensable asap. The dude has one foot out the door whether they like it or not.

Reddit's in was not simply "NSFW" content but essentially CSAM behind a paper-thin veneer of deniability. Let's not imitate that.

Uh what? Never once saw anything like that on reddit

Oh Reddit for sure had it. Jailbait was a big one and IIRC spez was a mod of it. It eventually picked up news attention and they axed it but it was a huge sub for a shockingly long time.

Wasn't the reason why Reddit got big though.

You should now understand why so many people were quick to jump ship once the CEO screwed over the moderators.

reddit had a lot of disgusting shite they wouldnt take down but i doubt its success was largely dub to that

While I think a majority of their success came from basically being the only usable search result from google, I would be lying if I didn't say I was extremely disappointed and left for a bit after I found out why I couldn't find any NSFW instances on here.

  • Publish useful content on lemmy. Link to that content on other social media sites
  • Anytime you see a negative article about reddit particularly on reddit, remind users this will continue to get worse, link them to lemmy and explain what it is/how to join.
  • Donate to lemmy development to improve UX.

If we could stop pretending we're superior to other social media that might be a start. The number of posts talking shit about the "average redditor" or suggesting that we need more "high quality content than reddit", or that everything needs to have a meaningful discussion is exhausting. We as a group seem to want to dictate who can comment, who can post, what kind of post is acceptable, and are fairly mean to newer people. You won't keep new people if you're rude to them or they see post after post trashing them.

Engagement comes at the price of low effort sometimes. So does content. Not every post or comment will be a shining beacon of perfection. Sometimes people just want to talk. Some of them are starved for human interaction.

Stop trash talking the lurkers. They may be sharing what content there is here and driving people to Lemmy instances. They're an important part of the ecosystem.

Ask what caliber of people you want here. Because it is very apparent to me that the loudest members only want a specific type of community member here. And they are very outspoken about that fact. But are they actively extending a hand to those people when they encounter them on any other platform? Word of mouth (or keyboard) works. It's slow but it works.

Might've missed it but I haven't seen anyone say "Make it not awful to use"

It's helpful to say that we need better onboarding infographics to simplify explaining how to use Lemmy, but also, Lemmy needs to be easier to use. Finding and following communities is far too complicated.

I come here everyday out of sheer bloody mindedness because I want it to work, not because I enjoy it. Yet.

Lemmy needs to be easier to use. Finding and following communities is far too complicated.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071#issuecomment-1653885992

We need to get this proposal implemented. It would pretty much solve the issue.

I totally agree with this point that, Lemmy needs to be accessible easily, I started using it and find it useful because of boost app. Otherwise it's very hard to understand and still is what is Lemmy.world what is lemmy.ml etc. And how to make them combined.

Let's not forget to comment this on I needed account , I tried to sign-up with lublnfrom boost didn't work. I had to Google sign-up for Lemmy.world which takes me to special form , which has disable login with disposable email id's. All in all TOOOOOOOOOOOO difficult process for common users. Doing this process I am still not sure if I comment on Lemmy.whatever subs.

Finding community and joining it, I still have no idea. It's all too complicated.

Overall

  1. What is a different Lemmy's means
  2. Simplifying sign-up process and make it streamlined
  3. Make easier to use Lemmy

These would be my suggestion as Lemmy stands now.

I'm trying to wrap my head around this, the issue is a very long conversation. Basically two subs merge together if they agree, if a user wants to post, both mods need to see if it's not a duplicate? This might add more complication with more merging like a 6 group merge or something, it could be chaotic with more mods and each other having conflict wars.

Yes this is the most critical. The apps that have been made are a good stride in the right direction but the fediverse is not intuitive to use

More tits.

I have always loved these great tits.

Something about their body language. I imagine the one on the left is telling a funny joke, or maybe it's laughing at something the one on the right has said.

I don't know; the one on the right looks mildly disgusted by the raucous laughter of the left.

Community grouping. It would massively increase the available content, and make lemmy much easier to browse.

We’ve got a new sorting option that boosts smaller communities coming in v 0.19. That plus community grouping would be killer!

I don't know if this can be adjusted at the platform level, but is it possible you could put in a filter for meme posts? That is 85% of my feed, and I'd really like to minimize them as much as possible.

I come to Reddit(and now Lemmy) for discussions rather than memes, and the content I'm looking for just doesn't appear in my feed at all really. It would be great if there was a way to filter out or diminish the quantity of those types of posts. Reddit has flair, which makes it easy to filter that way. I'm not sure if Lemmy has something comparable that would allow easy filtration like that.

I think some short of tagging system might be in the works. Not sure though, not whether you could filter by them.

Maybe you could change what you’ve subscribed to?

I mean in the main feed, as opposed to the subs/community subscriptions tab. I'd like to use it for content exploration, similar to how I would use /r/all on Reddit, but with memes filtered out.

Right. Yes I’m the wrong person to talk to. I gave up on local and all a while ago. Sometimes local is cool I guess.

Community grouping is also so closely aligned with a federated mindset - one instance may disappear but the community survives.

That said it’s clear you’ve got anything from openly fascist to diehard tankie on Lemmy servers so would definitely have to be a two-way choice and there’s a risk it just won’t work in the way we hope - I can easily see common topics fragmenting into so many shards anyway as one group can’t stand another group.

I think Reddit is going to make some new even more moronic decision after they IPO and there will be another exodus. This time around it can handle it and it's mature enough to not have the same issues as before.

Give it time. The platform exploded in popularity in a few months, let us [current users] let the last batch of newcomers to settle in before calling more folks in. Plus we don't even have much control over it, at the end of the day Lemmy grows as Reddit does stupid shit that makes it lose trust with its userbase.

If you build it, they will come.

It's the reason I've been motivated to post as much as I do, both in broader communities and a handful of niche ones that I want to see grow.

If you've thought about posting/commenting but just haven't yet, take the plunge! I never used to post on reddit at all, and I've been pretty active since joining Lemmy.

Have you tried moderating yet? With your posting frequency you'd likely make a good mod. The tools kind of suck but its better if you're on more like you are.

I created the XCOM community on lemmy.world, but I haven't had to mod a single thing yet, because it's slow (only 300-something subscribers, and mostly me posting).

I might look into it. The only catch is that I'm usually just checking lemmy on my phone, and I haven't looked into how many apps have the ability to mod stuff.

I find it's easier to engage on Lemmy. One can share a different viewpoint and often find discussion rather than being shit on because you're not part of the echo chamber.

Yeah, and I've also found that you don't have to be active on a post within the first hour for anyone to see your comment. People comment and have their comments seen days after, because there seems to be a lot of variety in how people sort their feeds here.

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I never feel like I have anything interesting to post. But I do try to encourage other posters by leaving a positive comment, even if it's just a thank you or something nice.
Upvotes don't do much, but some positive feedback should keep people motivated to keep posting. At least, that's how I see it.

It doesn't have to be that interesting. It just needs to be content. I found maybe 5%-10% of posts on imgur to be interesting, yet I still went there everyday for years. Same with Reddit, but likely even less.

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Unfortunately it's just a waiting game really, we grow slowly. Bringing people over is good, but they'll follow the content. As people come, posters will come too, and commenters, and then that's what ultimately brings over the rest.

Just casually mention it on other forums where appropriate. For example, any thread about how sucky Reddit is, explain there are other places to go, like Lemmy.

Can't do that on reddit right now. Turns out that results in suppression of your comments and possibly a shadow ban.

More political memes. Also more cringey conversatuions about how, actually, everything is political. Victory awaits.

That's quite a platform you just espoused. Can I tell you why it's problematic?

Gonna guess you really like tiktok

I literally quit my job to do tiktok full time

Yikes. Gonna hope this is satire. I was just making a joke, sort of, because tiktok is mindless scrolling where you can avoid anything PoLiTiCaL even though you're literally a Chinese test subject giving data to an authoritarian government

Stop shitting all over people just because they don't agree with you on everything

I think it's generally a good idea to respond to folks as if they were a friend or family member. And, if you need to pull the ripcord and get out of a conversation that's terribly frustrating, it means a lot to say something to the effect of "Thanks for the chat, but let's agree to disagree before we devolve into pure name calling."

Or something. I think it benefits the whole community to have a record of people disengaging when the conversation isn't productive. Doesn't matter why. Doesn't matter if you think the other person is clearly, obviously being an asshole. Politely disengage and try to stop thinking about it (if thinking about it is unproductive and stressing you out.)

Post things relevant to a hobby or interest that isn't Lemmy itself or something closely related.

There should be an instance with an actual registered organization behind it - privacy policy & all to back up its legitimacy. Without this, Lemmy is a hard sell for a lot of people who don't want to just hand off their information to a person who may or may not be doing certain things with it.

I think that's fair, yeah. Explaining that some person I don't know runs the server doesn't quite sound the same as saying this instance is run by company XY

It also doesn't require that this person you don't know have any legal obligations regarding data handling.

Linking to Lemmy image posts is a bad experience. This use case needs to be much better because content is the main way that non-Lemmy users can be motivated to join Lemmy. I tried to share this with a friend yesterday, and had to explain that the image I actually wanted them to see is locked behind a tiny thumbnail, and that the full size Good Place Janet someone commented is not what I wanted them to see (at least not without the context of the posted image).

There's no way to open a shared Lemmy link in your client of choice. You can manually add URLs on Android, but you have to do that for every Lemmy instance, so that's not going to fly. I don't know if there's any solution at all on iOS.

There's not a good way to control what content I see. It's essentially either "everything" or "a single community". On Reddit, you could already have multiple communities about the same topic on Reddit, but usually one was dominant, and you had multireddits to save you if there truly are a few good related subreddits. Now on Lemmy, you multiply that problem by N instances, and subtract the multireddit feature. This situation simply must be made better somehow.

This should solve that when it gets implemented.

There’s not a good way to control what content I see. It’s essentially either “everything” or “a single community”. On Reddit, you could already have multiple communities about the same topic on Reddit, but usually one was dominant, and you had multireddits to save you if there truly are a few good related subreddits. Now on Lemmy, you multiply that problem by N instances, and subtract the multireddit feature. This situation simply must be made better somehow.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071#issuecomment-1653885992

Nice, thanks for the link. That link is about the posting side, whereas I was talking only about the viewing side (apparently covered in issue 808), but the posting side is arguably even more important in reducing fragmentation. Just as it's frustrating to group N communities for viewing, it's equally frustrating to post to N communities, and then have to interact with them separately.

Unfortunately until it's implemented I just can't bring myself to use Lemmy full time. It's too chaotic content wise, but once it's implemented I may fully switch over.

Eh, if you're mostly just consuming/lurking, it's probably better to use Lemmy by viewing all posts on all communities on all instances, then filtering out the communities you don't like. Gonna be like that until it gets more popular, and importantly, stops becoming less popular.

Currently on reddit if you attempt to link to a image directly outside of reddit and somebody clicks it, it'll redirect them to a media viewer page that hides all the comments but provides a link to view them. As much as I hate that redirect, I don't think it is a terrible idea for Lemmy to do as well because of the issue your friend had with the thumbnail that you wanted them to click.

I don't like Reddit's approach. It hides nearly all information about the post. You don't get to see the number of upvotes or comments, and you can only see as much of the title as fits on a single line.

I'd rather the image post viewer default to an expanded state, and have a clearer delineation between the image and comments. Right now, there's not even a header saying "Comments". You're expected to just know.

That would be great. I am not sure if it was RES doing it or it was a default reddit thing but I do remember images automatically expanding on there. Having it happen automatically on Lemmy would be great as long as the user is not on a slow or data-capped connection.

Even on a slow connection, if you've clicked the link, you're there to view the post. The image simply must be visible by default. It would be more interesting to allow clients to choose what image quality to load, but I don't know a good way to do that. Maybe default to low quality, then you can choose high quality after logging in?

It would be amazing to be able to easily and reliably link comments to places, like r/locationhere might have done in Reddit. I am finding it slow to work that out here.

I say we should dress up in nice suits, and go door to door asking if people have heard of our great community haven, thanks to the Great Lemming who we keep forgetting the name of. Ramen.

Fix the design flaws first. Especially broken incentives for toxicity and lack of moderation tools. It's too big already right now.

Relay for Reddit stopped working for me today. I won't pay for content I partly create, so my shift will be final to Lemmy, unless my social media addiction finds another way.

Thing is, what Reddit still has, is the available history of content. If Lemmy has new topics and new content, it will at one point become second nature to also add "Lemmy" to a search query. And at some point hopefully without Reddit ever crossing the mind. For now it's a slow and painful process as contribution is the only way to push Lemmy.

So whatever you do, contribute as much as possible. Then we can do it. I'd say push the bigger communities first, the smaller will follow, like how it was with early Reddit.

I also stopped using Reddit forever today, since Relay stopped working.

But I feel like there will never be a way like searching on Google for thing I'm interested in + Lemmy.

The problem is that content is duplicated on many instances, and those instances may even don't have "Lemmy" in their websites

Most people are familiar with the reddit app. There should be a "reddit for lemmy" app that is as terrible as the reddit app

Which reddit app came to Lemmy?

I'm over here now thanks to Boost.

Ok. Never heard of it. I am an Apollo refugee.

I hope the developer of Relay makes a Lemmy app. I'm trying Boost and it's just OK. I might try a web based one (Photon or Alexandrite) next since I don't think a native app really adds any value over a PWA.

Sync for Lemmy is pretty good. Closest thing to Relay atm.

I've tried Jerboa, Sync, Boost, Connect, and Liftoff. They're all good, but IMO none of them are quite as good as Relay.

I use the default PWA for my instance and whenever I go back to my home page it acts like I am logged out until I reload the page. It gets old fast because it switches me from subscribed to local posts. I may finally cave and seek out a dedicated app in the hopes it works more smoothly.

Photon looks like it'll work better than the standard Lemmy web UI. I just need to get around to seeing if it works as a PWA, and installing it on my Lemmy server.

That's the struggle at first, getting a deluge of users that keep people both entertained, AND posting content.

Unfortunately I don't think we've reached that number of users yet and it throws us into a vicious cycle of losing users who were also posters.

I'm not sure how to grow it on our end, other than continuing to contribute to the communities, but I do know that if Reddit keeps following Elon's business decisions, they may end up losing many users as well.

I think a better explanation of how to use it would be good, like that there's not a native app and what an instance is. It took me some figuring how to get here.

True. As I mentioned, it was my favorite reddit app (Boost) coming to Lemmy that got me going. I had previously started to dip a toe into the fediverse, but it's a rather confusing concept to think you need to sign up to an instance that may not have any specific appeal itself, it just give you a connection to all the other instances (except when it doesn't).

They just had Jerboa when I signed up which I couldn't seem to log in to for about a week. I finally gave up and then Connect came out.

Honestly I would rather let people come in naturally.

endless growth faster than what occurs naturally is cancer

Literally

Quality over quantity, too. We have more than enough repost meme subs that are JPEGed to hell to last us many lifetimes. I'd like more subs on like, lawnmower maintenance, indoor gardening, painting, car repairs, mountain biking, etc.

Agreed, I personally liked true off my chests, am I the asshole, etc. more conversation encouragement but tbh I don’t really see that going over we’ll just get here given how hard it is to have a convo without trolls popping up or people who’ve been brainwashed into using the same sort of logic.

Idk like I say, if we got something good going on, more people will naturally want to come and to stay. We’ve got plenty of lessons we can learn right now from the community in its current size. Why exacerbate the issue

Gotta make the transitional learning curve almost 0.

Namely give people a solid app to use (I use Thunder, which is a near clone to the reddit apk called relay for reddit) and implement a way to set up a screen name easier than having to "mysteriously track down some strange thing called an instance" and create your name there and then going and finding the apk to use and logging in under your instance and screen name and password.

It's a turn off to how easy literally everything else on the internet is to set up. We need an apk that has a "new to lemmy" walk-through that explains how to navigate and sets you up with a login and instance. An apk with a 5 minute set up tutorial to get you started up and using lemmy would go a long ways in people coming and staying.

Growing naturally is the best way. No advertising is necessary, not if you like it how it is.

When a platform grows too fast it loses it's identity. If I had to bet I'd guess the recent migration has already stretched what identity Lemmy had before.

  • Participate. Comment, post, mod, support the software, make tools to help new users, donate to instance providers, write blog posts, review apps, whatever you're interested in and can do. Don't force yourself too hard cause this is still supposed to be fun and nobody benefits from burnout.
  • BE KIND. The more of a wholesome, open community we can create, the better. Don't feed the trolls. Report and move on.
  • If you're on other social media, maybe include a link to lemmy somewhere. Cross post lemmy posts, that kind of thing. PR never hurts. Try to stay away from "Lemmy army" kind of posts cause that usually pushes people away more than inviting them in.

All this being said, I'm not sure Lemmy is new-user friendly enough to expand quickly right now. I want my technology illiterate grandma to be able to sign up and use it without help. It's been amazing to join and be a part of this community. Like a lot of others I came here after Reddit API changes and I've loved seeing Lemmy grow.

Adoption of 3rd party apps should accelerate things.

Sync has been available for well over 2 months, I don't think that many former users will still follow. Sure, each new app will bring a fraction of its former users, but that's not sustainable.

Well, I'm new and was brought here by Boost. Hopefully more will join

I will say that the Lemmy registration process was not straight forward. The link to register brought me to a page with no registration form, just a bunch of Lemmy servers and no clear instructions on how to proceed from there. Room for improvement.

Boost is now available on Android and it's in a good state

I'm still confused how it works. I subscribe to a channel, but all it is is updates about the channel, no content. Looks like I need to go to their website to see the content (which doesn't seem right)

Have you taken a look at your instance's FAQ here? Other than that, there are numerous guides to getting set up with Lemmy and how to subscribe to communities on other instances. It's slightly different than Reddit, but apart from some technical details, everything works like Reddit once you're set up.

Because of the decentralized structure, there can be communities on the same topic on different instances (with different subscribers, moderation guidelines, etc.). Use the search to find communities you're interested in and post questions e.g. on the FAQ thread of your instance. Or right here of course.

This sounds like you have subscribed to a community where a bot just reposts Reddit content. Does that sound right? All the posts are by a bot that take you to Reddit?

It will be slower but I think we will get there.

I don’t think Lemmy will turn into “marketing platform” that Reddit is now . And I’m thankful for that!

As a lurker who doesn't post much:

Improve the quality of the platform. Fix the moderation issues. Find a solution to communities being fragmented across multiple servers. Keep improving reliability. And so on.

Actually, the people who would only bother with the fediverse if it had more content are exactly the people I don't want here.

But please pump up good content. not just low effort re-posts.

Do we have to have more people though?

Pretty much none of the communities that I used to browse on Reddit are active here, so I wouldn't mind more people here.

I agree. Some communities are missing. But I fear to see the toxicity of reddit replicated here. I wish we can avoid this.

I agree, but in my experience the focused communities that I liked to browse on Reddit were almost never toxic. The difference may be that I deliberately went to the specific communities that I was interested in; I generally never just browsed Popular, where I'm sure the bulk of the toxicity was.

Unfortunately the communities that I'm interested in have next to no activity here, so I would definitely like to see more users.

Content rate needs to go up, I agree, but the biggest source of content in comparable social media came from something I'd like to avoid: power users.

Since most can't help on the technical side of things, you can really help with creating communities. Hopefully the scaled sort helps a lot of issues with smaller communities getting buried.

Maybe moving discussion out of the censored lemmy.ml instance would help

Genuine question, is Lemmy.ml censored in some way?

Slurs are blocked, yes. That's the thing they have a problem with. Let your imagination answer why.

I know they had a word block list but I'm unsure if it's still around.

It’s still around but so rarely invoked most don’t even know about it. It’s basically a non issue, I’m not sure anyone suggesting it’s important for increasing the size of lemmy can be taken seriously, not least because it’s only on one instance.

Tell me @arin@lemmy.world what words do you need to use that the auto censor removes from your posts?

Whatever problems it has, it’s a simple and cheap means of providing some baseline of moderation which is hard for new platforms and something lemmy is struggling with.

Well then, I'll disregard the original comment. I don't mind that slurs are censored.

Freedom of spech, lol

I switched over from sync when boost released cause I love the columns view for posts.

Copying this from another post of mine:

The thing that kind of sucks about lemmy is there isn’t really any protection against fascists on the site. One of the reasons it took me so long to get off reddit is because there you have access to tools that let you see if someone you’re interacting with is an overt and open fascist, but nothing like that really exists here. In fact, it’s even worse here because the fascists will aggressively downvote to the point where anything directly calling out white supremacy gets absolutely slammed. Now you have a bunch of reddit frogs coming over here and the only real hint that they’re going to cause trouble is if their username ends in @lemmy.world or @feddit.de

The domain block is a bare minimum, I never want the displeasure of having to deal with a feddit,de poster ever again. Another thing they need to do is make votes public so I can clean house of people upvoting blatantly abusive comments or partaking in downvote harassment. Third they need to add tagging and user-level vote counts so you can identify known trolls without needing to commit their usernames to memory. Those three changes would go a long way in fixing a lot of the biggest problems with lemmy as a whole.

EDIT: And blocking a user shouldn’t delete them completely from your client but rather hide them. That way you can follow their comment streams looking for people supporting them and wipe them out in the process. The current system gives every comment below the original carte blanche to say whatever and there’s fuck all you can do about it because as far as you know, they don’t even exist.

I moved to Beehaw; you don't get to see lemmy.world and you don't get to see downvotes and I think both is an improvement to be honest.

lemmy.world is such a cesspool I don't understand it

It was good at attracting Reddit users who still had the Reddit mindset. If we go with the idea (as some have) to push a "simple default instance that we can point everyone to" that's what we'd end up with.

Sure, but it ends up being extreme even for Reddit. There's no discourse, it's just everyone nodding along and agreeing.

I'm not praising it, there's a critical mass that communities can grow before it becomes like that and it's interesting that lemmy.world is already hitting it.

Go to redditors and say "it's like reddit but with actual free speech" and that's why lemmy world is how it is.