What‘s keeping us from promoting Lemmy on Reddit?

Manu@feddit.de to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 11 points –

Serious question, as I‘ve barely seen any mention of Lemmy on Reddit. None of the Mod posts regarding the Blackout mentioned Lemmy as far as I‘m aware. Would it be against the TOS to start a coordinated promotion?

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er, nothing? I found out about lemmy from reddit

You can promote it all you want on reddit, just always be polite and not obnoxious in any way or form. Not saying that you personally would be, but speaking in general terms too much energy into convincing people to come here might have a negative effect on other people's motivation.

This! if I see people ask for alternatives I will recommend them, but I'm currently not going out of my way to force it down anyone's throat.

I dont think it's againts rules, I found Lemmy because of Reddit.

I found it on Reddit and seen it around, it‘s spreading. Might write some comments myself too, as long as I still have Apollo to do so; so far I am liking it here.

Nothing so far.

The automod post I have set up at r/edc links to the sopuli.xyz/c/edc version.

At r/knives, we have both the lemmy and squabbles versions linked.

Neither myself, or the mods I comoderate with at the knives sub have faced any issues. This could change, but as long as you aren't spamming the hell out of it, they aren't coming after mods, or users doing it here and there.

There was the new sub, r/lemmymigration, that got pulled down then reinstated after backlash though, and the person running that got banned for a bit. There's also been reports of anti-protest mods requesting, and getting, senior mods removed in their favor. All of which is bullshit that merits huffman getting kicked in the nads, but it was expected.

None of the Mod posts regarding the Blackout mentioned Lemmy as far as I‘m aware

Rumor has it they banned a lot of mods and communities for encouraging exactly that to their subscribers, so it was considered quite risky.

Lemmy development really needs another couple weeks or a month. There are over 100 instances peering and it's really pushing the database systems hard with the 100,000 users already. Database tuning and query optimization in the code is the order of the day. I also think some of the new front-end apps for web and smartphones would help.

I'm genuinely asking and don't mean this the way it sounds, but is this supposition or have you observed this yourself?

Everyone says their own instances aren't very resource intensive. Even the larger instances like lemmy.world don't seem to have huge specs.

Although there's a lot of subscriptions there doesn't seem to be an overwhelming amount of content being produced. The most active threads in /home have like 150 comments over 2 days? I don't have the data and this really is mere supposition but it just doesn't seem like that much load.

I did see they pushed a new version with some db optimisations so that's probably an indicator that you're right. Also things just feel unstable. Unusually long page load times or 500 errors just occasionally. Things definitely aren't great I'm just not certain that db linkages are the problem.

I’m genuinely asking and don’t mean this the way it sounds, but is this supposition or have you observed this yourself?

Yes, and I've been building social media message systems since 1984, and I'm a published author on messaging systems. I described some of the data integrity and sever malfunctions on multiple systems that have small to large numbers of users, including my own system on Oracle Cloud that has only me as a developer/user. Example of how it is failing: https://lemmy.ml/comment/616698

As the others have mentioned, I found out about Lemmy through multiple posts on Reddit. So at least at the time, a few days back, mentions of Lemmy were not being blocked / banned.

About promoting now: I think what would be better is if the supportive sub mods at Reddit made a community (or sublemmy, or whatever it should be correctly called) here first, and then posted a link to it on their blackout page on Reddit.

All that being said I am not sure I want a lot of the existing Reddit horde to invade Lemmy, but I guess I can't have my cake and eat it too.

I created https://lemmy.ml/c/azcardinals and promoted it on /r/azcardinals, (the only sub i am going to miss for gameday threads etc), and 99% of the comments were just talking about how stupid all these protests are and how the reddit app is fine and its the only app they ever used. Some of them didn't even know their were 3rd party apps. 🤷‍♂️

A vast majority of users seem to not care. Like at all. Obviously if those people have only ever used the relatively new reddit app they are pretty casual and new users. I really think that is the disconnect here. /u/spez sees that reddit has exploded in the last 5 or so years and those numbers are a quick payday if he can monetize quickly. But the OG power users that created meaningful content and moderated subs are leaving (or honestly left years ago). The platform will become (more) recycled tiktoc reposts and reposted tweets with toxic, useless comment chains. And maybe it will thrive as a business with that type of traffic, but that wasteland is not somewhere I want to be.

I agree. Earlier today I popped in to lurk Reddit to see what's going on, and as a treat I sorted on "Controversial" on the front page. Overwhelmingly, the users who are still on there do not want to go dark again. Like you said, they just do not care at all.

The issue is that not only do they not care, they do not understand what the protest is about and they do not even want to understand. They do not care for the site's legacy, they do not care for what made Reddit attractive to begin with, they do not care for users and mods affected by Reddit's proposed changes, they do not care that a handful of corporates should not have so much control over internet content. Nothing. They want their doom-scroll Reddit fix, that's it and apparently lose their mind if that goes away even for a couple of days.

Most seem to feel that it's mods power-tripping over nothing and if they have an issue with Reddit they should just leave. Problem solved. I hope as many mods there as possible just lock up their subs forever and leave. Nothing stops the remaining people from creating new subs even right now or from Reddit (the company) eventually reopening them and figuring out moderation and content.

The worst possible fate for reddit would be if the mods became all reddit employees. You would have those mindless drones that don't care about these protests or the legacy, and the entire conversation controlled by people that have money at stake depending on how the conversations go.

While I know it happened to an extent on the bigger subs, the control of the conversation is a huge. What made Reddit what it was is the ability to talk straight to an average person. People that have had similar experiences and have no skin in the game. If you have an issue with your 3d printer, for example, you can find someone in /r/3dprinting there who had the same issue with the same printer and find a real world way to fix it. If you google (and don't click on the reddit link) you will find nothing but over bloated pages with no answer other than a product to buy, or a 15 minute youtube video with someone showing off all their fancy equipment and a possible answer... but they are sponsored by the company who sold the product that "fixes" it.

Or if a company runs an add campaign and it turns out they have a shit product and the conversation goes sideways, they can just remove the bad comments.

Or politics, someone posts something about a candidate and someone shows up, with receipts, with how they aren't great. Those conversations can disappear if the person modding actually has money or a job depending on how the conversation goes when that candidate is mentioned.

Like I said, I know it already happens to an extent. But if the mods are all on the payroll they can steer the entire conversation. Facebook does it's thing, usually with smaller audiences (People's friends and family). Twitter someone can make a bs post but the comments are usually all gibberish. When someone sees something on Reddit, then all the top comments confirm it.... people get that confirmation bias. That could be powerful, and.... profitable.

The real hard pill to swallow is that Redditors, the people who created content and modded subs, for free... are no longer the END USERS. The END USERS are whoever wants to manipulate the masses. Politicians, advertisers etc.

The Redditors are now the PRODUCT.

The real tin foil hat part that is eating at me lately, I know, I am going to sound fucking nuts, but there is a huge push for the control of information lately. There was the nixing of net neutrality a few years ago and everyone's solution was to use a VPN. They have been slowly boiling the water the frog is sitting in with that one. I can't pay my home internet bill while I am at work connected to verizon unless I turn my VPN on. So it is happening.

Now, this RESTRICT ACT comes out of nowhere, banning VPN's (Hmmm, that's convenient) using communist China and TicTok as the scapegoat. While congress sits up there pretending they don't know what a router is. The internet, a relatively new aspect of humanity, has let information spread like crazy. A politician can't hide his shit by paying off the billionaires on the news. They just don't have as much control of the narrative anymore. Their wars are hated, their tax cuts for the rich are obviously BS, the masses see the billionaires while they are on their phone while they sit on the toilet at their minimum wage jobs working for them through a pandemic.

The herd is pissed off. And their solution is to control the flow of information instead. And a mass majority of people just... don't... fucking... care......

....... yet

/rant

I swear I am not crazy.

I swear I am not crazy.

No, you are not. At least not based on what you said above, or maybe we both are crazy because I agree with you :)

are no longer the END USERS. [...] The Redditors are now the PRODUCT.

I think this is the core issue I have with the current internet. I am not even rabidly anti-corporate or against reasonable commercialization. But the whole schtick nowadays is so ridiculous: Get users to your site and try to keep them only over there, make THEM generate your content, which primarily means users voluntarily revealing an astounding level of details about their lives and thoughts, and then sell all this information to whoever and / or manipulate your users for whatever nefarious political or commercial purpose.

And people are absolutely fine with all this >_<

In my experience lemmy was the most suggested alternative on reddit and then tildes, the only time i ever heard abou kbin was the day before the blackout with the subreddit ban and then during it.

I'd never heard of kbin at all until I actually signed up to a Lemmy instance.

I'd heard Lemmy mentioned somewhere before (I've searched for reddit alternatives a few times in the past as I got increasingly annoyed by their pushiness towards the app), but only really took notice of it a few days before the blackout when I saw it mentioned many times on reddit.

Yeah, I only got an actual link to kbin during the blackout here on lemmy, it was surprising to hear they got so many people so fast. It's nice they did, i just don't remember seeing anything about them on the alternatives subreddit or anywhere else.

Kbin seemed to be pushed more on Mastodon than Lemmy was, during and in the run up to the blackout. Lots of people giving new things a go this week, even from places other than Reddit!

Oh, that makes sense then! mastodon, much like twitter is still a big mystery to me.

It's a whole new frontier! :D

It is! And I do want to figure out mastodon, if anything, for their Crafting/art community, but I'm having a bit of a hard time figuring ou if/how can I go around visiting other instances I know its possible somehow because users from different ones show up for me, but mastodon is the one in struggling with. It's not like lemmy or kbin where I can see stuff, they prompt meto make ne an account before I can see anything and I just don't know how to find the people in the other instances from mine yet. :(

The easiest way is to search for hashtags and click through to profiles that look like they post interesting stuff. You can also check out https://fedi.directory/ where there are suggested accounts to follow for all kinds of different topics. If you've not made an intro post there yet, do that too with the tag #introduction and any other tags you're interested in, that way people will come to you!

Also what kind of crafts and do I already follow you there? 👀 lol

Oh, you definetly don't, I haven't found the courage to post anything yet lol, but you'll find me eventually, cause I really loved your profile so I'll be following you once I have some time to sit down and focus a bit on mastodon again. Thanks for the tips I won't give up on mastodon and try them out

I think we'll get along fine, I do embroidery in general, and I'm trying to drag myself back into sewing and crochet, it's been a few years with those

Do it do it do it, Mastodon is just as friendly a place as Lemmy in my experience.

I've had to migrate my account off Beehaw today sadly but on the bright side it's given me an excuse to explore more instances. Still haven't come across a sewing or embroidery / cross-stitch community anywhere. I'll have to look harder tonight. Have you seen any yet?

Not yet. That's one thing I'll miss from reddit until they pick up here, that's for sure. Let me know if you find anything!

Yeah, the defedeation thing, I really like Beehaw, and I ended up making a lemmy.world account too, so I'll just end up using both of them at the same time :V

That's fair. My gamedev account is on .world and honestly it's been fine, we're not savages over there or anything :D

I've found a new crochet community that only has a couple people but they're at least trying to post things !crochet@lemmy.ca (direct link)

!embroidery@discuss.tchncs.de (direct link)with one solitary post, dunno if they'll accept my cross stitch but it is technically embroidery so....

And a couple of sewing ones but neither have much going on.

Still, all it takes is for us to get stuck in making content, right? :)

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Kbin I think is really new, I've only heard it mentioned fairly recently, and I been exclusively using the fediverse for about a year now

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Funny, I mentioned joining Lemmy on reddit and had someone go "join tildes, it'll be easier" and then I went to tildes and in the first comment chain about rexxit there was a guy like "now I know it's much harder to join tildes than Lemmy" and I didn't know what was going to be easier or whatever but I liked the federation idea so I came here lol

I did hear of Lemmy first, with immediate criticism about supporting the CCP and so on. The second alternative mentioned on Reddit was kbin which is where I went first.

Unfortunately kbin runs on PHP and you can really feel the site lagging at times, no clue why someone would port a stable Rust code base to this mess. lemmy.ml is lighting fast in comparison and has working federation.

I did also try sh.itjust.works as an alternative Lemmy instance (which would be nice as it blocks lemmygrad.ml), but it's in Canada and I'm in Europe, so the latency is noticeable.

So now I'm here, oh well.

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I found out about lemmy on Reddit by chance and they wouldn’t say it by name, told me “rhymes with many”. Sounded like saying it would get people kicked off. Which made me want it even more. 🤣

Pirate family on reddit exposed me to the wonders of lemmy, so at the very least piracy mods are based. Indefinite black outs too instead of that weak 2 day protest.

Don't think it's against the rules but people will be annoyed if you just throw Lemmy into every conversation. Just spread the word where it's motivated.

I believe a coordinated and directed action could work well. Obviously random spam would just annoy people but the vast majority still hasn‘t heard of Lemmy yet and if we manage to get to them at least once, would be ideal. We could target the largest subs that are open currently and either put up a comment on a hot post and use our manpower to upvote the comment to the top, or make new posts which are more likely to be removed.

Redditors in general just aren't that into lemmy. Most redditors come here expecting to find a 1 for 1 replacement pre-warmed with millions of users and brimming with reddit culture.

Not having an algorithm to tell people what they want to see is a bigger impediment to attracting users than most people realise.

Additionally, I think mods are reluctant to direct users to any other community as they will give up lordship of their own fiefdom. Sorry, I acknowledge that I have probably an unfairly dim view of mods. I'm sure some are amazing, but certainly many are self-obsessed power trippers. They act in their own interests to preserve control rather than acting in the interest of the community.

I found out about lemmy from r/EDC where they mentioned in their B.O. post they would be at https://sopuli.xyz/c/edc

here's the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/145fxdb/reddit_is_killing_itself/

Hey :)

Welcome to lemmy. I'm the asshole mod that made the post lol.

Hey there :)

But why "asshole"? Almost every sub posted a similar thing and I see nothing wrong with that post unless I'm missing something 😝

Also curious, did you run into my comment by chance or did you actually get pinged when I mentioned the EDC community?

Just happened across it lol

You know how reddit is though. Any moderation is going to draw ire from someone. Since I decided to be as transparent as possible about how I moderate and why I make the decisions I make, more people saw the moderation, so there were more "someones" to get annoyed lol.

A couple of the automod posts had some folks get nasty, though I removed those once the initial two day no activity protest was over. I could have just bailed and let reddit replace me eventually, but I'm not able to do that, ethically. I made a commitment, so I'll make sure to find at least one mod to replace me next month before I stop moderating entirely.

I'll still hang in to lend advice to the new guys and make sure they aren't just going to trash the sub, but then I'm out entirely

We should make a community on Lemmy about promoting Lemmy on reddit. We could do something like an AMA with people talking about Lemmy. I don't see how they could stop us. If they ban us it's just more threads about how we got banned for talking.

Probably something like RedditMigration (to mirror kbinMigration and lemmyMigration on Reddit) serving as a landing page, with consolidated info in a pinned post and encouragement to create a shitty post in there, just so they break the ice would be cool.

There is afaik: r/lemmymigration

Looks like that subreddit is being run by people who are obsessed with kbin and don't actually support lemmy. But there are plenty of upvoted comments in support of lemmy. We should try to take that over to provide a better tutorial for redditors who are thinking about moving.

I think that's cause r/kbinmigration got banned and they got moved to r/lemmymigration, the support is more so supporting both while sympathizing how kbin's subreddit got banned which i think could be why there isn't that many posts of supporting lemmy

Yeah I see that but why they gotta hog Lemmys name if they don't actually like it.