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.
Plus building it is kind of the easy part -- the hard part is getting people to migrate over and having enough active posts / users that people feel it's worth their time to stay and post as well. Migration will inevitably splinter communities as well, especially small ones, where not enough people move over (or don't move quickly enough). I've seen so many alternatives where the userbase was too small or not posting enough or just right wing trolls or the site was unusably buggy. lemmy managed to be good enough in all those categories at the perfect time - when reddit spat in the face of their users.
It's the niche topics that need more activity. I love science - mostly space/physics - and it's mostly a ghost town. Once the unique corners grow their activity, it's going to be great.
I would have assumed spacey topics would sell like hot buns.
I guess Physics are more of a niche and you would probably find more armchair physicists here than actual physicists.
Agree.
Even simple things like subs for particular cars/car brands were thriving on Reddit but don’t exist here.
If things need more activity try posting, it works great
Regarding the content problem, I see the repost bots are still active, I wish they could be either turned off or have their rates severeöy limited.
At first glance they make Lemmy seem active and vibrant, but since they are just bots few people vote on the posts and fewer comment on them, they post so much the any original Lemmy content in those communities gets drowned out by the bots reposting Reddit threads.
During the influx of users after the apikalypse these bots where probably needed to not scare people that there was zero content from different subreddits, but now they just seem to be holding those communities hostage.
Easiest is yo block them, so they won't show up in your feed.
Yeah, I know, but they make Lemmy look like a place full of fake content
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Getting down voted for saying disagreement isn't tolerated on this site. You can't make this shit up lol
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
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 mostly fully 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After seeing other potential alternatives, then seeing how LW and a few other instances took off, credit really goes to protocol devs, fediverse devs/admins, and LW is a standout for the praise you just mentioned as well. It's a culmination of so many things going right to make such a diverse and expansive community. We're already seeing the tech question help phenomena that Reddit has right here on LW, where some search engine queries can be magically made better by appending lemmy.
Let the migration continue! I haven't missed Reddit since coming here.
Yeah, Lemmy isn’t anywhere near its final form, but it’s already a success my eyes. This place is a lot of fun because it’s full of nerdy shit I like.
If it keeps growing and becomes the new Reddit but free and open, then good for Lemmy and all the new users, even if the average post/comment quality goes down.
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.
Feels kind of dead
The frustrating aspect is that it isn’t dead here. I’ve been on dead forums where you make a post and nothing happens. On Lemmy I’ve posted on seemingly dead or near dead communities, and received a flurry of response in the form of votes and comments. There are definitely people subscribed, and willing to comment, but very few people posting threads. It is a bottleneck to have users all waiting for somebody else to post something.
I hope anybody reading this comment understands that in a smaller ecosystem they can’t just passively wait for content to fill the feed. There needs to be more contribution in the form of posts, and hopefully posts that go beyond just memes (memes are great and fun, but Lemmy desperately needs posts that go beyond just that) or arguing about politics (politics are important, but exhausting). More activity on interest, and hobby communities, especially with original content adds uniqueness here.
My new year's resolution is to post more threads in "dead" communities I care about. Thanks for the perspective.
The one thing I've noticed, at least on the lemmy.world instance, is that posts I make in whatever dinkum communities I'm in show up on the front page right there as bold as brass, which never happened on reddit. I think that's where some of these comments and upvotes are coming from. After I started noticing this I looked to see what communities the other random stuff I'm seeing on the front page is coming from and in quite a few cases they're also from tiny communities.
So that's pretty cool. Making a post in your niche subcommunity of choice is not necessarily just shouting into the void, and some people might actually see it even if they weren't looking for it.
Some of it absolutely is from the frontpage, but I consider that a reason communities need more posts. Posts from a niche community actually have a chance at wider visibility. People who interact with the posts are more likely to be the kind of people who would like the community I figure.
Yeah same, what lemmy needs is more of the niche stuff because that was what made reddit "reddit"
Rather than trying to find a specific community to ask a question. Ask it in a general community. Specific subreddits were only born when generic ones became too big. But as the generic ones are much smaller it makes more sense to ask your questions and make posts there.
That's helpful thank you. If I had a question for example for a specific video game you'd recommend going to the gaming community over the game specific one?
As of January 2024 that is still the recommended way of doing it (mostly because of the overall network size).
Yes absolutely. Ask in the general game community.
For example I wanted to know about HaikuOS. It's an open source OS. There's no community for it but I know Linux users are the most likely to know about it and the Linux community is huge.
So I asked in c/Linux and found users of the OS.
If I didn't get a response I'd ask in c/AskLemmy
I've done the same with anime and games.
That would work for asking, but it wouldn't help if you wanted to discuss community specific things. For instance if I wanted to discuss the new Heroic lineup after Stabby imploded the previous core I can't just post this into gaming. People are going to look at it, think "what the fuck did I just read?" and ignore it. That post requires a CS2 community and that community doesn't exist yet. There have been attempts but it's never taken off.
I think such communities are important for growth because those are the communities of you stick around for. I probably wouldn't be on Lemmy if the Formula 1 community wasn't active here. General communities are great for a general news feed, but the "niche" communities are the glue that keep people together.
My Reddit account is 16 years old but I have abandoned it. Lemmy is what Reddit was like 10 - 12 years ago. People were nicer for the most part and there was light discussion on random topics.
Yeah my account was about 15 years old. Reddit definitely decayed into worse and worse and I have no regrets leaving. But it did leave a little bit of a hole that's yet to be properly filled. And lemmy is definitely doing a good job, just hasn't filled it yet.
Yep. Need a bit more engagement, but not as much as Reddit/FB/etc.
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.
Lemmy devs should prioritize SEO optimizations to make the platform more visible on search engines.
This will boost traffic and leads to a positive userbase growth.
Half of what reddit was able to do for me is being overly generous, but my experience is the same.
Yeah, I think it’s just the critical mass that makes a space feel lively. The discussions I participated in felt great (actually felt like pre-digg reddit). It’s a trade-off. I similarly minimized my own reddit usage, but I still browse it on my desktop (much less than before). And that’s fine. I also stopped using Twitter, and Mastodon is a similar story: fewer, but better interactions. I don’t mind it, and it also might be by design. It’s not a for profit service and it does not need to make the engagement line go up all the time. I have more time to do what I actually want.
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.
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:
As a fairly longtime lurker on Reddit now bought into Lemmy, I'm making it a resolution to break that habit and post/comment more. Thanks for the PSA!
What should I post? Like legitimately, I'm mostly into sports, but short of copying what's getting posted in /r/NFL and /r/hockey, what should I do? Or maybe it's just that? Pick some of the best posts from those subs and bring them here organically (none of that dumb mirror/bot shit that discourages people from commenting)?
I don’t know what discussions sports people are into honestly. You know better than me. I assume aside from game news (which if nobody else is posting games, that is a no brainer), there is talk about players, training, trades, strategies, and I don’t know if like stories about the fandom are a thing. What are the kinds of discussions you liked on Reddit? Bring the best of that.
Just whatever strikes your fancy. Worse case it gets no attention, but usually you'll get at least some feedback
I posted (from an alt account) five articles (not just tweets, but legit stories) between my comment and yours. I'll try to do that daily. I read enough articles via rss, no reason I can't post them here for everyone else.
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.
Just like the stock market!
Stocks only go right.
💎👐
Absolutely right, engagement is key!
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.
I love it because the apps are much better.. The regular reddit app has too many notifications, and red reader is too boring, and laggy.
I'm using liftoff and it is so much better
Same. If they kept RIF I never would have known how crappy Reddit is and I left and never looked back.
Yeah, when RiF stopped working I just stopped using Reddit. I didn't want their app with their random irrelevant notifications, nft shit and all the rest.
Can't believe how many people went through the same steps. I miss reddit, but post RIF, it was unusable
I use it on occasion on mobile. Oh boy is the UX bad. UI is too cluttered as well but manageable.
The mobile UI before the exodus was fine imo.
I use the full width/height card UI in Sync. The old style isnt my thing and I use(d) lemmy/reddit during lunch break.
Same. I was a dedicated user of Boost for Reddit (before the API Armageddon) and the only reason why I'm using Lemmy now is because they made an app for Lemmy (which I'm currently using).
Boost is such an amazing app and made Reddit tolerable
When this happened I went back to Eternity, a fork of Infinity, the app I used for reddit. That's also the beauty of Lemmy, there are lots of third party apps unlike reddit that banned every single one
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.
I find it weird that they're not more mad that reddit got ruined by a fuckhead CEO and horrible management.
They are in denial, it was an amazing place and still is in some ways. I went from loving it to realizing it was basically a walmart that helped drown out the mainstreet web. Small forums and irc chats may be too much to moderate now that so much of humanity is online, and it is truly suprising people are willing to mod sites for free that prioritize monetization over community and sustainability. Sure mods power tripped 20 years ago, but in many ways it was easier to find an alternative run by sme's or fans of whatever that just did it for community. So much so they donated their time and money.. but now,, Why spend money when you can create a sub / community. But then you are stuck with that platform as it evolves. It took me a while but i finally accept defederation is as critical as the knowlege base that we all helped create.
The really confusing part to me, is that, though I haven't personally read the comments, I don't doubt your experience... But the post is in /r/redditalternatives.... Which should be filled with members who are actively encouraging and discussing openly alternatives to Reddit.... Right?
It confuses me why there seem to be so many Reddit die-hards in a subreddit about finding other sites that bear some similarity to Reddit...
Then again, straight Christians who are anti-LGBTQ+ show up to gay pride regularly too... Which is equally confusing to me. I get it, you don't like it. That's fine. Just go home Sarah, nobody wants you here when you're just going to complain the whole time.
(I know there's more depth to this example than I've touched on, it's not the point of the example, so I'll just stop there)
It's reddit though. How can we know how many of those people are real?
Even before the Reddit app debacle, reddit made very questionable decisions and if you went to look at that discussion at a later date, the answers that were artificially boosted to the top (this depended on how you went to look at the site, it seemed a lot less in old reddit) seemed as fake as a fake Amazon review, as if reddit was astroturfing their own website.
Reedits motto was "fake it till you make it" and we know that disinformation campaigns are also rife on the platform so there is every reason to believe a single entity is behind these accounts, whether it be Reddit itself or a third party.
That said, there is kinda a sunk cost fallacy thing too in the sense that people have decided Reddit is "their platform" of choice and people will defend it like a diehard sports fan does for right or wrong. Just like in politics which is just as weird too.
Reddit's bigger communities are a kind of double-speak: r/funny is anything but, for instance.
I don't think it's rooted in love for reddit, I think they hate lemmy because it isn't what they wanted - while ignoring the fact that they have the opportunity to help make it into what they want.
I guess it's not loyalty to Reddit and Spez, but rather to a place they deem their home.
For some of them, it may seem we caused stir in the community out of nowhere, a stir that ended up with a lot of damage to Reddit.
While they may misunderstand the root cause of why we're here, we need to understand this concept in order to communicate importance of this platform. Some people deleted their 10+ year accounts on Reddit. Some use Reddit in parallel with Lemmy. Some stick to Reddit and don't plan to go anywhere, and are forced to witness their house crumble.
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
To be fair, I've been seeing some of the exact same moderation abuse. Enforced echo chamber shit. At least nobody can pull a Spez here.
Is there a mod log, or where can I see the mod abuse? I've seen some people complain about it but I never see it
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”?
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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...
Eh, it's not that the moderators are out of control on Reddit. It's that they're under control... by a single corporation.
A moderator here could potentially move their community to another instance if the owner of the instance tries the asshattery that Reddit Corp does.
Users choose the communities that have mods that are cool, the mods choose the instance that's owned by someone that's cool. The second half of that sentence isn't true for reddit which turns it into a top down power dynamic.
Eh there are also power mods on the platform that have a lot of control over loads of large communities there who are an issue in Of themselves in the ways they can control or stifle narratives on the site.
I think many of those people are conflating subreddit moderators with reddit site moderators/admins. On many platforms, "mods" refers to the top level people.
Yup. Mods here are forced to have public mod logs, and people can create the same community under a different instance. Even instance admins have less power than Reddit admins.
So yes, if you hate mod abuse, Lemmy is better
The mod log is public and transparent.
No, they don't realize, because their sense of where the proverbial line should be drawn matches the mods. If you're a moderate (or heaven forbid a conservative) then you likey won't stay long or post these views often.
OMG reading through that comment chain - no not this one, the one on old-reddit.com - makes me remember what Reddit (outside of the tiny niche subs) is like, . Leadership flows down-hill, and it is not just spez over there, it is his entire empire of hate, small-mindedness, and bigotry. Who on earth would see what Elon did to Twitter and think, "me 2!" (then overthrow the mods who loved the communities that they themselves built, replacing them with scabs who ban the humans and upvote the bots)?
Edit: for those who cannot bring themselves to go THERE, I brought it here for your amusement - you're welcome:-P.
A bit of a self aware wolves moment as Scott Adams frequently says ridiculous, smug, inflammatory and poorly researched things on the internet.
Maybe it's a how-to manual in order to get better at it? :-P
Damn, rare insightful Dilbert.
Yeah, reading the comments on the linked thread made me curious as to how the other subs I used to visit were doing, and it was so…angry, like everywhere.
Honestly…has Reddit’s vibes always been so negative? Maybe I’m recognizing it for what it is now that I’m not as entrenched in it, but damn I left that site feeling irritated as hell. Lemmy isn’t perfect, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t feel as angry scrolling through here.
(The Gundam sub seems to be doing ok tho, godspeed to them)
They weren't always as bad as they are now - Huffman has done a lot to make them more so, especially after the protests. e.g. there were hateful trolls who got banned by a moderator who cared about their community, and Huffman removed the former mods (b/c of protesting) and put those trolls in their place. You can imagine what came next.
I have a feeling that the sorts of people both still active on Reddit and also still subscribed to "RedditAlternatives" are probably not the sort of people who are likely to take charge over their own happiness.
Looks like a lot of people of the conservative end of the political spectrum who can’t handle the leftist nature of Lemmy generally.
There’s an interesting thesis in this somewhere; conservatives respecting authoritarian power structures. Seems like they enjoy the boot of reddit.
IMO as Lemmy continues to grow those people will eventually find their way here. Conservatives love it when something is established and no longer new and scary.
I think it’s more an international thing. There was a thread a while back saying post where you’re from. Way less American dominated here, hence less American conservatism and ‘leftism’ and more balanced global views rather than the excessive america centredness of reddit. Federation helps with that too. No American corporate entity shaping the culture.
Some of those comment chains have real “drinking the verification can isn’t that bad” vibes.
Reading through some of the complaints, I suspect part of the problem some users are having is that they want to be toxic and argumentative, so jumped into the most toxic and argumentative parts of lemmy and then bounced off because their specific flavor toxicity was outnumbered.
Maximum toxicity.
>Reddit comments complaining about Lemmy on a post on Reddit with significantly less upvotes than the post on Lemmy about the post on Reddit about Lemmy.
I think these people are still in the denial stage of grief despite it being 6 months after the api apocalypse. They’ll come around eventually
Mate, that subreddit is dead because the few upvotes here are from people who came from there. So of course there aren't a whole lot of people on that sub anymore - but that's not indicative of the state of Reddit as a whole, especially compared to the fediverse.
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.
Well, in defense of Lemmy, it's nice to feel like I've got a lower chance of encountering Nazi rhetoric when in one of the anime/manga related instances
Oh I didn't mean to say that Lemmy is bad or wrong, far from it.
As a left-leaning (okay, outright communist), LGBT-supporting, Palestine-supporting (even pre-war), techy and nerdy person (i.e. Lemmy looks like it was made for me, lol), I still heavily agree we need some diversity here. Without it, Lemmy will never really be what Reddit has become. And we have all tools at our disposal - we are federated! So it becomes a little weird and phenomenal that we get such bubbles in here. But, I guess, this stems again from the small size of Lemmyverse - kind of a vicious circle.
Mastodon has more diversity, so maybe we just have to grow out of the current state? I don't have the answers.
The good thing about Lemmy is you can create your own instance.
Doesn't really help with how other instances are moderated/administered. Sure, I'm in control of what I see or not, but user interactions are by and large the same regardless of where my account is created.
Yeah, I mean.. I can’t control what type of food you’re going to eat, but I’m ok with that. We’re still having a converation, and that’s the important part.
I think you're confusing your current instance for the Fediverse. You can join Beehaw or another federation with different viewpoints. Granted the "main" instances are largely like the internet of old.
My current instance is very hands off and doesn't defederate with anyone, that's why I chose it. And Beehaw is one of the left/alternative ones that I mentioned. I don't mind either one, but an overwhelming part of their users are delusive and tiresome to debate with.
Overwhelmingly left and far left on the political spectrum, embracing all things LGBT+
And that's what makes it great. I don't get this idea that it'd be better if that wasn't part of the demographic. Like, what value does being anti-LGBT or neutral-but-whiny bring to the table, for example?
Bringing opposing points of view like that for the sake of it didn't help Reddit, but only strained moderation and made the user experience worse when we had to deal with so many hateful bigots for no good reason. I saw one sub get overrun by these people and practically squeeze everyone out in a coordinated effort. One of those subs became unequivocally anti-trans in a matter of weeks. It was awful.
And that’s what makes it great.
Not really. It's very tiresome when pretty much every thread turns into "capitalism bad" even from the most benign topics. Not that I disagree with it but it's just everywhere, to the point it's becoming a meme. That's what viking is talking about, there needs to be more diversity in the discussion otherwise it's just everyone circlejerking saying the same things over and over. It's not attractive to anyone that doesn't share those same views.
You can open a thread and almost play a lemmy bingo with the comments:
No matter the topic, capitalism will be blamed
Why are you driving 10 miles to that place? You should walk instead!
We should ban cars and replace them with trains. Put trains everywhere!
Linux good, Firefox best
A story on a cop dying will have lots of comments celebrating their murder and calling for more policemen to die
Like, what value does being anti-LGBT or neutral-but-whiny bring to the table, for example?
Anti-LGBT, none. But discussions here are increasingly centered on LGBT topics, which just doesn't concern me one way or another. And yes, I simply avoid them, it's just popping up in every thread, related or not. I'm not close minded or anything, I just don't want to have every discussion drift into issues that don't concern me.
On the political side, why is it either left, right, or neutral but whiny? There's quite a large number of neutral and not whiny people out there. My issue is that when I try to point out that some idealistic leftist topics will never work in a material society, I'm being attacked for no reason, so I withdraw from discussions (or don't even engage anymore at all); thus contributing my share to the growth of the echo chamber and the decline of post volumes.
As far as being anti-LGBT, there is no room for outright bigotry on any online space. Not being a FOSS zealot, not being anti-capitalist, and owning a car is not bigotry though
I think you are right about the lack of diversity.
My own take on it is that lemmy is currently populated by early adopters.
There might be a relation between beign open to try new things and being left-leaning, I don't know.
But I do think that over time, if Lemmy survives it's early day phase, more people joining should bring more doverse point of views.
Reddit sucked in 2008 and it sucks now. It only has value because people were too lazy to implement a proper openid system in any of the forum software packages over the years. There's no reason any community needs to be hosted on reddit. Forums SEO just like reddit when searching for answers except everyone has divested from the internet and given control to a handful of ruthless corporations who just want to hoover up all the data so they can train their live chat AI bots.
If you want lemmy to be better you have to contribute even if it means not being showered in validation and praise. The echo chamber era is over.
It's not just about openid/identity/authentication. It's also about syndication and subscription. For forums to fill the niche reddit fills, we would have needed much better tooling around things like RSS/Atom, to allow people to see and interact with content from many forums in a consolidated interface.
It's funny you mention echo chambers because most of what I've seen here is just that.
You can't go into a community and disagree with something without getting downvoted into oblivion. The hivemind here is the same as it is on Reddit, the difference being is that more people are left-leaning on the political spectrum, but hivemind nonetheless.
Forums are so much better than whatever Lemmy and Reddit are, the problem is none exist in the same "everything in the same place and people can create subsections" form.
Why don't we have federated forums then? The technology should be more or less similar.
lemmyBB exists which lets you view Lemmy as a forum. Seems like all the hosted versions of it are down though, and nutomic is too busy working on the backend to maintain it.
It doesn't solve the bumping issue though, if the majority of users use "Reddit style" Lemmy then threads become inactive when they're not in people's feed anymore, it's a major point of BBs, discussions are brought back to the front so people continue participating in them long term.
Bumping works just fine with the "New Comments" sort of Lemmy, which lemmybb uses.
That's the man himself! Hi :)
Yes, but if barely anyone sorts this way then the discussions just die much more quickly than they would on a BB
I wish we did, I think they went out of favour because most people prefer the "speed" of platforms like Reddit, where threads are active for a couple of hours and then something new comes up and a new conversation starts.
The problem is, there's no accumulation of knowledge, it's the same arguments and information getting repeated every time a new post is started on a similar subject.
You can't tell someone "Discussion is already happening on this subject in this thread, so we're deleting your post" when discussions don't get bumped to the top and discussions don't stay active once they're not on people's front page anymore.
The threaded replies don't help either, it's impossible to keep up with a post that gets a lot of attention since you can have hundreds if not thousands of branches spreading in all directions...
There's a good reason why specialized discussion platforms all use forums instead a Reddit style system, they want to build a knowledge database and they do, plenty of active threads that are over a decade old on many forums all over the internet!
That was very rare back when I used forums. But similarly, at least every month I'd have a reply to a 1-2-year-old comment I left in reddit. It happens.
Are you sure you're not a little nostalgic about your old forum years?
They're still used by people that are actual experts at what they do. There's a reason why GBATemp, XDAforums, all kinds of car and games forums are still being used and are still very active.
I love kbin but being a one man show and lacking API it was never really going to be the replacement. I am, however, glad to have it as one of a handful of smaller alternatives and a sort of cousin to Lemmy.
If it doesn't have an API, how do I still see posts from it in my feed? Do you mean it integrates with the fediverse, but only has a web interface for now (ie. no apps)?
Yeah, the latter. There is an API, but I think it was only released in the last month or so. I'm not sure to what extent it's complete.
A kbin instance can be downloaded as a PWA, and it works decent.
As for third party apps there's Lunar, iOS only. Haven't tried it.
There was also Artemis. It had the best UI/UX design I've ever seen. Unfortunately the dev appears to have vanished.
When I was leaving Reddit I heard of Kbin (which I do have an account in and still check all the time), raddle.me, Tildes, squabbles, and I think another. So many!
During the exodus I remember I wanted to try Tildes, but it was closed off from new users. (I don't even understand why it was recommended.)
There is Kbin:-)
One that I don't hear about is raddle.me, a centralized alternative.
They fail on their promise of curbing the mods problem with a transparent modlog and active admins. It's the same bunch of authoritarian kids as reddit and the power dynamics are unchanged, they make friends with each other and with the administrators and it's exactly as hard to get one removed as it ever was on major lemmy instances
I prefer the federation where if a mod/admin's bad you can just create a community with the same name on a different instance
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.
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?
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?
Instance owners tend to focus on making a sound backend that scales effectively. Im guessing SEO is not high on the priorities for instance owners. It takes time and is a mix of an art and science and it isn't really a 1 size fits all.
With that being said, I think the SEO will largely be on the front-end devs who build 3rd part apps that run on the various instances. IMO this makes more sense since front-ends can connect to all the various instances available so it's higher up the funnel.
Source: Experience working in SEO + developer of the lemmy web app Quiblr
I send Lemmy some money every month. Not a lot but what I can. I'm also learning Rust and once I get confident I'll contribute. I like Lemmy and the fediverse in general.
Replacing "Lemmy" with "Fedderverse" would behoove you, OP. Sincerely, A Kbin user.
Ernest has fixed a whole lot of the issues today, but I wouldn't recommend kbin at the exact moment, lol. Not that these issues have made me feel like going anywhere else.
It's been pretty solid aside from the last few days and the last few days straddled a major, worldwide holiday. I think we should be able to give Ernest a break over it. Yes, we're small. But he got on fixing it just as soon as the problem was identified and New Years had passed.
lemmy rules. i wish there were less memes and porn on the front page, and/or that the front page refreshed quicker and with more variety. but in recent months it's been bug free for me. and what's huge is that i actually feel good posting here. i'm not giving my effort to a shitty shitty corporate hellhole, it's doing some small part to expand the fediverse.
If your instance is running 0.19+, switch to Scaled as your default sort. It amplifies the smaller communities so you'll see more variety in content. It's so much better :)
I've never seen porn on here because my instance doesn't federate with any instance that host that kind of stuff, but I think you could block the communities where it is posted or switch instances.
I do my best to tell about Lemmy and explain what the Fediverse is with my surroundings. Lots of people don't even know about the existence of Lemmy/Kbin or the Fediverse yet. I try not to be pushy like a Arch Linux user but overall I'm doing my part !
I’m concerned with the amount of bugs cropping up between major updates. I looked at the repo and they have no unit tests. Eventually people will get fed up with the amount of bugs appearing.
I use a third party app and see very little. Over time it’ll get better also.
Lemmy still feels like beta (while Kbin is alpha), but it still is better than Reddit!
(no /s - I really believe that, b/c the people here vs. there make ALL the difference)
To all those who contribute code, thank you for making this micro-world a better place for us all!:-)
Lemmy I think is in a good place since it's still fairly new. It took a while before Reddit had critical mass and I'd say that happened when Reddit started "solving" crimes and then making the news because of it. The "We did it Reddit!". I think that's when people really started to show up. On here, there's not a constant flood, which can be a good thing. When you reply, you're not buried by thousands of other posts. On Reddit it felt like, if you didn't get in early, chances are no one really saw what you posted. Honestly, I've had better engagement here than I did on Reddit, both in views and quality of replies.
Only time I end up on Reddit, is when I'm searching something and a post from 2-3 years ago pops up. But I haven't logged into Reddit or actually engaged with anything new since the exodus. The date of this account was the last day I officially used Reddit.
We need to solve a mystery and get on the news. Let's all collectively work together on solving those millennium prize problems or something.
For me Lemmy provides a value proposition that reddit does not: consent.
Care to explain? Reddit users also signed up and agreed to their terms & conditions.
Lemmy its not just CCP propaganda anymore (sorry wumao)
Soon as I set Lemmy to open to All, 99% of my downtime scrolling switched to here. I only check Reddit for the Nuzlocke subreddit honestly lol
The Fediverse feels a lot like the old Reddit from 10+ years ago , but I suspect that once it becomes mainstream the shills and bots will move in and ruin it like they ruined Reddit.
Kbin, on the other hand, has too many issues.
No offense to Kbin’s developer Ernest, who is working hard, but Kbin is still in alpha stage, and it often has server errors (in fact, kbin.social is down right now, and it has been for the whole day), and the userbase and engagement are far behind Lemmy. There are also federation problems between Kbin and Lemmy sometimes. Kbin is also trying to be a more all-in-one product, with both microblogging and forums, and the users there like to have both, which is fine, but Reddit users are mostly forum users and they seem to prefer Lemmy more.
It was not fully down and this completely ignores the issues that Lemmy had when they updated to the next version a while back. Really unnecessary bashing.
But I realized later that this was a misunderstanding on my part, and that this is not an issue as long as the project is open source, with an open development, and as long as you avoid instances like lemmygrad.
Totally not suspicious, but at the minimum a bit ignorant on how open source software development typically goes. And it isn't just Lemmygrad, but even their allegedly more moderate main instance Lemmy.ml, which is really just more of the same as far as users and moderation issues go. More problematic is the fact though that you're still supporting the devs and their problematic views simply by supporting their software and its development by directly using it, and this won't change until a proper fork from actually decent people is going to become the main used Lemmy software.
And overall, no one won this, because the whole protest was a failure as way too many people just remained on Reddit.
Hello I was the one who wrote this write up on r/RedditAlternatives, just to clarify regarding my Kbin remarks, yesterday on January 3rd, kbin was indeed not working properly for the whole day yesterday with errors almost everywhere, even Ernest, the developer behind Kbin acknowledged this and put an announcement even on Mastodon.
But a one day error is not the only reason, in-fact I've made several huge and massive contributions to the Kbin community with the creations of m/AskKbin, m/RedditMigration and so on activaly moderating and contributing when it comes to engagement and so on (I even created multiple guides that had huge reach such as "The Redditor's guide to Kbin" and even published the guide to a website), I spent tons of months solely as a Kbin user - but I was reaching a point where the unstability and immaturity of Kbin was really pushing me to put it down and come to lemmy, especially considering how mature lemmy has become and is surely much more stable than kbin at the moment and has been so in the forseeable past. So maybe it came of as bashing, but to me as someone who actually gave Kbin a chance, it was the hard reality and I had to say it.
Regarding the open source part, I would like to agree to disagree with you there, sure you are still using Lemmy regardless of the instance and the development is still done by the same devs that led to such concerns, this was exactly my reason to stay away from lemmy and go to Kbin, but now I've realized that open source actually helps keep the developers in check as in that they will obviously know that if they do something against the users here and let's say, push some of their idealogoies in some way hypothetically, there will be a huge chance someone will fork Lemmy and use that as an opportunity to take away the users, this is the advantage of open source, the possibility of forking a project helps keep the original project in check and when it comes to moderation or censorship, this instance is not moderated by the same people behind lemmy.ml or lemmygrad either.
Lemmy has 2 devs. Reddit has hundreds of employees, each individually getting paid 2-3x more than what Lemmy makes in donations every year.
The expectation that Lemmy is a competitor to Reddit is borderline insane
For the average user it may have it may not be their preferred option but it's certainly a competitor. Lemmy is pretty much a drop in replacement to the point that several third party Reddit apps at least for Android have simply modified their api calls to use lemmy rather than Reddit.
There's not quite as much content but it already appears to be enough to be sustainable which is the most important part. And you can bet that whenever Reddit next messes up there will be further migration.
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.
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.
Well said
Work started on lemmy way back before lemmy could be a good alternative to Reddit
Plus building it is kind of the easy part -- the hard part is getting people to migrate over and having enough active posts / users that people feel it's worth their time to stay and post as well. Migration will inevitably splinter communities as well, especially small ones, where not enough people move over (or don't move quickly enough). I've seen so many alternatives where the userbase was too small or not posting enough or just right wing trolls or the site was unusably buggy. lemmy managed to be good enough in all those categories at the perfect time - when reddit spat in the face of their users.
It's the niche topics that need more activity. I love science - mostly space/physics - and it's mostly a ghost town. Once the unique corners grow their activity, it's going to be great.
I would have assumed spacey topics would sell like hot buns.
I guess Physics are more of a niche and you would probably find more armchair physicists here than actual physicists.
Agree.
Even simple things like subs for particular cars/car brands were thriving on Reddit but don’t exist here.
If things need more activity try posting, it works great
Regarding the content problem, I see the repost bots are still active, I wish they could be either turned off or have their rates severeöy limited.
At first glance they make Lemmy seem active and vibrant, but since they are just bots few people vote on the posts and fewer comment on them, they post so much the any original Lemmy content in those communities gets drowned out by the bots reposting Reddit threads.
During the influx of users after the apikalypse these bots where probably needed to not scare people that there was zero content from different subreddits, but now they just seem to be holding those communities hostage.
Easiest is yo block them, so they won't show up in your feed.
Yeah, I know, but they make Lemmy look like a place full of fake content
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.
This couldn't have been possible without the help of Spez and all the board responsible for the APIcalypse, thank you very much!
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
Getting down voted for saying disagreement isn't tolerated on this site. You can't make this shit up lol
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I totally agree with you. Feels like 4chan.
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.
After seeing other potential alternatives, then seeing how LW and a few other instances took off, credit really goes to protocol devs, fediverse devs/admins, and LW is a standout for the praise you just mentioned as well. It's a culmination of so many things going right to make such a diverse and expansive community. We're already seeing the tech question help phenomena that Reddit has right here on LW, where some search engine queries can be magically made better by appending lemmy.
Let the migration continue! I haven't missed Reddit since coming here.
Yeah, Lemmy isn’t anywhere near its final form, but it’s already a success my eyes. This place is a lot of fun because it’s full of nerdy shit I like.
If it keeps growing and becomes the new Reddit but free and open, then good for Lemmy and all the new users, even if the average post/comment quality goes down.
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.
The frustrating aspect is that it isn’t dead here. I’ve been on dead forums where you make a post and nothing happens. On Lemmy I’ve posted on seemingly dead or near dead communities, and received a flurry of response in the form of votes and comments. There are definitely people subscribed, and willing to comment, but very few people posting threads. It is a bottleneck to have users all waiting for somebody else to post something.
I hope anybody reading this comment understands that in a smaller ecosystem they can’t just passively wait for content to fill the feed. There needs to be more contribution in the form of posts, and hopefully posts that go beyond just memes (memes are great and fun, but Lemmy desperately needs posts that go beyond just that) or arguing about politics (politics are important, but exhausting). More activity on interest, and hobby communities, especially with original content adds uniqueness here.
My new year's resolution is to post more threads in "dead" communities I care about. Thanks for the perspective.
The one thing I've noticed, at least on the lemmy.world instance, is that posts I make in whatever dinkum communities I'm in show up on the front page right there as bold as brass, which never happened on reddit. I think that's where some of these comments and upvotes are coming from. After I started noticing this I looked to see what communities the other random stuff I'm seeing on the front page is coming from and in quite a few cases they're also from tiny communities.
So that's pretty cool. Making a post in your niche subcommunity of choice is not necessarily just shouting into the void, and some people might actually see it even if they weren't looking for it.
Some of it absolutely is from the frontpage, but I consider that a reason communities need more posts. Posts from a niche community actually have a chance at wider visibility. People who interact with the posts are more likely to be the kind of people who would like the community I figure.
Yeah same, what lemmy needs is more of the niche stuff because that was what made reddit "reddit"
Rather than trying to find a specific community to ask a question. Ask it in a general community. Specific subreddits were only born when generic ones became too big. But as the generic ones are much smaller it makes more sense to ask your questions and make posts there.
That's helpful thank you. If I had a question for example for a specific video game you'd recommend going to the gaming community over the game specific one?
As of January 2024 that is still the recommended way of doing it (mostly because of the overall network size).
Yes absolutely. Ask in the general game community.
For example I wanted to know about HaikuOS. It's an open source OS. There's no community for it but I know Linux users are the most likely to know about it and the Linux community is huge.
So I asked in c/Linux and found users of the OS.
If I didn't get a response I'd ask in c/AskLemmy
I've done the same with anime and games.
That would work for asking, but it wouldn't help if you wanted to discuss community specific things. For instance if I wanted to discuss the new Heroic lineup after Stabby imploded the previous core I can't just post this into gaming. People are going to look at it, think "what the fuck did I just read?" and ignore it. That post requires a CS2 community and that community doesn't exist yet. There have been attempts but it's never taken off.
I think such communities are important for growth because those are the communities of you stick around for. I probably wouldn't be on Lemmy if the Formula 1 community wasn't active here. General communities are great for a general news feed, but the "niche" communities are the glue that keep people together.
My Reddit account is 16 years old but I have abandoned it. Lemmy is what Reddit was like 10 - 12 years ago. People were nicer for the most part and there was light discussion on random topics.
Yeah my account was about 15 years old. Reddit definitely decayed into worse and worse and I have no regrets leaving. But it did leave a little bit of a hole that's yet to be properly filled. And lemmy is definitely doing a good job, just hasn't filled it yet.
Yep. Need a bit more engagement, but not as much as Reddit/FB/etc.
Lemmy devs should prioritize SEO optimizations to make the platform more visible on search engines. This will boost traffic and leads to a positive userbase growth.
Half of what reddit was able to do for me is being overly generous, but my experience is the same.
Yeah, I think it’s just the critical mass that makes a space feel lively. The discussions I participated in felt great (actually felt like pre-digg reddit). It’s a trade-off. I similarly minimized my own reddit usage, but I still browse it on my desktop (much less than before). And that’s fine. I also stopped using Twitter, and Mastodon is a similar story: fewer, but better interactions. I don’t mind it, and it also might be by design. It’s not a for profit service and it does not need to make the engagement line go up all the time. I have more time to do what I actually want.
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.
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):
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.
I don't know what current Reddit looks like but old reddit is still irreplaceable so far.
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:
As a fairly longtime lurker on Reddit now bought into Lemmy, I'm making it a resolution to break that habit and post/comment more. Thanks for the PSA!
What should I post? Like legitimately, I'm mostly into sports, but short of copying what's getting posted in /r/NFL and /r/hockey, what should I do? Or maybe it's just that? Pick some of the best posts from those subs and bring them here organically (none of that dumb mirror/bot shit that discourages people from commenting)?
I don’t know what discussions sports people are into honestly. You know better than me. I assume aside from game news (which if nobody else is posting games, that is a no brainer), there is talk about players, training, trades, strategies, and I don’t know if like stories about the fandom are a thing. What are the kinds of discussions you liked on Reddit? Bring the best of that.
Just whatever strikes your fancy. Worse case it gets no attention, but usually you'll get at least some feedback
I posted (from an alt account) five articles (not just tweets, but legit stories) between my comment and yours. I'll try to do that daily. I read enough articles via rss, no reason I can't post them here for everyone else.
Just like the stock market!
Stocks only go right.
💎👐
Absolutely right, engagement is key!
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...
https://bellriots.netlify.app/
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.
I love it because the apps are much better.. The regular reddit app has too many notifications, and red reader is too boring, and laggy. I'm using liftoff and it is so much better
Same. If they kept RIF I never would have known how crappy Reddit is and I left and never looked back.
Yeah, when RiF stopped working I just stopped using Reddit. I didn't want their app with their random irrelevant notifications, nft shit and all the rest.
Can't believe how many people went through the same steps. I miss reddit, but post RIF, it was unusable
I use it on occasion on mobile. Oh boy is the UX bad. UI is too cluttered as well but manageable.
The mobile UI before the exodus was fine imo.
I use the full width/height card UI in Sync. The old style isnt my thing and I use(d) lemmy/reddit during lunch break.
Same. I was a dedicated user of Boost for Reddit (before the API Armageddon) and the only reason why I'm using Lemmy now is because they made an app for Lemmy (which I'm currently using).
Boost is such an amazing app and made Reddit tolerable
But Liftoff doesn't seem to be getting updates.
When this happened I went back to Eternity, a fork of Infinity, the app I used for reddit. That's also the beauty of Lemmy, there are lots of third party apps unlike reddit that banned every single one
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.
I find it weird that they're not more mad that reddit got ruined by a fuckhead CEO and horrible management.
They are in denial, it was an amazing place and still is in some ways. I went from loving it to realizing it was basically a walmart that helped drown out the mainstreet web. Small forums and irc chats may be too much to moderate now that so much of humanity is online, and it is truly suprising people are willing to mod sites for free that prioritize monetization over community and sustainability. Sure mods power tripped 20 years ago, but in many ways it was easier to find an alternative run by sme's or fans of whatever that just did it for community. So much so they donated their time and money.. but now,, Why spend money when you can create a sub / community. But then you are stuck with that platform as it evolves. It took me a while but i finally accept defederation is as critical as the knowlege base that we all helped create.
The really confusing part to me, is that, though I haven't personally read the comments, I don't doubt your experience... But the post is in /r/redditalternatives.... Which should be filled with members who are actively encouraging and discussing openly alternatives to Reddit.... Right?
It confuses me why there seem to be so many Reddit die-hards in a subreddit about finding other sites that bear some similarity to Reddit...
Then again, straight Christians who are anti-LGBTQ+ show up to gay pride regularly too... Which is equally confusing to me. I get it, you don't like it. That's fine. Just go home Sarah, nobody wants you here when you're just going to complain the whole time. (I know there's more depth to this example than I've touched on, it's not the point of the example, so I'll just stop there)
It's reddit though. How can we know how many of those people are real?
Even before the Reddit app debacle, reddit made very questionable decisions and if you went to look at that discussion at a later date, the answers that were artificially boosted to the top (this depended on how you went to look at the site, it seemed a lot less in old reddit) seemed as fake as a fake Amazon review, as if reddit was astroturfing their own website.
The change that broke reddit for me was this: https://old.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/s71g03/announcing_blocking_updates/?limit=500 I have no way of looking at the thread without using old.reddit, so I don't know if it still looks as astroturfed as it did back then.
Reedits motto was "fake it till you make it" and we know that disinformation campaigns are also rife on the platform so there is every reason to believe a single entity is behind these accounts, whether it be Reddit itself or a third party.
That said, there is kinda a sunk cost fallacy thing too in the sense that people have decided Reddit is "their platform" of choice and people will defend it like a diehard sports fan does for right or wrong. Just like in politics which is just as weird too.
Reddit's bigger communities are a kind of double-speak: r/funny is anything but, for instance.
I don't think it's rooted in love for reddit, I think they hate lemmy because it isn't what they wanted - while ignoring the fact that they have the opportunity to help make it into what they want.
I guess it's not loyalty to Reddit and Spez, but rather to a place they deem their home.
For some of them, it may seem we caused stir in the community out of nowhere, a stir that ended up with a lot of damage to Reddit.
While they may misunderstand the root cause of why we're here, we need to understand this concept in order to communicate importance of this platform. Some people deleted their 10+ year accounts on Reddit. Some use Reddit in parallel with Lemmy. Some stick to Reddit and don't plan to go anywhere, and are forced to witness their house crumble.
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
To be fair, I've been seeing some of the exact same moderation abuse. Enforced echo chamber shit. At least nobody can pull a Spez here.
Is there a mod log, or where can I see the mod abuse? I've seen some people complain about it but I never see it
On the fediverse we're all spez
That seems like a lemmy problem. It's not their fault they aren't techy, it's Lemmy's fault for completely disregarding them.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
I always have to laugh when I see an ostensibly pro-lemmy comment that says:
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...
Eh, it's not that the moderators are out of control on Reddit. It's that they're under control... by a single corporation.
A moderator here could potentially move their community to another instance if the owner of the instance tries the asshattery that Reddit Corp does.
Users choose the communities that have mods that are cool, the mods choose the instance that's owned by someone that's cool. The second half of that sentence isn't true for reddit which turns it into a top down power dynamic.
Eh there are also power mods on the platform that have a lot of control over loads of large communities there who are an issue in Of themselves in the ways they can control or stifle narratives on the site.
I think many of those people are conflating subreddit moderators with reddit site moderators/admins. On many platforms, "mods" refers to the top level people.
Yup. Mods here are forced to have public mod logs, and people can create the same community under a different instance. Even instance admins have less power than Reddit admins.
So yes, if you hate mod abuse, Lemmy is better
The mod log is public and transparent.
No, they don't realize, because their sense of where the proverbial line should be drawn matches the mods. If you're a moderate (or heaven forbid a conservative) then you likey won't stay long or post these views often.
Except if I really have a problem with the mods here I can set up my own instance with blackjack and hoo…wait.
OMG reading through that comment chain - no not this one, the one on old-reddit.com - makes me remember what Reddit (outside of the tiny niche subs) is like, . Leadership flows down-hill, and it is not just spez over there, it is his entire empire of hate, small-mindedness, and bigotry. Who on earth would see what Elon did to Twitter and think, "me 2!" (then overthrow the mods who loved the communities that they themselves built, replacing them with scabs who ban the humans and upvote the bots)?
Edit: for those who cannot bring themselves to go THERE, I brought it here for your amusement - you're welcome:-P.
A bit of a self aware wolves moment as Scott Adams frequently says ridiculous, smug, inflammatory and poorly researched things on the internet.
Maybe it's a how-to manual in order to get better at it? :-P
Damn, rare insightful Dilbert.
Yeah, reading the comments on the linked thread made me curious as to how the other subs I used to visit were doing, and it was so…angry, like everywhere.
Honestly…has Reddit’s vibes always been so negative? Maybe I’m recognizing it for what it is now that I’m not as entrenched in it, but damn I left that site feeling irritated as hell. Lemmy isn’t perfect, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t feel as angry scrolling through here.
(The Gundam sub seems to be doing ok tho, godspeed to them)
They weren't always as bad as they are now - Huffman has done a lot to make them more so, especially after the protests. e.g. there were hateful trolls who got banned by a moderator who cared about their community, and Huffman removed the former mods (b/c of protesting) and put those trolls in their place. You can imagine what came next.
Jesus. Look at those comments. Reddit has gotten considerably worse since the exodus.
I think they hired a troll farm to make it look like engagements are up
I think people are willing to do it for free because they think being contrarian gives them some sort of clout.
One comment was just "too long won't read Reddit won lol". It was seriously only four paragraphs, way to self own, Reddit guy.
I rarely see worthless contrarian posts like this here and it's generally called out by at least a few people when it occurs.
I have a feeling that the sorts of people both still active on Reddit and also still subscribed to "RedditAlternatives" are probably not the sort of people who are likely to take charge over their own happiness.
Looks like a lot of people of the conservative end of the political spectrum who can’t handle the leftist nature of Lemmy generally.
There’s an interesting thesis in this somewhere; conservatives respecting authoritarian power structures. Seems like they enjoy the boot of reddit.
IMO as Lemmy continues to grow those people will eventually find their way here. Conservatives love it when something is established and no longer new and scary.
I think it’s more an international thing. There was a thread a while back saying post where you’re from. Way less American dominated here, hence less American conservatism and ‘leftism’ and more balanced global views rather than the excessive america centredness of reddit. Federation helps with that too. No American corporate entity shaping the culture.
Ha wow, you weren’t kidding.
Some of those comment chains have real “drinking the verification can isn’t that bad” vibes.
Reading through some of the complaints, I suspect part of the problem some users are having is that they want to be toxic and argumentative, so jumped into the most toxic and argumentative parts of lemmy and then bounced off because their specific flavor toxicity was outnumbered.
Maximum toxicity.
>Reddit comments complaining about Lemmy on a post on Reddit with significantly less upvotes than the post on Lemmy about the post on Reddit about Lemmy.
I think these people are still in the denial stage of grief despite it being 6 months after the api apocalypse. They’ll come around eventually
Mate, that subreddit is dead because the few upvotes here are from people who came from there. So of course there aren't a whole lot of people on that sub anymore - but that's not indicative of the state of Reddit as a whole, especially compared to the fediverse.
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.
Well, in defense of Lemmy, it's nice to feel like I've got a lower chance of encountering Nazi rhetoric when in one of the anime/manga related instances
Oh I didn't mean to say that Lemmy is bad or wrong, far from it.
As a left-leaning (okay, outright communist), LGBT-supporting, Palestine-supporting (even pre-war), techy and nerdy person (i.e. Lemmy looks like it was made for me, lol), I still heavily agree we need some diversity here. Without it, Lemmy will never really be what Reddit has become. And we have all tools at our disposal - we are federated! So it becomes a little weird and phenomenal that we get such bubbles in here. But, I guess, this stems again from the small size of Lemmyverse - kind of a vicious circle.
Mastodon has more diversity, so maybe we just have to grow out of the current state? I don't have the answers.
The good thing about Lemmy is you can create your own instance.
Doesn't really help with how other instances are moderated/administered. Sure, I'm in control of what I see or not, but user interactions are by and large the same regardless of where my account is created.
Yeah, I mean.. I can’t control what type of food you’re going to eat, but I’m ok with that. We’re still having a converation, and that’s the important part.
I think you're confusing your current instance for the Fediverse. You can join Beehaw or another federation with different viewpoints. Granted the "main" instances are largely like the internet of old.
My current instance is very hands off and doesn't defederate with anyone, that's why I chose it. And Beehaw is one of the left/alternative ones that I mentioned. I don't mind either one, but an overwhelming part of their users are delusive and tiresome to debate with.
And that's what makes it great. I don't get this idea that it'd be better if that wasn't part of the demographic. Like, what value does being anti-LGBT or neutral-but-whiny bring to the table, for example?
Bringing opposing points of view like that for the sake of it didn't help Reddit, but only strained moderation and made the user experience worse when we had to deal with so many hateful bigots for no good reason. I saw one sub get overrun by these people and practically squeeze everyone out in a coordinated effort. One of those subs became unequivocally anti-trans in a matter of weeks. It was awful.
Not really. It's very tiresome when pretty much every thread turns into "capitalism bad" even from the most benign topics. Not that I disagree with it but it's just everywhere, to the point it's becoming a meme. That's what viking is talking about, there needs to be more diversity in the discussion otherwise it's just everyone circlejerking saying the same things over and over. It's not attractive to anyone that doesn't share those same views.
You can open a thread and almost play a lemmy bingo with the comments:
Anti-LGBT, none. But discussions here are increasingly centered on LGBT topics, which just doesn't concern me one way or another. And yes, I simply avoid them, it's just popping up in every thread, related or not. I'm not close minded or anything, I just don't want to have every discussion drift into issues that don't concern me.
On the political side, why is it either left, right, or neutral but whiny? There's quite a large number of neutral and not whiny people out there. My issue is that when I try to point out that some idealistic leftist topics will never work in a material society, I'm being attacked for no reason, so I withdraw from discussions (or don't even engage anymore at all); thus contributing my share to the growth of the echo chamber and the decline of post volumes.
As far as being anti-LGBT, there is no room for outright bigotry on any online space. Not being a FOSS zealot, not being anti-capitalist, and owning a car is not bigotry though
I think you are right about the lack of diversity.
My own take on it is that lemmy is currently populated by early adopters. There might be a relation between beign open to try new things and being left-leaning, I don't know.
But I do think that over time, if Lemmy survives it's early day phase, more people joining should bring more doverse point of views.
Reddit sucked in 2008 and it sucks now. It only has value because people were too lazy to implement a proper openid system in any of the forum software packages over the years. There's no reason any community needs to be hosted on reddit. Forums SEO just like reddit when searching for answers except everyone has divested from the internet and given control to a handful of ruthless corporations who just want to hoover up all the data so they can train their live chat AI bots.
If you want lemmy to be better you have to contribute even if it means not being showered in validation and praise. The echo chamber era is over.
The echo chamber era is thriving sadly.
It's not just about openid/identity/authentication. It's also about syndication and subscription. For forums to fill the niche reddit fills, we would have needed much better tooling around things like RSS/Atom, to allow people to see and interact with content from many forums in a consolidated interface.
It's funny you mention echo chambers because most of what I've seen here is just that.
You can't go into a community and disagree with something without getting downvoted into oblivion. The hivemind here is the same as it is on Reddit, the difference being is that more people are left-leaning on the political spectrum, but hivemind nonetheless.
calls Lemmy and Reddit a forumAs a forum user, please don't...
Forums are so much better than whatever Lemmy and Reddit are, the problem is none exist in the same "everything in the same place and people can create subsections" form.
Why don't we have federated forums then? The technology should be more or less similar.
lemmyBB exists which lets you view Lemmy as a forum. Seems like all the hosted versions of it are down though, and nutomic is too busy working on the backend to maintain it.
It doesn't solve the bumping issue though, if the majority of users use "Reddit style" Lemmy then threads become inactive when they're not in people's feed anymore, it's a major point of BBs, discussions are brought back to the front so people continue participating in them long term.
Bumping works just fine with the "New Comments" sort of Lemmy, which lemmybb uses.
That's the man himself! Hi :)
Yes, but if barely anyone sorts this way then the discussions just die much more quickly than they would on a BB
I wish we did, I think they went out of favour because most people prefer the "speed" of platforms like Reddit, where threads are active for a couple of hours and then something new comes up and a new conversation starts.
The problem is, there's no accumulation of knowledge, it's the same arguments and information getting repeated every time a new post is started on a similar subject.
You can't tell someone "Discussion is already happening on this subject in this thread, so we're deleting your post" when discussions don't get bumped to the top and discussions don't stay active once they're not on people's front page anymore.
The threaded replies don't help either, it's impossible to keep up with a post that gets a lot of attention since you can have hundreds if not thousands of branches spreading in all directions...
There's a good reason why specialized discussion platforms all use forums instead a Reddit style system, they want to build a knowledge database and they do, plenty of active threads that are over a decade old on many forums all over the internet!
Yeah I've been waiting for something like that.
Discourse added federation
Oh come on, it's a forum with voting. Sort comments by old and posts by new and you have forum mode
And discussions that are dead after 24h max.
I take part in discussions that have been going on every day for 10 years + on forums.
And then there are forums like The Goonswarm Forums, where they get pissed when you accidentally "necro" a thread.
That was very rare back when I used forums. But similarly, at least every month I'd have a reply to a 1-2-year-old comment I left in reddit. It happens.
Are you sure you're not a little nostalgic about your old forum years?
They're still used by people that are actual experts at what they do. There's a reason why GBATemp, XDAforums, all kinds of car and games forums are still being used and are still very active.
there were other options?
Hello from /Kbin
I love kbin but being a one man show and lacking API it was never really going to be the replacement. I am, however, glad to have it as one of a handful of smaller alternatives and a sort of cousin to Lemmy.
If it doesn't have an API, how do I still see posts from it in my feed? Do you mean it integrates with the fediverse, but only has a web interface for now (ie. no apps)?
Yeah, the latter. There is an API, but I think it was only released in the last month or so. I'm not sure to what extent it's complete.
A kbin instance can be downloaded as a PWA, and it works decent.
As for third party apps there's Lunar, iOS only. Haven't tried it.
There was also Artemis. It had the best UI/UX design I've ever seen. Unfortunately the dev appears to have vanished.
Before the API, I think they were web scraping.
The API is new but took time and effort, it just wasn't available at the time.
It has an API, has for a while now
Kbin is just lemmy+mastadon iirc
Takkun?
When I was leaving Reddit I heard of Kbin (which I do have an account in and still check all the time), raddle.me, Tildes, squabbles, and I think another. So many!
During the exodus I remember I wanted to try Tildes, but it was closed off from new users. (I don't even understand why it was recommended.)
There is Kbin:-)
One that I don't hear about is raddle.me, a centralized alternative.
They fail on their promise of curbing the mods problem with a transparent modlog and active admins. It's the same bunch of authoritarian kids as reddit and the power dynamics are unchanged, they make friends with each other and with the administrators and it's exactly as hard to get one removed as it ever was on major lemmy instances
I prefer the federation where if a mod/admin's bad you can just create a community with the same name on a different instance
I have been thinking of starting my own Arabic instance since Lemmy has Arabic support. I am just not prepared for such a project.
Lets talk I can help you. I run the Brazilian Lemmy instance.
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.
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?
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?
1- yes.
2- I don't know
Is Lemmy Indexable?
I can chime in on your second question
Instance owners tend to focus on making a sound backend that scales effectively. Im guessing SEO is not high on the priorities for instance owners. It takes time and is a mix of an art and science and it isn't really a 1 size fits all.
With that being said, I think the SEO will largely be on the front-end devs who build 3rd part apps that run on the various instances. IMO this makes more sense since front-ends can connect to all the various instances available so it's higher up the funnel.
Source: Experience working in SEO + developer of the lemmy web app Quiblr
I send Lemmy some money every month. Not a lot but what I can. I'm also learning Rust and once I get confident I'll contribute. I like Lemmy and the fediverse in general.
Replacing "Lemmy" with "Fedderverse" would behoove you, OP. Sincerely, A Kbin user.
Ernest has fixed a whole lot of the issues today, but I wouldn't recommend kbin at the exact moment, lol. Not that these issues have made me feel like going anywhere else.
It's been pretty solid aside from the last few days and the last few days straddled a major, worldwide holiday. I think we should be able to give Ernest a break over it. Yes, we're small. But he got on fixing it just as soon as the problem was identified and New Years had passed.
The Reddit post specifically mentions Kbin and why the OP prefers Lemmy. Mentioning Lemmy specifically and not the Fediverse/Threadiverse is the point
lemmy rules. i wish there were less memes and porn on the front page, and/or that the front page refreshed quicker and with more variety. but in recent months it's been bug free for me. and what's huge is that i actually feel good posting here. i'm not giving my effort to a shitty shitty corporate hellhole, it's doing some small part to expand the fediverse.
If your instance is running 0.19+, switch to Scaled as your default sort. It amplifies the smaller communities so you'll see more variety in content. It's so much better :)
I've never seen porn on here because my instance doesn't federate with any instance that host that kind of stuff, but I think you could block the communities where it is posted or switch instances.
I am surprised reddit hasn't removed this post yet.
I got an account banned for saying "lemmy dot world" when someone asked "Are there even any good alternatives?"
If the fediverse sucks so much, why are Meta and WordPress and Mozilla making efforts to join it, hm?
Yes but, monetization of data and sucking balls can be orthogonal pursuits
I do my best to tell about Lemmy and explain what the Fediverse is with my surroundings. Lots of people don't even know about the existence of Lemmy/Kbin or the Fediverse yet. I try not to be pushy like a Arch Linux user but overall I'm doing my part !
I’m concerned with the amount of bugs cropping up between major updates. I looked at the repo and they have no unit tests. Eventually people will get fed up with the amount of bugs appearing.
I use a third party app and see very little. Over time it’ll get better also.
Lemmy still feels like beta (while Kbin is alpha), but it still is better than Reddit!
(no /s - I really believe that, b/c the people here vs. there make ALL the difference)
To all those who contribute code, thank you for making this micro-world a better place for us all!:-)
Which repo are you talking about? There are tests in the main rust repo. Rust puts its tests in line with the code. https://github.com/search?q=repo%3ALemmyNet%2Flemmy%20%22%23%5Bcfg(test)%5D%22&type=code
I have no idea how complete these or or anything. But it's not 0
Lol wut
Using an app, I’ve only had some very minor issues. Essentially, just occasional crashes.
Lemmy I think is in a good place since it's still fairly new. It took a while before Reddit had critical mass and I'd say that happened when Reddit started "solving" crimes and then making the news because of it. The "We did it Reddit!". I think that's when people really started to show up. On here, there's not a constant flood, which can be a good thing. When you reply, you're not buried by thousands of other posts. On Reddit it felt like, if you didn't get in early, chances are no one really saw what you posted. Honestly, I've had better engagement here than I did on Reddit, both in views and quality of replies.
Only time I end up on Reddit, is when I'm searching something and a post from 2-3 years ago pops up. But I haven't logged into Reddit or actually engaged with anything new since the exodus. The date of this account was the last day I officially used Reddit.
We need to solve a mystery and get on the news. Let's all collectively work together on solving those millennium prize problems or something.
For me Lemmy provides a value proposition that reddit does not: consent.
Care to explain? Reddit users also signed up and agreed to their terms & conditions.
Lemmy its not just CCP propaganda anymore (sorry wumao)
Soon as I set Lemmy to open to All, 99% of my downtime scrolling switched to here. I only check Reddit for the Nuzlocke subreddit honestly lol
The Fediverse feels a lot like the old Reddit from 10+ years ago , but I suspect that once it becomes mainstream the shills and bots will move in and ruin it like they ruined Reddit.
It was not fully down and this completely ignores the issues that Lemmy had when they updated to the next version a while back. Really unnecessary bashing.
Totally not suspicious, but at the minimum a bit ignorant on how open source software development typically goes. And it isn't just Lemmygrad, but even their allegedly more moderate main instance Lemmy.ml, which is really just more of the same as far as users and moderation issues go. More problematic is the fact though that you're still supporting the devs and their problematic views simply by supporting their software and its development by directly using it, and this won't change until a proper fork from actually decent people is going to become the main used Lemmy software.
And overall, no one won this, because the whole protest was a failure as way too many people just remained on Reddit.
Hello I was the one who wrote this write up on r/RedditAlternatives, just to clarify regarding my Kbin remarks, yesterday on January 3rd, kbin was indeed not working properly for the whole day yesterday with errors almost everywhere, even Ernest, the developer behind Kbin acknowledged this and put an announcement even on Mastodon.
But a one day error is not the only reason, in-fact I've made several huge and massive contributions to the Kbin community with the creations of m/AskKbin, m/RedditMigration and so on activaly moderating and contributing when it comes to engagement and so on (I even created multiple guides that had huge reach such as "The Redditor's guide to Kbin" and even published the guide to a website), I spent tons of months solely as a Kbin user - but I was reaching a point where the unstability and immaturity of Kbin was really pushing me to put it down and come to lemmy, especially considering how mature lemmy has become and is surely much more stable than kbin at the moment and has been so in the forseeable past. So maybe it came of as bashing, but to me as someone who actually gave Kbin a chance, it was the hard reality and I had to say it.
Regarding the open source part, I would like to agree to disagree with you there, sure you are still using Lemmy regardless of the instance and the development is still done by the same devs that led to such concerns, this was exactly my reason to stay away from lemmy and go to Kbin, but now I've realized that open source actually helps keep the developers in check as in that they will obviously know that if they do something against the users here and let's say, push some of their idealogoies in some way hypothetically, there will be a huge chance someone will fork Lemmy and use that as an opportunity to take away the users, this is the advantage of open source, the possibility of forking a project helps keep the original project in check and when it comes to moderation or censorship, this instance is not moderated by the same people behind lemmy.ml or lemmygrad either.
Yes, but still far from being a competitor
Lemmy has 2 devs. Reddit has hundreds of employees, each individually getting paid 2-3x more than what Lemmy makes in donations every year.
The expectation that Lemmy is a competitor to Reddit is borderline insane
For the average user it may have it may not be their preferred option but it's certainly a competitor. Lemmy is pretty much a drop in replacement to the point that several third party Reddit apps at least for Android have simply modified their api calls to use lemmy rather than Reddit.
There's not quite as much content but it already appears to be enough to be sustainable which is the most important part. And you can bet that whenever Reddit next messes up there will be further migration.