Did Reddit get massive because of Digg users making a beeline towards them or were they already big before that?
What lemmy or kbin need is more users, plain and simple.
I’m 50/50 on it.
I don’t want Lemmy to become too big to the point where it’s skirting on becoming the very shithole Reddit currently is.
I’d want Lemmy to at have a healthy amount of clout where it can be it’s own thing without pressure.
Counter point: lemmy doesn’t need to do anything to become a top website. Just stay decentralized and independently run. If that’s meant to be a “top website” so be it, but that’s not why I’m here.
I share similar thoughts. I care more about the quality of the content and most importantly the quality of the community than the popularity of the website. I do hope that we continue to grow and that the growth will be to the benefit of the community.
We need to have something that they cant have or is lower quality like communities like c/techsupport
Reddit grew alot when it got known that they did AMAs with celebrities and world leaders. All the tabloids would report on it. It’s difficult for Lemmy or even Reddit to repeat that without having someone in a paid full-time position to arrange and facilitate the interview.
Another thing is the size of the userbase. It got to the point that the sources for specific news were on Reddit, making it the first to have details on the stories, so it was often referenced in actual news outlets.
Celebs go on podcasts all the time. A lemmy instance for a podcast or journal would probably work. Similar to other businesses federating
The software architect of lemmy is unfortunately doomed. The very concept of how it works means exponential storage and bandwidth needs as it grows in sublemmits and instances. A better design would have been instances being the sublemmits themselves, and leaving it up to the clients to subscribe and aggregate them into a feed. This way scaling is a lot more horizontal, and communities that get too big can scale up individually or purge old data without affecting the rest of the system.
If the design itself is bad, then something will eventually spring up that will replace it. That’s the beauty of nascent platforms; they haven’t completely cornered the market.
I assume this is a larger theme across the Fediverse?
Could you expand on what causes the massive bandwidth needs? I’m have a vague idea but I’d be very curious to know.
If a user of an instance subscribes to content from another instance, their home instance is pulling, storing and sharing that content. With more and more instances, more time will be spent on sharing that content.
It should try to grow larger than in currently is, but not try to be a top website.
Trying to do the latter will involve clashing with online legal regulations, politicians, and compliance to a much greater extent than is required now. Furthermore, it will be inundated with “normie” culture if it strives to be as popular. If you make it accessible to the lower common denominator, you get the lowest common denominator.
I think you’re right. Having it as big as Reddit or other social media platforms wouldn’t be good. But I would like to have most communities for medium populated hobbies to have a popular enough comminity that I can not use Reddit for it. Right now, even some relatively popular communities have no members and no post generation.
We need reddit to mess up a couple of times before Lemmy gets to a critical mass, where active users keep growing instead of shrinking.
We also need Lemmy to focus on improving its SEO so people land on it organically.
Dopamine reward loops, good content and a reasonable UX.
-
If you gave a good, detailed answer with sources, you got rewarded for your effort with upvotes more than a low effort answer. This kind of appreciation motivated quality content generators to generate more content.
-
as usercount grew to a certain threshold, you basically got users from all sorts of domains generating quality content covering pretty much all topics
-
while official UX was horrible and 3rd party apps were needed, the basic system of sorting and indendation of answers allowed for long, detailed discussions which could be navigated and followed effortlessly.
-
The brand promise of Reddit was pretty simple—it was the “Front page of the Internet”.
It did not get popular because of the sub-communities or that there was a sub for everything ( at least not at first ).
Reddit became a thing because it was a single destination that aggregated and curated interesting content from the web that “interesting” people could comment on. If you were only going to make one stop on the Internet, it could be Reddit. Uses could share the main URL by word of mouth and new users would get the same experience. As content grew, Reddit became high ranking in search results.
Lemmy does not really offer the Reddit experience to a new user. New users do not want an offer to find an instance or create one, they want to experience the content, get addicted, and come back.
The closest Lemmy has right now to early Reddit is Lemmy World but how do new users know that? Actually, I guess old.lemmy.world is the closest. :)
Lemmy does not really offer the Reddit experience to a new user.
I agree with one caveat: yet.
If Lemmy can build up its userbase and content it could offer a similar experience to Reddit
The problem is the lack of a main page. People want to type “lemmy.com” and find what they are looking for.
I take it back!
I just type lemmy.com and got redirected to https://lemm.ee/?src=lemmy.com
I think that won’t be as big of an issue in time. As Lemmy grows, eventually people will be exposed to it and other services on the Fediverse and will be more likely to have an idea on how to get started, or at least find good guides.
Remember that pretty much everything on computers requires some instruction at the beginning. The advantage that Reddit and other software have is that people have (and continually are) already taught how to use them.
It’s a similar situation to Linux vs. Windows. A lot of distros on Linux are actually more user friendly and easier to learn than Windows - the issue with getting people to try Linux is that they already know how to use Windows and most people hate learning new things
Something like lemmy.world or lemm.ee will just become the “default” instance for new users.
What I think lemmy needs 1 it needs to feel like a website to the user 2 single login you join and automatically get put on a server that isn’t overloaded 3 search you need to be able to search for any sub you want right on the app 4 this is something that a user wont see but is important for them a unified system of raising money for instances
join-lemmy or join-mastodon should probably just pick a server for you with 1000-15000 users. There can be an advanced option to select a server, but that shouldn’t be the default workflow.
I disagree this is the single biggest reason people refuse to join the fediverse not even just lemmy but mastodon as well people should have the option to manually pick but default should be that it picks
Search engines, they don’t catalog Fediverse sites properly because of the heavy dependency on domains! :/
I think social media designed like “Reddit” is just THE logical way to structure social media. That’s why I think there is just an inherent demand for a platform like Reddit. Because of the network effect, social media platforms strongly tend to centralize. More users > more content > more users > more content > … it is a self-reinforcing cycle favoring centralization. So that is the reason why reddit is popular, it was “the first”, it is big. The only reason why people would ever leave is if Reddit themselves screw themselves over. Luckily for us, they do all the time.
Where Reddit really fails is how powerful admins and mods are, and regularly abusing that power. To fix this, you need to change the incentive structure so that power goes to the users themselves. Lemmy is already better at this because of its federated structure.
But I would go a step further and make communities work more like git. Anyone can fork any communities, meaning they create a new copy of a community but under their management. If enough people switch over to that fork, they get to keep the name of the sub.
That way mods and admins are incentivized to act in the best interest of users at all time, because if they don’t, they are easily deposed.
As a bonus it would also result in making new communities from two groups who shouldn’t have been together in the first place. Essentially creating more and more specialized communities more closely matching the wants of the users.
This is different to Lemmy or Reddit where you would have to create a new sub, with zero content to depose a mod/split the community.
You essentially make the process to switch out mods as low cost as possible for users. Thereby massively increasing competition, increasing quality and user satisfaction.
Ideally this would all be built on top of some base data storage layer like IPFS or something, so you don’t have to literally copy over all the content any time you fork a community, but you just copy the references to where the content is stored.
Also hosting should be as simple as possible, ideally on some decentralized hosting service, like some of these crypto solutions.
This would basically remove all barriers to creating and maintining your own communities, except for hosting cost and moderation.
If you had to design the perfect social media platform, I think that would be it.
Not sure about the new sub if the existing users have migrated to the new sub thing.
‘front page’ feeds would need to change as well with this because a lot of the time people are upcoting stuff they agree with or find funny without looking at the sub it’s been posted on.
This means a lot of subs could be deposed for generic meme subs just because they popular.
deleted by creator
Yeah that is a good point. I think it would need some permissions managment, like “only community members can vote” or “only community members can see posts”. And those might be attached to every post or not depending on how the community is configured.
You also have the ability to restrict users based on certain rules or roles. Like on Reddit, no posting if your account is less than X days old, etc… Certain members may be allowed to upvote but not post etc…
You may set it so new users can only see any posts made after they joined or not. And then they are also exempted from forking those posts.
Automatic timeouts for when posts should be deleted would also be nice. Also togglable community wise.
Basically setting the platform up to be as public or as private as the community wants.
Would be pretty complex though and not that essential. And might break the whole fork model.
Reddit basically put a near optimum UI (video wtf?) on the message board and forum concepts.
Ofc reddit made the interface worse over time, but they basically took a few quantum leaps.
Yeah, the nested comments section with up/downvotes is the most efficient way to structure a discussion. Infinitely better than the old forums.
There are a few issues with how up/downvotes can be undesirably distributed (like brigading), but the core concept is good.
It would make sense to have different filters on top of that.
Like rewarding high-quality comments (based on some metric like lexical complexity). Or maximizing diversity of opinion, like by rewarding comments that are different from all the others, would help with the circle jerking and brigading. Or categorizing comments as serious, joke, insult, by political leaning, etc.
Also with these LLMs, it would be interesting to try and summarize the entire comments section, giving you briefly the most brought up points or most interesting points.
Or by rewarding comments that have been made by people like you. Like if you are a nuclear physicist, you will preferentially see comments by other nuclear physicists.
And you can toggle between all of them like new, hot, too all, etc.
Perhaps you would even have a marketplace for these filters where anyone can post new ones, like an app store. Give users maximum control over their experienve.
What Lemmy needs: buy the top search term for the word Reddit in the Apple/Google app stores.
Needs
But do they really?
Huge growth splurges tend to disrupt or regress the culture.
Maybe slownsteady growth is best.
That’s fair. I just feel like 3rd party apps ate where Lemmy has an advantage.
Reddit got massive because it had very vibrant communities and lots of them that inspired a loyalty in its uses.
I was brought to Reddit by a previous user, and I brought several of my friends to Reddit.
For lemmy to get there, you need thousands of communities.
Want to know stuff about Rav4? There’s a sub for it.
Want to know about accounting? There’s a sub for it?
Want to know about what’s happening in Oklahoma city? There’s a sub.
Lemmy isn’t anywhere close to this point. In fact most subs are very dead.
Preach. So what, we multiply the amount of people those Sublemmies get by 100. It’s still going to be dead. That’s how dead it is.
We need to create Sublemmies for certain groups out of thin air. There’s no chance we can convince people to move when the amount of engagement is orders of magnitude less.
Look at League of Legends. You know, the most played videogame in the world. One post per day in here. It’s over.
The entire LCS regular season I made post match threads at [email protected] . I always enjoy those discussions. Six weeks, 2-3 days a week, so maybe 15 posts. I probably got a dozen comments combined. I went into a few team discords asking for engagement.
On Reddit that’s more like 78 posts. Each of those posts on Reddit will get hundreds of comments. 12 comments on Lemmy versus way more than 1600 comments on Reddit.
The league communities here aren’t anywhere close to 0.1% of the league community there.
It’s hard to build from absolutely nothing.
A lot of those are bots though, fr.
Reddit didn’t start out like that either. If Lemmy is to grow, it will take years of dedicated active use from us.
