It’s no secret that Lemmy is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Reddit. The issue it faces however is that it’s still relatively niche and not many people know about it. I propose that we change this. By contacting the mods of large subreddits and asking them to make and promote relevant Lemmy communities we could substantially increase the amount of people who discover the fediverse. What’s more, I don’t think this is would be a hard sell considering many mods are already pissed off with Reddit due to their API changes. I believe that this is the time to act, so this is a call to arms, to help grow the fediverse into the future of social media!
Lemmy and Mastodon require some extra thought processes that most people do not want or can’t work through. They want instant, fast and as much of it as possible.
Somehow this has to become so easy to understand and use that even the dimmest bulbs in society will have no trouble using it.
Upside? This will bring more usage and adoption. Downside? This will bring in more trash.
One nice (yet sometimes annoying) thing about Lemmy is that you can have multiple communities of the same thing.
What I think will happen is that a few instances of Lemmy will become the big ones and their communities for memes, news and politics will dominate.
I can even see something happening to remove duplicates. Perhaps lemmy.world and lemmy.ml agree that /politics is on lemmy.world and /news is on lemmy.ml
App developers will make those default communities easy to find. Kind of like how reddit used to have 50 or so default sub reddits.
Less popular instances will have shadow communities that will be more difficult to find, but where there will be a more hardcore group of contributors and members.
I honestly think the combining of the same communities on different instances will happen more at the app layer. It wouldn’t be hard to group them all in the same category for convenience and it allows for more granular control. Downside being that it makes an already complex platform more complicated but hey, that’s kind of the point and reason people come here to lemmy in the first place. I want more people to join lemmy but I also know that it’s going to be a niche platform for quite a while if not the rest of it’s existence.
Summit announced it already [email protected]
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In my experience, reddit mods are completely hopeless
We aren’t going to get mods to promote us. That is just silly.
We should buy advertising though, definitely.
When the API thing happened, several of the subreddits I frequented had threads about finding an alternative to move to. Lemmy was mentioned, but but discounted early on.
One problem was that people found out the main dev was a tankie and didn’t want to be associated with the project because of that.
They ended up going to discords, or self hosted forums, or just staying on reddit.
If we’re talking about the same discussion, I think I remember a thread on either the modcoord or redditalternatives sub.
From what I remember, the disagreement was that the only communities that were shown in the splash page were extremely edgy commie stuff. Blatant propaganda communities. There was a pro-Russian invasion community in the top 5 communities and lots of “Death to America” type stuff. ’
Compounding things, the initial response to these complains was a dismissive “Redditors aren’t smart enough to work out how instances work!” which really didn’t make people want to persevere.
I’ll admit, I was in two minds because of this. But gave it a go out of curiosity for the tech.
I saw several threads and may be mixing them up, but at one point someone dug up a link to an interview with desselines where he claimed that the uyghur genecide and the tiananmen square massacre were both hoaxes. There was also some worry in one of the discussions about security and the inability to delete comments. Also something about private messages being stored in plaintext on the server.
The main reason I’m still posting and reading on Reddit is that I belong to a lot of small subreddits that haven’t had any reason to migrate elsewhere. You can dislike what Reddit leadership is doing, but lots of people belonging to small subreddits haven’t been impacted as much.
When are Lemmy posts going to show up on Google searches??
They do, the problem is 1: Google prioritize Reddit. And 2: free domains like. ml dont show up on Google, so Lemmy.ml is practically invisible.
This isn’t true, you can google “lemmy ml” and lemmy.ml will show up in the results
How did you find out that .ml isn’t on Google? Sure, it might be buried below shitton of sites that paid to be on top, or sites with better SEO, but they are not inherently invisible.
I didn’t know that about free domains. What is Google’s (at least publicly acknowledged) rationale for this?
I want to call out a few QoL things here that will help lemmy:
- There are a lot of read-the-headline-not-the-article commenters which is natural in an aggregation feed of links; there are numerous posts a day where people rewrite the news’ headlines to fit their agenda where the actual article and articles headline doesn’t reflect ANY of what they’re suggesting. if you run these sub lemmies for news on your server, I encourage you to use a bot or enforce rules for news that simply scrapes the title out of the link. Otherwise people will post news links that lead to a real source but have a false headline.
- There is a staggering amount of people pushing for oddities like child porn acceptance and I keep seeing it. Unless an entire server is compromised, reach out to the mods and ask to get subs cleaned up. Give moderators the benefit of the doubt and a chance to act without breaking federation completely. Its important Lemmy moderates content but also communicates well amongst each other when something is going wrong.
To your second point: possession of child porn is actually illegal in the US and many other countries.
In fact, depending on the country the instance is hosted in, it’s entirely possible that the people running an instance that hosts it could be arrested for not only possessing it (on their servers) but also distributing it (through their servers). (This is, in part, why YouTube has tried to crack down on videos that aren’t for children: they may be held liable for it.)
I think lemmy will have an eternal September moment eventually when the platform improves. Mastodons will likely be soon. It’s not a good thing nor is it a bad thing. There will be both benefits to it and negatives as well.
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What can I do then?
Honestly, I would rather Lemmy attract its own community naturally rather than it be the place all redditors pipe into. I think most people who have already come from there can agree the culture is not really conductive to quality discussion, and we’ve started to see some of that leak into Lemmy as well.
Rather than just copy/paste reddit’s users and culture, we should try to develop both on their own. Create an environment that users want to spend their time on. Then through word of mouth on other platforms they entice people here. I don’t think just being the place redditors flood after every fuckup is healthy for the growth of the platform. As a Mastodon user, I’m kinda glad it isn’t the primary platform Twitter refugees are flocking to.
I’m not sure the culture aspect is unique to Reddit though. The culture seems more or less platform independent IMO.
What is “naturally”? I heard about Lemmy through reddit during the exodus. Was that unnatural?
Lemmy attract its own community naturally
Do you want to see more content, or you don’t?
I prefer 100 quality posters to 100,000 shitposters.
I personally want to see more good content. Quantity means nothing if the quality isn’t up to par.
more good content
Well, it still counts as “more content” which is usually on par with user count.
If all I wanted was more content, I could make an LLM hallucinate something for me. That’d be content. Not very good content but tonnes of it.
Is that what you want?
Since when AI content is compared to user content? Why do you change topic?
I really don’t think Lemmy is polished and issue-free enough for tons of people to move here. It might be in the future but I feel like pushing it would do no good.
Yeah, let it grow organically. Like other open-source projects, it’s unlikely to shrink, and it’ll gain profile and draw users from Reddit etc over time–faster when Reddit drops the ball, which it’ll do more often as it scrambles to extract more profit from a shrinking user base.
There’s no reason to rush it. That’ll just cause growing pains and give Lemmy a bad reputation.
There is always a risk of collapse for lemmy. When you are in decline there can be negative feedback loops furthering the decline.
OP has straight up mental illnesses
So, for my two cents: REDDIT was my go to for very biased but usually non-corporate info. For example, Baldurs Gate 3. In the past, I would research ‘BG3 builds reddit’ and just check out different builds people tried. It was always much better than going to a crappy corporate owned ‘gaming mag’ type website, where most of them just copy/pasted info from reddit anyway. It was a pretty good repository for info like that, and reddthat (or lemmy I guess) has not reached that level yet. I tried doing some searching on here for bg3 builds, almost nada.
Yeah, given the Fediverse’s much smaller amount of active users and its shorter history, it barely has niche communities nor a wealth of specific knowledge. Anyone who wants the Fediverse to be able to support that role that Reddit currently fulfills of non-corporate information has to know that there’s a very large road ahead and it needs active building.
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Yep, almost all useful info for BG3 is in reddit and it sucks. I haven’t even seen a community for BG3 on Lemmy, but I’m sure it exists somewhere.
Thank you! I’ve been looking :)
I found this one, and checked it out a few times. It’s not where it needs to be. Is there a way to maybe sticky or have sub-topics specifically for things such as builds, or quest faq, or things like that? I think maybe some nesting or stickied topics would help. Some type of sub-categorization inside the actual (not sure what we call these, topics?).
Probably something to suggest over there, all of your points make sense
Yeah, good idea. I did. Not sure if it’s even possible with the lemmyverse though, as I have yet to come across a well organized ‘page’ like that yet.
I dn’t know how to link, but search baldur on lemmy.world
Hope you posted your bg3 build on Lemmy after that…
I don’t have one, that’s why I’m trying to look for one! But when I find a good combo I will be posting it, yes.
Stop trying to turn this place into R. We left because it was shit. If you don’t like this place, go somewhere else.
Are we blaming the people and communities of Reddit or the actions of the IPO-minded business?
Inb4 “yes”.
The IPO-minded business was unwilling to curtail and curate the userbase as every user was the equivalent to potential profit. There’s many many many people from Reddit who should not find a place online to call home. They can stay with the capitalists until the capital runs dry.
Inb4 failed
It was the infamous groupthink, brigading, and shitlord mods that were responsible for the R enshittening.
All that business stuff was icing on the cake which was used as a scapegoat by the very people who made R such a shit place to begin with.
Are we blaming the people and communities of Reddit or the actions of the IPO-minded business?
It depends on the person, I think. I left Reddit because I was outright disgusted with its idiotic userbase, but plenty people are here because they know that the vulture capital will wreck that place.
And at the end of the day, we might as well ask if both aren’t intrinsically tied - Reddit’s userbase being so awful because of the business behind it. @[email protected] mentioned the “shitlord mods”, most of the time the admins behave in a rather similar fashion.
I left because of how they treated third party apps devs, Reddit mods, and users. Total disregard and disrespect. Which left me feeling the same.
No, we’re blaming OP for trying to make lemmy more like an ipo-minded business.
Sounds like you’re blaming the users for the CEO being a cunt
Also sounds like you don’t understand the structural implications of Lemmy being a federated social network
Also sounds like you’re intolerant of other’s opinions and think they should leave
Sounds like you’re a conservative
You need your hearing checked, as well as your reading comprehension.
I put a Kbin and Lemmy community in the sidebar of /r/vexillology shortly after the beginning of the API protest.
Is there a similar community here?
