I hate big tech controlling social media. I desperately want social media to be federated.
I really love community-driven social media like Reddit. Lemmy feels… too small. I really loved that Reddit let me jump into any niche hobby, and instantly I had a community. Lemmy, you’ll be lucky if that community even exists, and if it does, chances are nobody has posted in ages.
On the other hand, Lemmy is full of political content lately. I’ve basically been doom scrolling everything US election-related, and it’s really starting to take a toll on my mental health.
I know I can filter content. I know I can post and be the change I seek. Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.
Not sure what the point of this is, or if it’s even the right community to vent about this. I just really want to replace Reddit, but I find myself going back more and more (e.g. r/homekit is very active compared to Lemmy version).
I believe in Lemmy and the fediverse. But the subreddits with content I like aren’t here yet. So I still have to go back for that stuff.
But I always check here first.
Yes Lemmy is smaller and doesn’t have instantly fully formed communities. Reddit has been around for almost 2 decades. Lemmy is newer, smaller, and actively fights the sorts of shenanigans that Reddit initially used to get big.
If you want more niche activity, make posts and interact with posts. Lemmy is user driven- that means you. It isn’t a giant megasite where you can just expect to be a passive receiver of endless content.
I was their in reddit beginning. There were no initial shenanigans. It was a good place and existed at just the right time, when people wanted to leave Digg because it was turning into a dumpster fire, similar to what reddit has done.
When reddit started turning to shit there just wasn’t anything for the masses to migrate to that was available other than here. Problem is that here isn’t as simple to get into. In lemmy, the learning curve is slightly higher than “bare minimum”.
Sort of, but it didn’t really work. Reddit existed in 2005, but wasn’t popular. It only became popular in 2010 after all of Digg went to it, because it was pretty much a Digg clone, but with owners who weren’t Digg.
I’ve presented you with the proof that early Reddit was populated with large numbers of sockpuppet accounts by the owners, creating whole cloth communities to draw in users, which is not something that is happening on Lemmy.
The entire reason the Digg mass exodus was viable was people leaving Digg found these “preexisting” Reddit communities and felt more comfortable joining in.
Lemmy doesn’t have that socketpuppet population to springboard with, so growth is slower and unpopulated communities are not falsely full of fake users.
I hung out on reddit long enough over the previous couple of years when people were up in arms to leave. It wasn’t the lack of subs or community size that kept people away. It was simply that it was harder to figure out how to get up and going. You can’t just go to lemmy.com, create a name and password, and start doing stuff. Further still is that now people want an apk for phone browsing and particularly when the masses wanted to leave reddit, there was also no “use this apk and its easy”. Plus, creating an instance is much more work than creating a subreddit.
It was never about the size of the website already appearing to be in place. Lemmy just has a harder entry fee. It keeps lemmy at a lower user base in the same way every subscription service in existence knows it wants to make things super easy to sign up, but time intens8ve and difficult to cancel. Because it takes a bit of effort, lots of people don’t get around to doing it.
You can’t just go to lemmy.com, create a name and password, and start doing stuff.
Go to https://lemm.ee/
Have a look around, see if the content and the formatting is appealing to you, register an account if you want to be able to curate your feed further
Go to https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.
Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your “instance”, use “lemm.ee”
If you want more choices for apps, have a look at https://www.lemmyapps.com/
I think the Lemmy devs political stance and instances such as hexbear are more detrimental to the success of the platform than the entry bar.
Edit: Discuit is a centralized site, and now has 209 weekly active users: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/OiU8YjZ_
On Lemmy you feel like your voice is heard more because it’s smaller, IMO.
I hear you dude! 😜
reddit was once smaller than it is now too
Feel free to block communities with political content.
You can also use an app or alternative frontend to filter keywords. [email protected] has a post about that.
For communities, [email protected] can help
For home kit, the Apple communities are probably more active, and you should be able to post about it there too
To add to this using these two features has really helped remove a lot of the threads that were taking a toll on my mental health from my feed.
definitely agree. this has helped save my sanity in recent times.
And if the user uses Mbin instances, he/she can even block posts that link to other domains, as often political posts link to news sites.
Lemmy is amazing. I am so glad I found my way here. I was doom scrolling as well. I had to unsubscribe from all my political communities I had joined and just keep one of my news committees. I then expanded the groups for my other interests. This really helped. You are in control of your time line here.
Funny cause I reduced my recent reddit usage cause I got tired of the toxic post election political liberal cope
Growth is a process, not an immediate switch. Every social media started small and then grew. If immediatism, or however it is called, was the predominant factor for any struggle to become an achievement, nothing would be achieved.
And on lack of contents, I, for one, block everything that is not of my interest, quite a lot to be honest, specially with certain niches spamming the federated platforms, but even then, I get a feeling I should trim even some of the communities/magazines I follow/subscribe to as I can barely catch up to those already.
One suggestion I saw a while ago was to use more general communities for things you’re interested in and as it grows then the more niche communities can be made. Ex: post about a specific game you like in gaming up until enough people like it to make a sub for that game. Or post about a song you don’t know in asklemmy until enough people do that to make whatsthissong
I totally get wanting the niche communities and, personally, I just lurk reddit completely not voting, posting, or commenting unless as a last resort if I really need to find info that Lemmy isn’t able to provide.
It’s a slow process and I don’t think there’ll be another boost of users in Lemmy until reddit does another thing that enshittifies it to annoy people to leave.
Our community [email protected] has for now everything beer, wine, cider… it didn’t reach the point of creating another specific, niche community. So I totally get the niche interests aren’t represented here yet and the number of homebrewers is big.
Still we get good engagement for lemmy and there are active people from industry, so I wouldn’t call it exactly small.
And some times, having the initiative to create such more specific communities could be a change factor for the growth of a social media. Also, with federation, not just the person can choose where to create the community on while not making it a walled garden as other sites would still have access to it, but also if a community for the given subject already exists but the user thinks he can do better, he/she can more easily do it with how expansive the “fediverse” is.
Build Lemmy and they will come!
you gotta realize reddit didn’t just “appear” one day with those obscure niche topics built out. There is a network effect large communities have. We need hundreds of thousands more members before that is possible.
I think you probably weren’t there for early reddit, but most of the active posters here on Lemmy were. It was tiny. Like Lemmy.
You can’t force those niche communities to exist here. It doesn’t work. But what you can do is post and create valuable content. and eventually we may get there.
Yeah, the reason I like Lemmy is because it reminds me of old reddit. Like old old reddit, before the Digg migration.
It’s so weird to me that people are so spoiled today that they feel inconvenienced when there isn’t limitless content in their niche fields of interest being served to them on a platter every single day.
Those of us who remember the before times can tell you that the absolute best of a platform comes before that point. I’m sure it’s lovely getting your full every single second, but the best conversation, the best education, the best introspection comes when you’re allowed a few minutes between stimuli to think.
I feel like “Old woman yells at cloud” but I really feel like our younger folks who crave endless, mindless interaction, don’t know what they miss out on.
Pardon me for wanting to have a place where I can discuss my hobbies, I guess.
You can still do that.
Start the conversation. That’s what we all did, and where these communities got their start.
I’ve tried, believe me I’ve tried. Posting a bunch of threads out into the void doesn’t suddenly manifest a like-minded community to reply to and engage with those threads. It won’t truly be viable until there’s a much larger userbase to begin with.
And honestly, it just comes across as patronizing to say the only reason my hobbies don’t have traction here must be because I didn’t try hard enough.
And how do you think that larger userbase is going to come into existence?
Not overnight, that’s for sure. It’s going to take a long time to ever get that kind of critical mass.
What I’m trying to get at is that people need to stay for a critical mass to be reached instead of going “there’s nobody here” and leaving.
I can’t blame them, because they’ve been conditioned to be consumers of content. While they idealize creators, they also put up barriers in their minds as the the level of quality a given comment, piece of content, whatever, needs to achieve before getting involved.
I try and think of Lemmy as the equivalent of the Linux. We’re just going to have lower adoption because there isn’t a corporate juggernaut behind us promoting this thing.
But if people really want to know why reddit was able to become reddit, it happened here yesterday with cats. It’s bean memes. Its Stör. Its us developing culture of our own as a community.
So its fine. I’m not too worried. We’re doing great.
I didn’t get a wall of voids and honestly, I feel a little left out lol.
Unfortunately, community building is work, and it’s work that users actually do on the bigger, corporate sites. Those community builders helped get those spaces going, helped make them appealing, and help trap users there. In smaller spaces like this, we need to be the community builders, not just the content consumers.
One thing I find really helps is to use something that doesn’t look like the space you left. Lemmy looks an awful lot like Reddit, but it has themes, and even alternative web clients that can change the experience and make it feel like something new.
Lemmy also isn’t the content and communities, it’s just the website’s server software. You can access… ugh… the “threadiverse”… from websites using other ActivityPub enabled servers. There’s an ActivityPub Discourse plugin. nodeBB is adding ActivityPub support in its next version. Friendica and Hubzilla have group support, and work with Lemmy-hosted communities.
Find a new window on social media, and it might help you engage with it differently.
The other thing you can do is just niche down a bit here. Find a few active communities that you’re interested in, and focus your attention on them. Lemmy is actually much, much more like classic forums, where communities or spheres of interest have their own website. The difference here is that you can actually look outside of those communities to interact with other forums, too. It works a a lot better if you treat it that way. Find your home, as it were, and branch out from there.
Unfortunately, the modern mental model of social media is the fire hose, not the node-and-spoke that is actually best supported by the technology.
Someone has to be the first on the dance floor, and you don’t want to be it.
Most people are obviously more lurkers than contributors. I don’t think one should expect that to change, given the vastly different mindsets behind it.
<Elaine dancing>
I have really been enjoying Comic Strips. There can be some political content, but there’s plenty of other interesting and funny stuff too.
Rather than trying to replace something else, it’s a good idea to look for what’s new to you.
Does lemmy have flairs? Would be useful if they had a mandatory flair for objectionable content
I don’t want to simply repeat what others have said, but on a personal level, I’m actually enjoying the smaller overall community - it makes it a bit more personal, I feel. I enjoy that. Yeah, fair enough, it’s not great for niches, but you don’t have to be tethered down to one place for your content.
Back in my day, you had to go to completely different websites for your niche content! Forums were the mainstream!
Ya I don’t mind and I think it’s because this place reminds me a lot of old forums or old reddit. I really miss some of my old forums and the community that would be built there.
. The smaller feel also encourages contributing over lurking, because every individual’s comment can actually get read, unlike the huge megathreads of reddit.
Thing is, it can be great for niches! The Star Trek instance is very Star Trek. The TTRPG instance has a lot of potential. If we try to build the fediverse out from these niche nodes first, instead of starting from the general and trying to branch out, it could work a lot better than what we currently have.
I agree that, asking with the bad things OP mentions, there are good things about a smaller site. I remember a lot of times on Reddit when I had something to say, but when I went into the thread there were thousands of comments and I’d feel like there just wasn’t a point in adding mine.
On Lemmy, when I make a comment, it’s very likely to be seen (for better or worse), and I have much more of a feeling of adding to the conversation. It’s more like joining a conversation at a party.
I think the people who grew up a bit later may feel this more keenly than some of us olds who used to have to use the yellow pages.
All I’m getting lately in my feed are cats!
Would you rather have cats or beans?
Cats have beans, duh.
Beans have cats, duh.
Not a bug! That’s a feature.
No, of course not. Cats are mammals, not insects.
Honestly, that was what early reddit was like too. Lots and lots of cat pics.
