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!
Have a look at this post, we had a similar discussion there: https://lemmy.world/post/3074361
Long story short, the platform still needs a bit of work before being able to really move communities. Some examples exist (lemdro.id, piracy, startrek) but those are tech savvy audiences, there would be a lot more friction with more generalist communities
I fully agree with you. And I want to emphasize that the main issue is that if you start advertising Lemmy like OP suggest before it’s “fully ready” to give the best experience to this people, they will decide now that lemmy is not for them and after that it’s very difficult to make they try again and change their mind.
Exactly the mistake threads just made, trying to capitalize on twitter’s rate limiting fiasco. The “general public” is extremely fickle, and Reddit will give us more opportunities.
One thing that annoys me coming from Reddit is, that there isn’t just one group of each theme. You have for example gaming groups on several instances and you can either chose to subscribe to a number of those or chose the one you like.
But in the end, one will be the go-to group, and wouldn’t that centralize the most popular groups?
(Honest question, I’m new to Lemmy and the thoughts behind it)
instances are like countries with their own constitution (rules) and police (mods). This means that two communities in different instances may seem the same, but they are not, because they have to follow the rules and culture of their instance.
Just like a Technology club in Japan will not be the same as the Technology club in the US because they will be culturally different. I think it will take some time for the Fediverse to think this way.
For me, this is better. Instead of having one giant technology community where your comments and posts are drowned out, we can have different technology communities with their own culture and norms, just like we visit different countries. Your comment and posts will be not drowned out.
It is a different paradigm to the centralised one of Reddit.
Yep, if you’re not from the US, instances are vastly superior.
Imagine all the times people from around the world asked for plumbing help on Reddit and got hit with “that ain’t up to code, buddy, get to ass down to Howm Deeepo” 😂
Americans do tend to assume the internet revolves around them, as they’re a bit insular and don’t see that it really, really, really doesn’t
A lot of that is social media/algorithmic too. It wasn’t until I start migrating to Lemmy (specifically lemm.ee) that I started seeing a lot of varied content.
Seriously? Aren’t the anti-USA comments getting a bit tired by now?
This is not an anti-American comment, but a fact. The USA is a superpower and a big country. As a superpower, americans don’t need to be informed about what happens in the world because it doesn’t affect them. Their country is the source of world power. And Americans tend to travel within their country because it’s big and full of tourist attractions.
Compare that with Canada, which has 40 million people. We need to be aware of every single decision the US makes so that the country can adapt. There is a famous quote from Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
Hmm, you know how the Tarrifs are limiting trade? I don’t want to get political, but when trade slows, that is when it becomes obvious that USA is NOT immune to whatever happens to the rest of the world.
Every pyramid has a foundation.
Yes, the USA is a big country and a superpower.
But things that happen in the world do have major impact on the country and all of its citizens. The need to be up to date and aware of world events is critical. Everyone should be educated. It is the only way to make informed decisions.
You may not have meant it as an anti-American trope but it came off that way. Even the comment you attribute to Trudeau is a thinly veiled insult to our country. That is not lost on me or others here in the fediverse or other American citizens. The anti-USA bashing has become hackneyed and decidedly juvenile.
I expect better from you.
They are tiring honestly, I agree
These two comments prove my last sentence
You don’t notice the “anti”-everything comments, only the ones you perceive as “America-hate”
And by the way, nobody hates you, you’re just really bad at dealing with sarcasm
No, they don’t. I was addressing specifically the anti-American sentiment that seems to be the “hip thing to do”. Nothing more, nothing less.
Just because I did not mention any other energy wasting hate speech does not mean I am not aware.
I still expect better from you.
I do agree, however I would argue that an increased user base would help accelerate progress on improving lemmy
To be honest, people who are tech savvy and bug tolerant enough to be on Lemmy are probably already here. There were quite a few discussions about it (and still now on Reddit)
I predict it will be the mobile apps that get us over that hump
Definitely. Sync and Boost will bring the largest users influx
Infinity too.
Indeed
Which is unfortunate imo. More mobile users means less effort and lower quality content
Mirror for that lemmy.world post since they’re currently down…
The fact that large instances hit more downtime than something like reddit will always be a detriment.
lemmy.world really needs to close signups and the creation of new communities, until they can improve their uptime
or they should at least be removed from https://join-lemmy.org/instances maybe it could track the uptime and use that to build the list?
but Reddit actually does go down pretty often too
They said themselves the issue isn’t signups or server capacity, it’s that they’ve been under multiple rounds of DDoS attacks.
Why are they being DDoS’d though? I thought it was because they’re the biggest instance and thus shutting down still helps
Well, by that logic, if they shut down, the the next largest will be targeted, and then the next largest, etc. That’s not a winning game for anyone involved…
Right but we’ll be more decentralized so any such attack won’t affect the threadiverse as much. Right now every time .world goes down the entire fediverse feels half dead because it’s so large.
But if this happens 7 times and there’s now 7 major instances, each will only take up like 10% of the total and attacking it won’t affect much.
In that sense, getting more decentralized is basically a natural evolution of the big instances being attacked. I’m just trying to speed it up.
Yeah but why give new users a bad experience, you’re just gonna drive them away from Lemmy and they never come back
Also we’re overly centralized on them, we need to decentralize better, both users and communities
I mean, that could happen to any other Lemmy instance too, unfortunately. And even if you do decentralize, a server going down still deprives the rest of us of that content, so it’s never not going to cause some issues. So I wouldn’t hold this against Lemmy.world.
I don’t hold it against them, it’s just unfortunate that they’ve been having so much downtime recently, certainly more than most other good instances
Thanks!
Yeah, people say we should use small instances to keep things spread out but two of the ones I tried have major posting issues that stop comments working, We really need to stress test and big squish before we really push it to everyone, some of the issues I’ve seen have been fixed and on general it’s very stable so I don’t think it’s got far to go
Which were those, out of curiosity?
Discuss.online and slrpnk both good communities but issues with syncing
Thanks!
Have had absolutely zero issues on slrpnk even after the big Reddit migrations.
It also needs about 1000% less hostility when it comes to anything beyond superficial discussion. Basically every news thread just gets brigaded by idiots trolling with pictures of pig shit. I get it, internet is not serious business, but in terms of actual discourse at the moment, this place is worse than Facebook.
Wow, my experience is very opposite this. It sounds like you’re describing reddit to me honestly. I’ve seen way less hostility here compared with Reddit
It depends on what content you consume I guess. On Reddit, news subs generally enforce decorum pretty strongly which really eliminates outright trolling. On lemmy there is the opposite of this in many places - lemmygrad and hexbear openly state that it is their goal to shit up threads to deny “shit libs” a platform, and the mods on several major instances seem to openly allow it.
So if you never consume that kind of content on either platform, you’d never notice the relative toxicity of lemmy.
That’s why instances need to defederate and block lemmygrad and hexbear, to discourage that behavior.
This is neither here nor there, but the only thing I hate with a burning passion more than right wingers is the tankie filth that pervades those instances.Wait, do you any links to them admitting that? I believe you, but it’s a good idea to have that saved.
I say this as someone who hates tankies just as much as the next dude, but that community isn’t really productive nor helpful. If you seriously have an issue with lemmygrad there are many instances that have defederated from them (i think sh.itjust.works is?). A community like that does nothing but to bring drama within the lemmyverse. Yes, their views are at times abhorrent but you are just provoking a community that already has major issue with large portions of the lemmyverse. We really should leave that toxic drama stirring behind.
Didn’t you just say “it’s a good idea to have this stuff saved”
You just asked for evidence.
the mods on several major instances seem to openly allow it.
Mods AND Lemmy developers.
I don’t see that either. People have disagreed with me politely and intelligently here which is just good conversation.
Yeah, I’ve run into this here. I posted a question to one of the posts asking why it was such a big deal, and all the sudden I’m a corporate defender. I don’t think this is a reddit, lemmy, or anything issue, it’s just internet and echo chambers. If you don’t reply with a “OMG YES SO TRUE OMG” then you are a dissident.
Come visit !worldnews@sh.itjust.works if you want quality discussion!
How about we just forget about trying to beat anyone and just get on to using the platform.
Reddit won’t die anytime soon.
Lemmy won’t become popular anytime soon.
It took Reddit years before it became a major platform known by millions. It will take Lemmy years to gain notoriety among millions. Give it time, enjoy what it so now because in a year, two years or three or four years from now, we’ll all be wishing for the good old days when Lemmy just started and we were able to enjoy the simple system it is now.
Reddit really did benefit from the fall of Digg though - this was about just shy of 20 years ago? Digg was where Reddit is now, thoroughly upsetting its user base with wholesale changes to the content of the site that nobody liked, and Reddit capitalized on that, and stole Digg’s thunder.
I think Lemmy can potentially do the same. For a second, it looked like Squabbles/Squabblr was going to be the winner, but the last I checked, they imploded after some controversy.
(I came here from Reddit, incidentally - the user interface is very intuitive.)
Doesn’t seem like most Reddit users care. There is still way more activity on Reddit then here, and that probably isn’t changing anytime soon. And right now Reddit still has better content since it seems mostly Lemmy is just posts about Reddit.
Look at the comments per day of any major subs such as
https://subredditstats.com/r/AskReddit
The 3rd party apps shutdown made a huge impact on the number of comments. Activity is still there, but much less
Yeah lemmy can do the same, but begging redditors to switch won’t help anything. I was part of the digg migration, nobody on reddit ever posted on digg to go switch. I just searched for something else, and reddit was there. I certainly didn’t spend a second thinking about digg afterwards, and i wont think about reddit either.
Agreed, lots of naysayers here for some reason
I know right? People think that Lemmy will grow “naturally”, but Lemmy is not a plant, there is nothing natural about this process. If people want it to grow, actions must be taken just like the OP proposed.
Naturally meaning make lemmy a good experience and people will come. Begging redditors to come won’t help anything. Hell, OP and anyone else is free to just set up an instance where a bot reposts whatever gets posted to reddit front page, or a specific sub. That’s a fine idea i think to help lemmy grow, as is any idea that will improve the Lemmy experience. But there’s no need to spam reddit mods and ask them to help grow lemmy.
free to just set up an instance where a bot reposts whatever gets posted to reddit front page, or a specific sub.
https://lemmit.online/ is that instance
Naturally meaning make lemmy a good experience and people will come.
They can’t come if they don’t know about Lemmy. I came here, because I’d seen many posts about it on Reddit. You probably heard about it from someone too. We’re on the internet in 2023: people don’t go beyond first few links on Google, they rarely leave big platforms and aggregators like Facebook and Reddit. While I agree that this particular strategy raises questions (I don’t see why Reddit mods would care), I support the cause.
They’ll know about it when it’s a good product. And , they do know about it, every fuck spez thread had lemmy memtioned as an alternative. At this point, any redditors who cared about the api changes know about lemmy. And that’s fine if you want to go on reddit and spam lemmy links.
But it makes no sense to go to current reddit mods who are committed to volunteering for reddit six weeks after all this shit went down. They like reddit and dont plan on leaving, if they did they would have six weeks ago.
People know about it already, they find it confusing, hard to use, you cannot block an instance, there are no multireddits, Sync is still in beta, the main instance is down half of the time.
All of these points should be addressed for Lemmy to become mainstream
You make it sound like one blocks another, but we already have a lot of people and there’s no reason why we can’t attract more. You’re here despite these issues.
Critical mass has high inertia.
Not this again…
Lemmy isn’t everyones’ cup of tea. Reddit, despite the API shenanigans, still does what people want.
People are not moving here from Reddit if they haven’t already. They’d sooner go to Discord. Less cognitive load, and their subs already have servers set up. Lemmy has a 5 communities different servers for each sub and most will be inactive, so it’s already a losing battle.
Make Lemmy it’s own thing, rather than aspiring to be the 2nd head of the Hydra. Organic growth is good, sustainable. Boom and bust wholesale migrations look like failed hostile takeovers.
I think you’re grossly overestimating the ability of FOSS to reach “regular” people. 99.9% of Redditors haven’t even heard of Lemmy. There are assuredly very many people using Reddit who would be very happy to switch to something better.
You’re not wrong with any of your points, I’m just saying there’s no reason to discourage a “get the word out” campaign. People can make their own choices, but only after they know what the options are.
Have a look at this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/1507unf/post_why_dont_reopen_here_completely/
People were being told to move to Lemmy, but they fiercely refused, sometimes being utterly agressive.
And this is a Unixporn community, which is supposed to be aware of FOSS.
I think a more appropriate approach is just to mention lemmy to your circles of friends and try to get any redditors you personally know to give lemmy a try, at least get the app installed so they can browse both reddit and lemmy. Lemmy won’t be able to handle millions upon millions of new people, especially ones with no guidance, but communities aren’t built overnight and we should do our best to get those who could use lemmy to use lemmy, one at a time. We shouldn’t be trying to overthrow reddit, just give a viable alternative to those willing to try one. It’s the more organic approach.
Grass roots wins Vs marketing.
Make that healthy root system grow!
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.
What is “naturally”? I heard about Lemmy through reddit during the exodus. Was that unnatural?
I’m not sure the culture aspect is unique to Reddit though. The culture seems more or less platform independent IMO.
No. Most large Reddit communities are toxic, both on the user and mod end. Let Lemmy grow at its own pace without repeating the same mistakes Reddit made.
This is the best take. I’d rather organic growth, here people come here for actual content, than just shove a bunch of redditors over and repost reddit content
In some communities they’re already doing exactly that.
Right now lemmy feels more toxic to me than reddit in many ways. I’ve never been on a reddit news thread where people were openly trolling and posting pictures of pig shit in response to comments they don’t like.
Trolls and other idiots are part of humanity and its perfectly natural for lemmy to have its share. Reddit does as well. But taking one sub as a basis to say that lemmy seems more toxic than reddit sounds very far fetched.
Those get autodeleted, or are on instances that are explicitly been defederated across most instances outside of lemmy.ml
Much the popular posts in lemmy are memes, shitpostings, or politics/technology news which we can easily obtain from other media. The way I see it, lemmy lacks experts, scientists, doctors etc that that can bring interest and credibility to the posts or threads. They can help generate quality contents, what lemmy lacks till now.
This is something lemdro.id focuses on as an instance but to technical content. Particularly the !android@lemdro.id community is ran by the same mod team as the r/android subreddit and what comes with that are the AMAs with industry experts, various authors of android content on XDA and more, and other various things. !android@lemdro.id is the premier source for Android news and technical content with the subreddit redirecting to there where reasonable
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.
Oh boy, it looks like main character syndrome patients have migrated from Reddit…
I just thought Lemmy could benefit from my plot armour. /s
In all honesty, as much as I want non-profit Reddit alternatives to succeed, I think Lemmy is a tough sell to Redditors. Here’s roughly how I think that’d go.
Lemmy user: “You should try Lemmy”
Redditor: “Sure, what’s its website?”
Lemmy user: “There are many”
Redditor: “Wait what”
Lemmy user: “You have to pick one”
Redditor: “Why?”
Lemmy user: “See, Lemmy is not a website, but a network of federated instan-”
Redditor: “That sounds complicated. I just want a website like Reddit”
Lemmy user: “But don’t you care about how Reddit has treated its mods, app devs and the general community?”
Redditor: “Yeah but all this Lemmy and Kbin stuff is confusing. Can I just use a website without reading up on all this Fediverse stuff?”
Lemmy user: “Okay, just go to Lemmy.world”
Redditor: “It seems to be down”
Lemmy user: “Hmm, maybe try Lemmy.ml?”
Redditor: “This website looks a little… hard to wrap my head around”
Lemmy user: “There are alternative frontends”
Redditor: “What now?”
Lemmy user: “Do you know about Alexandrite?”
Redditor: “Nevermind, I’m out”
If we want to convince a wide range of users to use Lemmy, we have to make using Lemmy a no-brainer for everyone.
I’m trying to contribute by building a new opensource web UI that I hope will provide a better UX for the average Redditor. It’s not ready to become a daily driver yet, but I’m hoping to get to a point where it’s nice enough that instances will want to host it on their domain. Maybe I’m delusional in thinking this web UI will appeal to users that don’t like the current ones. But there’s only one way to find out, and that is to build it.
Lemmy user: “You should try Lemmy”
Redditor: “Sure, what’s its website?”
Lemmy user: “there are many, here’s a list, just pick one, you can always use a different one later”
Redditor: “ok cool I’m glad you explained it in a simple way that is easy for me to understand I will use lemmy exclusively now”
If it was that easy to convince Redditors, we’d already have a very diverse userbase. But by all means, keep spreading the word. We all want Lemmy to succeed.
Honestly that conversation is very, very bad. That’s exactly how you not introduce new things to people.
Like you don’t start throwing unknown terms to them, or at least I very much hope so. It is a network of forum websites. Yes it’s good to know that it’s federated but for a starter that’s just an unknown word that makes it complicated.
lemmy.world, lemmy.ml: why the overloaded ones?
And when they say that it starts to get complicated, why would you mention yet another complicated concept out of the blue? Yes, if you do it that way, that’s disastrous, and does much more harm than good.Oh, we’re promoting our open source web UI now? Well, ngl, mine’s kinda lean; it’s Leanish!
Heck yeah, share your work with the world.
We should probably compile a regularly updated list somewhere. It’s great that people have so many options. Now we just need to make it easier for them to find a web UI that suits their needs.
You’re not wrong, but it’s no reason to discourage other people from making the effort if they want to.
The website looks good!
Dude, you just paraphrased my experience perfectly. Well almost, wtf is Kbin… (And what is Discord for that matter, someone mentioned that above?)
Nice strawman.
Lemming: You should try Lemmy, it’s a way to have reddit style content, but without a company controlling it.
Redditor: Wow cool, Fuck Spez. Where do I join?
Lemming: it doesn’t matter, every domain that participates has the same content, here’s a list of places to choose from.
I agree with both posts.
I put lemmy off because the way everyone was explaining it was confusing AF. Everyone comes at you like they are on the street handing out Bibles.
People go through this whole fediverse diatribe. There should just be a universal Eli 5 infographic that each instance shows new users that briefly describe how it works.
Once you remove the decentralized fedi talk it’s actually pretty simple to understand.
It’s a just rhetorical device to explain a theory for why most Redditors haven’t jumped ship yet. It may be correct, it may be incorrect.
“Hello we are from the Church of the Fediverse, have you a moment to talk about our Lord and Saviour Lemmy? No not the tankies one”
Haha, that is a pretty hilarious visual. Do we get funny hats?
Best I can do is magic underwear.
IMO the biggest thing Lemmy needs is a better onboarding experience and an official page that recommends mobile apps/alternate front-ends. One of the Lemmy devs said they wanted to overhaul https://join-lemmy.org/ and it’s on their list, which is a good first step. Until then I think it’s best to wait before trying to capture the average audience and have them leave in confusion.
Yes I never thought plastering it with screenshots of your rust codebase made a good first impression. I get it, open source is awesome, but come on guys. That shouldn’t be the first description of your product that people see.
deleted by creator
True, they’ve only just begun
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.
As far as I’m concerned Reddit=Facebook=Twitter…
Although, it would be nice to see more actual useful communities that don’t just latch on to pop politics, news culture, and media trends.
Two of my reddit using friends have never heard of lemmy until I told them about it a few days ago. Although they are quite invested in the FOSS world.
I am here because I read something about Lemmy on reddit, two or three times. More exposure on reddit would show many people that there is an alternative. It wouldn’t convince millions but maybe enough to let some niche communities grow.
That’s surprising, I saw Lemmy mentioned a lot during the 3rd party apps debacle.
There is even a sub called LemmyMigration
They all already know about Lemmy 🤷♀️
People “all already know about Apple computers”, but they keep reminding us anyways! It seems to work. I think there are a lot of people who have been meaning to check out Lemmy, and could use a reminder. Or people who came and left before it was as worth staying.
This is a bad parallel to draw, and I think you’re aware of that.
