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!
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Critical mass has high inertia.
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.
Lemmy attract its own community naturally
Do you want to see more content, or you don’t?
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 prefer 100 quality posters to 100,000 shitposters.
Agree with Blaze, they probably remember too when Reddit was in its infancy, it was unappealing to your average netizen, the same as Lemmy is now
Remember that 90% of Reddit is now ex-Tumblr and Facebook people; they would come to lemmy, see it’s a bit clunky, and go tell a hundred others on Reddit how bad an experience it was for them
Next thing lemmy has a reputation like Tesla that isn’t going to shake off any time soon
From what I’ve seen on reddit, this is sort of already happening. Lemmy’s name isn’t mud yet, but it’s being spoken of like most of the alternatives over there: not good enough or flawed in some way. Lack of content and users is the main one that gets said about all of them, but beyond that, the negative things I see said about Lemmy most often are: “scatter-brained”, “unintuitive”, “tanky”, “messy”, “not respecting user privacy”, “admins defederating and shadow banning”, “having to apply to instances”, “federated content not appearing the same on each instance”, “lack of mod tools”, “need a third party site to help find communities”, etc.
And it should be said that many of the most common negative things I’ve seen said about Lemmy on Reddit are being addressed, but some are not. Privacy (public voting) and issues with admins erecting invisible walls in the federation through various means are not being seriously addressed as far as I’ve seen.
I think the main issue that will ultimately hurt Lemmy versus any other platform that comes along is that Lemmy’s selling point of defederation is only a selling point to some people. Most people on Reddit don’t care about centralization, they just want a platform like reddit. They’ll come here and put up with it if they have too, but they will scamper off for a centralized site the moment one starts gaining traction unless Lemmy finds some way to provide something equally as unified, simple, and easy to use.
Maybe a frontend or app that just shows you everything and allows you to interact easily without worrying about logins or urls for instances, and pushes the federation aspect “behind the scenes”.
in fairness, most of the whining about defederated instances is coming from the same people who turned reddit into a cesspit.
reddit was a cesspit 10 years ago, only the trash stayed after 2012
Maybe a frontend or app that just shows you everything and allows you to interact easily without worrying about logins or urls for instances, and pushes the federation aspect “behind the scenes”.
Let’s say I’m browsing Lemmy.world through this frontend and I stumbled upon !privacy@lemmy.ml. Would the following be clear?
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”.
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. @z00s@lemmy.world 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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
Reddit’s decline is greatly exaggerated.
It’s also advantageous to keep low agency and low quality users on reddit.
Lemmy has already started to decline in quality since average redditors started migrating here.
I might have a controversial question: but why? Do we really want this mass exodus to the Lemmy community? I think we have a nice little thing here. People will keep coming anyway, slowly, if they really are interested in what this is about
You mean you don’t want communities infested with bots promoting thinly veiled advertisements and reposting crusty old content to farm upvotes to make their accounts look more legitimate?
I agree with this. The fedi communities as they exist appear to be happy with the niche. We don’t need to be the replacement of a corporate owned social network. Nor should we be.
Places like mastodon or lemmy should grow organically over time if we all want a healthier online culture.
It’s a nice little thing, but there so much to miss compared to Reddit. Sure, we have memes, technology and news. But there is very little other discussion going on, even for big things like food, sports, finance and relationships (picked some on the top of my mind). Huge communities on Reddit. Barely anything here.
Overall Lemmy is very much a disappointment when it comes to “niche” communities, if you can even call those large subjects that. But it’s even worse for smaller subjects.
Exactly, I enjoy the high quality discussion currently found on Lemmy and I feel the masses would only bring the average IQ down.
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.
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.The website looks 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.
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.
Current redditors are a virus. They are nothing like the people who built the site a decade ago. We don’t need them here
Lmao elitism like this will just turn Lemmy into a radioactive, insular circlejerk cesspool
If you want the reddit experience you can just stay there. It’s still available and active. You sound like the kind of people that move across country because you want change then complain the new state isn’t the same as your old home full of those problems that made you move.
And you sound like a republican telling refugees to go back to their home country
People are leaving Reddit out of conscience and are looking for a more free place to share opinions, which this structurally is.
If you don’t like it, start your own instance or join r/conservative
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I almost agree with this. I think that the problem aren’t the individuals themselves, but how that environment conditioned them to behave like morons. And I also think that, as long as they change their behaviour when arriving, they could be useful to bring more content quantity to Lemmy.
I’ve been a reddit user for at least 15 years. I’ve been a Lemmy user for a few months. Lemmy has a long way to go before it’s a “viable Reddit alternative”. Right now it’s barely usable.
You find it unusable? How so?
For me, it needs features from RES, Toolbox, highlight new comments, etc.
Unless I’m mistaken, highlighting new comments was a reddit gold feature, not RES.
Yep, that’s why I listed it separately. I used a script for highlighting comments on reddit: https://archive.fo/kgsfz
Perhaps it would be simple enough to modify it to work on lemmy.
EDIT: Saidit has it built-in.
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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.
Yeah. I would prefer that nobody from Reddit come except those that it feels like a fit for. If they need to be brow beaten, don’t beat their brow. They are happier there, we’re happier here.
This place is already pretty great.
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.
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.
I think something we could do as a community is to make resources that help make understanding things happening here easier, like rapidly updated community guides to the available apps with screen shots showing features.
Really what we need is independent and community development of cool new things that you can’t get anywhere else, a real reason to actually come here over all the other similar choices - ideally things that corporate sites would avoid because they’re focusing on profit.
One tool I’m going to be working on is having an instance/community that makes it easy for people to work on collaborative design - ideally it’ll be a pipeline where idea get refined into design briefs then fact finding tasks split from that and eventually it all boils up into a series of implementation tasks, testing and documentation then finally actually gets turned into an open source product or a piece of creative commons media.
Is there somewhere you can point me to with more information on this idea? I’m intrigued and would like to participate in this type of community.
I’m just researching and working things out so far, will let you know if I get anything properly written up.
I think stuff like this needs to happen organically, otherwise you’ll have people who hate it, complain about it, and give it a bad rep, hindering its growth
