the predicted commie red wave revolution are all here in their dozens, actually about 2000 of them

revolution!

I don’t like the title cause there’s a decently sized userbase here, but the article is good. If the article was something like “Why don’t more people use Lemmy?” then I would share this on Reddit, but as-is most people will just read the headline and skip it.

I mean the sad explanation is that they simply don’t care. They’ll complain all the livelong day about the problems but they’ll never leave. That much was clear after they killed the API and everyone protested for a whopping 2 days.

And yet here we are 3 years later, still protesting.

everytime an instance, or a community goes down or recieves too much drama, they scatter to other platforms thats why. some went to piefed, and others. the last instance that went down, there was much more people lemmy, especially in some categories(not much but more than now)

I don’t use Mastodon or Twitter either. I never understood following specific people and prefer following topics instead.

I don’t generally like the Twitter model and rarely use it, but I will say that one thing that it does do well, better than the Reddit/Threadiverse model, is very rapidly assembling information about a specific, temporary topic.

Like, the Reddit model is about letting a community assemble over time and letting people find their way there and moderators be chosen and all that. That works quite well for a lot of things, and lets people with expertise in the field arise and all that.

But let’s say that there’s a huge natural disaster and people are putting up video clips from their cell phones and stuff like that. They can coalesce around a hashtag or a couple of hashtags pretty quickly and relevant material from people who have had no contact with each other and maybe no time to assemble a community or anything gets drawn together. Other users retweeting content help highlight it. The topic probably won’t be active for long. It can be really useful for a rapid setup and teardown scenario.

Of course, that’s really mostly following a hashtag, rather than a particular user…

I also dislike the “short comment” model that Twitter uses (though over the years, the comment length has been increased and workarounds added), but one thing that it does help with is to help deal with inexperienced users unfamiliar with quoting etiquette. In email or in traditional forum systems, it’s conventional to quote a bit of relevant text before responding to it. This requires knowing syntax for doing so and when it’s appropriate. Twitter deals with that by forcing everything to be broken up into bite-size chunks as a property of the system, so someone responding to something is forced to respond to only the relevant bit. I think that that probably helps make Twitter more-approachable.

People that do actual geolocations for the war in Ukraine are basically the primary sources. They figure out where and when videos were taken and do the actual work. Following the topic gets you to some big account that aggregates them

Mastodon allows you to follow hashtags, which would be like following a topic.

Exactly. And with the advanced web interface on Mastodon or an app like Moshidon or Manfred, you can create custom timelines that show just a collection of hashtags.

I use that a lot—exclusively, really.

Exactly! I’d be curious to see the reverse poll, asking Lemmy users “Why does nobody use Mastodon?” (and include Bluesky and Twitter in the poll.)

I use Lemmy (and in the past Reddit) because topic based conversation is what makes sense to me. Anytime I try to use Mastodon or Bluesky I lurk for a bit and then just come back here.

following people is nice if you know these people personally, like from real life.

I think its okay the way it is. Too much attention leads to many reposts, karma farmers, bots, now AI bullshit etc.

I think it’s too empty a lot of times. Mainstream topics are nicely populated but a vast amount of specific communities are just one person posting links over and over with a handful of upvotes and zero comments. Sometimes I see posts here and have to go to Reddit to see what the community thinks about it, because on Lemmy the post is completely dead.

I say this in all of these threads: more users does not mean a better experience.

Instead, focus on making our communities the best they can be.

I think that’s only true after a certain amount of users.

I joined Lemmy a couple of years ago and I already notice more user engagement. I would like a little bit more, such that more niche communities can have an ecosystem of posters instead of a single one doing most posts. But not much more indeed

I say this in all of these threads: more users does not mean a better experience.

It does when your current amount of users is functionally equivalent to, like, “2”.

To be fair, karma farmers aren't really possible on Lemmy.

Does anyone else find the font on this uncomfortable to read is that just me?

Your browser likely has a “reader view”. In Firefox, by default, this can be toggled via clicking the little page icon in the URL bar. Remote styles won’t be applied in that.

It is not just you

nobody

I’m somebody!

I’m nobody.

Also: Happy Cake Day!

Thanks!

I’m not!

Just you wait. Growth will happen in shocks. Basically people probably haven’t heard about Lemmy yet.

Plenty of people heard about Lemmy and bounced off. PieFed is the one people haven’t heard about yet, there’s some hope that they get a big growth spurt

I have to be that guy and point out that the Threadiverse isn't just Lemmy, and microblog-Fedi isn't just Mastodon.

Oh ok

Reddit started out small too, you know when it was actually good.

I use Lemmy every day!

Lemmy ist for talking about topics, mastodon is for following brands and entering parasocial relationships.

No you're thinking of Threads

Mastodon is a source for links to post to Lemmy. :P

That’s also true. It has a wider audience, so there is more stuff to discuss. But I feel like it converges mostly to mainstream topics, and more niche things are harder to discuss.

If everyone used lemmy, lemmy would be reddit

This is the thing right here. Enjoy Lemmy as it is. There’s plenty of people here. The more people there are, the more it’s going to suck. Be glad Lemmy isn’t Reddit. I sure as fuck am. Lemmy is exactly the right size. Well, maybe it could double or triple and there would be more content and that would be a net positive, but anything more than that and it’s going to start devolving into the same cesspool that Reddit has become.

I don’t know if more people make lemmy automatically more shitty. After all this community started with a few hand fulls of reddits banned political extremists which tended to be the most annoying part at reddit (at least for me). New users at lemmy learn pretty quickly to ignore/ban pricks. I’d hope we get more content (and again advise anyone alread here to share their interests by posting in the dedicated communities).

As long as instance owners moderate, the trashy people will be forced too flock to instances that allow that type of behavior and then we can block those instances individually.

I left Reddit because of how the moderators got pissed on, not the community. I just never went to /r/popular and enjoyed my life. My mod tools were removed from me and I can’t be assed to get their shitty app. I’d rather put my time somewhere that I’m not being used for free labor while also being sold as a product.

yea the tiered/hierarchical moderation is a great feature, if an instance sucks then it will get defederated or at least blocked by users (or even as a default block for new users that can be removed on a per-user basis in their settings)

This is a great point and it does speak to the Fediverse being more resilient for sure. I still do not wish for numbers like Reddit has, somehow life uh… finds a way (to make everything shit).

No, the issue with reddit is the lack of openness and chokehold spez has on it. Lemmy is free.

You put too much faith in the general public.

If someone wants to act in an unbecoming way, they have a right to provided it isn’t breaking the law.

Free as in beans

Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with beans. Who’s gonna do it? You? 🫘

Hexbear!

F*ck spez.

The main issue with reddit, as with every other large platform is the quality of the people using it. They are made worse by the platform itself, but the platform would not be able to be so bad, if the people were not predominantly trash.

People on here are hardly saints lol. I had several people wishing for my death as well as some guy following me around

It’s not good to be the king…

I guarantee there are many bad people here, because… humans. It’s all about percentages though I guess, at this point a lot of lemmy users wanted something different, something ‘better’, but at some point most lemmy users will just be here because everyone else is here, at which point the decent people will have found the next lemmy (this has already happened no doubt).

It’s partially the platform, partially the moderators, partially the people using it

I’d say we have too many reposts and not enough original content here. I mean you probably need to think about the value proposition. What does the Lemmyverse offer to someone from Mastodon? A lot of what we do is post the news and memes. And we got some Linux computer support. Now they already got all of that over on Mastodon. Oftentimes it won’t even be a repost by some third party, but they get more original content because bloggers and comic artists post themselves over there. Along with some computer magazines and news outlets.

we also have science memes, showerthoughts and comic strips though!

I wonder if the comic strips community isn’t just frequented by way too many high drama people to be appealing to a general audience. 😂 It is one of the very popular communities, though.

sue 2: Users could agree on one community. Or (a functionality Lemmy doesn't have), similar communities could be grouped or linked together. Instead of choosing between Linux@lemmy.ml and Linux@lemmy.world, users could follow a combined “Linux” topic.

Doesn't PieFed do exactly that?

Yes, and it consolidates comments from cross-posts. Very neat.

Its very cool.

Personally I’m not a fan. Imagine if /r/games and /r/gaming on reddit shared comment sections. That’d be a complete mess.

Different communities should be allowed to nurture their own culture.

Well it doesn’t mix the comments, there’s a divider between

A divider, lol. It’s still the same page and everything. Hardly any separation. We shouldn’t encourage this mono-culture style.

Well you don’t have to use it if you don’t like it. Many people like it, it was a feature with high demand. Even without the feature I always check the crossposts for different comments, so it’s the same thing just more convenient, no difference in “mono-culture”

What do you think about the Mbin model? (linked an example post)

Is it just the related links under the post? Seems fine to me.

How does the topic consolidation work, exactly? Does it only consolidate cross-posts, or does it also consolidate all posts from communities that have exactly the same name? The only documentation I can find is at join.piefed.social/features/ which just says:

Consolidated Comments – View all comments from multiple related posts on one page (example).

The real answer, that we all know but dare not speak, is that it’s miserable here.

Once you’ve blocked the tankies, porn, and militant dweebs, it’s wall to wall politics and titty memes.

I’m here because I’m also a miserable asshole.

Conservatives did this to you. I’m sending you some “cheer up” tiddies.

You can be in the left and know this place is filled with the most broken progressives we have 🤷

Conservatives did this to us. We’re gonna need some more “cheer up” tiddies.

There was a glorious few months before Reddit enshittified even further, before the bigger migration of users. After that it turned into 90% American politics.

Edit: downvote me all you want Americans, but the rest of the world is kind of sick of your shit ngl.

My main reason for looking for alternatives. Wanted to stop my morning coffee doom scrolling to consist of only US politics… if you can call it politics that is… Lemmy fits the bill.

As someone has said before, I agree with a bit of lack on on-boarding, you need to be a little bit more insistent on setup to ensure you get the communities you want. Not hard, but can definitely imagine that would stop some from trying out lemmy any further.

Yeah that was a big part of why I swapped, but it’s getting flooded again.

PieFed helps with this

How?

When you signup on piefed.social it asks you something like “do you want to see posts about US politics?” And if you don’t want to see them, it gives you a filter that hides/dims posts that have “Trump” in the title lol it’s pretty effective. It’s configurable but the server admin so not every instance will have it, but they might have something similar.

I didn’t downvote your comment but I’m American and most of us are sick of it too. We’re trying. I vote in every election.

A lot of us are sick of it, too. Not happy about being stuck on this ride.

Honestly I do look at American politics with amusement. When I was younger I always thought my country was shitty and western world is a shining palace, and reddit and Lemmy broke that illusion of mine.

More I look at your politicians, I realised yours and mine aren’t as different as one might think they are. Like yes, you got better infrastructure and civic sense, yet in some ways we’re in same boat.

There was beans before there were titty memes, also there’s a lot of owl and cat pictures, and random comics

Moths, off and on.

to block all the politics communities should be an option at sign-up, or better yet, even when you browse without being signed in.

yeah, having tags for each community would be great.

That's terrible! Outrageous! Where can I find these titty memes so I can block them?

It’s been a thing on !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world for the past days or two..

… but it’s more meme than titty.

Soapy Titty memes are a breath of fresh air compared to recurring bean memes TBH 🫘

Don’t forget about the cats!

I really don’t know why I’m still here, because I’m not a miserable asshole, at least not in the way that makes you enjoy being around Lemmy’s userbase.

I want the technology to succeed but it feels like a victim of who’s likely to even be interested.

Yeah.

I don’t really think I’m an asshole but I’m certainly unhappy.

Misery loves company as they say.

I think I’m here because I crave the dopamine, but am not willing to log in to reddit or whatever else.

Basically it’s the best option from a range of bad options.

Well, as the saying goes, be the change you want in the world - if you find a community that you'd like to see more posts on, and you can contribute, then by all means, please do so

The UX still has a long way to go.

I’m very tolerant of shitty tech and like a struggle, and even I am often like wtf.

Signed up to piefed.zip the other day, and the default feed is just horrendous

Most users will just quit instead of trying to figure out how to fix it manually.

No proper onboarding

Alexandrite is pretty great

When you onboard onto Reddit it asks interests and points users to subreddits. I don’t think anything like that exists on Lemmy, but could be a good thing for the less tech inclined.

definitely, it would help setup default subscriptions, and even default blocks would be very nice

Default blocks are difficult, one of the things the dev of the Tesseract frontend got absolutely roasted for a few months ago was for how aggressive the block list was and blocking Blähaj just reeks of transphobia. (The primary issue was his lack of disclosure of the existence of the block list.) There is no low controversy way of making a default block list beyond what we already do with most instances defederating a couple of the most egregious instances.

Tesseract didn’t disclose it, if you make the messaging clear then it can work. A button like “Block political communities” with a full list of what’s being blocked and a link to the page to edit your block list.

33 people participated

Lemmy and Reddit usage are relatively low compared to their respective social media siblings. I’ve always believed the reason is in the difference in how they’re structured. Most other social media is wired around people as the primary structural unit. “Who’s saying what?” Reddit and Lemmy are instead wired around topics. “What are people saying about this?” And I assume the difference in popularity is evidence for how most people themselves are wired.

Having seen and experienced the different platforms, I’d say Facebook and Twitter/X have much larger userbases but vulnerable to manipulation, while Reddit is supposedly for people believing themselves to be “smarter” and above those social media platforms, and then Lemmy and Mastadon definitely more niche and heavily on the activist progressive side.

Social networks live and die by network effects. People don’t use Instagram because it’s the best. They use Instagram because that is where their friends are. Either everybody uses a site, or nobody does.

In other words, you’re saying I use Lemmy because I have no friends. If that’s what you mean, you’d be right.

Finding communities can be confusing: There can be multiple communities about the same topic on different servers: For example: Linux@lemmy.ml and Linux@lemmy.world

I agree that finding communities can be confusing, but I don’t think the problem is the naming.

For example on Reddit if you wanted to talk about video games you’d look at /r/gaming. However over time, since that was a “default sub”, it became a bit of a mess and instead /r/Games was the community to have real discussion about video games. But of course over time that too became a bit of a mess and /r/TrueGaming was the best place to talk about video games. In fact for a long time /r/True<topic> was a common way to find the better community.

Of course the name of a community might be confusing to an outsider. On Reddit if I’m a fan of Game of Thrones there is /r/GameOfThrones, but what if I’m looking for something a bit more meme worthy, well that’s /r/freefolk.

And that’s true even on Lemmy. What if I want Star Trek memes? Well that’s !tenforward@lemmy.world

I think discoverability is something that can be improved. Of course at the moment so many communities are so small, so looking at all of them isn’t really much of a problem. You can usually find what you’re looking for.

Reddit has like 8 different Dragon Ball communities lol, and 3 for the show “From”

but still something that could be improved in Lemmy, to have an advantage over Reddit

The grouping is something that should have been solved long ago. Also removing/merging duplicate posts in the feed, it’s crazy it doesn’t do this yet.

Also removing/merging duplicate posts in the feed, it’s crazy it doesn’t do this yet.

This does exist in the default Lemmy UI, it’s just a bit inconsistent. Also it’s hard to notice when it is working, for obvious reasons lol.

Since a few weeks I actively post lots of news in several mostly already existing communities. But it is frustrating. I do not see much user growth. If it just would be 1-2 new users per week I’d be happy…

I tried to post regularly in a few existing community. View were up, engagement null. I didn’t knew what to do either.

Because it’s a carbon copy of reddit and it replicates all of its problems in miniature. Also because everyone in here is extremely exclusionary and hateful of anyone who isn’t wholesome 100. Also because it’s decentralized but not peer to peer, which means that it’s basically feudalism.

Damn dude, who hurt you?

I don’t like the way they said it, but I do see their point.

I don’t get banned from places often, but I’ve literally had a guy just decide they didn’t like my face and ban me from an instance.

And people 100% do sometimes act like you have to be completely in their comfort zone or you’re a terrible person.

I was about to respond 'I've never been banned from an instance' but then realized that I don't know how I could verify it. 🤔

It’s finicky. You kind of have to check the mod log from that instance. I went to respond to a comment there and couldn’t and the mod log showed me as banned.

"nobody", nearly 50k people.

Asking people on mastodon if they use lemmy also doesn't make much sense to me. I don't use mastodon because it's not threaded, people on mastodon probably don't use lemmy for a similar reason. I'm not sure how many people use both threaded and unthreaded platforms, but it feels to me like the two layouts attract different people.

Then there are psychos like me who use both, and Bluesky, and other social media and have a personal blog.

Bag 'm and tag 'm folks, get this psychopath out of here. If we allow this, what’s next? We’ll allow people who use friendica?

Me too! It’s interesting how different they all are.

I haven’t logged into my bluesky account since like ages. Mainly because I’m using my real Identity there, which I’m not comfortable with talking online. I love anonymity. I speak a little more off my mind because I’m anonymous.

I mean, you can make a new/second account.

Maybe because they’re spread out over a bunch of different instances?

The people love algorithms, even if they don’t admit that. Reddit and the other platforms invest a lot of money to make people more addicted, and it works. Lemmy on the other hand… well people quickly engage with lemmy.ml and think what the fuck is this place

Well it’s an ml account that made you go what the fuck is this place so I guess it’s an appropriate response.

Or they meant to post this in another thread, I don’t know how it happens but I see it like once a month or so.

Diva seems like one of the less shitty .mls. The joke they are making is that the hostility people experience is a direct result of their thighs/ass being so phattt and not the inherent toxic gravity of .ml to disenfranchised would-be crybullies

oh it was intentional ALTahaha

Mastodon doesn’t really have those types of algorithms, it’s all just the people you follow in the order they posted, like Twitter in 2008

I would say Lemmy has bern growing more rhan pifed. Lemmy is still “new” compared to Reddit. A lot of users like the Reddit UI compared to Lemmy’s barebones (like on Voyager).

In my view, people go to the areas where good content is happening, not different communications architecture.

2/3 of polled Mastodon & co. users use no link aggregator, neither Threadiverse not siloed ones.

Maybe microblogging is good enough for them?

Just gonna throw this out there: Lemmy is a bad and dumb name.

1. It’s a joke about users being lemmings
   • this subtly denegrates the user on every usage
   • this implies the app/product itself isn’t that serious and sounds kinda childish
2. It’s not a satisfying word from a pronunciation standpoint. How many other company or product names can you think of that end with that ee sound? Reddit, Twitter, Threads, they all end with these conclusive consonant sounds. Lemmy sounds like it’s trailing off while whining.
3. At best it conjures up images of rat like rodents.

I don’t think you’re wrong but I question how much the name really matters. As a name, Reddit is also kind of confusing until someone explains the pun and has historically been seen as weird. Only reason it’s not weird now is cause it’s popular. The name “lemmy” could just as well see the same happen.

I agree with you here, if people have no problems using Tiktok or Bilibili or Zalando, Lemmy shouldn't be much worse.

I agree, Reddit’s name isn’t why people use it, but critically it doesn’t hold people back from using it.

Reddit is a satisfying enough word, doesn’t disparage it’s users or sound like a childish joke, and doesn’t conjure images of rats or rodents.

I don’t love it but it is a much better name than Lemmy.

I just assumed it was named after Lemmy Kilmister 😂

It is

Lemmy say that this whole “name dumb” thing is idiotic and completely subjective anyway. You should really go outside and take a look at the names of products people use.

No, you’re confusing partially subjective with completely subjective and the two are vastly different.

And somehow magically all corporate product names land the one you want and all fediverse or FOSS inventions land the one you don’t? Come on it’s a quite common, low-hanging fruit complaint. Besides, the domain space for naming things is unpredictable.

And somehow magically all corporate product names land the one you want

No, it’s not magic, it’s called marketing, market research, and psychology. There are literally billions of dollars that go into advertising, do you think they just magically come up with names?

all fediverse or FOSS inventions land the one you don’t

Literally never once claimed that. Mastodon is a little long but at least it’s satisfying and conjures up images of a big fuzzy creature instead of a rodent.

Lemmy, reddit, and other forum type websites are primarily text based. Microblogging and social media are short form and have plenty of pictures and videos, which catches and retains the attention of users more. Their algorithms are also more intense and curated compared to say reddit’s front page which is more generalized to all its users. Forums mean you have to spend time reading and typing while you can doomscroll and press a reaction button on social media and microblogging.

I was on Reddit a long time, it wasn’t always huge. Usenet forums before that. I like following topics, not people, and like hosting communities built around topics but would hate to have “followers” of myself personally, that sounds hellish. So never used Facebook, etc, and don’t even love Mastodon, really.

But apparently this is a minority view?

I’m with you. I also come from the Usenet days and much prefer to follow topics over people.

I do have some web forums that I visit from time to time but those have even less traffic than Lemmy.

I don’t use Reddit at all now, so Lemmy is pretty much the only option for this style of topic based content. The ability to follow hashtags on Mastodon is kind of nice too. Unfortunately, people spamming unrelated hashtags on their posts can still be a problem.

I use Lemmy

100% of online respondents have confirmed they have access to internet.

99% of non-lemmy users give up right before they start using lemmy

I dunno about that… aren’t there hundreds of thousands that gave up after seeing what Lemmy is all about?

Can confirm, I'm part of the 99%. Never tried Lemmy in the first place.

Reddit seems to be highly algorithmic now, so I think it has more of the “doomscrolling effect” that does accrue a lot of engagement.

Nobody used reddit for a long time as well

Until people did

Lemmy feels like reddit around 2009

Because there is no advertisement for it? Thing is, if you don’t go actively looking for a Reddit Alternative, chance is you will never have heard of Lemmy. At least, that was the case for me.

Because there are a bunch of people on here that have a problem when you don’t have the shit of the world on your mind 24/7.

Hi. I’m Nobody.

Oh, hi Odysseus.

No. You’re just some guy.

why does this matter.

Best question here. Also, if Lemmy had a ton of users would it really be the place we want to hang out? I personally felt Reddit got worse after it blew up and a lot of people joined.

I used to sit around and talk about silly things like Linux just fine then I noticed I started getting constantly brigaded by Winblows Fanbois. Reddit turned into a shit hole of sub-par generic groupthink and I would rather that did not happen on Lemmy.

I kind of like this level of people as lemmy is less saturated and that’s a good thing. Quite often when I was on reddit you’d look at a thread and everything that can be said has been said, so there’s nothing new you can add.

I find myself commenting on lemmy a lot more because it’s not saturated and that pun hasn’t been done, the perspective hasn’t been provided, the counterpoint to another comment hasn’t been commented etc.

Im glad bots dont use lemmy as they do reddit.

Hidden from Google search results

*resistant to crawling and ddos

…until found by another means.

I was recruited from reddit where search results about Lemmy can be found through google. Though see a lot of people have arrived here through the catgorl culture and linux

They keep blocking me on VPN. I do NOT use Reddit. I can browse stuff on VPN but I can’t post. Piefed hasn’t started doing that, least not the instance I use. May change in the future…

1. If you are just a basic prole who wants to use a forum and discuss today’s issues, Lemmy seems to be a smaller version Reddit. How does it stand out?

2. The name is awful. Twitter grew regardless of the name, so maybe this point is dumb. Also, avatar looks like a rat.

3. Rainbow. If you want more users, expand your market. Rainbow in USA means Democrat LGB. Would you like more Christians and Muslims to join? Hindu?

4. I’m a moron, not a programmer… but wouldn’t a lot more users destroy Lemmy? From my reading of what other smarter people have said, too much growth would lead to exponential costs and isn’t really feasible. I am not well read on this topic, so apologies.

I would guess that the founders made these design decisions to exclude normies, maybe that’s also why they picked the name and selected the rat icon. In which case, everything is working as designed and all is well.

rainbow means democrat LGB

You’re missing letter there

People have lots of excuses for not using Lemmy. If I had to come up with one, I would say first impressions. The design / UI is not the greatest. It works, but it’s not the greatest.

What would you consider “the greatest”?

For something to be popular, you have to turn it on and you’re using it.

That will always be the biggest issue.

I think there are a lot of people who would use lemmy and enjoy using lemmy but just dont know about it. As an old reddit user I found the whole thing a bit confusing at first but after a few days it was fine. Lemmy is leagues above other reddit alternatives.

Quadruple moderation.
Moderation is waay waay worse on lemmy

lemmy.world/post/51345527.

Basically this. Quadruple moderation on lemmy is stupid.
Reddit agents easily ban content and active contributors

If I had to guess: the culture here seems unusual, and unwelcoming — sometimes even hostile — to diverse opinions (i.e. people who aren’t similarly unusual).

I haven’t met many people IRL who would fit in here. For some visitors, that’s okay (I don’t fit in here, myself), but I think most people would just move along and forget that Lemmy exists.

Being federated, Lemmy is technically capable of being more diverse. It’s a bit ironic that it still ended up being like this.

Also, some images don’t load. I just ignore those, but still people might be put off by broken UX

About the images thing: half the posts on reddit are just [content removed by moderator] when you click into them

That’s actually the best defense of reposting I’ve heard

How is that related to Lemmy though?

I blame some of the toxicity in the fact that a big chunk of lemmy users came here because they were banned from Reddit precisely for being hostile.

I blame some of the toxicity in the fact that a big chunk of lemmy users came here because they were banned from Reddit precisely for being hostile.

Totally this. Lemmy is a pretty toxic place because of it. And I’ll get downvoted for saying it. 🤣 🤣

I use Lemmy and Mastodon, so I’m not really a great person to ask.

But I think all federated platforms have branding issues. “You should use Lemmy.” What does this mean exactly? What site do you join? What app do you download on the phone?

Yeah, it took me awhile to figure out how to join the fediverse, and I don’t think I joined the instances that most suited my interests because I didn’t know about them.

I just suggest that people join .world (unless I know the person I’m talking to will best fit a different instance) and not worry about it. Once they understand how it works, they can make an account on a different instance if they want. There’s no need to overthink it.

Been on Mastodon for several years. Just now trying Lemmy.

A lot of people do use Lemmy. I dont get why so many people think something has to have literally everyone on earth using it or its dead. You see the same thing in games, too. Id rather there not be a singular monolirh even with lemmys fediverse design. The internet was better when it wasnt this way.

Exactly. Be grateful that all of reddit is not here.

Niche and local communities are non-existent here. It’s either politics, furry memes, or anime posts. It would be nice for the other communities to have engagement.

hey don’t forget all the mental health communities here…

And we have cats communities to deal with that one!

who am I? am I nobody? …yeah I guess I kinda am

Boiling it down to 3 things:

1. Content Scale & Variety - Lemmy has a lot of content but it’s very tech/political heavy. It doesn’t have much to offer outside of that domain. Meanwhile, there’s a whole shitposting subreddit dedicated to an NFL conference – I don’t even closely follow professional American football, but it’s glorious.
2. User Experience Friction - You can’t just sign up, you need to pick a server. You’ve already lost a significant amount of people in that step.
3. User Base - There’s nice folks on here, but some really sour the experience for the rest of us by being straight up hostile if we don’t agree on every little detail.

To expand on 3, there are no (that I’m aware of) official community channels for businesses in the Fediverse compared to Reddit. The default avenues to interact with them are usually Discord, Reddit, and even Twitter.

User Experience Friction - You can’t just sign up, you need to pick a server. You’ve already lost a significant amount of people in that step.

I think this can be improved if there was a better way to explain the identity of each instance and why you might want to join other than just “generic Lemmy server for everyone to use”

Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they’re not gonna have a good time.

I suggest a map that shows which instances are federated/defederated from eachother and lets you find which one has the closest identity to what you like. And possibly a disclaimer before joining one of the trifecta instances.

Or just say fuck it and join the one literally called “shit just works” like me 😂

I thought ML was machine learning🥴

Big same lol

Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they’re not gonna have a good time.

It’s worse than that. Lemmy just as reddit is mostly American. American election results were kinda… interesting. And Lemmy is very-very-very polarised. So there’s likely 33% chance that new American user will get to “politically their” instance, 33% chance they’ll get to the instance on the other side of the spectrum, and 33% chance it doesn’t matter what instance they’ll end up at, they’ll be terrified by both sides. So at best it’s 33% chance for user to find their hivemind, realistically it’s probably much less because even people technically from “your side” might find Lemmy to be way too radical. And that’s just Americans, imagine how the rest 96% of the world react to Lemmy.

Ideally, I think instances ought to be something the casual user can be unaware of. Like the default experience should be instance-independent and the choice of instance should be some trivial thing that you can change on a whim carrying your entire user identity and chat history with you. I don’t really get any functional sense of community from my instance anyway

Being able to migrate an account between instances would help a huge amount. I am almost wishing we could agree on a default instance for all newcomers, but this would work to just centralize the user base so it’s not a good solution. However, if account migration were implemented, there could be a sort of “first steps” or “training ground” instance that accepts all new users by default and only allows accounts to remain there for a set period of time before asking them to find a new instance to call home. This would let users who aren’t interested in the technical details of federation get their feet wet and figure out which instance aligns with them before needing to make the choice.

This scheme would definitely require that new users have the option of signing up to a particular instance right away; no need for the default instance to be the only sign up option.

I really like your idea of “baby’s first instance”. And then they are sent off the nest.

some people might get confused for the instance they joined, like world, or ML, instead of another one, they go back to reddit.

Step 2 is dead right. Before you can proceed, we’re going to need you to make an apparently important and irreversible decision that you didn’t even want to make, based on incomplete information.

YOU HAVE MADE A BLOOD PACT WITH WORLD.

ML HATES YOU NOW

i feel like it’s usually the opposite. some people just really insist on getting upset about anyone on .ml

I love everyone!

and which instance you start out on… is going to heavily influence your experience/content and get you branded/blocked by a lot of the userbase

I feel like this is an issue of (either accidentally or incidentally) putting focus on something that doesn’t really need it. Picking instances should not matter; not in the sense of “it’s federated blah blah” but more in the sense of “it’s 2026, there’s password managers, noone uses their real identities for everything; having multiple accounts wherever it’s convenient should be normal”.

Number 1 is the reason I rarely visit Lemmy. The choice and wording of political posts and reactions to them create a very negative atmosphere and sometimes it is combined with rather unrational doomerism. Threads just feel angry and hostile too often for me to have fun on here. This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.

This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.

That’s so much extra work

That’s why you are supposed to pick an instance that does most of that work for you: one that will have already blocked what you don’t like.

The banlist is public but is essentially a hassle of an Excel spreadsheet to crawl through, what would be nice would be having some sort of public “moderation trends” (broad-strokes view of what have we been blocking and will continue to do so) and “moderation commitments” (eagle view of what will happen when you report a post to us).

Haha there are in fact 8 different NFL shitposting subreddits, one for each of the 8 different divisions. And each one is as active as just about any Lemmy community.

I agree on the other 2 points as well. Not only is it weird to have to pick an instance, the names and descriptions are off putting as well. You scroll through and several of the top ones are openly Marxist/leninist/leftist. 95% of people see that and are immediately put off. It sends a message that Lemmy is fundamentally for leftist agenda-posting, and a lot of users treat it that way. Click on any completely non-political-sounding community (like Movies or something), sort top all time and you will usually be greeted immediately by posts about Israel/Palestine or Donald Trump. Its exhausting honestly.

Edit: also, why does join-lemmy.org not show .world (one of the largest coms if not the largest) anywhere on the popular instances page? What kind of drama is going on there? This is exactly the kind of shit Im talking about.

From what I’ve heard of more technical people on here while lurking discussions, Lemmy isn’t scalable.

If everyone from Reddit were to move over to Lemmy, we’d be in big trouble.

Let’s state plainly: the title is false. I use lemmy; you’re using lemmy; the other commentators are using lemmy.

There’s a concept I’ve been mulling over for a while–and economists probably have a term for it of which I’m ignorant of–that is that free software fails in capitalist market economies. I expect that statement to create a knee-jerk reaction. The truth is free-software is everywhere and as computers become ever more embedded into our economies free-software’s presence will only grow exponentially. It’s often the foundation for computerised economies.

Free-software enthusiasts understand that its become endemic to the economy. However businesses and consumers still ignore it even when it might be prudent to select or fund free-software. To ignore it seems contradictory to a lot of ideals. A capitalist business should use free-software as the monetary cost is zero: it’s a free product. Revolutionary organisations should adopt free-software is it aligns with their ideologies. Yet we know they don’t. These actors are acting irrationally.

Free-software lacks something that is a prerequisite to participate in an economy: capital. It has no money to propagandise itself. To phrase it another way: it has no money to buy ads. Without ads it doesn’t exist to entities who do have capital.

In Australia Reddit brought ad-space inside shopping-centers. Commercial software has revenues from which a portion can be spent on advertising and its through this advertising that growth can occur. The reason why lemmy has a small user-base is because it has no revenue streams. It’s an economic sink.

If we were to imagine that the user-pool was to dramatically increase what would actually occur? I imagine many instances would be overwhelmed with traffic, knocking them offline. For those that remain a lot of traffic would be perceived as spam. There is no revenue stream that’s attached to that user-base. If there was you would–absolutely!–see lemmy’s user-base increase as there would be a profit incentive: more users would equate to more profit. The current reality is that more users equates to more debts.

The market for ‘internet-forums’ has already consolidated into the big-players we know of. Maybe someone could take lemmy’s code and usurp the established vendors. That behaviour is already underway now; it’s why we have a multitude of lemmy instances. Maybe the next titan of ‘internet-communities’ will be running a lemmy stack. Not all operators are hosting lemmy with ideology/charity being at the fore. Some site operators are asking themselves, “how can I monetise this?”

From my perspective the issue isn’t why people don’t use lemmy, it’s why is hosting so expensive? The prerequisites to self-hosting (whether it be for personal use or for an established group or organisation) are costly. One has to pay rent on a DNS, static-IP, hardware and data connections. These prerequisites are commercial in nature and are priced as if every buyer has a revenue stream from which these rents are payed from.

If an individual/group wants independence and decides to self-host they’re taking on these rents that have been priced at commercial rates. Those are the monetary hurdles. There’s an intellectual hurdle too: a group needs to have members that know how to administer and maintain servers. The prerequisites are rather burdensome. It should then not come as a surprise that a group of young people who play video-games with each other elect to have their community on discord, or whatever commercial-entity takes on the economic and intellectual burdens. These commercial entities hide the complex nature of computer systems and the economic relationships that exist. In exchange they’re chasing speculative profits. They have revenue coming in from which they can apportion to advertising and paid programmers. They have the incentives to grow.

In December 2018, Discord announced it had raised $150 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures, and Technology Opportunity Partners.

Lemmy is reactionary software. It pines for the day’s of webmaster superiority… Where a webmaster ruled a personal fiefdom and brought and sold other fiefdoms. Users should be able to host and maintain servers for themselves and their communities. Economic rents and knowledge-specialisation are high hurdles to overcome. If they are overcome they’ll find a wasteland where users have already been captured by existing market players—not only that! They’ll exist side-by-side commercial vendors that pay to have their software blasted from every ad outlet they can afford. The enthusiast or ideologue has sparse capital to attract new users away from their existing ‘digital-home’ whilst the current players have enormous war-chests and if non-economic forces somehow push new-users towards them (e.g. something ‘viral’) they have insufficient economic resources to accommodate them.

I would advocate for technology like GNUnet, i2p and hyphanet (GNUnet being my personal favorite). Software such as those abolish the major economic-rents that would otherwise be required for the ‘clearnet’. (DNS rents are unjustifiable and I would like to direct readers to the OpenNIC project.) However the intellectual burden is increased.

I would like to take a jab at the idea that Reddit (or whatever third-party is used) takes ownership of a community and their user-generated content. They certainly do, but the community leaders voluntarily gave it up. They also neglected their responsibilities. There’s no reason why users couldn’t have a local-mirror of their community even if it is hosted on a third-party platform. That would negate the reality of a third-party purge and therefore the ‘destruction’ of their community. These communities are irresponsible with irresponsible users. How does one make an irresponsible user responsible? I don’t think it can be done.

I’m just going to hop in here to remind folks to donate to your instance if you can afford to do so!

The autism is this comment is thicker than Earth’s mantle. Which is a layer of silicate rock between the crust and the outer core. It has a mass of 4.01×1024 kg (8.84×1024 lb) and makes up 86% of the mass of Earth. It has a thickness of 2,900 kilometers (1,800 mi) making up about 46% of Earth’s radius and 84% of Earth’s volume. It is predominantly solid but, on geologic time scales, it behaves as a viscous fluid, sometimes described as having the consistency of caramel. Partial melting of the mantle at mid-ocean ridges produces oceanic crust, and partial melting of the mantle at subduction zones produces continental crust.

The easier way to say what you said is that there’s no marketing and no money.

must be a suprise, but people dont like kgb propaganda and linux nerds

I like linux nerds.

In my opinion the following:

1. Minority of very vocal users who get angry if you don’t share every point of their world view. Honestly you can just block most of them.
2. Limited active subgroups - There are only a handful of active subs the rest are just dead. Which leads to…
3. Limited content, posts stay in my feed for a week at a time before being replaced. I often block posts I like just because I’m sick of seeing it in my feed.
4. Shitty moderation - mods here are way worse than Reddit.

I’ll be honest I miss old Reddit, Lemmy feels like an apocalyptic wasteland but it’s still better than most alternative. It’s kind of nice I don’t sit and consume content as much as I used to.

multiple instances, instances getting shutting down causes people to scatter, limiting lemmys pontential engagement.

I’ll be honest I miss old Reddit

Everyone does. Just like we all miss og Myspace or geocities sites. Old Reddit at its prime was a different time period. Can’t recapture that just like you can’t recapture the geocities era of the internet.

We’re being enshittified. Lemmy is the least enshittified (thus far.)

It’s because everything that becomes popular starts with people in the 14-20 year range.

Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Tiktok…

The Fediverse will eventually grow once something triggers a snowball effect due the nature of connectivity and federation. Until then, the way to make it grow is to have young people make it popular.

Edit: There also needs to be more “fun” here. I think the Fediverse is a more “serious” place which isn’t what those other social media sites offered. “Serious 24/7” isn’t that enticing for young people.

The other day I was imagining a game or game service that has you make a Fediverse account of some kind. You get people to signup with a username that automatically creates a “@fedi.games” account. That account can have access to Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed etc.

what, you don’t think it’s fun endlessly memeing about doomerism and murder?

There’s not enough politics IMO. No fun at all.

People need to spend more time on lighthearted issues like Palestine and the evils of capitalism

The irony:

You are askinf people on Lemmy why people don’t use lemmy?

Brother, don’t you own a mirror? Go get high and existential on reddit.

This is a blog post. The link was merely shared here by OP.

Hey, I’m here! wtf just going to ignore me like that??

Ssh, this is a library.

Lemmy as a name is very poor branding. It’s almost as bad as Mastodon.

It’s this plus onboarding. Reddit is easy to remember. It tells you exactly what you are getting. Lemmy sounds like a new lemmings games. It gives vintage when it should do the opposite.

It’s a bad name and will never become popular because it’s stupid to say outloud and on top of it onboarding is unnecessarily complicated.

Perfect. I’m in the right place.

I think it’s pretty good. Two syllables, easy to say, no similar sounding competing platforms. What do you think’s wrong with it?

Naming something after a famous person means you’re starting off on the back foot in terms of SEO and brand clarity.

Digg worked well because it came out of an era where adding a second G was enough to sound techy, but it also played into the dig/bury aspect of voting. Reddit works because the name is “read it” while also being a unique string you couldn’t mistake for anything else. Both have a lot going for them that Lemmy just doesn’t.

Eh not that famous, I bet most people dont have any name associations with Lemmy except that it sounds kinda like “lemming”. Which is sort of unfortunate though because lemmings (the de facto name for lemmy users) generally means crowd-following idiots. But as far as factors that inhibit the growth of lemmy go Id put the name way down the list.

Until I read this post I had never heard of this “famous” Lemmy.

Until I read this post I had never heard of this “famous” AC/DC.

That’s what your post reads like to me.

My experience is the only (valid) one.

That’s what your post reads like to me.

The less snarky version is saying you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000. Though, your musical illiteracy does not impact what I said about branding and SEO.

Disagree. This is a case of the brand actually not meaning much. “Reddit” isn’t great either, but people think it does because it’s well known.

I’m reminded of the person who said Mario was a character designed from the ground up to be marketable, when it was literally created to make a graphic of a person readable in a 16x16 sprite with three colors.

I’m offended now 😱

I think you guys have a great chance to capture Reddit’s exodus. I used it for about 16 years and me and all of my friends have realized how awful it’s become. People are looking for a new platform. I’m going to try and help by opening PRs against the repos.

Reddit has been exodusing for multiple years now. At some point, people are going to have to stop caring about the gorilla down the road and just be good, and I think Lemmy is good. Posts that make it to the front page often have over 1K reputation! It’s far from Reddit big, but it’s still big!

I’m a 31 yr old dude that just found out about this along with what the fediverse is. When I found out, I was researching this stuff so it took me some time to understand it all and I still don’t think I fully understand it all

Part of the problem is there’s a lot less to it than it feels like there is. The analogies we use to teach to non-tech people don’t quite match up.

It’s simply a structured way to log in and send messages back and forth.

You can use it to stitch together forums, link shares, social media, video sharing, or image sharing sites.

But we really don’t bind things together all that tightly. At best you can follow someone on pixelfed or mastodon. Since there’s truly no minimum wiring, a lot of services don’t even really fully communicate with each other. So we end up mostly with mastodon <-> mastodon links and lemmy->piefed<-lemmy links.

activitypub is a protocol. like email.

instances are just what provider you want to use, gmail, hotmail, outlook, etc.

and the ‘platform’ lemmy, piefed, mastroton, pixelfed, is just the aesthetics

Unlike like email the fediverse servers defederating / blocking each other more.

dogmail can send to birdmail but not to catmail.

unlike

Google does a lot of “defederating” (for lack of a better term), it’s one of the reasons why setting up and hosting your own email is one of the nightmare sections of selfhosting communities.

Where do all those meme posts about “Lemmy is bad name / bad branding” come from? I’ve seen it recurrently enough every time someone launches a FOSS thing that I would normally suspect it’s part of a LLM farm or a scam attempt from some sort of naming / patents agency, but I’ve seen these reactions from long enough (2015-ish).

It’s named after a famous musician that was active for like 30+ years. Half the results when you search “Lemmy” are him, not the platform. Oh, and he had an unfortunate collection of Nazi memorabilia - he claimed it wasn’t because he liked the nazis just that he liked the look of their shit…

FOSS often ends up with bad names unfortunately. People never know what is going to become big when they start a project and they might get a giggle out of the name when it’s a small project. By the time the project becomes big enough that the name might actually start being a problem, it is also known by that name and changing it could significantly impact how many people keep using it. Unfortunately, a name change is often a touchy subject for any project.

Coca-Cola the drink is named after the drug and no one complains. Plus, words can have and acquire more than one meaning during their lifetime (see eg.: “fine” which means all of bad, regular and good).

Coca-Cola literally contained drugs when it was invented… The name wasn’t in conflict, it was extremely descriptive. I feel like that analogy only works if we find out that Lemmy was originally created for the sole purpose of discussing Motorhead.

Like, you asked where these posts complaining about names of Lemmy (and other FOSS projects) comes from and the above is the explanation. Just because you disagree doesn’t mean all the people that do agree are a psyop or bots, lol.

217 comments on this in 24 hours says to me that there must at least a few people using lemmy

on reddit it would be 6000.

30K users is small potatoes. even niche subreddits have userbases larger than that.

Yea, once a post is up on reddit for even 3 hours its not worth interacting with because no-one will see what you have to say anyways. Honestly its what makes Lemmy better to me.

This is exactly one of the reasons I like this more. Writing anything of reddit is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean. This comment here might only be read by 10 people, but 10 good, real people will actually read it.

Thank you for the compliment ☺️

Yeah but thats better than most niche message boards back in their heyday. Probably better than y incubators message board to.

A big chunk of reddit traffic and users are bots. Another large segment are more recent arrivals from India (check out how many Indian topics make the front pages on the weekends when USA/UK traffic is low.) While I can’t prove it I have a hunch that Spez hired a bunch of Indian clickfarms to pump the numbers before the IPO. Maybe he just promoted in India more to get an influx of users for the IPO or maybe they are mostly “social media marketers” hired to sell health/peptide supplements (seriously there are services that do that on Reddit so be careful ever taking any such advice from them.)

But my point is that the quality of users is pretty weak and I’m certain American advertisers have noticed by now. 300ish real, quality users is a better engagement metric than 6000 bots.

With most of the replies from bots…

What would it have been if asked on 2010 Reddit?

I’d wager not much more than here.

That is what we want people to believe. It’s nice and cosy without the ‘mainstream’ users. ;)

I use Lemmy. And you do. And 1000 other people do. So I’d say it’s big enough.

And Reddit was small for years and years when it started. I don’t even think I really started using it till around 2013-2014. Didn’t have a username or anything just came across it through Google searches. All websites take a while to build a userbase.

This I think is the main problem to adoption. It’s very hard to come across Lemmy results on a search engine even if I’m trying to specify Lemmy. (Not that search engines matter for most people these days what with the LLM executive summary pushing out real web pages, who needs resources when you have slop, am I right? \s)

It took me a long time before I signed up. I think I lucked for at least a year. I didn’t want to join an instance and then regret it. And all instances have their own small novel of rules, that I need to read through to know if I agree with. And even if you do, you have to send an application and get approved as well.

It almost scared me away - I’d imagine the same goes for a lot of people.

1. Few people like to be the first(ish) one on the dance floor.

2. It’s slightly harder to sign up for than Reddit, so people interested in this kind of thing usually just sign up for Reddit (or stay there).

3. Most people don’t care about the advantages Lemmy affords us; they care about what’s on TV tonight or which celebrity is dating which celebrity.

I think because people are the same no matter what platform they’re using and you’ll end up with the same kinds of arguments, trolling, or derailing everywhere. But they already have platforms they’re on for those, so why switch?

Lemmy would have to be pretty different and because humans are the same everywhere, I’m not really seeing that difference.

I see it somewhat when browsing contents in other languages because the culture is different enough to lend itself to different contents, or at least different arguments that are less tiresome than what I see on English platforms…

Because you get banned from communities by mods too extreme for reddit or the USSR

ALT1000004677

Just because they know the Fediverse, doesn’t mean they know Lemmy.

For more than 50% of all Mastodon users (that’s more than 25% of all Fediverse users), the Fediverse equals Mastodon. For large parts of the rest, if it doesn’t behave like Mastodon, it’s disturbing.

Besides, how are they supposed to learn about Lemmy anyway? Yes, in theory, Mastodon and Lemmy are federated. In theory.

In fact, however, they’re almost completely incompatible. Lemmy is all about groups. It doesn’t support any interaction between users directly. Mastodon, on the other hand, is about users interacting with each other directly. It has no support for groups whatsoever. At all. Nada. Zilch.

One of many reasons why there’s almost no interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy that’d demonstrate to Mastodon users that Lemmy exists by confronting them with Lemmy content.

By the way, the latter won’t work anyway. Mastodon doesn’t show you what software a message came from. Thus, most Mastodon users assume that everything they see comes from Mastodon.

@squirrel there may also be people following topics in Lemmy from another Fediverse service but not having a Lemmy account (i.e. which actually use Lemmy, but may not be counted there). Thats my case for the moment, while I still try to figure out if I can keep it like that or need to create an account

lemmus.org As I understand it, lemmus.org was launched only 5 years ago. reddit has been established for 21 years, nobody was looking for alternatives until the reddit mods became synonymous to political dogma groups and began to deteriorate into one of the most toxic, divisive and counter productive platforms on the internet. people aren’t finding lemmus because google refers to reddit as default provider for answers/results. I only found this because I looked through articles particular for FOSS and decentralization, normies don’t know what that is to look for it.