posted in Fediverse

squirrel@squirrel@cake.kobel.fyi

Why Does Nobody Use Lemmy?

This is not going to be a blogpost about “Why do people still use Reddit instead of everyone moving to Lemmy?”. I noticed that even with Mastodon users, who already understand and like the advantages of decentralized platforms, the usage of Lemmy is extremely small, and more people use Reddit. Most of them haven’t even heard of Lemmy. To be fair, the Reddit usage also seems to be fairly low.

byte21516.xyz/blog/posts/2026/useLemmy/useLemmy.html
dance_ninja@dance_ninja@lemmy.world

Replying to @⁨squirrel@cake.kobel.fyi⁩

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.
onion_trial@onion_trial@europe.pub

Replying to @⁨dance_ninja@lemmy.world⁩

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.

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lambalicious@lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org

Replying to @⁨dance_ninja@lemmy.world⁩

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).