To follow-up on the Reddit thread yesterday, here are a few elements that can be interesting to discuss.

Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy

Just quoting “Lemmy” or pointing to join-lemmy.org can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance. Recent post by a new joiner 9 days ago, they had to change server 2 times to get a satisfying experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536.

Using something like

"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users

Feel free if you have any questions"

Can already point them in one direction, and avoid them getting lost in the too many options.

If people want to debate the choice of those two instances, I’ll add my thought process in the comments.

The Lemmy feed looks as depressing as Reddit’s All, and how to mitigate that

Some feedback I received when promoting Lemmy the way above

Just checked out lemmy to see if it’s different from reddit. Im very disappointed lmao.

First post I see is a comic about cultural appropriation with an ifunny watermark. Next are several posts about the proton vpn ceo “going full maga.” And finally a post I saw on Reddit days ago that is ragebait making fun of the cybertruck.

Yikes. It’s the same exact thing.

–

Lemmy still has a pretty obnoxious tankie problem. Even if you block the .ml instance, pretty much every thread about US politics or world news on any major instance gets hijacked by the same handful of trolls and their associated vote bots. Hopefully this will become less of a problem as more sane people join, but just as a word of caution, be aware that you will be called western imperialist scum by a bunch of 14 year olds.

–

Lemmy is utter rubbish, it’s as if their entire userbase consists of the top layer of scum carefully siphoned off from the Reddit cesspool. It got the worst of the annoying political echo chamber and “very smart” argumentative users from Reddit.

I just clicked on half a dozen random Lemmy servers, and all of them had at least one link about Trump in the top 5 posts. Even ones that seem like they’re supposed to be about tech.

Normal humans want the Reddit of 10+ years ago back. We don’t want to use a different site colonized by the same modern day Redditors we loathe interacting with.

–

To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong. Open https://discuss.online/ , by default you’ll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.

What I try to do in such instances is to give something like

"While politics are important, you can still very much block them. Here are an example of some communities that can interest you:

I also wrote a long post about that issue that you can read here https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/

As a side note, I recently started a discussion on !fedigrow@lemm.ee about a potential political-free instance for new joiners, feel free to have a look: https://feddit.org/post/6819084

Lemmy is too small, 42k monthly active users is nothing

Discuit, the centralized alternative to Reddit, currently counts 181 weekly active commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/NlAdOWAp

You can also mention that NodeBB is now federating with Lemmy:

That’s all for now, happy to discuss in the comments.

Note: if you’re not interested in promoting Lemmy, feel free to hide this post, you are able to do this on specific posts if your instance is running 0.19.4 and newer

  • rglullisAEnglish
    4·
    4 hours ago

    Content is King. You can have a good chunk of people that manage to go through the UX issues, they will still leave if they don’t find what they want. The mirror bots (alien.top, lemmit.online) were meant to help with that, but the people here would rather complain about the post volume instead of learning how to follow only the subscribed communities.

    Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

    A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third. My proposal to separate user/local instances from topic-based instances has been rejected here, even after I offered to put them under the governance of a wider admin group.

    Now, I’m tired of this culture and small thinking. Fine if you want to be proselytizing and convincing people “at retail”, but this will not be nearly as impactful if we had a dozen people who had the courage to setup a Lemmy instance with Fediverser.

    • A Wild Mimic appears!@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      4·
      3 hours ago

      The issue with the mirroring, at least how it was done, is that it was too much content for not enough users, creating the feeling of a deserted mall. If my comment disappears in a flood of posts, it’s no better than when my comment disappears in a flood of comments (like it does on reddit). (Lets forget about the part when one guy started copying entire threads including their users, which was not well thought out)

      A way of combining communities into “multilemmys” would be great. I can understand why there’s pushback for separating topics from users. A Lemmy instance is not just a basket for specific topics, it’s a expression of ideology, and as such ideological arguments about the moderation in your proposed structure are guaranteed. It also would reduce comments with minority viewpoints to a minimum.

      A slow and steady promotion of lemmy is the best that can happen - from what i learned in the last year a slow and steady influx of people is preferred by the majority, and not a flood of people that can’t be handled by our culture.

      I like efficiency too, but some things do get lost when speeding things up too much.

      • rglullisAEnglish
        2·
        3 hours ago

        (Lets forget about the part when one guy started copying entire threads including their users, which was not well thought out)

        That was me. ;)

        And sorry to disappoint you, I thought about it a lot. Mirroring the entire thread was less about the benefit the (few) users that are here and more about the potential to bring the masses of Reddit users who are stuck there because they (rightfully) claim that they do not have any other place to find their niche content. Mirroring the entire thread was also a way to ensure that we were (a) breaking the monopoly on the conversation and (b) creating an incentive for app developers to create a hybrid Lemmy/Reddit client, that could read from Lemmy and post to both, which would effectively make the transition away from the siloed network completely transparent.

        The one thing that I didn’t get to execute properly was that I should’ve completed the two-way bridging before enabling the full mirrors.

        A Lemmy instance is not just a basket for specific topics, it’s a expression of ideology…

        1. This is booooooring. So boring. This is the kind of thing that keeps people away. To the absolute majority of people, social networks are about FFF: Friends, Family and Fucking.
        2. It’s not an exclusive option. If you are part of 5% of people who want to be in the small, niche group are still free to do so. The other 95% of people who just care about gorging in from the content hose would be perfectly happy by following from the larger topic-based instances.

        A slow and steady promotion of lemmy is the best that can happen

        This is what the Mastodon crowd would also say. Now they are seeing constant churn and watching Bluesky grow, and have to bury their faces in the sand arguing stupid things like “Bluesky might be winning, but they are not really decentralized”. Yeah, it is true. It’s not “really” decentralized. 99.98% of the world will say “so what?” and continue to use it.

        I’m tired of consolation prizes and moral victories. I want the web to be free, and I want it to be free for more than just a tiny niche of ideologues. Slow and steady will not win against Big Tech.