Since my favorite reddit app came to Lemmy I’m really keen on getting more people into the fediverse to pump up the volume of content around here. Are there any initiatives that we can assist to get folks onboard?
I had my wife join, and she likes it, but laments the slow pace of new material in the communities.
If we could stop pretending we’re superior to other social media that might be a start. The number of posts talking shit about the “average redditor” or suggesting that we need more “high quality content than reddit”, or that everything needs to have a meaningful discussion is exhausting. We as a group seem to want to dictate who can comment, who can post, what kind of post is acceptable, and are fairly mean to newer people. You won’t keep new people if you’re rude to them or they see post after post trashing them.
Engagement comes at the price of low effort sometimes. So does content. Not every post or comment will be a shining beacon of perfection. Sometimes people just want to talk. Some of them are starved for human interaction.
Stop trash talking the lurkers. They may be sharing what content there is here and driving people to Lemmy instances. They’re an important part of the ecosystem.
Ask what caliber of people you want here. Because it is very apparent to me that the loudest members only want a specific type of community member here. And they are very outspoken about that fact. But are they actively extending a hand to those people when they encounter them on any other platform? Word of mouth (or keyboard) works. It’s slow but it works.
I think it’s generally a good idea to respond to folks as if they were a friend or family member. And, if you need to pull the ripcord and get out of a conversation that’s terribly frustrating, it means a lot to say something to the effect of “Thanks for the chat, but let’s agree to disagree before we devolve into pure name calling.”
Or something. I think it benefits the whole community to have a record of people disengaging when the conversation isn’t productive. Doesn’t matter why. Doesn’t matter if you think the other person is clearly, obviously being an asshole. Politely disengage and try to stop thinking about it (if thinking about it is unproductive and stressing you out.)
I agree, but in my experience the focused communities that I liked to browse on Reddit were almost never toxic. The difference may be that I deliberately went to the specific communities that I was interested in; I generally never just browsed Popular, where I’m sure the bulk of the toxicity was.
Unfortunately the communities that I’m interested in have next to no activity here, so I would definitely like to see more users.
I’m still confused how it works. I subscribe to a channel, but all it is is updates about the channel, no content. Looks like I need to go to their website to see the content (which doesn’t seem right)
Have you taken a look at your instance’s FAQ here? Other than that, there are numerous guides to getting set up with Lemmy and how to subscribe to communities on other instances. It’s slightly different than Reddit, but apart from some technical details, everything works like Reddit once you’re set up.
Because of the decentralized structure, there can be communities on the same topic on different instances (with different subscribers, moderation guidelines, etc.). Use the search to find communities you’re interested in and post questions e.g. on the FAQ thread of your instance. Or right here of course.
This sounds like you have subscribed to a community where a bot just reposts Reddit content. Does that sound right? All the posts are by a bot that take you to Reddit?
The thing that kind of sucks about lemmy is there isn’t really any protection against fascists on the site. One of the reasons it took me so long to get off reddit is because there you have access to tools that let you see if someone you’re interacting with is an overt and open fascist, but nothing like that really exists here. In fact, it’s even worse here because the fascists will aggressively downvote to the point where anything directly calling out white supremacy gets absolutely slammed. Now you have a bunch of reddit frogs coming over here and the only real hint that they’re going to cause trouble is if their username ends in @lemmy.world or @feddit.de
The domain block is a bare minimum, I never want the displeasure of having to deal with a feddit,de poster ever again. Another thing they need to do is make votes public so I can clean house of people upvoting blatantly abusive comments or partaking in downvote harassment. Third they need to add tagging and user-level vote counts so you can identify known trolls without needing to commit their usernames to memory. Those three changes would go a long way in fixing a lot of the biggest problems with lemmy as a whole.
EDIT: And blocking a user shouldn’t delete them completely from your client but rather hide them. That way you can follow their comment streams looking for people supporting them and wipe them out in the process. The current system gives every comment below the original carte blanche to say whatever and there’s fuck all you can do about it because as far as you know, they don’t even exist.
It was good at attracting Reddit users who still had the Reddit mindset. If we go with the idea (as some have) to push a “simple default instance that we can point everyone to” that’s what we’d end up with.
I’m not praising it, there’s a critical mass that communities can grow before it becomes like that and it’s interesting that lemmy.world is already hitting it.
Sync has been available for well over 2 months, I don’t think that many former users will still follow. Sure, each new app will bring a fraction of its former users, but that’s not sustainable.
Well, I’m new and was brought here by Boost. Hopefully more will join
I will say that the Lemmy registration process was not straight forward. The link to register brought me to a page with no registration form, just a bunch of Lemmy servers and no clear instructions on how to proceed from there. Room for improvement.
Focus on stealing users from Reddit. Show them how fucked up reddit has become and provide an easy alternative. It took me too many clicks to transfer over the first time, but once it was made simpler I transferred and deleted reddit. Sew mass discontent on reddit.
I don’t think spamming Reddit with Lemmy links will do much besides paint a picture of Lemmy users as obnoxious. I’d rather have Lemmy differentiate itself as more than just a Reddit alternative by offering something different and have the users come on their own. It’s not about quantity for me, but quality. For example, I’d love to see some communities that focus on long-form discussions and heavy moderation to promote a more nuanced debate. I’d also love to see some media outlets host and moderate their own Lemmy instances to try and move the debate away from Facebook and the likes.
There should be an instance with an actual registered organization behind it - privacy policy & all to back up its legitimacy. Without this, Lemmy is a hard sell for a lot of people who don’t want to just hand off their information to a person who may or may not be doing certain things with it.
I think that’s fair, yeah. Explaining that some person I don’t know runs the server doesn’t quite sound the same as saying this instance is run by company XY
That’s the struggle at first, getting a deluge of users that keep people both entertained, AND posting content.
Unfortunately I don’t think we’ve reached that number of users yet and it throws us into a vicious cycle of losing users who were also posters.
I’m not sure how to grow it on our end, other than continuing to contribute to the communities, but I do know that if Reddit keeps following Elon’s business decisions, they may end up losing many users as well.
It’s still around but so rarely invoked most don’t even know about it. It’s basically a non issue, I’m not sure anyone suggesting it’s important for increasing the size of lemmy can be taken seriously, not least because it’s only on one instance.
Tell me @arin what words do you need to use that the auto censor removes from your posts?
Whatever problems it has, it’s a simple and cheap means of providing some baseline of moderation which is hard for new platforms and something lemmy is struggling with.
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