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.
I actually think Lemmy needs more work before it grows much bigger. The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit.
Lemmy in general uses this but a lot of mobile UI’s don’t have proper implementations (or at least they didn’t for a while). I’m not sure if liftoff is still in development but the reason I switched back to Jerboa was because spoiler support was finally added
I have actually found that people don’t respond to me at all when I say something they feel is controversial. I get a ton of downvotes and maybe once out of every 5 or so times I get one really persistent person who won’t let it go. But that’s it.
I completely agree. I'm personally holding off on heavy promotion of this platform until we hit 1.0. If people join too early and are turned off by the lack of polish, they may not come back after it's fixed.
They need to add paid awards with some split for Lemmy development and the instance. That was the reason people bought into Reddit gold. It was a good faith, fund the platform thing.
Awards would only work for people on your own instance though. Pushing them across instances is difficult. If they’re free, they become worthless and defeat the purpose. And passing money between instances is stupidly complicated. I guess you’d have to go to the instance in order to buy the award there. Which gives people an incentive to run their own instance. I’d hope that wouldn’t make servers too small. As much as people seem to like the idea of many, many small instances federated, I think the system works best with several large instances than a million small ones.
Not if they’re setting up their own servers. This kind of horizontal growth is the healthiest way to grow a federated network, and something we can do that centralised platforms can’t.
The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit
Fair point. The same was said of Mastodon many moons ago. A lot of people put a lot of time and energy into detailed feature requests, describing the problem to be solved, and exactly how their proposed solution would work.
Given that I’ve also seen the same complaint about apps in other federated networks like matrix, maybe what’s needed is a general solution? A website where experienced mods describe the problems they strike, and how social software developers could help them with mod features.
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
We need a better site to link to than join-lemmy.org. It should concisely pitch lemmy to everyday users and suggest an instance for them to sign up at. Don’t get into the weeds about federation or choosing instances or selecting apps. Just select a sane default and point people to it. Rotate defaults to avoid overloading a given instance or making it too powerful.
It’s not only the “base” instance IMO, most servers have wildly different communities.
There should IMO be some way to search for communitues from any server (and subscribe to them, which is a real hassle especially if your base server doesn’t yet know about them). I like the endless flow of memes as much as the next person, but what I really want is a bunch of communities I’m interested in so that I can lurk, ask questions and eventually create some hi quality content.
The instance finder is built to encourage the use of topic specific instances rather than general use ones so that communities are grouped together better in the same site. The site can then manage all the communities effectively and have the site customized to accomodate them better (and make it feel more like a home for what you like looking at and discussion with others rather than one of many reddit clones)
Categories are mainly so that people are sent to a topic instance that matches their interests. Science goes to mander, programming to p.d, sports to fanaticus, gaming to lemmy.zip, etc.
If youve got some suggestions on how to improve it though let me know, still in progress
lemmy.world is in general. Just instances appear in more than one spot (and some general communities appear for a category if they have the largest community for that category and theres no topic specific instances for it). For example of multiple spots lemmy.db.zer0 is in A.I., anarchist, and a couple others since it has those topics in it
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.
Linking to Lemmy image posts is a bad experience. This use case needs to be much better because content is the main way that non-Lemmy users can be motivated to join Lemmy. I tried to share this with a friend yesterday, and had to explain that the image I actually wanted them to see is locked behind a tiny thumbnail, and that the full size Good Place Janet someone commented is not what I wanted them to see (at least not without the context of the posted image).
There’s no way to open a shared Lemmy link in your client of choice. You can manually add URLs on Android, but you have to do that for every Lemmy instance, so that’s not going to fly. I don’t know if there’s any solution at all on iOS.
There’s not a good way to control what content I see. It’s essentially either “everything” or “a single community”. On Reddit, you could already have multiple communities about the same topic on Reddit, but usually one was dominant, and you had multireddits to save you if there truly are a few good related subreddits. Now on Lemmy, you multiply that problem by N instances, and subtract the multireddit feature. This situation simply must be made better somehow.
There’s not a good way to control what content I see. It’s essentially either “everything” or “a single community”. On Reddit, you could already have multiple communities about the same topic on Reddit, but usually one was dominant, and you had multireddits to save you if there truly are a few good related subreddits. Now on Lemmy, you multiply that problem by N instances, and subtract the multireddit feature. This situation simply must be made better somehow.
Nice, thanks for the link. That link is about the posting side, whereas I was talking only about the viewing side (apparently covered in issue 808), but the posting side is arguably even more important in reducing fragmentation. Just as it’s frustrating to group N communities for viewing, it’s equally frustrating to post to N communities, and then have to interact with them separately.
Unfortunately until it’s implemented I just can’t bring myself to use Lemmy full time. It’s too chaotic content wise, but once it’s implemented I may fully switch over.
Eh, if you’re mostly just consuming/lurking, it’s probably better to use Lemmy by viewing all posts on all communities on all instances, then filtering out the communities you don’t like. Gonna be like that until it gets more popular, and importantly, stops becoming less popular.
It would be amazing to be able to easily and reliably link comments to places, like r/locationhere might have done in Reddit. I am finding it slow to work that out here.
Currently on reddit if you attempt to link to a image directly outside of reddit and somebody clicks it, it’ll redirect them to a media viewer page that hides all the comments but provides a link to view them. As much as I hate that redirect, I don’t think it is a terrible idea for Lemmy to do as well because of the issue your friend had with the thumbnail that you wanted them to click.
I don’t like Reddit’s approach. It hides nearly all information about the post. You don’t get to see the number of upvotes or comments, and you can only see as much of the title as fits on a single line.
I’d rather the image post viewer default to an expanded state, and have a clearer delineation between the image and comments. Right now, there’s not even a header saying “Comments”. You’re expected to just know.
That would be great. I am not sure if it was RES doing it or it was a default reddit thing but I do remember images automatically expanding on there. Having it happen automatically on Lemmy would be great as long as the user is not on a slow or data-capped connection.
Even on a slow connection, if you’ve clicked the link, you’re there to view the post. The image simply must be visible by default. It would be more interesting to allow clients to choose what image quality to load, but I don’t know a good way to do that. Maybe default to low quality, then you can choose high quality after logging in?
I don’t know if this can be adjusted at the platform level, but is it possible you could put in a filter for meme posts? That is 85% of my feed, and I’d really like to minimize them as much as possible.
I come to Reddit(and now Lemmy) for discussions rather than memes, and the content I’m looking for just doesn’t appear in my feed at all really. It would be great if there was a way to filter out or diminish the quantity of those types of posts. Reddit has flair, which makes it easy to filter that way. I’m not sure if Lemmy has something comparable that would allow easy filtration like that.
I mean in the main feed, as opposed to the subs/community subscriptions tab. I’d like to use it for content exploration, similar to how I would use /r/all on Reddit, but with memes filtered out.
Community grouping is also so closely aligned with a federated mindset - one instance may disappear but the community survives.
That said it’s clear you’ve got anything from openly fascist to diehard tankie on Lemmy servers so would definitely have to be a two-way choice and there’s a risk it just won’t work in the way we hope - I can easily see common topics fragmenting into so many shards anyway as one group can’t stand another group.
Just casually mention it on other forums where appropriate. For example, any thread about how sucky Reddit is, explain there are other places to go, like Lemmy.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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