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.
laments the slow pace of new material in the communities.
Participation. We need more of it. Like…a lot more of it.
Lurkers shouldn’t lurk, and people should give others the benefit of the doubt far more often than they ever did on Reddit, if they ever did at all. Make Lemmy a community where engagement is valuable and fun and actually useful.
Is that true though? I used to be a major lurker, but now I post relatively often. I think having other people post about stuff you care about, rather than just screenshots of other websites, can be a big factor.
On Reddit I usually didn’t comment anything, even if I had something to say. I do comment here, and a big part is that more people actually engage here.
This is daunting. I don’t want to make one. I have a full-time job and a house to take care of. I haven’t had a day off in over a month. I’m not set up to moderate a community. I’m not even set up to vet moderators. People say this on Lemmy all the time like it’s the easiest thing in the world. It’s not for everyone.
That’s just the state that Lemmy is in right now. It’s not a massive community like Reddit is. It’s not easy! It’s very time consuming, and probably not a very rewarding experience. However, if you want to use Lemmy that’s probably the best solution. Either that or come back when it’s a more mature software. You would have had a similar experience in the early days of Reddit.
To add to this, artificial engagement is disingenuous. It’s akin to corporate-owned comment sections inviting people to “speak their mind” which, of course, no one does.
It’s a balance that should be kept: being willing to contribute, but not feeling forced to contribute. Quality begets quality, and if we compromise on quality chasing quantity, we would end up copying the worst of Reddit.
That’s what I did over on kbin. I’m responsible for posting 95+% of pro wrestling news on Lemmy/kbin, and another person sets up most of the discussions. The community wasn’t picking up speed back during the early redditpocalypse. Now we’re getting tons of activity.
So I was wishing that r/korea woukd be a thing on lemmy, I found an instance hosted in Korea and subscribed. I started posting, now after like 3 month it’s full of only my own posts, each gets 3-7 upvotes and every 5th gets a comment from someone outside of Korea ^^.
I feel that if I’m the only one posting anyway I perhaps should bring it to my own instance which I have controll over and could moderate if it became necessary. I have no idea who is the admin of that one.
The instance is a little small and the community doesn’t have many users. It could help advertising it a little so interested people find out about it. Looks like someone even made a post after your comment.
This is a community I help with, but there are others like it: !communitypromo
perhaps should bring it to my own instance which I have controll over and could moderate if it became necessary. I have no idea who is the admin of that one.
I agree. I’ve been shying away from some instances. Since that community is small anyway, you could make it on your own / find a different instance for it.
Very much this. Every time you see something interesting make a post about it please. It doesn’t need to be polished. You don’t need to worry about it.
Save hot takes and negativity for posts made by bots. Pay attention to who is posting what, because the poster has to see that negativity and it is not sustainable. You are making every comment to a person. When you bitch about a title or article, it is going to a person that gets a notification and has to see it. Everyone that has tried to do this regularly with the goal of just making regular posts has quit, myself included. It is straight up unhealthy from a mental health perspective to have to read or see what the bottom 5% sludge post. This is one reason why we have so many bots and memes.
The single biggest change that would make this place better would be a negativity filter to wreck the few mental health patients that are always on here down voting every new post. Simply filter for the 0.01% of users with abnormal negativity and sandbox them so they are the only ones that see their own negativity. Posting something here for the first time and seeing this kind of response right away is totally disenfranchising. People that troll the world like this belong in little sandboxes of their own sadistic self gratification. I think down votes are useful and important, but their abuse should be eliminated systematically.
It took a serious change in attitude for me to not become a lurker anymore. I always figured that if I have nothing interesting to say, I should just be quiet.
Eventually I realized that people are often happy to just get some feedback and interaction, even if it isn’t the most interesting or original response. As long as it’s done in a positive and friendly manner, you’re creating a sense of community.
I’m a lurker, but want to contribute. It took a lot to get an account (and then got a bunch of hate because I picked lemmy.world), but I can’t find any guidance on how to create a new sub. Is there any advice on that?
That was rude of them. I usually recommend people start with lemmy.world, and then move to something else if they want to, once they get a feel for what they want.
Is there any advice on that?
I’ll see if I can find a guide, but it’s fairly simple. On desktop, you click on “Create Community” at the top. This will create a community (the equivalent of a subreddit) (for you it will be on lemmy.world). After that, you should pick a good name since you can’t change that (it’s the thing that goes in the url, like if you did cats: lemmy.ca/c/cats. Everything else you can change up later on. I found it easier to learn by doing.
If you want to make a community on a different instance, you will need to create an account on that instance, make the community the same way, and then add your original account as a moderator. This is more annoying, so I’d recommend just making communities on your home instance for now.
Sometimes (probably most times) people don’t have anything to add to a conversation. In these moments it’s better not to comment at all. Just look at how shitty reddit is with dozens of people making the same stupid joke in the comments on any popular post. Quality is better than quantity.
I think giving the benefit of doubt is extremely important. Being welcoming to newcomers, slowly integrating them into the different culture here, will help a lot (FTR I’m new myself, only been here a few months).
That’s not to say we should give every jackass a soapbox to stand on, but at least learn if they’re willing to converse in good faith before shouting them down.
Unfortunately it’s just a waiting game really, we grow slowly. Bringing people over is good, but they’ll follow the content. As people come, posters will come too, and commenters, and then that’s what ultimately brings over the rest.
Give it time. The platform exploded in popularity in a few months, let us [current users] let the last batch of newcomers to settle in before calling more folks in. Plus we don’t even have much control over it, at the end of the day Lemmy grows as Reddit does stupid shit that makes it lose trust with its userbase.
I’ve looked back at a few reddit threads, and I’m thankful most of those users aren’t coming here. I’m alright with the current level of content and participation. What little there is here is still better than most of what’s on r/all, and it’s not like we want to attract advertisers and self-promoting accounts.
I agree with you, I like that it feels more cozy and there are way fewer trolls/devil’s advocate types that I’ve run into here. And that’s from my multiple different accounts that I’ve test drived on different instances. I personally think that lemmy is too confusing for people to settle into due to the nature of federation and such so its only gonna be people really committed to getting away from mainstream social media that will come over long term.
The discourse I’ve observed thus far has felt more honest, less pugnacious than on Reddit. Obviously I’ve seen a drop in the bucket, but anyway, it’s good so far.
You’re probably right, but ultimately I think the vast amount of niche content around so many different hobbies is the most valuable thing, even if it comes with a bit of… human toxicity.
Sadly, I just can’t imagine how you get the former while really effectively suppressing the latter.
In general, I agree with you, where the quality of posts and comments on Lenny appear to be of much higher quality than Reddit used to be. At the same time though, I miss even some of the not-so-niche big communities that were engaging and kept me addicted to Reddit - like r/formula1. The community is too small here too sustain that interest
Yeah, I understand why you feel that way. I’m finding that how I interact with Lemmy is much different than reddit. On reddit, I often felt compelled to browse and post. Here, it feels more like a conscious choice, something I do because I see it as a good use of my time.
We need to cut back the bot traffic a touch. All new people coming and see are a million posts with no participation. It’s good to have the content but we’re kind of lacking in curation and a lot of what’s coming over is not stuff we’re interested in commenting on. As long as we just keep carbon copying Reddit and Twitter and the Verge and hundreds of other places, we’re going to have a lot of empty post sitting around.
Actual discourse and discussion needs to happen. We’re fairly low on trolls currently, which is a fantastic thing. But we also don’t have a lot of spicy takes either.
More moderation, administration tools, better filters, easier ways to shut out bad actors. Right now the best we can do is defederate when somebody can’t manage their clientele. And we’re still way too bot-able.
More migration tools something I can to what mastodon does if you need to move instances.
#2: I’ve seen some spicy takes, at least in the politics communities. Others, people are generally just more chill. I consider that a feature.
#3: The upcoming 0.19.0 will let users block instances as well as users/communities. Filters are unfortunately a client-specific feature right now, but fortunately there are a lot of clients to choose from now.
#4: 0.19.0 has this. Users can export their profile settings data (including subscriptions and blocklists) and import those elsewhere.
Where do you see bot traffic? From my observations, Lemmy has the opposite problem than what you describe in your point 1: all threads I see do get plenty of comments (not as many as reddit, but still plenty), but we get relatively few new threads. Or does that only happen in specific communities? I don’t look at communities I’m not subscribed to, maybe that is why.
‘New’ is a bot orgy, which is a real shame because quality posts get lost in it and it’s harder for them to gain visibility and traction in the wider instance. If you stick to subscribed communities you won’t notice, but for new users who haven’t curated their communities yet (or people like me who just like discovering stuff I wouldn’t think to seek out specifically), browsing the general aggregate can be a great way to discover content and communities to follow.
Or it would be, if it wasn’t bot bot bot bot bot bot thread, bot bot bot bot bot bot thread, bot bot thread, bot bot thread, bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot, wait a minute, thread!
Improve the quality of the platform. Fix the moderation issues. Find a solution to communities being fragmented across multiple servers. Keep improving reliability. And so on.
It’s the reason I’ve been motivated to post as much as I do, both in broader communities and a handful of niche ones that I want to see grow.
If you’ve thought about posting/commenting but just haven’t yet, take the plunge! I never used to post on reddit at all, and I’ve been pretty active since joining Lemmy.
Have you tried moderating yet? With your posting frequency you'd likely make a good mod. The tools kind of suck but its better if you're on more like you are.
I created the XCOM community on lemmy.world, but I haven’t had to mod a single thing yet, because it’s slow (only 300-something subscribers, and mostly me posting).
I might look into it. The only catch is that I’m usually just checking lemmy on my phone, and I haven’t looked into how many apps have the ability to mod stuff.
I find it’s easier to engage on Lemmy. One can share a different viewpoint and often find discussion rather than being shit on because you’re not part of the echo chamber.
Yeah, and I’ve also found that you don’t have to be active on a post within the first hour for anyone to see your comment. People comment and have their comments seen days after, because there seems to be a lot of variety in how people sort their feeds here.
I never feel like I have anything interesting to post. But I do try to encourage other posters by leaving a positive comment, even if it’s just a thank you or something nice.
Upvotes don’t do much, but some positive feedback should keep people motivated to keep posting. At least, that’s how I see it.
It doesn’t have to be that interesting. It just needs to be content. I found maybe 5%-10% of posts on imgur to be interesting, yet I still went there everyday for years. Same with Reddit, but likely even less.
Growing naturally is the best way. No advertising is necessary, not if you like it how it is.
When a platform grows too fast it loses it's identity. If I had to bet I'd guess the recent migration has already stretched what identity Lemmy had before.
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