How can we boost Lemmy membership?

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.

jazir5,

Community grouping. It would massively increase the available content, and make lemmy much easier to browse.

maegul,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

We’ve got a new sorting option that boosts smaller communities coming in v 0.19. That plus community grouping would be killer!

jazir5,

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.

maegul, (edited )
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

I think some short of tagging system might be in the works. Not sure though, not whether you could filter by them.

Maybe you could change what you’ve subscribed to?

jazir5,

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.

maegul,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Right. Yes I’m the wrong person to talk to. I gave up on local and all a while ago. Sometimes local is cool I guess.

sunbeam60,

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.

stevedidWHAT,
@stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world avatar

Honestly I would rather let people come in naturally.

endless growth faster than what occurs naturally is cancer

Literally

Wahots,
@Wahots@pawb.social avatar

Quality over quantity, too. We have more than enough repost meme subs that are JPEGed to hell to last us many lifetimes. I’d like more subs on like, lawnmower maintenance, indoor gardening, painting, car repairs, mountain biking, etc.

stevedidWHAT,
@stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world avatar

Agreed, I personally liked true off my chests, am I the asshole, etc. more conversation encouragement but tbh I don’t really see that going over we’ll just get here given how hard it is to have a convo without trolls popping up or people who’ve been brainwashed into using the same sort of logic.

Idk like I say, if we got something good going on, more people will naturally want to come and to stay. We’ve got plenty of lessons we can learn right now from the community in its current size. Why exacerbate the issue

arin,

Maybe moving discussion out of the censored lemmy.ml instance would help

SlicingBot,

Genuine question, is Lemmy.ml censored in some way?

JackFromWisconsin,
@JackFromWisconsin@midwest.social avatar

I know they had a word block list but I’m unsure if it’s still around.

maegul,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

SlicingBot,

Well then, I’ll disregard the original comment. I don’t mind that slurs are censored.

Omega_Haxors,

Slurs are blocked, yes. That’s the thing they have a problem with. Let your imagination answer why.

Devious_Thoughts,

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.

gianni,

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.

miss_brainfart,
@miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml avatar

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

gianni,

It also doesn’t require that this person you don’t know have any legal obligations regarding data handling.

revilo366,

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.

dolle,

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.

WhyFlip,

Adoption of 3rd party apps should accelerate things.

Open,
@Open@lemmy.world avatar

Boost is now available on Android and it’s in a good state

WhyFlip,

This is what brought me here.

coffee,

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.

WhyFlip,

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.

tsonfeir,

Be careful who you invite.

Omega_Haxors,

Describe it as “openly leftist, there’s tankies on there” and if it turns them off, bullet dodged.

tsonfeir,

The tankie trolls will just seduce the right wing trolls. We need fewer trolls.

Omega_Haxors,

Copying this from another post of mine:

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.

anothermember,

I moved to Beehaw; you don’t get to see lemmy.world and you don’t get to see downvotes and I think both is an improvement to be honest.

zephyreks,

lemmy.world is such a cesspool I don’t understand it

Omega_Haxors,

Go to redditors and say “it’s like reddit but with actual free speech” and that’s why lemmy world is how it is.

anothermember,

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.

zephyreks,

Sure, but it ends up being extreme even for Reddit. There’s no discourse, it’s just everyone nodding along and agreeing.

anothermember,

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.

peterhing,

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)

8000mark,

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.

Nath, (edited )
@Nath@aussie.zone avatar

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?

GoblinMan,

I switched over from sync when boost released cause I love the columns view for posts.

Trollivier,

Do we have to have more people though?

Mayonnaise,

Pretty much none of the communities that I used to browse on Reddit are active here, so I wouldn’t mind more people here.

Trollivier,

I agree. Some communities are missing. But I fear to see the toxicity of reddit replicated here. I wish we can avoid this.

Mayonnaise,

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.

ryannathans,

Stop shitting all over people just because they don’t agree with you on everything

Spasmolytic,

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.)

setsneedtofeed,
@setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world avatar

You just made an enemy for life!

atrielienz,

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.

dennison,

Since my favorite reddit app came to Lemmy

What app is this?

raginghummus,

Sync, probably

dennison,

Boost, apparently

Spasmolytic,
dennison,

Will check it out, thank you!

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • random
  • uselessserver093
  • Food
  • [email protected]
  • aaaaaaacccccccce
  • test
  • CafeMeta
  • testmag
  • MUD
  • RhythmGameZone
  • RSS
  • dabs
  • oklahoma
  • Socialism
  • KbinCafe
  • TheResearchGuardian
  • Ask_kbincafe
  • SuperSentai
  • feritale
  • KamenRider
  • All magazines