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.
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.
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
Make valuable original content here that’s not found elsewhere, post and comment thoughtfully as much as possible(No. Pun. Chains). Don’t try to turn this place into reddit, be better than reddit.
People who are on reddit that wanted to come here right now has already done so, so it’s important to drew in people who has never used reddit before here instead of always waiting for reddit to do something stupid.
Also less celeb gossip please, need a place where I can get away from that on the Internet.
the last point should be ignored, the whole point of lemmy is to have as many communties as possible and subscribe to the ones you like. you can defederate ones you dont like
I respectfully disagree. The goal should always be to foster high quality discussion over raw quantity of comment and artificial engagement and the devs have said as much in their documentation of Lemmy’s design.
Otherwise, this place would be no different from 9gag or imgur comment sections, much less reddit.
Also less celeb gossip please, need a place where I can get away from that on the Internet.
You get celeb gossip? I believe I’m somehow connected to the sewage hose that’s Elon Musk posts. I’d love for some more varied content instead of “[rich idiot] said [something incredibly stupid]”
What I like about your username, other than reminding me of an actress I like, is that you could really be here, but no one would think that she would (1) be on lemm.ee and (2) she would use her actual name and photo for her account.
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!
Don't focus on looking for ways to find new members. Focus on ways to make people who find the fediverse want to stay. Accomplish that by putting something here that they like to see and want to see again.
When they join the Fediverse, or when they come to visit and consider joining, they're going to search for the stuff they want to see. They might look for memes, but more likely, they're going to look for their hobbies. If the only hobbies reflected here are gaming and programming and the fediverse itself, most people are not going to want to stay, the userbase is going to develop an even heavier bias towards certain types of people, it will become more alienating to other types of people, and it will stagnate.
Make an effort to post about and comment about other things. Cooking, movies, TV, sports, fashion, hair, plants, decor, architecture, history, religion, travel, a nearby city or town. Join those communities. Remember, when you see a cool article about nutrition, or a cool video guide to Copenhagen that you think people will enjoy, share it here. Post it, even if the community is small and you don't think people will care, because we need to seed communities with something. This is what I've been doing in a few communities, but mostly in https://lemmy.world/c/malefashionadvice. It's been frustrating, I haven't really been able to build the community up yet, but it's okay.
While we're at it, don't alienate people by posting, commenting about, or upvoting things that... suck. Keep all forms of bigotry at the door. If you're a hardcore libertarian or tankie or militant atheist... I'm not going to tell you to stop believing what you believe, but try to cool it, like 10%? Please? Nobody wants you breathing down their throats with extremism.
And... I've done this too, but let's make sure that we're not focusing too much on meta posts. They can be worthwhile, but they also are not what new people want to see.
Totally agree this is the way, and I just subscribed to !malefashionadvice Found fashion subs on reddit pretty standoffish and not helpful, so going to give this a try.
Eh. I do also want to see lemmy grow, but it has to grow through different communities, if the only active community is 196 then it's going to grow in a very shitty direction. If it grows through hobby communities, it will slowly capture the charm and power of the Reddit network—as a place you can go to talk about anything and have any problem solved.
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.
Not-so-secret of Reddit success (vs other link aggregators) was that they allowed NSFW content. Set up a separate opt-in corner of Fediverse to post that stuff and a big chunk of reddit will migrate over.
Oh Reddit for sure had it. Jailbait was a big one and IIRC spez was a mod of it. It eventually picked up news attention and they axed it but it was a huge sub for a shockingly long time.
I was shooting the breeze with a fellow Team Lead (automotive manufacturing), when I noticed that he was browsing Indeed, on our workstation. He didn’t care if they noticed; he knows he is indispensable.
While I think a majority of their success came from basically being the only usable search result from google, I would be lying if I didn’t say I was extremely disappointed and left for a bit after I found out why I couldn’t find any NSFW instances on here.
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.
Publish useful content on lemmy. Link to that content on other social media sites
Anytime you see a negative article about reddit particularly on reddit, remind users this will continue to get worse, link them to lemmy and explain what it is/how to join.
Might’ve missed it but I haven’t seen anyone say “Make it not awful to use”
It’s helpful to say that we need better onboarding infographics to simplify explaining how to use Lemmy, but also, Lemmy needs to be easier to use. Finding and following communities is far too complicated.
I come here everyday out of sheer bloody mindedness because I want it to work, not because I enjoy it. Yet.
I’m trying to wrap my head around this, the issue is a very long conversation. Basically two subs merge together if they agree, if a user wants to post, both mods need to see if it’s not a duplicate? This might add more complication with more merging like a 6 group merge or something, it could be chaotic with more mods and each other having conflict wars.
I totally agree with this point that, Lemmy needs to be accessible easily, I started using it and find it useful because of boost app. Otherwise it’s very hard to understand and still is what is Lemmy.world what is lemmy.ml etc. And how to make them combined.
Let’s not forget to comment this on I needed account , I tried to sign-up with lublnfrom boost didn’t work. I had to Google sign-up for Lemmy.world which takes me to special form , which has disable login with disposable email id’s. All in all TOOOOOOOOOOOO difficult process for common users. Doing this process I am still not sure if I comment on Lemmy.whatever subs.
Finding community and joining it, I still have no idea. It’s all too complicated.
Overall
What is a different Lemmy’s means
Simplifying sign-up process and make it streamlined
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.
Something about their body language. I imagine the one on the left is telling a funny joke, or maybe it’s laughing at something the one on the right has said.
I think Reddit is going to make some new even more moronic decision after they IPO and there will be another exodus. This time around it can handle it and it’s mature enough to not have the same issues as before.
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