I started out looking for an exact replacement for Reddit (where I mostly lurk). Initially I thought the lack of content and traffic on Lemmy was a bad thing, but I now see it as early days of a community and lack of content means I have a chance to make a post or comment that is valued and gets engagement from other users. Reddit was so mature that anything I wanted to post was either already there, not welcome or buried under an ocean of other content/comments. If you use both you could even find good content on Reddit to crosspost on Lemmy.
It’s quite nice being part of a small community now. Even just an up/down vote from you will be worth more here. It’s great.
Just a joke. I used to just read the comments in reddit threads and be satisfied with the conversations already being had. The subreddits I usually visited were busy enough that I had plenty to read. Rarely did I ever feel like logging in to add something. (I’m also unoriginal, so if I thought of a joke I’d go find it in the reddit thread and upvote it, ha).
Lemmy has less comments, less to read. But I also don’t pointlessly scroll forever, so I guess that’s probably good.
Thanks for pointing that out! High quality content takes time to craft. It’s being skilled and/or knowledgable, being able to convey that across on a digital platform (where basically everyone’s anonymous and of unknown backgrounds), and being engaging while you’re at it. It definitely can be demanding for some.
I feel like that is more or less to be expected. A ton of people found Lemmy during the reddit protests. Now that the protests are gone and Lemmy has had its growing pains some users are leaving, going back to reddit or other places. If we keep using it and making content users will grow organically.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
Having recently jumped from the largest instance to a small unknown one, I will say that it’s nice not having to deal with downtimes roughly 20% of the time when I try to use Lemmy.
LASIM can copy your current subs to another instance, as others have said. I wish there was a way to migrate posts/comments over. I guess you could just link to your old account in your bio though.
I appreciate World’s transparency but it’s been a lot nicer on lemm.ee for me. Not having a way to kill time when I need to isn’t the end of the world but definitely annoying.
I don’t think it’s about a craving for centralisation but for newcomers and people still learning the core ideas about decentralisation it’s about a promise of more active engagement and more varied content.
And FOMO. New users gravitate towards the large instances because they think they will miss content, not knowing they can easily access said content on any instance as long as it hasn’t defederated from them.
I’m barely seeing any content at all, I often see a post click on the community and it shows either 2 other posts and nothing else or nothing at all. It constantly seems like the majority of posts just disappear into the void.
It is much much more of a pain to access content on small instances where it hasn’t synced yet. It means visiting those larger instances anyway to check if it’s worth subscribing to communities. And then trying to actually subscribe is a lesson in patience while it gives you no search results and errors out if you try to visit an unsynced community directly.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
Because decentralization, at least as it is now, runs counter to what people are looking for in a social media platform; mainly discoverability.
Does it though? My instance has very little locally, but if I browse ‘All’ it really isn’t any different than being on any other instance, even a big one.
You are only shown what your server has stored. Your server only stores what people of your instance have subscribed to. If you visit bogger instances, they all have different Hot feeds, because each server pulls different content. There is no one way to see what is going on in all of the fediverse. You are only ever shown a part.
Sure but above a certain user count, your instance will usually have at least one subscriber to just about every active community. (I may have used a bot to help this process…)
It’s hard to find instances that offer what world offers, so I get it.
OTOH, I ended up moving or handing over most of my communities that I had created on world because this instance is TOO popular and bogged down all the time. Plus, they make arbitrary and drastic decisions without discussion on matters like defederation and often banning. It’s smart to go to a smaller instance but it’s also risky because any instance could go down at any moment. That’s why many of my communities are duplicated (across world and infosec) because it would be devastating to lose all of those quality links and engagement.
I think there is a gap in understanding how Lemmy works and how it differs from reddit, in particular with the less technical crowd. We definitely don’t want people sharing giant instances, but that matches more with the sign up for reddit, use reddit logic many people are used to.
I think it’s also why we have seen such drama over Sync for Lemmy and its ads and pricing. To the techy crowd that was the majority of Lemmy users, that all seems antithetical to what Lemmy is and how it works. To the people who came to Lemmy from reddit, and especially those who may have tried out Lemmy because of Sync, the criticism sounds maddening because that’s the way it always worked on reddit.
So in some sense all of this is expected. Lemmy will lose some users, but maybe it will find an equilibrium. The key focus these days imho should be outreach about smaller instances, and outreach about donating to your instance (if you can) to keep it running.
I think more people need to make communities they are interested in that might already exist on beehaw/lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/etc but on other instances. We really need to not keep everything on a few instances… I agree it contradicts itself. I tried by creating fallout but hard to get activity. Even its main community is quiet so that makes sense. I might try something a bit less niche.
There are a lot of parts of Lemmy that are rough around the edges or aren’t there at all. Hopefully it improves over time, especially as new front end apps can free developers to focus on the back end, but we’ll see.
It’s not that users want to centralize everything. It’s Lemmy’s design that promotes it, because despite federation, there are still advantages to choosing big instances and communities.
Joining the largest instance makes searching, joining, or opening communities much more seamless.This can be addressed by:
Improving the search so that it can find communities, or even content, that no one on the instance has subscribed yet.
Making it easier to open a community in your home instance.
In addition to Sub/Local/All feed, you can have a “moderated” feed (with communities selected by admins). The “local” feed is most useful for instances on a specific topic. But for very small instances, it’ll be too empty at least at first. So a moderated feed can create an on-topic feed that’s more lively.
For most topics, only the largest communities are large enough to have good content, so everyone wants to join them. To address this, you need some easy mechanism to subscribe to all communities on a topic. For example, we can let communities follow other communities. Then people can create topical meta-communities that aggregate content without centralizing it.
Interesting what do you mean? I use signal but I can’t get anyone other than my ex wife to use it with me. It is so much nicer than google voice or the texting app, regardless of the end to end encryption.
I like the idea of federated social media platforms conceptually, but ai absolutely want to make my home on the largest instances. That’s just an artifact of how I use social media, though, I always gravitate towards the busiest platforms because interacting with so many people is the real joy of it.
Lemmy is having an identity crisis of sorts. It was built to be decentralized yet we (users) seem to want to centralize everything and we all go to a few of the largest instances.
Is that any different on Mastodon and other Fediverse projects?
I did this. I didn’t initially realize there is such a thing as instances (I thought I was joining Lemmy). Came from Reddit so didn’t expect this. Now I only use my Lemmy.world account, the other one is doing nothing (should probably get around deleting it at some point).
So far I’ve created an account at sh.itjust.works (first one), lemmy.world (main during most of my time here), lemmy.dbzer0.com (first attempt to migrate to another instance) and at lemm.ee, because I wasn’t happy with how lemmy.world admins run their instance (preemptively defederating Hexbear but not Meta).
I think people who’ve only ever known reddit/instagram/twitter will find it dull, but this is still a relatively active place with quality users and mods.
The bigger and more reddit-like it gets the harder it will be to moderate and the more expensive it will be to run. Things are fine right now.
At least there’s something to do here. Mastodon almost always feels like a ghost town to me. I only really keep it on my home screen because I like the icon.
I originally thought it would display everything from every instance by default, but if it isn’t, then I don’t know why you would design a social media platform to work in a federated manner if only stuff from your instance is shown.
People are obsessing over numbers like bitcoiners do. Stop it.
Of course it’s going to die down after the novelty effect has passed. Do we aim for the “fediverse” to be as big (and as toxic) as the likes of 4chan, twitter or reddit? I don’t know about you, but I’m glad it’s not the same thing.
It’s a FOMO, bigger is better, kind of thing. I think some people came here looking for a replacement, which can’t happen, instead of looking for a community, which can.
It’s funny that you say that. Although it’s not I guess replacing Reddit in terms of scale, the browsing experience on Lemmy and that community feeling is actually an improvement for me.
So, I guess for me Lemmy is a more than adequate replacement. I don’t want all of Reddit here though, I think that would cause a whole lot more problems than it would solve.
I just installed Infinity for Lemmy and it looks pretty good so far. It’s still at Avery early stage, but it has the nice look & fell of Infinity for Reddit.
And when the smaller instances I am on can’t handle mobile browsing. It’s annoying when you press back and it takes you all the way back instead of just where you were.
Sadly, there’s just not a critical mass of users in most of the communities I’m interested in. I pop in here every once in a while to see what’s going on, but it’s currently lacking the diversity of content that you get on Reddit. I’m still rooting for it to succeed.
there were 3-4ish communities on that other site that i was pretty active in that are ghost towns here and there is a zero to none chance that they will migrate over. i still go over there for those communities.
that said, for the mindless amusement/newsanddoom scroll lemmy is fine and i do find myself more active here in the general community. it’s just those niche communities haven’t hit the numbers they need to be self-sustaining.
All/New was the only way you could get an entirely new feed a couple times a day.
There was still some lore and beefs between servers (like with wolfballz, a right wing community taken down for hatespeech, or hexbear that became incompatible and headed their own way). Feddit.de has a still a bunch of old federated servers cached that came into and went out of existence.
Between Lemmy.ca (I joined there in March) and Beehaw, there were 10 people posting regularly as in a handful of posts a day. Lemmy.ml had a mix of general news and user “Yogthos” posting pro-China news/propaganda.
It was a quiet but nice little place. The admins running the instance would often be quick to reply and give you detailed answers whenever you needed them. Now many have their plate full with moderation actions and keeping their site up.
!Programmerhumor was one of the first communities to me that seemed based off a Reddit subreddit theme.
We knew the change winds were coming, slowly at first in May, then suddenly exploded after May 30th. Beehaw grew from 700 users to 14000 in less than two weeks (during the time the Reddit protest was being organized). That was a crazy change for Fediverse people, new people everywhere, minor trolls popping here and there, Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works being born, admins working overtime to accept new members. All very exciting.
Second half of June there was some trouble. Beehaw defederated because they couldn’t keep up with moderating users from instances with open signup processes (and I suspect it was triggered by a troll making a hateful post about his dick on the LGBTQ sub).
Then there was a torrent of accounts made on some instances that originally had one or two users. They had no comments or posts and had a username with a random word and a bunch of numbers. All of a sudden the instances with the “most users” were these completely inactive instances.
CAPTCHA was better implemented, and dbzero helped create a filter to monitor and defederate instances with hugely disproportionate number of accounts compared to activity.
You are getting heavily down voted but honestly there is some truth to it, just may be phrased less extreme. There are too many people here who are really stuck in their techie bubble and seem to have little to no understanding of what the general population actually wants or likes or needs.
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