It’s no secret that Lemmy is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Reddit. The issue it faces however is that it’s still relatively niche and not many people know about it. I propose that we change this. By contacting the mods of large subreddits and asking them to make and promote relevant Lemmy communities we could substantially increase the amount of people who discover the fediverse. What’s more, I don’t think this is would be a hard sell considering many mods are already pissed off with Reddit due to their API changes. I believe that this is the time to act, so this is a call to arms, to help grow the fediverse into the future of social media!
What can I do then?
How about we just forget about trying to beat anyone and just get on to using the platform.
Reddit won’t die anytime soon.
Lemmy won’t become popular anytime soon.
It took Reddit years before it became a major platform known by millions. It will take Lemmy years to gain notoriety among millions. Give it time, enjoy what it so now because in a year, two years or three or four years from now, we’ll all be wishing for the good old days when Lemmy just started and we were able to enjoy the simple system it is now.
Reddit really did benefit from the fall of Digg though - this was about just shy of 20 years ago? Digg was where Reddit is now, thoroughly upsetting its user base with wholesale changes to the content of the site that nobody liked, and Reddit capitalized on that, and stole Digg’s thunder.
I think Lemmy can potentially do the same. For a second, it looked like Squabbles/Squabblr was going to be the winner, but the last I checked, they imploded after some controversy.
(I came here from Reddit, incidentally - the user interface is very intuitive.)
Yeah lemmy can do the same, but begging redditors to switch won’t help anything. I was part of the digg migration, nobody on reddit ever posted on digg to go switch. I just searched for something else, and reddit was there. I certainly didn’t spend a second thinking about digg afterwards, and i wont think about reddit either.
Doesn’t seem like most Reddit users care. There is still way more activity on Reddit then here, and that probably isn’t changing anytime soon. And right now Reddit still has better content since it seems mostly Lemmy is just posts about Reddit.
Look at the comments per day of any major subs such as
https://subredditstats.com/r/AskReddit
The 3rd party apps shutdown made a huge impact on the number of comments. Activity is still there, but much less
Agreed, lots of naysayers here for some reason
I know right? People think that Lemmy will grow “naturally”, but Lemmy is not a plant, there is nothing natural about this process. If people want it to grow, actions must be taken just like the OP proposed.
Naturally meaning make lemmy a good experience and people will come. Begging redditors to come won’t help anything. Hell, OP and anyone else is free to just set up an instance where a bot reposts whatever gets posted to reddit front page, or a specific sub. That’s a fine idea i think to help lemmy grow, as is any idea that will improve the Lemmy experience. But there’s no need to spam reddit mods and ask them to help grow lemmy.
free to just set up an instance where a bot reposts whatever gets posted to reddit front page, or a specific sub.
https://lemmit.online/ is that instance
Naturally meaning make lemmy a good experience and people will come.
They can’t come if they don’t know about Lemmy. I came here, because I’d seen many posts about it on Reddit. You probably heard about it from someone too. We’re on the internet in 2023: people don’t go beyond first few links on Google, they rarely leave big platforms and aggregators like Facebook and Reddit. While I agree that this particular strategy raises questions (I don’t see why Reddit mods would care), I support the cause.
They’ll know about it when it’s a good product. And , they do know about it, every fuck spez thread had lemmy memtioned as an alternative. At this point, any redditors who cared about the api changes know about lemmy. And that’s fine if you want to go on reddit and spam lemmy links.
But it makes no sense to go to current reddit mods who are committed to volunteering for reddit six weeks after all this shit went down. They like reddit and dont plan on leaving, if they did they would have six weeks ago.
People know about it already, they find it confusing, hard to use, you cannot block an instance, there are no multireddits, Sync is still in beta, the main instance is down half of the time.
All of these points should be addressed for Lemmy to become mainstream
You make it sound like one blocks another, but we already have a lot of people and there’s no reason why we can’t attract more. You’re here despite these issues.
Critical mass has high inertia.
Honestly, I would rather Lemmy attract its own community naturally rather than it be the place all redditors pipe into. I think most people who have already come from there can agree the culture is not really conductive to quality discussion, and we’ve started to see some of that leak into Lemmy as well.
Rather than just copy/paste reddit’s users and culture, we should try to develop both on their own. Create an environment that users want to spend their time on. Then through word of mouth on other platforms they entice people here. I don’t think just being the place redditors flood after every fuckup is healthy for the growth of the platform. As a Mastodon user, I’m kinda glad it isn’t the primary platform Twitter refugees are flocking to.
What is “naturally”? I heard about Lemmy through reddit during the exodus. Was that unnatural?
I’m not sure the culture aspect is unique to Reddit though. The culture seems more or less platform independent IMO.
Lemmy attract its own community naturally
Do you want to see more content, or you don’t?
I personally want to see more good content. Quantity means nothing if the quality isn’t up to par.
more good content
Well, it still counts as “more content” which is usually on par with user count.
If all I wanted was more content, I could make an LLM hallucinate something for me. That’d be content. Not very good content but tonnes of it.
Is that what you want?
Since when AI content is compared to user content? Why do you change topic?
I prefer 100 quality posters to 100,000 shitposters.
Have a look at this post, we had a similar discussion there: https://lemmy.world/post/3074361
Long story short, the platform still needs a bit of work before being able to really move communities. Some examples exist (lemdro.id, piracy, startrek) but those are tech savvy audiences, there would be a lot more friction with more generalist communities
I fully agree with you. And I want to emphasize that the main issue is that if you start advertising Lemmy like OP suggest before it’s “fully ready” to give the best experience to this people, they will decide now that lemmy is not for them and after that it’s very difficult to make they try again and change their mind.
Exactly the mistake threads just made, trying to capitalize on twitter’s rate limiting fiasco. The “general public” is extremely fickle, and Reddit will give us more opportunities.
I do agree, however I would argue that an increased user base would help accelerate progress on improving lemmy
To be honest, people who are tech savvy and bug tolerant enough to be on Lemmy are probably already here. There were quite a few discussions about it (and still now on Reddit)
One thing that annoys me coming from Reddit is, that there isn’t just one group of each theme. You have for example gaming groups on several instances and you can either chose to subscribe to a number of those or chose the one you like.
But in the end, one will be the go-to group, and wouldn’t that centralize the most popular groups?
(Honest question, I’m new to Lemmy and the thoughts behind it)
instances are like countries with their own constitution (rules) and police (mods). This means that two communities in different instances may seem the same, but they are not, because they have to follow the rules and culture of their instance.
Just like a Technology club in Japan will not be the same as the Technology club in the US because they will be culturally different. I think it will take some time for the Fediverse to think this way.
For me, this is better. Instead of having one giant technology community where your comments and posts are drowned out, we can have different technology communities with their own culture and norms, just like we visit different countries. Your comment and posts will be not drowned out.
It is a different paradigm to the centralised one of Reddit.
Yep, if you’re not from the US, instances are vastly superior.
Imagine all the times people from around the world asked for plumbing help on Reddit and got hit with “that ain’t up to code, buddy, get to ass down to Howm Deeepo” 😂
Americans do tend to assume the internet revolves around them, as they’re a bit insular and don’t see that it really, really, really doesn’t
A lot of that is social media/algorithmic too. It wasn’t until I start migrating to Lemmy (specifically lemm.ee) that I started seeing a lot of varied content.
Seriously? Aren’t the anti-USA comments getting a bit tired by now?
This is not an anti-American comment, but a fact. The USA is a superpower and a big country. As a superpower, americans don’t need to be informed about what happens in the world because it doesn’t affect them. Their country is the source of world power. And Americans tend to travel within their country because it’s big and full of tourist attractions.
Compare that with Canada, which has 40 million people. We need to be aware of every single decision the US makes so that the country can adapt. There is a famous quote from Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
Hmm, you know how the Tarrifs are limiting trade? I don’t want to get political, but when trade slows, that is when it becomes obvious that USA is NOT immune to whatever happens to the rest of the world.
Every pyramid has a foundation.
Yes, the USA is a big country and a superpower.
But things that happen in the world do have major impact on the country and all of its citizens. The need to be up to date and aware of world events is critical. Everyone should be educated. It is the only way to make informed decisions.
You may not have meant it as an anti-American trope but it came off that way. Even the comment you attribute to Trudeau is a thinly veiled insult to our country. That is not lost on me or others here in the fediverse or other American citizens. The anti-USA bashing has become hackneyed and decidedly juvenile.
I expect better from you.
They are tiring honestly, I agree
These two comments prove my last sentence
You don’t notice the “anti”-everything comments, only the ones you perceive as “America-hate”
And by the way, nobody hates you, you’re just really bad at dealing with sarcasm
No, they don’t. I was addressing specifically the anti-American sentiment that seems to be the “hip thing to do”. Nothing more, nothing less.
Just because I did not mention any other energy wasting hate speech does not mean I am not aware.
I still expect better from you.
It also needs about 1000% less hostility when it comes to anything beyond superficial discussion. Basically every news thread just gets brigaded by idiots trolling with pictures of pig shit. I get it, internet is not serious business, but in terms of actual discourse at the moment, this place is worse than Facebook.
Yeah, I’ve run into this here. I posted a question to one of the posts asking why it was such a big deal, and all the sudden I’m a corporate defender. I don’t think this is a reddit, lemmy, or anything issue, it’s just internet and echo chambers. If you don’t reply with a “OMG YES SO TRUE OMG” then you are a dissident.
Wow, my experience is very opposite this. It sounds like you’re describing reddit to me honestly. I’ve seen way less hostility here compared with Reddit
It depends on what content you consume I guess. On Reddit, news subs generally enforce decorum pretty strongly which really eliminates outright trolling. On lemmy there is the opposite of this in many places - lemmygrad and hexbear openly state that it is their goal to shit up threads to deny “shit libs” a platform, and the mods on several major instances seem to openly allow it.
So if you never consume that kind of content on either platform, you’d never notice the relative toxicity of lemmy.
That’s why instances need to defederate and block lemmygrad and hexbear, to discourage that behavior.
This is neither here nor there, but the only thing I hate with a burning passion more than right wingers is the tankie filth that pervades those instances.Wait, do you any links to them admitting that? I believe you, but it’s a good idea to have that saved.
I say this as someone who hates tankies just as much as the next dude, but that community isn’t really productive nor helpful. If you seriously have an issue with lemmygrad there are many instances that have defederated from them (i think sh.itjust.works is?). A community like that does nothing but to bring drama within the lemmyverse. Yes, their views are at times abhorrent but you are just provoking a community that already has major issue with large portions of the lemmyverse. We really should leave that toxic drama stirring behind.
Didn’t you just say “it’s a good idea to have this stuff saved”
You just asked for evidence.
the mods on several major instances seem to openly allow it.
Mods AND Lemmy developers.
Come visit !worldnews@sh.itjust.works if you want quality discussion!
Mirror for that lemmy.world post since they’re currently down…
The fact that large instances hit more downtime than something like reddit will always be a detriment.
lemmy.world really needs to close signups and the creation of new communities, until they can improve their uptime
or they should at least be removed from https://join-lemmy.org/instances maybe it could track the uptime and use that to build the list?
but Reddit actually does go down pretty often too
They said themselves the issue isn’t signups or server capacity, it’s that they’ve been under multiple rounds of DDoS attacks.
Why are they being DDoS’d though? I thought it was because they’re the biggest instance and thus shutting down still helps
Well, by that logic, if they shut down, the the next largest will be targeted, and then the next largest, etc. That’s not a winning game for anyone involved…
Right but we’ll be more decentralized so any such attack won’t affect the threadiverse as much. Right now every time .world goes down the entire fediverse feels half dead because it’s so large.
But if this happens 7 times and there’s now 7 major instances, each will only take up like 10% of the total and attacking it won’t affect much.
In that sense, getting more decentralized is basically a natural evolution of the big instances being attacked. I’m just trying to speed it up.
Yeah but why give new users a bad experience, you’re just gonna drive them away from Lemmy and they never come back
Also we’re overly centralized on them, we need to decentralize better, both users and communities
I mean, that could happen to any other Lemmy instance too, unfortunately. And even if you do decentralize, a server going down still deprives the rest of us of that content, so it’s never not going to cause some issues. So I wouldn’t hold this against Lemmy.world.
I don’t hold it against them, it’s just unfortunate that they’ve been having so much downtime recently, certainly more than most other good instances
I predict it will be the mobile apps that get us over that hump
Definitely. Sync and Boost will bring the largest users influx
45k users in a week with sync.
That’s impressive
Infinity too.
Indeed
Which is unfortunate imo. More mobile users means less effort and lower quality content
Yeah, people say we should use small instances to keep things spread out but two of the ones I tried have major posting issues that stop comments working, We really need to stress test and big squish before we really push it to everyone, some of the issues I’ve seen have been fixed and on general it’s very stable so I don’t think it’s got far to go
Stop trying to turn this place into R. We left because it was shit. If you don’t like this place, go somewhere else.
Are we blaming the people and communities of Reddit or the actions of the IPO-minded business?
Inb4 “yes”.
Are we blaming the people and communities of Reddit or the actions of the IPO-minded business?
It depends on the person, I think. I left Reddit because I was outright disgusted with its idiotic userbase, but plenty people are here because they know that the vulture capital will wreck that place.
And at the end of the day, we might as well ask if both aren’t intrinsically tied - Reddit’s userbase being so awful because of the business behind it. @z00s@lemmy.world mentioned the “shitlord mods”, most of the time the admins behave in a rather similar fashion.
I left because of how they treated third party apps devs, Reddit mods, and users. Total disregard and disrespect. Which left me feeling the same.
No, we’re blaming OP for trying to make lemmy more like an ipo-minded business.
Inb4 failed
It was the infamous groupthink, brigading, and shitlord mods that were responsible for the R enshittening.
All that business stuff was icing on the cake which was used as a scapegoat by the very people who made R such a shit place to begin with.
The IPO-minded business was unwilling to curtail and curate the userbase as every user was the equivalent to potential profit. There’s many many many people from Reddit who should not find a place online to call home. They can stay with the capitalists until the capital runs dry.
Sounds like you’re blaming the users for the CEO being a cunt
Also sounds like you don’t understand the structural implications of Lemmy being a federated social network
Also sounds like you’re intolerant of other’s opinions and think they should leave
Sounds like you’re a conservative
You need your hearing checked, as well as your reading comprehension.
Oh boy, it looks like main character syndrome patients have migrated from Reddit…
I just thought Lemmy could benefit from my plot armour. /s
I really don’t think Lemmy is polished and issue-free enough for tons of people to move here. It might be in the future but I feel like pushing it would do no good.
Yeah, let it grow organically. Like other open-source projects, it’s unlikely to shrink, and it’ll gain profile and draw users from Reddit etc over time–faster when Reddit drops the ball, which it’ll do more often as it scrambles to extract more profit from a shrinking user base.
There’s no reason to rush it. That’ll just cause growing pains and give Lemmy a bad reputation.
There is always a risk of collapse for lemmy. When you are in decline there can be negative feedback loops furthering the decline.
Not this again…
Lemmy isn’t everyones’ cup of tea. Reddit, despite the API shenanigans, still does what people want.
People are not moving here from Reddit if they haven’t already. They’d sooner go to Discord. Less cognitive load, and their subs already have servers set up. Lemmy has a 5 communities different servers for each sub and most will be inactive, so it’s already a losing battle.
Make Lemmy it’s own thing, rather than aspiring to be the 2nd head of the Hydra. Organic growth is good, sustainable. Boom and bust wholesale migrations look like failed hostile takeovers.
I think you’re grossly overestimating the ability of FOSS to reach “regular” people. 99.9% of Redditors haven’t even heard of Lemmy. There are assuredly very many people using Reddit who would be very happy to switch to something better.
You’re not wrong with any of your points, I’m just saying there’s no reason to discourage a “get the word out” campaign. People can make their own choices, but only after they know what the options are.
As someone who recently was wondering what my alternatives to Reddit were, then stumbling here recently, I think what we need is a good personality to do a 3 minute YouTube tutorial that gets out on Reddit.
I still don’t fully understand the difference between the two, but what I do know is encouraging. But it took effort to discover that difference. Reddit is apathetic. A three minute video may be short enough to get people to understand.
Just needs to show what it looks like (similar to Reddit with sync and I’m sure others), then a brief description of how it differs under the hood, and then how to set up an account and subscribe to a community.
Have a look at this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/1507unf/post_why_dont_reopen_here_completely/
People were being told to move to Lemmy, but they fiercely refused, sometimes being utterly agressive.
And this is a Unixporn community, which is supposed to be aware of FOSS.
I think a more appropriate approach is just to mention lemmy to your circles of friends and try to get any redditors you personally know to give lemmy a try, at least get the app installed so they can browse both reddit and lemmy. Lemmy won’t be able to handle millions upon millions of new people, especially ones with no guidance, but communities aren’t built overnight and we should do our best to get those who could use lemmy to use lemmy, one at a time. We shouldn’t be trying to overthrow reddit, just give a viable alternative to those willing to try one. It’s the more organic approach.
Grass roots wins Vs marketing.
Make that healthy root system grow!
“Hello we are from the Church of the Fediverse, have you a moment to talk about our Lord and Saviour Lemmy? No not the tankies one”
Haha, that is a pretty hilarious visual. Do we get funny hats?
Best I can do is magic underwear.
Reddit’s decline is greatly exaggerated.
It’s also advantageous to keep low agency and low quality users on reddit.
Lemmy has already started to decline in quality since average redditors started migrating here.
Honestly, my problem with Lemmy is that there’s mostly hardliners here, hardly any average opinions.
might be that most of us are just lurking 👀
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Vote ratios are never balanced.
Current redditors are a virus. They are nothing like the people who built the site a decade ago. We don’t need them here
I messaged r/comicbooks mods after they were briefly banned by reddit offering them a place on my instance if they ever wanted to shift their community away from reddit. They threatened to permanently ban me for spam LMAO
I feel sorry for you :(
I just thought it was funny honestly. I dunno if you’re being sarcastic or not I can’t tell
Lmao elitism like this will just turn Lemmy into a radioactive, insular circlejerk cesspool
If you want the reddit experience you can just stay there. It’s still available and active. You sound like the kind of people that move across country because you want change then complain the new state isn’t the same as your old home full of those problems that made you move.
And you sound like a republican telling refugees to go back to their home country
People are leaving Reddit out of conscience and are looking for a more free place to share opinions, which this structurally is.
If you don’t like it, start your own instance or join r/conservative
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Redditors are exactly like the Ukrainian refugees bro. They are so oppressed bro. Trust me bro. Lmaoooooo
I almost agree with this. I think that the problem aren’t the individuals themselves, but how that environment conditioned them to behave like morons. And I also think that, as long as they change their behaviour when arriving, they could be useful to bring more content quantity to Lemmy.
Do we actually care about “beating” Reddit? As long as a friendly & knowledgeable community exists on Lemmy, do we really care about also being the largest?
It would be nice if lemmy had the same level of niche communities as Reddit. That requires large total numbers I think.
Lemmy and Mastodon require some extra thought processes that most people do not want or can’t work through. They want instant, fast and as much of it as possible.
Somehow this has to become so easy to understand and use that even the dimmest bulbs in society will have no trouble using it.
Upside? This will bring more usage and adoption. Downside? This will bring in more trash.
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One nice (yet sometimes annoying) thing about Lemmy is that you can have multiple communities of the same thing.
What I think will happen is that a few instances of Lemmy will become the big ones and their communities for memes, news and politics will dominate.
I can even see something happening to remove duplicates. Perhaps lemmy.world and lemmy.ml agree that /politics is on lemmy.world and /news is on lemmy.ml
App developers will make those default communities easy to find. Kind of like how reddit used to have 50 or so default sub reddits.
Less popular instances will have shadow communities that will be more difficult to find, but where there will be a more hardcore group of contributors and members.
I honestly think the combining of the same communities on different instances will happen more at the app layer. It wouldn’t be hard to group them all in the same category for convenience and it allows for more granular control. Downside being that it makes an already complex platform more complicated but hey, that’s kind of the point and reason people come here to lemmy in the first place. I want more people to join lemmy but I also know that it’s going to be a niche platform for quite a while if not the rest of it’s existence.
Summit announced it already !summit@lemmy.world
In all honesty, as much as I want non-profit Reddit alternatives to succeed, I think Lemmy is a tough sell to Redditors. Here’s roughly how I think that’d go.
Lemmy user: “You should try Lemmy”
Redditor: “Sure, what’s its website?”
Lemmy user: “There are many”
Redditor: “Wait what”
Lemmy user: “You have to pick one”
Redditor: “Why?”
Lemmy user: “See, Lemmy is not a website, but a network of federated instan-”
Redditor: “That sounds complicated. I just want a website like Reddit”
Lemmy user: “But don’t you care about how Reddit has treated its mods, app devs and the general community?”
Redditor: “Yeah but all this Lemmy and Kbin stuff is confusing. Can I just use a website without reading up on all this Fediverse stuff?”
Lemmy user: “Okay, just go to Lemmy.world”
Redditor: “It seems to be down”
Lemmy user: “Hmm, maybe try Lemmy.ml?”
Redditor: “This website looks a little… hard to wrap my head around”
Lemmy user: “There are alternative frontends”
Redditor: “What now?”
Lemmy user: “Do you know about Alexandrite?”
Redditor: “Nevermind, I’m out”
If we want to convince a wide range of users to use Lemmy, we have to make using Lemmy a no-brainer for everyone.
I’m trying to contribute by building a new opensource web UI that I hope will provide a better UX for the average Redditor. It’s not ready to become a daily driver yet, but I’m hoping to get to a point where it’s nice enough that instances will want to host it on their domain. Maybe I’m delusional in thinking this web UI will appeal to users that don’t like the current ones. But there’s only one way to find out, and that is to build it.
Honestly that conversation is very, very bad. That’s exactly how you not introduce new things to people.
Like you don’t start throwing unknown terms to them, or at least I very much hope so. It is a network of forum websites. Yes it’s good to know that it’s federated but for a starter that’s just an unknown word that makes it complicated.
lemmy.world, lemmy.ml: why the overloaded ones?
And when they say that it starts to get complicated, why would you mention yet another complicated concept out of the blue? Yes, if you do it that way, that’s disastrous, and does much more harm than good.Lemmy user: “You should try Lemmy”
Redditor: “Sure, what’s its website?”
Lemmy user: “there are many, here’s a list, just pick one, you can always use a different one later”
Redditor: “ok cool I’m glad you explained it in a simple way that is easy for me to understand I will use lemmy exclusively now”
If it was that easy to convince Redditors, we’d already have a very diverse userbase. But by all means, keep spreading the word. We all want Lemmy to succeed.
Oh, we’re promoting our open source web UI now? Well, ngl, mine’s kinda lean; it’s Leanish!
Heck yeah, share your work with the world.
We should probably compile a regularly updated list somewhere. It’s great that people have so many options. Now we just need to make it easier for them to find a web UI that suits their needs.
You’re not wrong, but it’s no reason to discourage other people from making the effort if they want to.
Dude, you just paraphrased my experience perfectly. Well almost, wtf is Kbin… (And what is Discord for that matter, someone mentioned that above?)
Nice strawman.
Lemming: You should try Lemmy, it’s a way to have reddit style content, but without a company controlling it.
Redditor: Wow cool, Fuck Spez. Where do I join?
Lemming: it doesn’t matter, every domain that participates has the same content, here’s a list of places to choose from.
I agree with both posts.
I put lemmy off because the way everyone was explaining it was confusing AF. Everyone comes at you like they are on the street handing out Bibles.
People go through this whole fediverse diatribe. There should just be a universal Eli 5 infographic that each instance shows new users that briefly describe how it works.
Once you remove the decentralized fedi talk it’s actually pretty simple to understand.
It’s a just rhetorical device to explain a theory for why most Redditors haven’t jumped ship yet. It may be correct, it may be incorrect.
Two of my reddit using friends have never heard of lemmy until I told them about it a few days ago. Although they are quite invested in the FOSS world.
I am here because I read something about Lemmy on reddit, two or three times. More exposure on reddit would show many people that there is an alternative. It wouldn’t convince millions but maybe enough to let some niche communities grow.
That’s surprising, I saw Lemmy mentioned a lot during the 3rd party apps debacle.
There is even a sub called LemmyMigration
