To follow-up on the Reddit thread yesterday, here are a few elements that can be interesting to discuss.

Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy

Just quoting “Lemmy” or pointing to join-lemmy.org can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance. Recent post by a new joiner 9 days ago, they had to change server 2 times to get a satisfying experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536.

Using something like

"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users

Feel free if you have any questions"

Can already point them in one direction, and avoid them getting lost in the too many options.

If people want to debate the choice of those two instances, I’ll add my thought process in the comments.

The Lemmy feed looks as depressing as Reddit’s All, and how to mitigate that

Some feedback I received when promoting Lemmy the way above

Just checked out lemmy to see if it’s different from reddit. Im very disappointed lmao.

First post I see is a comic about cultural appropriation with an ifunny watermark. Next are several posts about the proton vpn ceo “going full maga.” And finally a post I saw on Reddit days ago that is ragebait making fun of the cybertruck.

Yikes. It’s the same exact thing.

–

Lemmy still has a pretty obnoxious tankie problem. Even if you block the .ml instance, pretty much every thread about US politics or world news on any major instance gets hijacked by the same handful of trolls and their associated vote bots. Hopefully this will become less of a problem as more sane people join, but just as a word of caution, be aware that you will be called western imperialist scum by a bunch of 14 year olds.

–

Lemmy is utter rubbish, it’s as if their entire userbase consists of the top layer of scum carefully siphoned off from the Reddit cesspool. It got the worst of the annoying political echo chamber and “very smart” argumentative users from Reddit.

I just clicked on half a dozen random Lemmy servers, and all of them had at least one link about Trump in the top 5 posts. Even ones that seem like they’re supposed to be about tech.

Normal humans want the Reddit of 10+ years ago back. We don’t want to use a different site colonized by the same modern day Redditors we loathe interacting with.

–

To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong. Open https://discuss.online , by default you’ll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.

What I try to do in such instances is to give something like

"While politics are important, you can still very much block them. Here are an example of some communities that can interest you:

I also wrote a long post about that issue that you can read here https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/

As a side note, I recently started a discussion on !fedigrow@lemm.ee about a potential political-free instance for new joiners, feel free to have a look: https://feddit.org/post/6819084

Lemmy is too small, 42k monthly active users is nothing

Discuit, the centralized alternative to Reddit, currently counts 181 weekly active commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/NlAdOWAp

You can also mention that NodeBB is now federating with Lemmy:

That’s all for now, happy to discuss in the comments.

Note: if you’re not interested in promoting Lemmy, feel free to hide this post, you are able to do this on specific posts if your instance is running 0.19.4 and newer

  • freamon@community.nodebb.org
    3·
    10 days ago

    Oh, yeah. It’s still ongoing. You can track the progress at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/api/alpha/routes.py if you like. At the bottom of that page, things with a ‘Stage 1’ are what’s left to do.

    The remaining stuff is mostly to do with chat / notifications. Once done, a basic app could be released, and then improved to include stuff that’s missing (things like uploading an image to post or a comment, and viewing reports)

    EDIT: sorry, this was meant to be a reply to another comment. Still getting the hang of NodeBB. Now will this edit work …

  • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
    54·
    10 days ago

    And again blaze doing the hard work for shaping fedi in positive ways while lemmy.world mods are busy censoring speech!

  • 4Robato@lemmy.worldEnglish
    81·
    10 days ago

    I think one of the biggest barriers of the fediverse is decision paralysis.

    So stop looking around! Go to https://lemmy.world/ and join :)

    If you want to expend extra time, there are more servers and you can join a different one, if you are undecisive join the one above :)

  • Free_Opinions@feddit.ukEnglish
    91·
    10 days ago

    This is the best platform for constant live updates about what the people you don’t like are up to. Then there’s articles about everything that’s wrong in the world and also some memes - mostly political.

  • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    111·
    10 days ago

    To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong. Open https://discuss.online , by default you’ll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.

    The fact that they (or you) complain about the “All” timeline having the same stuff in all servers shows they have no idea what they’re talking about: that’s the entire point of an All feed! (plusminus stuff like defederation). It would make more sense to compare the Local feed of instances, IMO.

    Besides, the default sorts are active and popularity nowadays, so it only makes sense that stuff that we care about and have to have words with, takes the forefront. If you want to solve that the solution is not “let’s ignore what’s going on around the world”, it’s “post more cats” and “post more ich_iel”. Or just use the Scaled sort, I don’t understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.

    And that’s right there with the complaint about the 42k users too. The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about. Complaining that for the next people to come in “I’m going to be called a westerner imperialist” is delicious hypocrisy on not noticing how indoctrinated they are.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      72·
      10 days ago

      The fact that they (or you) complain about the “All” timeline having the same stuff in all servers shows they have no idea what they’re talking about: that’s the entire point of an All feed! (plusminus stuff like defederation). It would make more sense to compare the Local feed of instances, IMO.

      The complaint is not about the All timeline being the same everywhere. The complaint is that most of the All feed is US politics, a topic which is already massively dominant on Reddit. Some people are looking at alternatives because they want to avoid that. If it’s the same, why bother changing and not stay on Reddit?

      I don’t understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.

      Good point, could be something that could be change by admins.

      The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about.

      Well, that’s not the case for everyone. A lot of people came here because they wanted third party apps on Reddit.

      • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        5·
        10 days ago

        The complaint is that most of the All feed is US politics, a topic which is already massively dominant on Reddit. Some people are looking at alternatives because they want to avoid that. If it’s the same, why bother changing and not stay on Reddit?

        Well then the key is to not show the All feed. That feed, by its very design, is about showing the overview of what is going about “the known fedi”, and we can’t control what other people talk about, fedi or otherwise. If he current news is Luigi, exploded Starlink launches and double Nazi salutes, that’s what’s going to be talked about - and the presence of generalist instances is going to amplify that effect. Unless you have enough cats, enough Linux, or enough ich_iel.

        A lot of people came here because they wanted third party apps on Reddit.

        Well then they were told wrong: here it’s not about developing for Reddit. In fact, when someone tried to act on trying to bring people from Reddit or emulating “third party app” by bringing in the threads from Reddit, it was the lemmings who complained (even if rightfully so).

  • Mr_Blott@feddit.ukEnglish
    2·
    10 days ago

    I had to read your title three times before I realised you weren’t trying to convince carpenters to join

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    7·
    10 days ago

    An official Android and iOS app called “Lemmy”. If you wanna go big, you need the mobile platform.

  • TrickDacy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    10 days ago

    The thing I hate worst about Lemmy is that a lot of people are dickheads about their opinion, which often is barely different from the persons’ opinions you see them aggressively shitting on. In other cases the opinions are pretty different but start with the same basic premise, yet some users see no common ground at all. It’s become really disheartening honestly. There are probably more than 30 users like that which I had to block for my own sanity

    • BothsidesistFraud@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      10 days ago

      This is the twitter and reddit ethos. Everyone is Super Smart and You Are Wrong Ha Ha.

      On reddit you can find smaller communities where people are more normal and it’s closer to having a discussion at a bar than it is going on to /r/politics or something.

      People DEFINITELY don’t like showing up at a new place and posting stuff and people piling on with snark and stuff.

  • PlainSimpleGarak@lemmings.worldEnglish
    31·
    8 days ago

    Unfortunately, everyone of your quoted feedback is spot on. Lemmy got the worst of reddit’s political echo chamber combined with the “I am so smart” crowd. To make Lemmy barely tolerable, I’ve had to filter far too many words and block far too many communities. Most people aren’t going to jump through hoops to make a platform usable.

  • comfy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    8 days ago

    To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong.

    Most of them are. Some of them are even plain old factually wrong, not just condescending or exaggerating.

    It’s important to understand that many of these instances were raised by people who didn’t like reddit’s widespread US-defaultism (including people claiming reddit is left-of-center because it swings Democrat) and its tolerance of bigots and trolls. Now if someone wants to set up their own instances to clone reddit and keep all the bad parts, sure, all we can really do is ignore them or get ignored by them. But when those people complain that this is “a bunch of 14 year olds” with “vote bots” or a “political echo chamber”, that’s just plain old ignorant, or shocked that they’re suddenly in a place with a different culture and struggling to believe it’s mostly just normal nerdy people like reddit is.

  • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
    102·
    10 days ago

    I’m for the sink or swim mentality. Point them here and if they come up with an excuse to not be here then they probably weren’t going to be a good contributor anyway.

    I’m fine with being selective. There is no reason we need 1M+ MAU for the sake of the network, we aren’t trying to turn a profit

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      201·
      10 days ago

      There is no reason we need 1M+ MAU for the sake of the network, we aren’t trying to turn a profit

      There’s also no reason a topic as popular as TV shows relies on 3 posters to keep the main community active: !showsandmovies@lemm.ee

      We don’t need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement

          • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            10 days ago

            I don’t know if @GreenEngineering3475@lemmy.world has a bot that automatically posts news from a feed or is just a diligent poster but he is always posting relevant news to the NFL community.

            For college football, @g0d0fm15ch13f@lemmy.world and @ToasterOverlord@fanaticus.social do a great job modding and make sure that community has content.

            The CFB community has really active game threads and even a community poll, the NFL community is more for news but it’s very helpful for me to follow the news in the league and most posts get at least a few comments.

            • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
              2·
              10 days ago

              That’s nice. About fantasy football, did you promote in on the other NFL communities? I guess it’s too much of a niche topic. I had some success with fantasy football for the Euro 2024, but that was a continent-wide competition, not a regular season.

              • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                10 days ago

                I’ve promoted it and it has plenty of subscribers, it just doesn’t have a lot of regular activity. It’s not my community anyway, I’ve just been trying to steward it the last two seasons. I think it’s more just become more of a place to chat about fantasy football than an active place ask for and give advice for fantasy football. I’m fine with that as well.

      • Zero22xx@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        71·
        10 days ago

        We don’t need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement

        Definitely agreed with this. And less always (understandably) angry political posters, more escapists that want to chat about movies, games etc. It becomes like that snake eating itself because people that want a break from real life come here and see nothing but the same 24 news cycle as everywhere else. And then, speaking for myself, searching up certain niche communities and finding them either non-existent or with 3 posts from 1 and a half years ago.

        I’ve been thinking of porting a couple of my old review posts over here from my banned but not yet closed Reddit account. Just so that, for example, the next time someone visits the Ghibli community there’ll be 4 posts instead of 3.

        And the Sonic communities are pretty disappointing too, considering I’m always seeing it mentioned in the wild these days. Makes me think (or hope) that there’s a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.

        Reddit is sadly still unbeaten in searching up a TV show that you enjoy and finding an entire community built around it. And those communities never took a lot of members. So it shouldn’t be impossible here.

        • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
          4·
          10 days ago

          Makes me think (or hope) that there’s a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.

          If you have a topic you would like to talk about, feel free to post about it in !fedigrow@lemm.ee. Not sure we have enough people for Sonic, but we can try.

  • nitrolife@rekabu.ruEnglish
    5·
    10 days ago

    Just my opinion: No need to focus on reddit. The world is not focused by that platform, and there are other people on the Internet.

    To attract an audience, you need exactly to attract an audience. Add indexing by search engines, Add SEO optimization for lemmy-ui, etc. People can find interesting instances exactly in google search after that without any provisioning. That’s why web search engines be created.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      71·
      10 days ago

      Lemmy is a very similar platform to Reddit, it makes sense to target those people.

      web search engines

      The sad thing is that search engines aren’t really at the best at the moment, and with Google and Reddit deal, it’s not like they are going to promote alternatives forums that much.

      • nitrolife@rekabu.ruEnglish
        1·
        10 days ago

        Google and Reddit deal, it’s not like they are going to promote alternatives forums that much

        There is more than one search engine in the sea.

        And that would be an argument if it weren’t for a completely broken CEO headers in the web interface. I can’t attach a screenshot because I changed the web in my copy to the Photon. In general, there are tons of SEO mistakes. At least according to Yandex Webmaster page.

        UPD: for example api don’t have robots.txt method. As result I generate new pages lists for best search optimization with self written script…