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can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance.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
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
- https://discuss.online/c/casualconversation@lemm.ee
- https://discuss.online/c/foodporn@lemmy.world
- https://discuss.online/c/superbowl@lemmy.world
- https://discuss.online/c/patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
- https://discuss.online/post/15026558 for 20 non-political communities"
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:
- https://feddit.org/post/7035166?scrollToComments=true
- https://community.nodebb.org/topic/71fe3f89-361c-4716-a79e-de02f94b3113/test-from-lemmy-to-nodebb
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
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.
Indeed, hence the proposition for a “politics-free instance” https://lemmings.world/post/19715687
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.
I’m very new to the fediverse but I am trying to learn what exactly I am doing. I joined lemmy through a link my relative sent me and somehow I did not get to select an instance, it seemingly auto-assigned me to lemmy.cafe. Which, tbh it’s working out I think, but what did I do for this to have happened? I’m also on pixelfed and am awaiting an email from loops. Meta is too frightening to stay, I deleted TikTok and Reddit. I just long for the community I felt in those places.
Hello,
A few pointers for you :
- https://lemmy.cafe/post/11539890 a list of 20 general interest communities
- !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca
- https://www.lemmyapps.com/
I created Quiblr which acts as a client for all Lemmy servers. I’ve tried to remove some of the friction that comes with the Fediverse (including the sign up).
Check it out and let me know what you think. It sounds like you’re exactly the kind of user I built Quiblr for (i.e. folks who are familiar with big tech social media and are not familiar with the fediverse)
hi! i also am on the lemmy.cafe instance :) there’s not many of us but it’s very chill
as for what you did to have happened, your relative may have just sent you a link to lemmy.cafe?
that’s the cool part of fediverse: you technically don’t “join the fediverse” in the same way you don’t “join email.” Rather, you signed up for an account on a single server that can communicate with all the communities hosted between all the different servers. It’s kind of like how you might choose to make an account on outlook.com versus gmail.com—and you visit the site to go there.
The youngest couple generations don’t really do writing (or reading) they watch videos to learn things. Pixelfed.org just pushed Lemmy onto fourth place.
Promotion of Lemmy should be to millennials and older, say.
A thought that just hit me in the shower.
I don’t feel like lemmy is too small. It quite comfortably fills all my lazing on aggregator time without getting stale. The thing is, like many here, I’m a libertarian leftist politics nerd that’s into linux and self hosting.
That description describes a sizeable chunk of this project’s userbase so enough content is being posted enough to saturate the feed.
If you want the project to expand into other niches, you will have to post into the void about whatever you’re into. Seed forums with TV shows or photography or hiking or warhammer or whatever you’re into and encourage others to do the same.
All forums are dead at first but if you want people to come and talk about pottery, you’re going to have to make that forum cozy before it gets enough interaction to become self sustaining.
Two thoughts:
- I’m subscribed to 160 communities, most very small, but see interesting stuff due to the Scaled option - also deliberately avoid the big news communities. Evidently, it takes time to join 160 small cs, so to get started it could be handy to have an all/local except list, and remove the biggest news /memes unless people tick a box saying they like such. Or make an algorithm that prioritises stuff related to what I upvote (which is how other social sites seem to get people started - e.g. i just tried rednote and it quickly learned i like mountains and trains) - but i guess that’s hard to implement as each instance would need to work out ‘related to’.
- 2nd point - there are other user-interfaces - I’m using Alexandrite which has a better layout than lemmy default, but how to make this easier (instructions suggest docker, how many casual users will do that …)?
An official Android and iOS app called “Lemmy”. If you wanna go big, you need the mobile platform.
When you search for “Reddit” in the app store and it also shows an app for Lemmy, we are getting there.
Reddit is going to pay enough for this to never happen
Rule. Clickbait or meaningful?
Yep, lemmy definitely has a problem with too much politics.
I propose that no post should include the head or face of any politician. Seeing a politician typically ruins your day. Best to either keep politics abstract (memes) or not do that at all.
Why not promote piefed?
@ericjmorey@discuss.online OP answered here: https://feddit.org/comment/4286281 (the lack of mobile apps, was the answer)
This link doesn’t work. There’s only 3 communities for patientgamers: world, shitjustworks, and ml
I’ve noticed that people forgot how long ago the Reddit blackout was (about 19 months ago?), and Lemmy has improved a lot since then. Back then Lemmy was like pre-alpha, super buggy, and servers were very unstable. And we have way more 3rd party apps/frontends now.
Also, why not mentioning one instance when making that comment?
I still remember when federation was barely working. We’ve made good progress since then
Prevent opinion downvoting by disabling downvotes globally.
50 upvotes, 90 downvotes, that’s not problematic at all, but there is the huge total score of -40 in this case that could lead to the deletion of the post or comment.
By the way: My instance is one of the few with downvotes disabled. So, if you want to give me feedback on this, I can only see comments…
Opinion downvoting was the most toxic feature of Reddit and led to perfect echo chambers. We should have left it there.
Blahaj does it as well
And again blaze doing the hard work for shaping fedi in positive ways while lemmy.world mods are busy censoring speech!
Sounds like we’re filtering out the exact type of people I would never want to come from Reddit. Dunno why y’all want them.
because the only reason I still use Reddit is to interact with adults in my profession from around the world with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints and with good hearts but limited tolerance for spending time learning obscure tech
so anything to reduce the barrier of entry for those people is one less reason to ever use Reddit again. that’s a win in my book. if you want to stick to your ML communities y, that’s your right. but are you really going to change the world by shutting everyone out?
No one is going to change the world by posting. Very few people have the time or energy to discuss or debate every day. I’d rather just not deal with an entire host of opinions and takes that I already deal with every day in real life.
What I’ve learned over my time using sites like Digg and Reddit is that allowing conservative views to fester and form their communities on a platform allows them to organize and grow and seep into other “non political” spaces. The Donald, gamergate, transphobia, general reaction, whatever.
And the “anti-politics” enlightened centrist types are enablers that allow this.
If people come here and go “wow they sure are critical of Israel, America, Trump, and billionaires. I hate this”, then they’re self selecting themselves from joining and I just don’t think that’s a loss.
The measurement of a platform to me is the quality of the users, not the quantity.
“non political” spaces.
The Donald
Was it really considered non-political? Not that familiar with that sub history
No. My point was that as Reddit became more mainstream, it became more conservative. As it became more conservative, more conservative spaces were created like the Donald and gamergate subs. And people and ideas from those spaces ended up seeping into other “non political” subs, like technology, gaming, movies, etc.
The amount of xenophobia, transphobia, anti-feminism, etc. I saw in general purpose subs grew post Digg migration, especially in gamer subs as gamergate happened in 2014.
Conservatism and centrist liberalism are the dominant political beliefs in the US, UK, and seemingly most of Europe too. Those voices will outnumber and browbeat leftist voices over time if they join an online platform en masse, in my experience.
Everyone else is already here or is not interested in text-based forums
I generally try to avoid political shit here myself, it’s too depressing and I’m not sure reddit-like forums is really a good format for that.
But for those who are out there posting cybertruck memes, thanks for scaring away the MAGAs for the rest of us. It is much appreciated.
