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.

Server issues and quits need to be addressed, and mobile apps Ned to be polished. If the UX isn’t at least on par with Reddit, then it will only hurt to advertise now to the general public.

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)

Mirror for that lemmy.world post since they're currently down...

https://programming.dev/post/1625433

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

I predict it will be the mobile apps that get us over that hump

I do agree, however I would argue that an increased user base would help accelerate progress on improving lemmy

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.

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.)

From what I've seen on reddit, this is sort of already happening. Lemmy's name isn't mud yet, but it's being spoken of like most of the alternatives over there: not good enough or flawed in some way. Lack of content and users is the main one that gets said about all of them, but beyond that, the negative things I see said about Lemmy most often are: "scatter-brained", "unintuitive", "tanky", "messy", "not respecting user privacy", "admins defederating and shadow banning", "having to apply to instances", "federated content not appearing the same on each instance", "lack of mod tools", "need a third party site to help find communities", etc.

And it should be said that many of the most common negative things I've seen said about Lemmy on Reddit are being addressed, but some are not. Privacy (public voting) and issues with admins erecting invisible walls in the federation through various means are not being seriously addressed as far as I've seen.

I think the main issue that will ultimately hurt Lemmy versus any other platform that comes along is that Lemmy's selling point of defederation is only a selling point to some people. Most people on Reddit don't care about centralization, they just want a platform like reddit. They'll come here and put up with it if they have too, but they will scamper off for a centralized site the moment one starts gaining traction unless Lemmy finds some way to provide something equally as unified, simple, and easy to use.

Maybe a frontend or app that just shows you everything and allows you to interact easily without worrying about logins or urls for instances, and pushes the federation aspect "behind the scenes".

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?

People are not moving here from Reddit if they haven't already.

I think you're underestimating Reddit's ability to continue degrading the Reddit experience with their ham-fisted attempts to maximize revenue.

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.

I think the problem was Lemmy didn't have the apps in place ready to take advantage of reddits API deadline. Loads of people come to Lemmy but it wasn't up to scratch yet. So they went back to what they already knew.

Now big apps like sync are on board. If they give lemmy another go I reckon they will stay this time.

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.

fr, the best part of reddit were the ultra talented people, storywriters, artists etc. Also don't forget the most popular post on reddit is "The senate" and a picture of palpatine

You're right that lemmy primarily needs content, and it doesn't have to be just credentialed experts. It will grow in appeal the more there are real communities discussing whatever their subject of interest is.

I moved to my own forum because the alternatives are:

1. Trust that the lemmy instance I choose won't do the same thing reddit did.
2. Host my own Lemmy instance.

For #2, Lemmy isn't polished enough, so I went with a traditional forum option that's been around for a while.

This is something lemdro.id focuses on as an instance but to technical content. Particularly the !android@lemdro.id community is ran by the same mod team as the r/android subreddit and what comes with that are the AMAs with industry experts, various authors of android content on XDA and more, and other various things. !android@lemdro.id is the premier source for Android news and technical content with the subreddit redirecting to there where reasonable

Are we blaming the people and communities of Reddit or the actions of the IPO-minded business?

Inb4 "yes".

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

It’s a nice little thing, but there so much to miss compared to Reddit. Sure, we have memes, technology and news. But there is very little other discussion going on, even for big things like food, sports, finance and relationships (picked some on the top of my mind). Huge communities on Reddit. Barely anything here.

Overall Lemmy is very much a disappointment when it comes to “niche” communities, if you can even call those large subjects that. But it’s even worse for smaller subjects.

I agree with this. The fedi communities as they exist appear to be happy with the niche. We don’t need to be the replacement of a corporate owned social network. Nor should we be.

Places like mastodon or lemmy should grow organically over time if we all want a healthier online culture.

I don't want them here. I continue to promote Lemmy on a one-to-one basis. No mass-market appeal, no calls for the masses. Don't poison the well.

Exactly, I enjoy the high quality discussion currently found on Lemmy and I feel the masses would only bring the average IQ down.

I just thought Lemmy could benefit from my plot armour. /s

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.

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"

You're not wrong, but it's no reason to discourage other people from making the effort if they want to.

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.

Oh, we're promoting our open source web UI now? Well, ngl, mine's kinda lean; it's Leanish!

The website looks good!

Dude, you just paraphrased my experience perfectly. Well almost, wtf is Kbin... (And what is Discord for that matter, someone mentioned that above?)

Haha, that is a pretty hilarious visual. Do we get funny hats?

When the API thing happened, several of the subreddits I frequented had threads about finding an alternative to move to. Lemmy was mentioned, but but discounted early on.

One problem was that people found out the main dev was a tankie and didn't want to be associated with the project because of that.

They ended up going to discords, or self hosted forums, or just staying on reddit.

Yes I never thought plastering it with screenshots of your rust codebase made a good first impression. I get it, open source is awesome, but come on guys. That shouldn't be the first description of your product that people see.

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.

Is there somewhere you can point me to with more information on this idea? I'm intrigued and would like to participate in this type of community.

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.

It would be nice if lemmy had the same level of niche communities as Reddit. That requires large total numbers I think.

That's surprising, I saw Lemmy mentioned a lot during the 3rd party apps debacle.

There is even a sub called LemmyMigration

People "all already know about Apple computers", but they keep reminding us anyways! It seems to work. I think there are a lot of people who have been meaning to check out Lemmy, and could use a reminder. Or people who came and left before it was as worth staying.

No matter what you do people will hate it, complain about it, and give it a bad rep.

I think right now, any publicity good, bad, or upside down will help.

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

Lmao elitism like this will just turn Lemmy into a radioactive, insular circlejerk cesspool

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.

They do, the problem is 1: Google prioritize Reddit. And 2: free domains like. ml dont show up on Google, so Lemmy.ml is practically invisible.

You find it unusable? How so?

If you want to share what you're making, dip your toes into the water. Some communities will appreciate the self-promotion as long as you do it in a sensible way, and other won't. Right now, some degree of self promotion is great because it's new content, which the Fediverse needs.

Yeah, given the Fediverse's much smaller amount of active users and its shorter history, it barely has niche communities nor a wealth of specific knowledge. Anyone who wants the Fediverse to be able to support that role that Reddit currently fulfills of non-corporate information has to know that there's a very large road ahead and it needs active building.

Hope you posted your bg3 build on Lemmy after that....

Yep, almost all useful info for BG3 is in reddit and it sucks. I haven't even seen a community for BG3 on Lemmy, but I'm sure it exists somewhere.

They are actually blocking links to fediverse based websites, especially lemmy. Some of the larger lemmy instances are having their links deleted and people posting them warned/banned

They did that Friday with the site redesign, well damn close to it. Not a complete sell out like Digg was.

To your second point: possession of child porn is actually illegal in the US and many other countries.

In fact, depending on the country the instance is hosted in, it's entirely possible that the people running an instance that hosts it could be arrested for not only possessing it (on their servers) but also distributing it (through their servers). (This is, in part, why YouTube has tried to crack down on videos that aren't for children: they may be held liable for it.)

Because Reddit sucks, and moderators know that better than the average user.
Plus, if they’re the ones that can make their communities on Lemmy or Kbin, they wouldn’t lose their power, just the majority of their subscribers.
That last reason is why most will say no. Still it’s worth an effort I think

You can cut that link in half to remove that tracking info: https://www.reddit.com/...

Tbh when I'm reading comments on Lemmy I'm seeing way more negativity than what was in Reddit discussions.. this comment is really an example of that too. It was a nightmare reading discussion here when Sync was released. I'm trying to like this place but I find the community here to be a bit exhausting, it seems if you don't conform to certain ideas/opinions you're just going to get torn apart in the discussion. Not to mention I'm seeing a lot more politically right leaning attitudes around here than I'm used to (which doesn't HAVE to be a bad thing but unfortunately usually ends up being so).

Not saying all of Lemmy is like this, but from what I see get voted to the top of discussions more often than not, it seems to be the vibe here. Reddit had it's issues of course but at least it still seemed to carry a lighthearted attitude in the community. I hope more people come here still and the community vibe changes.

Disagree with this take in general (growth is worthwhile if only to shift communications platforms in general to open and federated protocols) but I don't think Lemmy is quite where we need it to be in order to sustain a migration. Finding a good instance is still tough, the idea of federation isn't easy to grasp for a new user yet, and the UX is still hammering out bugs. (Big thanks to all the devs that already work on Lemmy and all those that shifted over with the Reddit exodus for driving it to new heights so rapidly.)

An ideal migration from my perspective would have them find instances that cater to their interests and views and would allow easy defederation if undesired. Also, more control for the end user in what communities they see on their feeds when going through discovery (new/hot/etc feeds).

With better user controls for self moderation and better distribution of users across multiple instances I think we can have our cake and eat it too: growth towards a free world of communications without bogging us down by dealing with the folks/attitudes we find repugnant.

I agree and disagree.

If it's one or the other I'd also say we don't need growth. But truth is: We have to be of a certain size so that talking about niche topics works. Currently there are communities that just don't work because it's just one person or a very few active people and it's not enough for a conversation. It's just, we need to grow in a healthy way. In certain places and we need to attract just the right people.

But altogether it's what i've been saying about free software and/or platforms for years now. We don't need to compare ourselves to something else, we don't need to clone something else... This is our little cozy place. If i wanted everything to be like on reddit, I'd just go there and not spend my time here and complain.

One thing I disagree is that Lemmy is becoming like Reddit. I met a few nice people here. And it did and still does feel different. And maybe this place is big enough to be a home for all of us. From people who are 'toxic' in other people's eyes to people that just want to talk about 80s computers. I think we need a few things to change and a technical solution to the problem so that people can get along. We already have federation and some servers de-federating others because of fundamental disagreements. I think moderation has to be enhanced. And we need to stop showing the 'ALL' feed per default. That just contains silly memes or lots of low quality content. That'd be a good start.

So we are gatekeeping lemmy now lmao?

Honestly, I think the platform is pretty stable if you take out the outages caused by DDoS. Let's also be honest, would anyone be shocked if those DDoS's were actually sourced by a competitor who lost users to this platform?

It takes a ton of time and effort to be able to build robust DDoS mitigation strategies, even for Fortune 500/100 companies. Sure, you can throw yourself behind a known mitigation company, but their out of the box rules don't always work for you. Most of the time you go behind them in a "transparent" mode and begin slowly deciding what is and isn't a real threat. Volumetric attacks are easy to deal with - "hey, that's fake traffic, block it.". Attacks like the admins of lemmy.world have talked about are application layer and require much finer tuned filters. You can't just immediately say "block this" because you may block legitimate traffic.

I think it's more about getting the time to be able to develop the features mods want after dealing with how to protect the site, than it is about "stability of Lemmy"

Is Lemmy even considered a stable platform yet? Some of those feel like nice-to-haves once the platform is stable software.

Is there a similar community here?

Maximize attention brought to lemmy as an alternative so that the last salvageable soul on reddit gets the message

Have a look at this thread: https://old.reddit.com/...

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.

Reddit users don't want to be solved.

If we aren't careful, the top comment chain on every post will be puns we've all seen too many times

Old.lemmy.world is similar. There are other Lemmy reskins that get at that Internet of 10 years ago look.

There are some compromises with old.Lemmy that I expect to get ironed out over time but for typical use, it is nice and minimalist.

Lemmy is the LGBT/woke Old Reddit clone

*checks comment history*

Children need a man as a father, not a spineless cuck.

https://lemmy.world/comment/693917

Cisgender is a slur:

https://lemmy.world/comment/726144

Where did the big bad woke touch you?

Lemmy.world and other large instances are just like Condé Nast Reddit. Same censorship, same garbage. If you think that Lemmy is more free, then let me remind you that Reddit pre-2014 was more free than Lemmy.world. Yes, once upon a time Reddit was much more free and open than the so called "Lemmyverse". Why I say this is because of Lemmy's rules and policies. As an anecdote, I literally got banned from a community for saying that there are only two sexes (no foul language, nothing). For me, who was a Redditor during the pre-2014 era, this was unheard of. Lemmy is less like Old Reddit, and more like Raddle.me (Communist Old Reddit-clone). Lemmy is the LGBT/woke Old Reddit clone. It's not as fringe as Raddle.me, but it is still fringe, and it will therefore not be able to have the same reach as Old Reddit once had. The fact that Reddit is woke now is a bait-and-switch, as I explained earlier. Reddit would have never been successful had it been woke from Day 1. I predict that Lemmy will never grow as large as Reddit because of this reason.

I think it's a huge shame it went this way, and I'm still hoping small instances will be able to grow so we get a truly distributed platform. Right now the entire lemmy conversations just stops when Lemmy.world is down which is ridiculous to me. It's like email would stop because Microsoft Outlook is down.

I feel like people who don't agree with the centralization are in minority though. And this I see as a big risk to Lemmy.