I think its okay the way it is. Too much attention leads to many reposts, karma farmers, bots, now AI bullshit etc.

I don't use Mastodon or Twitter either. I never understood following specific people and prefer following topics instead.

"nobody", nearly 50k people.

Asking people on mastodon if they use lemmy also doesn't make much sense to me. I don't use mastodon because it's not threaded, people on mastodon probably don't use lemmy for a similar reason. I'm not sure how many people use both threaded and unthreaded platforms, but it feels to me like the two layouts attract different people.

I have to be that guy and point out that the Threadiverse isn't just Lemmy, and microblog-Fedi isn't just Mastodon.

sue 2: Users could agree on one community. Or (a functionality Lemmy doesn't have), similar communities could be grouped or linked together. Instead of choosing between Linux@lemmy.ml and Linux@lemmy.world, users could follow a combined “Linux” topic.

Doesn't PieFed do exactly that?

Lemmy and Reddit usage are relatively low compared to their respective social media siblings. I've always believed the reason is in the difference in how they're structured. Most other social media is wired around people as the primary structural unit. "Who's saying what?" Reddit and Lemmy are instead wired around topics. "What are people saying about this?" And I assume the difference in popularity is evidence for how most people themselves are wired.

217 comments on this in 24 hours says to me that there must at least a few people using lemmy

I mean the sad explanation is that they simply don't care. They'll complain all the livelong day about the problems but they'll never leave. That much was clear after they killed the API and everyone protested for a whopping 2 days.

Boiling it down to 3 things:

1. Content Scale & Variety - Lemmy has a lot of content but it's very tech/political heavy. It doesn't have much to offer outside of that domain. Meanwhile, there's a whole shitposting subreddit dedicated to an NFL conference -- I don't even closely follow professional American football, but it's glorious.
2. User Experience Friction - You can't just sign up, you need to pick a server. You've already lost a significant amount of people in that step.
3. User Base - There's nice folks on here, but some really sour the experience for the rest of us by being straight up hostile if we don't agree on every little detail.

Social networks live and die by network effects. People don't use Instagram because it's the best. They use Instagram because that is where their friends are. Either everybody uses a site, or nobody does.

Nobody used reddit for a long time as well

Until people did

Lemmy feels like reddit around 2009

The UX still has a long way to go.

I'm very tolerant of shitty tech and like a struggle, and even I am often like wtf.

Signed up to piefed.zip the other day, and the default feed is just horrendous

Most users will just quit instead of trying to figure out how to fix it manually.

No proper onboarding

I kind of like this level of people as lemmy is less saturated and that's a good thing. Quite often when I was on reddit you'd look at a thread and everything that can be said has been said, so there's nothing new you can add.

I find myself commenting on lemmy a lot more because it's not saturated and that pun hasn't been done, the perspective hasn't been provided, the counterpoint to another comment hasn't been commented etc.

nobody

I'm somebody!

It's because everything that becomes popular starts with people in the 14-20 year range.

Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Tiktok...

The Fediverse will eventually grow once something triggers a snowball effect due the nature of connectivity and federation. Until then, the way to make it grow is to have young people make it popular.

Edit: There also needs to be more "fun" here. I think the Fediverse is a more "serious" place which isn't what those other social media sites offered. "Serious 24/7" isn't that enticing for young people.

The other day I was imagining a game or game service that has you make a Fediverse account of some kind. You get people to signup with a username that automatically creates a "@fedi.games" account. That account can have access to Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed etc.

Reddit started out small too, you know when it was actually good.

I don't like the title cause there's a decently sized userbase here, but the article is good. If the article was something like "Why don't more people use Lemmy?" then I would share this on Reddit, but as-is most people will just read the headline and skip it.

I’m a 31 yr old dude that just found out about this along with what the fediverse is. When I found out, I was researching this stuff so it took me some time to understand it all and I still don’t think I fully understand it all

I use Lemmy

Lemmy as a name is very poor branding. It's almost as bad as Mastodon.

The real answer, that we all know but dare not speak, is that it's miserable here.

Once you've blocked the tankies, porn, and militant dweebs, it's wall to wall politics and titty memes.

I'm here because I'm also a miserable asshole.

Hi. I'm Nobody.

The people love algorithms, even if they don't admit that. Reddit and the other platforms invest a lot of money to make people more addicted, and it works. Lemmy on the other hand... well people quickly engage with lemmy.ml and think what the fuck is this place

Finding communities can be confusing: There can be multiple communities about the same topic on different servers: For example: Linux@lemmy.ml and Linux@lemmy.world

I agree that finding communities can be confusing, but I don't think the problem is the naming.

For example on Reddit if you wanted to talk about video games you'd look at /r/gaming. However over time, since that was a "default sub", it became a bit of a mess and instead /r/Games was the community to have real discussion about video games. But of course over time that too became a bit of a mess and /r/TrueGaming was the best place to talk about video games. In fact for a long time /r/True was a common way to find the better community.

Of course the name of a community might be confusing to an outsider. On Reddit if I'm a fan of Game of Thrones there is /r/GameOfThrones, but what if I'm looking for something a bit more meme worthy, well that's /r/freefolk.

And that's true even on Lemmy. What if I want Star Trek memes? Well that's !tenforward@lemmy.world

I think discoverability is something that can be improved. Of course at the moment so many communities are so small, so looking at all of them isn't really much of a problem. You can usually find what you're looking for.

I use Lemmy. And you do. And 1000 other people do. So I'd say it's big enough.

A lot of people do use Lemmy. I dont get why so many people think something has to have literally everyone on earth using it or its dead. You see the same thing in games, too. Id rather there not be a singular monolirh even with lemmys fediverse design. The internet was better when it wasnt this way.

If I had to guess: the culture here seems unusual, and unwelcoming — sometimes even hostile — to diverse opinions (i.e. people who aren't similarly unusual).

I haven't met many people IRL who would fit in here. For some visitors, that's okay (I don't fit in here, myself), but I think most people would just move along and forget that Lemmy exists.

Being federated, Lemmy is technically capable of being more diverse. It's a bit ironic that it still ended up being like this.

Also, some images don't load. I just ignore those, but still people might be put off by broken UX

I was on Reddit a long time, it wasn't always huge. Usenet forums before that. I like following topics, not people, and like hosting communities built around topics but would hate to have "followers" of myself personally, that sounds hellish. So never used Facebook, etc, and don't even love Mastodon, really.

But apparently this is a minority view?

Hey, I’m here! wtf just going to ignore me like that??

2/3 of polled Mastodon & co. users use no link aggregator, neither Threadiverse not siloed ones.

Maybe microblogging is good enough for them?

Because it's a carbon copy of reddit and it replicates all of its problems in miniature. Also because everyone in here is extremely exclusionary and hateful of anyone who isn't wholesome 100. Also because it's decentralized but not peer to peer, which means that it's basically feudalism.

Because there are a bunch of people on here that have a problem when you don't have the shit of the world on your mind 24/7.

If everyone used lemmy, lemmy would be reddit

Because there is no advertisement for it? Thing is, if you don't go actively looking for a Reddit Alternative, chance is you will never have heard of Lemmy. At least, that was the case for me.

In my opinion the following:

1. Minority of very vocal users who get angry if you don’t share every point of their world view. Honestly you can just block most of them.
2. Limited active subgroups - There are only a handful of active subs the rest are just dead. Which leads to…
3. Limited content, posts stay in my feed for a week at a time before being replaced. I often block posts I like just because I’m sick of seeing it in my feed.
4. Shitty moderation - mods here are way worse than Reddit.

I’ll be honest I miss old Reddit, Lemmy feels like an apocalyptic wasteland but it’s still better than most alternative. It’s kind of nice I don’t sit and consume content as much as I used to.

I use Lemmy and Mastodon, so I'm not really a great person to ask.

But I think all federated platforms have branding issues. "You should use Lemmy." What does this mean exactly? What site do you join? What app do you download on the phone?

People have lots of excuses for not using Lemmy. If I had to come up with one, I would say first impressions. The design / UI is not the greatest. It works, but it’s not the greatest.

In my view, people go to the areas where good content is happening, not different communications architecture.

Lemmy, reddit, and other forum type websites are primarily text based. Microblogging and social media are short form and have plenty of pictures and videos, which catches and retains the attention of users more. Their algorithms are also more intense and curated compared to say reddit’s front page which is more generalized to all its users. Forums mean you have to spend time reading and typing while you can doomscroll and press a reaction button on social media and microblogging.

The grouping is something that should have been solved long ago. Also removing/merging duplicate posts in the feed, it's crazy it doesn't do this yet.

That is what we want people to believe. It's nice and cosy without the 'mainstream' users. ;)

Just you wait. Growth will happen in shocks. Basically people probably haven’t heard about Lemmy yet.

It took me a long time before I signed up. I think I lucked for at least a year. I didn't want to join an instance and then regret it. And all instances have their own small novel of rules, that I need to read through to know if I agree with. And even if you do, you have to send an application and get approved as well.

It almost scared me away - I'd imagine the same goes for a lot of people.

Where do all those meme posts about "Lemmy is bad name / bad branding" come from? I've seen it recurrently enough every time someone launches a FOSS thing that I would normally suspect it's part of a LLM farm or a scam attempt from some sort of naming / patents agency, but I've seen these reactions from long enough (2015-ish).

Does anyone else find the font on this uncomfortable to read is that just me?

Just gonna throw this out there: Lemmy is a bad and dumb name.

1. It's a joke about users being lemmings
   • this subtly denegrates the user on every usage
   • this implies the app/product itself isn't that serious and sounds kinda childish
2. It's not a satisfying word from a pronunciation standpoint. How many other company or product names can you think of that end with that ee sound? Reddit, Twitter, Threads, they all end with these conclusive consonant sounds. Lemmy sounds like it's trailing off while whining.
3. At best it conjures up images of rat like rodents.

everytime an instance, or a community goes down or recieves too much drama(like how some users dint like the "political stance of a specific instance owners(not tankies)), they scatter to other platforms thats why. some went to piefed, and others. the last instance that went down, there was much more people lemmy, especially in some categories(not much but more than now)

I'd say we have too many reposts and not enough original content here. I mean you probably need to think about the value proposition. What does the Lemmyverse offer to someone from Mastodon? A lot of what we do is post the news and memes. And we got some Linux computer support. Now they already got all of that over on Mastodon. Oftentimes it won't even be a repost by some third party, but they get more original content because bloggers and comic artists post themselves over there. Along with some computer magazines and news outlets.

I use Lemmy every day!

I would say Lemmy has bern growing more rhan pifed. Lemmy is still "new" compared to Reddit. A lot of users like the Reddit UI compared to Lemmy's barebones (like on Voyager).

1. Few people like to be the first(ish) one on the dance floor.

2. It's slightly harder to sign up for than Reddit, so people interested in this kind of thing usually just sign up for Reddit (or stay there).

3. Most people don't care about the advantages Lemmy affords us; they care about what's on TV tonight or which celebrity is dating which celebrity.

Let's state plainly: the title is false. I use lemmy; you're using lemmy; the other commentators are using lemmy.

There's a concept I've been mulling over for a while--and economists probably have a term for it of which I'm ignorant of--that is that free software fails in capitalist market economies. I expect that statement to create a knee-jerk reaction. The truth is free-software is everywhere and as computers become ever more embedded into our economies free-software's presence will only grow exponentially. It's often the foundation for computerised economies.

Free-software enthusiasts understand that its become endemic to the economy. However businesses and consumers still ignore it even when it might be prudent to select or fund free-software. To ignore it seems contradictory to a lot of ideals. A capitalist business should use free-software as the monetary cost is zero: it's a free product. Revolutionary organisations should adopt free-software is it aligns with their ideologies. Yet we know they don't. These actors are acting irrationally.

Free-software lacks something that is a prerequisite to participate in an economy: capital. It has no money to propagandise itself. To phrase it another way: it has no money to buy ads. Without ads it doesn't exist to entities who do have capital.

In Australia Reddit brought ad-space inside shopping-centers. Commercial software has revenues from which a portion can be spent on advertising and its through this advertising that growth can occur. The reason why lemmy has a small user-base is because it has no revenue streams. It’s an economic sink.

If we were to imagine that the user-pool was to dramatically increase what would actually occur? I imagine many instances would be overwhelmed with traffic, knocking them offline. For those that remain a lot of traffic would be perceived as spam. There is no revenue stream that's attached to that user-base. If there was you would--absolutely!--see lemmy's user-base increase as there would be a profit incentive: more users would equate to more profit. The current reality is that more users equates to more debts.

The market for 'internet-forums' has already consolidated into the big-players we know of. Maybe someone could take lemmy's code and usurp the established vendors. That behaviour is already underway now; it's why we have a multitude of lemmy instances. Maybe the next titan of 'internet-communities' will be running a lemmy stack. Not all operators are hosting lemmy with ideology/charity being at the fore. Some site operators are asking themselves, "how can I monetise this?"

From my perspective the issue isn't why people don’t use lemmy, it's why is hosting so expensive? The prerequisites to self-hosting (whether it be for personal use or for an established group or organisation) are costly. One has to pay rent on a DNS, static-IP, hardware and data connections. These prerequisites are commercial in nature and are priced as if every buyer has a revenue stream from which these rents are payed from.

If an individual/group wants independence and decides to self-host they're taking on these rents that have been priced at commercial rates. Those are the monetary hurdles. There's an intellectual hurdle too: a group needs to have members that know how to administer and maintain servers. The prerequisites are rather burdensome. It should then not come as a surprise that a group of young people who play video-games with each other elect to have their community on discord, or whatever commercial-entity takes on the economic and intellectual burdens. These commercial entities hide the complex nature of computer systems and the economic relationships that exist. In exchange they're chasing speculative profits. They have revenue coming in from which they can apportion to advertising and paid programmers. They have the incentives to grow.

In December 2018, Discord announced it had raised $150 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures, and Technology Opportunity Partners.

Lemmy is reactionary software. It pines for the day's of webmaster superiority.. Where a webmaster ruled a personal fiefdom and brought and sold other fiefdoms. Users should be able to host and maintain servers for themselves and their communities. Economic rents and knowledge-specialisation are high hurdles to overcome. If they are overcome they'll find a wasteland where users have already been captured by existing market players—not only that! They’ll exist side-by-side commercial vendors that pay to have their software blasted from every ad outlet they can afford. The enthusiast or ideologue has sparse capital to attract new users away from their existing 'digital-home' whilst the current players have enormous war-chests and if non-economic forces somehow push new-users towards them (e.g. something ‘viral’) they have insufficient economic resources to accommodate them.

I would advocate for technology like GNUnet, i2p and hyphanet (GNUnet being my personal favorite). Software such as those abolish the major economic-rents that would otherwise be required for the 'clearnet'. (DNS rents are unjustifiable and I would like to direct readers to the OpenNIC project.) However the intellectual burden is increased.

I would like to take a jab at the idea that Reddit (or whatever third-party is used) takes ownership of a community and their user-generated content. They certainly do, but the community leaders voluntarily gave it up. They also neglected their responsibilities. There's no reason why users couldn't have a local-mirror of their community even if it is hosted on a third-party platform. That would negate the reality of a third-party purge and therefore the ‘destruction’ of their community. These communities are irresponsible with irresponsible users. How does one make an irresponsible user responsible? I don't think it can be done.

I'm offended now 😱

Since a few weeks I actively post lots of news in several mostly already existing communities. But it is frustrating. I do not see much user growth. If it just would be 1-2 new users per week I'd be happy...

33 people participated

Reddit seems to be highly algorithmic now, so I think it has more of the “doomscrolling effect” that does accrue a lot of engagement.

Been on Mastodon for several years. Just now trying Lemmy.

Lemmy ist for talking about topics, mastodon is for following brands and entering parasocial relationships.

who am I? am I nobody? ...yeah I guess I kinda am

They keep blocking me on VPN. I do NOT use Reddit. I can browse stuff on VPN but I can't post. Piefed hasn't started doing that, least not the instance I use. May change in the future...

Maybe because they’re spread out over a bunch of different instances?

From what I've heard of more technical people on here while lurking discussions, Lemmy isn't scalable.

If everyone from Reddit were to move over to Lemmy, we'd be in big trouble.

Hidden from Google search results

I think there are a lot of people who would use lemmy and enjoy using lemmy but just dont know about it. As an old reddit user I found the whole thing a bit confusing at first but after a few days it was fine. Lemmy is leagues above other reddit alternatives.

Because you get banned from communities by mods too extreme for reddit or the USSR

must be a suprise, but people dont like kgb propaganda and linux nerds

So, saying 'nobody uses X' is a bit of a stretch considering that whenever it's said, there's proof to the contrary that people use said thing. People use lemmy at times, but the problem is as it has been pointed out before many times, is that lemmy is still too niche and small when compared to larger platforms.

One of the big reasons I can think of is, is that Lemmy just doesn't have the span of community as someplace like Reddit does. You're not going to find a Darts lemmy instance, you're not going to find a MentalHealth lemmy instance or anything. On Reddit, there's hundreds of micro-communities that cover a range of interests that anybody can join and talk about.

Lemmy only seems to focus on just a handful of things; Politics, Memes, Games, Piracy, Linux, News, Technology and Asking Questions. That's great and all but, just about anyone has these in spades. Not everyone wants to cycle through those things on a daily basis, they'll want something more. But it's going to turn people off from Lemmy immediately when they migrate from Reddit.

Yeah sure, we can tell them to make an instance to cover that niche itch, but once it's built, it can be months to even years before it gets attention. And nobody wants to spend time just running around like an annoying salesman to get people to join said instance just to feel better about converting someone else over from one side to the other.

Another reason is that - moderation can be ass. Yeah, some moderators on Lemmy have the mentality and maturity of an edgy 15-year old who spends too much time online for their own good. And we can all see it in plain sight on the modlog so I don't even need to explain.

For something to be popular, you have to turn it on and you're using it.

That will always be the biggest issue.

I think because people are the same no matter what platform they're using and you'll end up with the same kinds of arguments, trolling, or derailing everywhere. But they already have platforms they're on for those, so why switch?

Lemmy would have to be pretty different and because humans are the same everywhere, I'm not really seeing that difference.

I see it somewhat when browsing contents in other languages because the culture is different enough to lend itself to different contents, or at least different arguments that are less tiresome than what I see on English platforms...

Just because they know the Fediverse, doesn't mean they know Lemmy.

For more than 50% of all Mastodon users (that's more than 25% of all Fediverse users), the Fediverse equals Mastodon. For large parts of the rest, if it doesn't behave like Mastodon, it's disturbing.

Besides, how are they supposed to learn about Lemmy anyway? Yes, in theory, Mastodon and Lemmy are federated. In theory.

In fact, however, they're almost completely incompatible. Lemmy is all about groups. It doesn't support any interaction between users directly. Mastodon, on the other hand, is about users interacting with each other directly. It has no support for groups whatsoever. At all. Nada. Zilch.

One of many reasons why there's almost no interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy that'd demonstrate to Mastodon users that Lemmy exists by confronting them with Lemmy content.

By the way, the latter won't work anyway. Mastodon doesn't show you what software a message came from. Thus, most Mastodon users assume that everything they see comes from Mastodon.

why does this matter.

Quadruple moderation.
Moderation is waay waay worse on lemmy

1. If you are just a basic prole who wants to use a forum and discuss today's issues, Lemmy seems to be a smaller version Reddit. How does it stand out?

2. The name is awful. Twitter grew regardless of the name, so maybe this point is dumb. Also, avatar looks like a rat.

3. Rainbow. If you want more users, expand your market. Rainbow in USA means Democrat LGB. Would you like more Christians and Muslims to join? Hindu?

4. I'm a moron, not a programmer... but wouldn't a lot more users destroy Lemmy? From my reading of what other smarter people have said, too much growth would lead to exponential costs and isn't really feasible. I am not well read on this topic, so apologies.

I would guess that the founders made these design decisions to exclude normies, maybe that's also why they picked the name and selected the rat icon. In which case, everything is working as designed and all is well.

The irony:

You are askinf people on Lemmy why people don't use lemmy?

Brother, don't you own a mirror? Go get high and existential on reddit.

https://lemmy.world/post/51345527.

Basically this. Quadruple moderation on lemmy is stupid.
Reddit agents easily ban content and active contributors