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!
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.
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.
I predict it will be the mobile apps that get us over that hump
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.”
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.
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
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.
“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”
I’ve been a reddit user for at least 15 years. I’ve been a Lemmy user for a few months. Lemmy has a long way to go before it’s a “viable Reddit alternative”. Right now it’s barely usable.
You find it unusable? How so?
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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.
IMO the biggest thing Lemmy needs is a better onboarding experience and an official page that recommends mobile apps/alternate front-ends. One of the Lemmy devs said they wanted to overhaul https://join-lemmy.org/ and it’s on their list, which is a good first step. Until then I think it’s best to wait before trying to capture the average audience and have them leave in confusion.
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.
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!
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.
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?
I’m really not interested in this being a Reddit clone. Several of the subreddits I wanted to be rid of have already popped up, here, while the better side of Reddit isn’t really showing up, especially since Reddit re-opened and purged pesky mods so they could all get back to their scrolling.
Oh, yes lawd, that’s what I need. I need fucking antiwork to shit up the place with their misery vibe while 196 goes skipping back to Reddit and takes all the fun times with her. Sign me up.
I wanted to become involved with a completely different community, with different mores, a different feel, and its own vibe. Fuck Reddit. I left that place looong before the blackout thing, I got tired of its toxic culture that sucked the life out of me after a few minutes.
Now that’s starting to leak into Lemmy and I’m frankly eyeing the door.
If you liked Reddit, you need to go back there. I didn’t like Reddit. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want there to come here, either.
The joy of the Fediverse is that growth is nice but we don’t NEED growth. A lot of you can’t understand that. You can’t understand that the platform will NOT fail if it doesn’t get the kind of exponential, runaway growth that you associate with social media success. We do not actually need to hit TikTok numbers, ever. We need steady, slow user growth from people wanting something different, that’s what. If the Fediverse becomes the Linux of social media, fine.
So no. No to this idea. Let Reddit stay on Reddit, thank you.
So we are gatekeeping lemmy now lmao?
Much the popular posts in lemmy are memes, shitpostings, or politics/technology news which we can easily obtain from other media. The way I see it, lemmy lacks experts, scientists, doctors etc that that can bring interest and credibility to the posts or threads. They can help generate quality contents, what lemmy lacks till now.
Hmmm. So I think I posted on Reddit maybe a half dozen times ever? I didn’t get the appeal. It kinda felt like shouting into a thunderstorm… I’m not sure I “get” Lemmy either, though it feels more like talking in a crowded room than everyone shouting at a cloud. :p More seriously though, I’ve had a few interesting conversations here, but miss the feel of forums of the 2000’s where people just talked about stuff that they were making. Lemmy feels like everyone is striking up a conversation, but still trying to be careful about talking about their own interests because that’s “self promotion”. :-\ I dunno, maybe I’m looking for something that just doesn’t exist anymore.
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I think something we could do as a community is to make resources that help make understanding things happening here easier, like rapidly updated community guides to the available apps with screen shots showing features.
Really what we need is independent and community development of cool new things that you can’t get anywhere else, a real reason to actually come here over all the other similar choices - ideally things that corporate sites would avoid because they’re focusing on profit.
One tool I’m going to be working on is having an instance/community that makes it easy for people to work on collaborative design - ideally it’ll be a pipeline where idea get refined into design briefs then fact finding tasks split from that and eventually it all boils up into a series of implementation tasks, testing and documentation then finally actually gets turned into an open source product or a piece of creative commons media.
