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.
Doesn’t seem like most Reddit users care. There is still way more activity on Reddit then here, and that probably isn’t changing anytime soon. And right now Reddit still has better content since it seems mostly Lemmy is just posts about Reddit.
Look at the comments per day of any major subs such as
https://subredditstats.com/r/AskReddit
The 3rd party apps shutdown made a huge impact on the number of comments. Activity is still there, but much less
Agreed, lots of naysayers here for some reason
I know right? People think that Lemmy will grow “naturally”, but Lemmy is not a plant, there is nothing natural about this process. If people want it to grow, actions must be taken just like the OP proposed.
Naturally meaning make lemmy a good experience and people will come. Begging redditors to come won’t help anything. Hell, OP and anyone else is free to just set up an instance where a bot reposts whatever gets posted to reddit front page, or a specific sub. That’s a fine idea i think to help lemmy grow, as is any idea that will improve the Lemmy experience. But there’s no need to spam reddit mods and ask them to help grow lemmy.
free to just set up an instance where a bot reposts whatever gets posted to reddit front page, or a specific sub.
https://lemmit.online/ is that instance
Naturally meaning make lemmy a good experience and people will come.
They can’t come if they don’t know about Lemmy. I came here, because I’d seen many posts about it on Reddit. You probably heard about it from someone too. We’re on the internet in 2023: people don’t go beyond first few links on Google, they rarely leave big platforms and aggregators like Facebook and Reddit. While I agree that this particular strategy raises questions (I don’t see why Reddit mods would care), I support the cause.
They’ll know about it when it’s a good product. And , they do know about it, every fuck spez thread had lemmy memtioned as an alternative. At this point, any redditors who cared about the api changes know about lemmy. And that’s fine if you want to go on reddit and spam lemmy links.
But it makes no sense to go to current reddit mods who are committed to volunteering for reddit six weeks after all this shit went down. They like reddit and dont plan on leaving, if they did they would have six weeks ago.
People know about it already, they find it confusing, hard to use, you cannot block an instance, there are no multireddits, Sync is still in beta, the main instance is down half of the time.
All of these points should be addressed for Lemmy to become mainstream
You make it sound like one blocks another, but we already have a lot of people and there’s no reason why we can’t attract more. You’re here despite these issues.
Critical mass has high inertia.
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.
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?
I personally want to see more good content. Quantity means nothing if the quality isn’t up to par.
more good content
Well, it still counts as “more content” which is usually on par with user count.
If all I wanted was more content, I could make an LLM hallucinate something for me. That’d be content. Not very good content but tonnes of it.
Is that what you want?
Since when AI content is compared to user content? Why do you change topic?
I prefer 100 quality posters to 100,000 shitposters.
Oh boy, it looks like main character syndrome patients have migrated from Reddit…
I just thought Lemmy could benefit from my plot armour. /s
I really don’t think Lemmy is polished and issue-free enough for tons of people to move here. It might be in the future but I feel like pushing it would do no good.
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.
There is always a risk of collapse for lemmy. When you are in decline there can be negative feedback loops furthering the decline.
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.
Exactly the mistake threads just made, trying to capitalize on twitter’s rate limiting fiasco. The “general public” is extremely fickle, and Reddit will give us more opportunities.
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.
Mirror for that lemmy.world post since they’re currently down…
The fact that large instances hit more downtime than something like reddit will always be a detriment.
lemmy.world really needs to close signups and the creation of new communities, until they can improve their uptime
or they should at least be removed from https://join-lemmy.org/instances maybe it could track the uptime and use that to build the list?
but Reddit actually does go down pretty often too
They said themselves the issue isn’t signups or server capacity, it’s that they’ve been under multiple rounds of DDoS attacks.
Why are they being DDoS’d though? I thought it was because they’re the biggest instance and thus shutting down still helps
Well, by that logic, if they shut down, the the next largest will be targeted, and then the next largest, etc. That’s not a winning game for anyone involved…
Right but we’ll be more decentralized so any such attack won’t affect the threadiverse as much. Right now every time .world goes down the entire fediverse feels half dead because it’s so large.
But if this happens 7 times and there’s now 7 major instances, each will only take up like 10% of the total and attacking it won’t affect much.
In that sense, getting more decentralized is basically a natural evolution of the big instances being attacked. I’m just trying to speed it up.
Yeah but why give new users a bad experience, you’re just gonna drive them away from Lemmy and they never come back
Also we’re overly centralized on them, we need to decentralize better, both users and communities
I predict it will be the mobile apps that get us over that hump
Which is unfortunate imo. More mobile users means less effort and lower quality content
Definitely. Sync and Boost will bring the largest users influx
I do agree, however I would argue that an increased user base would help accelerate progress on improving lemmy
To be honest, people who are tech savvy and bug tolerant enough to be on Lemmy are probably already here. There were quite a few discussions about it (and still now on Reddit)
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.
Wow, my experience is very opposite this. It sounds like you’re describing reddit to me honestly. I’ve seen way less hostility here compared with Reddit
It depends on what content you consume I guess. On Reddit, news subs generally enforce decorum pretty strongly which really eliminates outright trolling. On lemmy there is the opposite of this in many places - lemmygrad and hexbear openly state that it is their goal to shit up threads to deny “shit libs” a platform, and the mods on several major instances seem to openly allow it.
So if you never consume that kind of content on either platform, you’d never notice the relative toxicity of lemmy.
That’s why instances need to defederate and block lemmygrad and hexbear, to discourage that behavior.
This is neither here nor there, but the only thing I hate with a burning passion more than right wingers is the tankie filth that pervades those instances.Wait, do you any links to them admitting that? I believe you, but it’s a good idea to have that saved.
I say this as someone who hates tankies just as much as the next dude, but that community isn’t really productive nor helpful. If you seriously have an issue with lemmygrad there are many instances that have defederated from them (i think sh.itjust.works is?). A community like that does nothing but to bring drama within the lemmyverse. Yes, their views are at times abhorrent but you are just provoking a community that already has major issue with large portions of the lemmyverse. We really should leave that toxic drama stirring behind.
Didn’t you just say “it’s a good idea to have this stuff saved”
You just asked for evidence.
the mods on several major instances seem to openly allow it.
Mods AND Lemmy developers.
Come visit !worldnews@sh.itjust.works if you want quality discussion!
“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”
Haha, that is a pretty hilarious visual. Do we get funny hats?
Best I can do is magic underwear.
Reddit’s decline is greatly exaggerated.
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.
Honestly, my problem with Lemmy is that there’s mostly hardliners here, hardly any average opinions.
might be that most of us are just lurking 👀
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Vote ratios are never balanced.
Lemmy and Mastodon require some extra thought processes that most people do not want or can’t work through. They want instant, fast and as much of it as possible.
Somehow this has to become so easy to understand and use that even the dimmest bulbs in society will have no trouble using it.
Upside? This will bring more usage and adoption. Downside? This will bring in more trash.
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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.
I honestly think the combining of the same communities on different instances will happen more at the app layer. It wouldn’t be hard to group them all in the same category for convenience and it allows for more granular control. Downside being that it makes an already complex platform more complicated but hey, that’s kind of the point and reason people come here to lemmy in the first place. I want more people to join lemmy but I also know that it’s going to be a niche platform for quite a while if not the rest of it’s existence.
Summit announced it already !summit@lemmy.world
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?
It would be nice if lemmy had the same level of niche communities as Reddit. That requires large total numbers I think.
Two of my reddit using friends have never heard of lemmy until I told them about it a few days ago. Although they are quite invested in the FOSS world.
I am here because I read something about Lemmy on reddit, two or three times. More exposure on reddit would show many people that there is an alternative. It wouldn’t convince millions but maybe enough to let some niche communities grow.
That’s surprising, I saw Lemmy mentioned a lot during the 3rd party apps debacle.
There is even a sub called LemmyMigration
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.
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.
Have a look at this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/1507unf/post_why_dont_reopen_here_completely/
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.
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.
Grass roots wins Vs marketing.
Make that healthy root system grow!
Let them find their way on their own. They’ll figure it out. As with the migration of MySpace to Faceboobs to Reddit - so the migration will continue. Let’s not spoil the countryside just yet, okay? Lemmy is what reddit used to be but ain’t been in a long time.
They all already know about Lemmy 🤷♀️
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.
This is a bad parallel to draw, and I think you’re aware of that.
On one hand I can’t say that we shouldn’t try. On the other hand, If we let nature take its course it gives us time to scale. Until they pull a full-on dig 2.0 which might be very close, It would be kind of nice just to have a gentle increasing onslaught coming into our breach.
They did that Friday with the site redesign, well damn close to it. Not a complete sell out like Digg was.
Those poor bastards. I’m kinda shocked the investors and employees haven’t had a mutiny yet.
Wait, what did they redesign this time?
There was a new front page layout up Friday.
I want to call out a few QoL things here that will help lemmy:
- There are a lot of read-the-headline-not-the-article commenters which is natural in an aggregation feed of links; there are numerous posts a day where people rewrite the news’ headlines to fit their agenda where the actual article and articles headline doesn’t reflect ANY of what they’re suggesting. if you run these sub lemmies for news on your server, I encourage you to use a bot or enforce rules for news that simply scrapes the title out of the link. Otherwise people will post news links that lead to a real source but have a false headline.
- There is a staggering amount of people pushing for oddities like child porn acceptance and I keep seeing it. Unless an entire server is compromised, reach out to the mods and ask to get subs cleaned up. Give moderators the benefit of the doubt and a chance to act without breaking federation completely. Its important Lemmy moderates content but also communicates well amongst each other when something is going wrong.
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.)
