Honestly, there’s a reason hype has died down. The site has all the same problems as other alternatives.
After the initial hype, it’s only as big as a reasonably large individual subreddit. In fact, here are the top weekly posts of lemmy’s federation partners and T_D’s exodus site. The latter edges out the former slightly in upvotes and much more substantially in comments, and it’s just a single community. Even in the fairly small category of “biggest extant reddit alternative”, lemmy doesn’t take first prize.
Same content problem as all the others: roughly half of the posts are politics of a uniform orientation, and the other half are reposted facebook memes.
Reddit’s killer app is the presence of a sizable community for every little niche thing, and that’s not there. Unless your only interests are politics (within roughly .3 standard deviations of the median Huffpo writer) or Facebook memes, it’s not a viable alternative.
Competition: Sure, it’s federated in theory, but the block-happy, drama-centric culture means that, if an alternative were to pop up with the userbase of 2012 Reddit (or even 2018 Reddit), it’d get defederated almost immediately. Open federation solves the “dozens of sites competing for the same thousand-or-so people” problem. Closed federation just pretends to do so.
This is basically all the same issue: not enough users. It’s so dumb. “Lemmy isn’t as good as Reddit because everyone isn’t there yet. But ya, Reddit sucks.” /face-palm Then come over and get users to come over instead of saying there’s not enough people.
Hey, it’s not all politics! Star Trek is doing great here! I just saw a post about how the Bell Riots are going to…wait…
well it doesnt necessarily need to be politics, the biggest subgroup for lemmy users are usually people into tech (a lot of tech and tech adjacent communities are fairly sized on lemmy) as they are the ones more likely to make the jump. Easiest way to tell is to go to the communities page, sort by all communities and count the number, or even just get an eyeballs search to know that a common thread between many communities is either memes or tech
Not only not enough users, but there are certain users on here that are generating constant spam and/or propaganda. That becomes half the feed if you don’t block them.
Fair enough. But thats also understandable since there’s no single entity moderating. I think we should accept to get wet when showering.
I‘m pretty sure we can use blocklists for instances that suck like mastodon. Its very easy although masto doesnt do a good job yet to promote blocklists.
Which means that when more people come in here, there will be more spam and more propaganda, reaching the feed more often. And you won’t really stop people like that, they’ll simply go to a different instance and do the exact same thing.
