When we have a critical mass of people, we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics in an organic way.
The thing is that “normies”(I hate the term) weren’t on reddit when it was the size of lemmy. The only experience they have is joining it after it had 10 years of development reached critical mass of users.
So we are stuck being compared to an impossible standard. When I compare Lemmy to old reddit lemmy hands down blows it out of the water. Old reddit had cp and racism on the front page every single day for years.It was hard to use and hostile to new users.
I’ve seen lemmy pop up in search engine posts already which was cool to see. Ive also seen lots of high quality intelligent posts granted they are only tech related but we will grow.
I tried to use Reddit for years and absolutely hated it. Finally after virtually every internet search for any question i had lead need too Reddit I decided to aquire a taste for it.
I guess that’s a fair point, but I’d rather shoot for what’s good instead of settle for “better than terrible”.
Jesus, it was that bad? I am surprised they weren’t taken down by the FBI.
we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics in an organic way
- In my experience, many of the people claiming to be experts on reddit are spreading misinformation. This goes for Twitter too, and probably most other large social media sites. People love to be seen as an authority on a topic.
- Reddit is anything but organic, and is getting worse and worse in this regard.
The eye opening moment is when one of these threads touches on a subject you know a lot about and the top upvoted comment is spouting complete bullshit. See it once and you start to doubt the credibility of every other highly upvoted comment that looks legit but could be just as wrong, you simply don’t know enough to immediately disprove it.
I have a conspiracy theory that most users who are an expert don’t post much about that.
For example I am an expert on two things most people find obscure; and for all my comments I just avoid talking about them. It’s too hard to wrap up an idea without lots of background information, there are no short posts or comments I can make about it.
Almost all the highly upvoted stuff are short. Were I to try to make an expert post it would be totally ignored. So why bother for me when I can snarky about things I know nothing about ? More fun !
I think experts who write short terse pithy comments that hit the mark, at a timely fashion, are rarer than hens teeth
an organic way.
Not sure if that defines current reddit if you have a look at /r/TheoryOfReddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1gdpeyp/this_bot_thing_is_dystopian_bot_copied_my_post/
On the other hand, I found this interesting thread on !houseplants@mander.xyz today: https://lemmy.world/post/21385568?scrollToComments=true
Feel free to have a look at !newcommunities@lemmy.world for niche communities
It’s not just about the communities. We push communities a lot, and we do need more communities. But fundamentally we need a lot more PEOPLE.
Hard disagree.
A million empty communities simply makes all of lemmy look like a barren wasteland nobody uses.
We, if anything, need to stop making a community for every single edgecase that someone might ever one day want to talk about, and focus on the basics, until there’s enough people interested in some random niche thing to justify adding the community.
That is to say, it should be organic community growth led by users making a more specific community from a larger community, and not server admins making, for example, 421,000 different sports team communities hoping users will somehow magically appear and use any of them.
Lemmy is still at the scale that a single /c/NFL could more than adequately handle the entire volume of people talking about NFL games, and we don’t really need a /c/ for each league, team, player, and coach or whatever.
I agree with you, but not sure if that’s what the person above meant.
But yeah, centralization should happen. We could probably close 95% of the existing communities and regroup on the last 5%
!football@lemmy.world for instance covers most of the needs for that sport
Exactly! Yes!
I get downvoted everytime I point out that a healthy network comes with users. Lots of users. Users of all kinds. Users you don’t agree with. Users you do agree with. I said that the userbase of threads being on Lemmy would be a culture clash, but it would be a sign of a growing fediverse concept.
Everyone else says if the threads users federated with Lemmy, they would personally block the instance. Which just shows how much of a bubble the people here want to live in.
I work at an airport. You will never see a more diverse group of people from a bigger selection of places than at an international airport. I don’t agree with all of them. I don’t agree with the majority of them. But I can converse with them. I can make small talk for 10 minutes.
I treat the fediverse as I treat the real world. I wouldn’t look at these people and say “You’re banished from my existence for having conflicting politic or religious beliefs! Begone from my presence! You do not deserve to exist in my world!”
But thats how people here treat “outsiders” or “normies”.
I want the fediverse concept to grow. I want the idea of a concept that’s immune to corporate ownership by design to BE normalized.
Because right now, it’s a niche interest that 98% of people have never heard of. Corporations want to keep it that way…if they’ve even heard of the Fediverse. They might to be too busy exploiting labor, and polluting the planet with their private jets and resource sucking plants located in places that already have water shortages.
Yes I’m talking to you Nestle, and you Starbucks CEO. I don’t know how this comment turned into a rant against them specifically, but fuck Nestle, and fuck Starbucks.
Perhaps it’s just me having different priorities, but I have no interest in making small talk with lots of people. There’s plenty of spaces for that already whilst the spaces for enthusiasts have been sacrificed to the general public.
I’m not arguing this specifically about Lemmy, or trying to suggest policy, I’m just chipping in that there’s at least something to be said for not trying to make all social spaces for all people.
But please remember that in order to enjoy such diversity of opinions as you mentioned… we must become intolerant.
To the intolerant. There is no faster way to shut down conversations than to allow bullies to dominate everything within their reach.
So long as conversations can be kept “fun”, there will naturally be many more to follow, but when they cross the line, then fun-time is over and the people go home. Unfortunately, modding efforts are in short supply here - not as limiting as content creation, but still a constraining factor.
Feel free to join us on https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ to promote Lemmy (most of the other subs ban it)
I was just pointing that with 44k monthly active users, interesting conversations are already happening. A few of them are reposted on !bestoflemmy@lemmy.world , we could probably do a better job to repost them there more
we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics
Lol we have that now… just be sure to phrase your question in the form of a Linux distro.
But to be serious I do think we’re heading that way, but it’s going to take a long time, likely as long as it took Reddit (if not longer).
That comment chain demonstrates a real appeal of Reddit. Even for something like a post-episode TV discussion, a critical mass of people means that not only can you have the discussion in the first place, but there might be some extra info from someone who worked on the set, or attended an audience taping.
You can click to see the rest of the comments to see plenty wrong with Reddit too, but it’s not like there’s any particular drive to prevent the elements of Reddit culture that I find annoying from coming to Lemmy too.
I’d be surprised if there’s ever a critical mass of people on a federated app though. If there is, it’s more likely to be on something with the proper funding, that hides the details from regular users (e.g
it’ll be BlueSky, not Mastodon). On Reddit, Lemmy has a reputation for being too complicated, for the mundane reason that is. Too much stuff that should happen doesn’t, and the answer to why are the stuff that ‘normies’ don’t want to hear (LW and PD instances are both a bit unstable atm), or they’re so unintuitive that that they’ll need answering forever (e.g everything around discussion languages, instance blocks, newly-discovered communities , etc etc).
I’ve just seen a user accidentally submit the same post to the same community multiple times (the worst I’ve seen is 4 times). Preventing that is some real ‘web dev 101’ shit. Federated apps can be an interesting hobby for inexperienced devs (like me), and mildly diverting for anyone who wants to use them as a user, but a critical mass of users?! Forget about it.
All the others will get bought out and enshittified. The future is not there.
The Fediverse has the potential to be the future. It’s gated behind open sourceheads not being all…open-sourcey about. Making it clunky to use and badly designed and then pulling the establishment economist “you poor schlub you’re just too dumb to get it” card, thereby shooting their own efforts in the foot.
If they can make it open source AND easy to use/intuitive/well designed, then we have a solid future. If not, the future still won’t be those other places.
It might though - don’t underestimate how much some sheeple prefer to simply be taken care of, rather than e.g. make a simple change to a config file. They will allow companies to sell all of their data, and not blink an eye. X is enshittifying for entirely different reasons (political ones), and Reddit for sheer stupidity, and Google as well, and… well but anyway, look at how many people are still on them, as opposed to here.
