Since my favorite reddit app came to Lemmy I’m really keen on getting more people into the fediverse to pump up the volume of content around here. Are there any initiatives that we can assist to get folks onboard?

I had my wife join, and she likes it, but laments the slow pace of new material in the communities.

178 points

laments the slow pace of new material in the communities.

Participation. We need more of it. Like…a lot more of it.

Lurkers shouldn’t lurk, and people should give others the benefit of the doubt far more often than they ever did on Reddit, if they ever did at all. Make Lemmy a community where engagement is valuable and fun and actually useful.

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102 points

Artificial engagement only gets you so far.

I only say something when I have something to say. If I don’t, then it becomes a chore.

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19 points

I try to say it when I have something to say though. I didn’t always bother on Reddit.

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9 points

Mostly this

On Reddit I usually didn’t comment anything, even if I had something to say. I do comment here, and a big part is that more people actually engage here.

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17 points

Oh, right. The poison. The poison for Kuzco, the poison chosen especially to kill Kuzco, Kuzco’s poison.

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7 points

Sudden, but appreciated reference to The Emperor’s New Groove.

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14 points

To add to this, artificial engagement is disingenuous. It’s akin to corporate-owned comment sections inviting people to “speak their mind” which, of course, no one does.

It’s a balance that should be kept: being willing to contribute, but not feeling forced to contribute. Quality begets quality, and if we compromise on quality chasing quantity, we would end up copying the worst of Reddit.

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5 points
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Deleted by creator
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3 points

This is daunting. I don’t want to make one. I have a full-time job and a house to take care of. I haven’t had a day off in over a month. I’m not set up to moderate a community. I’m not even set up to vet moderators. People say this on Lemmy all the time like it’s the easiest thing in the world. It’s not for everyone.

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37 points
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OC brings people. Adopt a community you wish was bigger and make a personal commitment to post to it daily.

For bonus points convince two other people to adopt their own community. We’ll pyramid scheme this sucker with content.

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11 points

That’s what I did over on kbin. I’m responsible for posting 95+% of pro wrestling news on Lemmy/kbin, and another person sets up most of the discussions. The community wasn’t picking up speed back during the early redditpocalypse. Now we’re getting tons of activity.

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Nice!

You’re our LemLM success story. We’ll put you on the cover of non-existent magazine.

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6 points

So I was wishing that r/korea woukd be a thing on lemmy, I found an instance hosted in Korea and subscribed. I started posting, now after like 3 month it’s full of only my own posts, each gets 3-7 upvotes and every 5th gets a comment from someone outside of Korea ^^.

I feel that if I’m the only one posting anyway I perhaps should bring it to my own instance which I have controll over and could moderate if it became necessary. I have no idea who is the admin of that one.

!korea@lemmy.funami.tech

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3 points
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I had no idea that !korea@lemmy.funami.tech existed until you posted about it.

I am in Korea regularly. I joined the community.

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2 points

The instance is a little small and the community doesn’t have many users. It could help advertising it a little so interested people find out about it. Looks like someone even made a post after your comment.

This is a community I help with, but there are others like it: !communitypromo@lemmy.ca

perhaps should bring it to my own instance which I have controll over and could moderate if it became necessary. I have no idea who is the admin of that one.

I agree. I’ve been shying away from some instances. Since that community is small anyway, you could make it on your own / find a different instance for it.

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4 points

MLMEMMY LEMLMY MLEMMYM

I dunno which one works, but the only way we’ll get enough Huns to pull this off is with a solid tagline.

Maybe something like, “Upvote your down line, lest ye receive downvotes from your up line.”

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LemLM?

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34 points

Lurkers gonna lurk.

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7 points

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Is that true though? I used to be a major lurker, but now I post relatively often. I think having other people post about stuff you care about, rather than just screenshots of other websites, can be a big factor.

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commenters gonna comment

posters gonna post

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22 points

It took a serious change in attitude for me to not become a lurker anymore. I always figured that if I have nothing interesting to say, I should just be quiet.
Eventually I realized that people are often happy to just get some feedback and interaction, even if it isn’t the most interesting or original response. As long as it’s done in a positive and friendly manner, you’re creating a sense of community.

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7 points

Yes! One kind comment is worth 1000 snarky or rude ones.

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14 points

Lurkers shouldn’t lurk

you’re not my real dad!

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10 points
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Very much this. Every time you see something interesting make a post about it please. It doesn’t need to be polished. You don’t need to worry about it.

Save hot takes and negativity for posts made by bots. Pay attention to who is posting what, because the poster has to see that negativity and it is not sustainable. You are making every comment to a person. When you bitch about a title or article, it is going to a person that gets a notification and has to see it. Everyone that has tried to do this regularly with the goal of just making regular posts has quit, myself included. It is straight up unhealthy from a mental health perspective to have to read or see what the bottom 5% sludge post. This is one reason why we have so many bots and memes.

The single biggest change that would make this place better would be a negativity filter to wreck the few mental health patients that are always on here down voting every new post. Simply filter for the 0.01% of users with abnormal negativity and sandbox them so they are the only ones that see their own negativity. Posting something here for the first time and seeing this kind of response right away is totally disenfranchising. People that troll the world like this belong in little sandboxes of their own sadistic self gratification. I think down votes are useful and important, but their abuse should be eliminated systematically.

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7 points

Sometimes (probably most times) people don’t have anything to add to a conversation. In these moments it’s better not to comment at all. Just look at how shitty reddit is with dozens of people making the same stupid joke in the comments on any popular post. Quality is better than quantity.

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4 points

I think giving the benefit of doubt is extremely important. Being welcoming to newcomers, slowly integrating them into the different culture here, will help a lot (FTR I’m new myself, only been here a few months).

That’s not to say we should give every jackass a soapbox to stand on, but at least learn if they’re willing to converse in good faith before shouting them down.

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2 points

I’m a lurker, but want to contribute. It took a lot to get an account (and then got a bunch of hate because I picked lemmy.world), but I can’t find any guidance on how to create a new sub. Is there any advice on that?

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5 points

got a bunch of hate because I picked lemmy.world

That was rude of them. I usually recommend people start with lemmy.world, and then move to something else if they want to, once they get a feel for what they want.

Is there any advice on that?

I’ll see if I can find a guide, but it’s fairly simple. On desktop, you click on “Create Community” at the top. This will create a community (the equivalent of a subreddit) (for you it will be on lemmy.world). After that, you should pick a good name since you can’t change that (it’s the thing that goes in the url, like if you did cats: lemmy.ca/c/cats. Everything else you can change up later on. I found it easier to learn by doing.

If you want to make a community on a different instance, you will need to create an account on that instance, make the community the same way, and then add your original account as a moderator. This is more annoying, so I’d recommend just making communities on your home instance for now.

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2 points

Yes. I have this issue in a new subs that people want to lurk but not post. Really hard to keep posting.

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3 points

Stay strong, it’s the hardest phase. After a while, other people will post too.

Also, take breaks if you need to.

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1 point
Deleted by creator
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86 points

I actually think Lemmy needs more work before it grows much bigger. The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit.

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29 points
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It’s tough to sell some of the niche communities without proper spoiler tagging, too. Need something easier to use that works on all platforms.

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16 points

Proper spoiler tagging is important

I Jerboa uses this format

: : : spoiler Title

Without the spaces between the colons, this is just to show what it looks like.

: : :

Title

This is with the spaces removed

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10 points

Lemmy in general uses this but a lot of mobile UI’s don’t have proper implementations (or at least they didn’t for a while). I’m not sure if liftoff is still in development but the reason I switched back to Jerboa was because spoiler support was finally added

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I completely agree. I’m personally holding off on heavy promotion of this platform until we hit 1.0. If people join too early and are turned off by the lack of polish, they may not come back after it’s fixed.

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6 points

Yes. Besides, there isn’t any profit being made, is there? I mean, today, more users just means more cost.

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2 points

Well in theory, more users do mean more donations.

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2 points

They need to add paid awards with some split for Lemmy development and the instance. That was the reason people bought into Reddit gold. It was a good faith, fund the platform thing.

Awards would only work for people on your own instance though. Pushing them across instances is difficult. If they’re free, they become worthless and defeat the purpose. And passing money between instances is stupidly complicated. I guess you’d have to go to the instance in order to buy the award there. Which gives people an incentive to run their own instance. I’d hope that wouldn’t make servers too small. As much as people seem to like the idea of many, many small instances federated, I think the system works best with several large instances than a million small ones.

I guess it’s complicated.

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1 point

today, more users just means more cost

Not if they’re setting up their own servers. This kind of horizontal growth is the healthiest way to grow a federated network, and something we can do that centralised platforms can’t.

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5 points

All I want is the ability to block inbox replies when I say something controversial.

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11 points

That would be nice, but for now you could just mark all as read without reading them.

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1 point

I have actually found that people don’t respond to me at all when I say something they feel is controversial. I get a ton of downvotes and maybe once out of every 5 or so times I get one really persistent person who won’t let it go. But that’s it.

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2 points

The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit

Fair point. The same was said of Mastodon many moons ago. A lot of people put a lot of time and energy into detailed feature requests, describing the problem to be solved, and exactly how their proposed solution would work.

Given that I’ve also seen the same complaint about apps in other federated networks like matrix, maybe what’s needed is a general solution? A website where experienced mods describe the problems they strike, and how social software developers could help them with mod features.

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67 points

We need a better site to link to than join-lemmy.org. It should concisely pitch lemmy to everyday users and suggest an instance for them to sign up at. Don’t get into the weeds about federation or choosing instances or selecting apps. Just select a sane default and point people to it. Rotate defaults to avoid overloading a given instance or making it too powerful.

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18 points

It’s not only the “base” instance IMO, most servers have wildly different communities.

There should IMO be some way to search for communitues from any server (and subscribe to them, which is a real hassle especially if your base server doesn’t yet know about them). I like the endless flow of memes as much as the next person, but what I really want is a bunch of communities I’m interested in so that I can lurk, ask questions and eventually create some hi quality content.

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5 points
3 points

Well yes you can search for the name of a community but not for the type of content, IDK like from all the descriptions.

Maybe a sort of indexer could do that…

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1 point

Sounds like you’re looking for a different client. Connect has a perfectly functional search bar.

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2 points

When I search for a community in Connect it only shows me communities my home sever knows about.

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7 points
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I think the joinlemmy is currently worked on

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6 points
3 points

I like the design, but the categories are all wacky, if your in the know about fedi stuffs.

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3 points
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The instance finder is built to encourage the use of topic specific instances rather than general use ones so that communities are grouped together better in the same site. The site can then manage all the communities effectively and have the site customized to accomodate them better (and make it feel more like a home for what you like looking at and discussion with others rather than one of many reddit clones)

Categories are mainly so that people are sent to a topic instance that matches their interests. Science goes to mander, programming to p.d, sports to fanaticus, gaming to lemmy.zip, etc.

If youve got some suggestions on how to improve it though let me know, still in progress

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4 points

Agreed.

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57 points
  1. We need to cut back the bot traffic a touch. All new people coming and see are a million posts with no participation. It’s good to have the content but we’re kind of lacking in curation and a lot of what’s coming over is not stuff we’re interested in commenting on. As long as we just keep carbon copying Reddit and Twitter and the Verge and hundreds of other places, we’re going to have a lot of empty post sitting around.

  2. Actual discourse and discussion needs to happen. We’re fairly low on trolls currently, which is a fantastic thing. But we also don’t have a lot of spicy takes either.

  3. More moderation, administration tools, better filters, easier ways to shut out bad actors. Right now the best we can do is defederate when somebody can’t manage their clientele. And we’re still way too bot-able.

  4. More migration tools something I can to what mastodon does if you need to move instances.

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19 points
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#1: Absolutely.

#2: I’ve seen some spicy takes, at least in the politics communities. Others, people are generally just more chill. I consider that a feature.

#3: The upcoming 0.19.0 will let users block instances as well as users/communities. Filters are unfortunately a client-specific feature right now, but fortunately there are a lot of clients to choose from now.

#4: 0.19.0 has this. Users can export their profile settings data (including subscriptions and blocklists) and import those elsewhere.

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10 points

The upcoming 0.19.0 will let users block instances as well as users/communities

Oh hell yeah! Finally!

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7 points

I just block the bots, I want to see what real people care enough to post.

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5 points

That’s what I’m doing too. But trying to bring people in and saying oh just block all the bots as the default is not optimal.

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1 point

Welcome to the new web. Nothing is optimal, it’s a good intro for people. The setting is there and that’s what matters.

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5 points

You can also turn off the Lemmy option to see bot posts, and then just manage bot-like humans.

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4 points

That’s what I meant, but appreciate the clarification.

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2 points

Where do you see bot traffic? From my observations, Lemmy has the opposite problem than what you describe in your point 1: all threads I see do get plenty of comments (not as many as reddit, but still plenty), but we get relatively few new threads. Or does that only happen in specific communities? I don’t look at communities I’m not subscribed to, maybe that is why.

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6 points

Go hit up lemmyworld, hit all hit new.

Every sport, every team, every game as a post. Every verge article ends up on every copy of technology on every service.

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2 points

wow ok I hadn’t realised. I only ever see the lemmit.online bot posts which kinda make me rage.

If there’s multiple bots posting this spam then it’s not really a single-bot problem.

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1 point
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‘New’ is a bot orgy, which is a real shame because quality posts get lost in it and it’s harder for them to gain visibility and traction in the wider instance. If you stick to subscribed communities you won’t notice, but for new users who haven’t curated their communities yet (or people like me who just like discovering stuff I wouldn’t think to seek out specifically), browsing the general aggregate can be a great way to discover content and communities to follow.

Or it would be, if it wasn’t bot bot bot bot bot bot thread, bot bot bot bot bot bot thread, bot bot thread, bot bot thread, bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot, wait a minute, thread!

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54 points

Make valuable original content here that’s not found elsewhere, post and comment thoughtfully as much as possible(No. Pun. Chains). Don’t try to turn this place into reddit, be better than reddit.

People who are on reddit that wanted to come here right now has already done so, so it’s important to drew in people who has never used reddit before here instead of always waiting for reddit to do something stupid.

Also less celeb gossip please, need a place where I can get away from that on the Internet.

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20 points

the last point should be ignored, the whole point of lemmy is to have as many communties as possible and subscribe to the ones you like. you can defederate ones you dont like

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5 points

I respectfully disagree. The goal should always be to foster high quality discussion over raw quantity of comment and artificial engagement and the devs have said as much in their documentation of Lemmy’s design.

Otherwise, this place would be no different from 9gag or imgur comment sections, much less reddit.

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7 points
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Deleted by creator
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6 points

From Margot Robbie. Got it.

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11 points
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Also less celeb gossip please, need a place where I can get away from that on the Internet.

You get celeb gossip? I believe I’m somehow connected to the sewage hose that’s Elon Musk posts. I’d love for some more varied content instead of “[rich idiot] said [something incredibly stupid]”

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4 points
5 points

What I like about your username, other than reminding me of an actress I like, is that you could really be here, but no one would think that she would (1) be on lemm.ee and (2) she would use her actual name and photo for her account.

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Asklemmy

!asklemmy@lemmy.ml

Create post

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it’s welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

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