Did Reddit get massive because of Digg users making a beeline towards them or were they already big before that?
The goals of federated social media and corporate social media. Unlike siloed corporate social media, the fediverse platforms are not meant to compete with one another for being the ‘top dog’ so to speak. The idea is just diversity amongst the platforms and different options for people with different preferences. Since the fediverse is not concerned with revenue or appealing to a venture capitalist, competition is unimportant and I hope it stays that way.
The more users the more content there is though which is ultimately what I want as a user.
This is even more important for more niche communities a lot of which are still very quiet/dead/non-existent on Lemmy relative to reddit.
In a way they do. At least the instances don’t compete, but the users do. Example, there could be a meme community on two instances. Users will probably gravitate towards one. The downside is that smaller communities get buried. Most of the smaller communities I’m subbed to on Lemmy don’t ever pop up in my hot/active. Reddit was a bit better I think and smaller/less active communities popped up in my front page more often and felt more balanced. I think the hot algo in Lemmy could be tweaked to be more balanced like that, would also help the competition.
“If you make it, they will come”.
It maight not be fast but there is huge potential from what I have experienced so far.
That’s true if your store is on some street where people are passing by and taking a look, but if your store is deep in some forest somewhere then it might stay unnoticed forever.
This is the case right now, Lemmy needs better SEO so that normal people can stumble upon it
To continue the analogy, if nobody understands how to purchase from your store or even what the store is, you’re not going to stay in business. That’s why I think Lemmy needs to bring the UI/UX up to industry design standards and simplify a LOT.
The abundance of controls and information is nice for power users, but it scares away the newbies who already think Lemmy is too complicated. Go to any other major social media site and check out how they bury/simplify/remove choices from users to not overload them. Don’t get me wrong, I think the UIs that provide all that info should definitely exist (think RES) but should not be the default.
The other thing is the sign up process: join-lemmy.org is what people have be telling folks to look at if they want to join, and it immediately gets into the nitty gritty of tech specs and servers and other things that the average Joe doesn’t know about and may get intimidated by.
This has been my nearly universal feedback when telling non-techie people about Lemmy. I know I may get pilloried for saying it since there is a lot of hate for big social media companies on here, but a lot of what they do works and I think we can copy some of that without losing the magic of federated social media & opposition to big corporations.
Why is everyone in such a hurry to make lemmy into a Reddit clone?
For more interesting and easily discoverable content. Really that’s what people want at the end of the day.
Exactly. I hate Reddit more than most people here (I’m a mod on a sub that has more than a million subscribers and felt disrespected by spez), but the fact of the matter is they’re the gold standard of quality answers and discussions.
I would want Lemmy to get to that level, not immediately, but that’s the dream.
I want lemmy to become popular just so you can be quoted in news articles. User “fist eye mouth eye fist” wrote that…
Or just have 🤛👁️👄👁️🤜 appear in reputable news outlets.
By the way why are people able to do that? I see that person’s username is mojo by hovering over it but at a glance it’s just emojis.
I would just love to see more users in the communities I care about! I loved Reddit for that reason alone. Here I can find the memes, news, and opinions that I care about, but none of my hobbies. I really miss it to be real with you.
Yeah, I get annoyed at the people acting like this place is perfectly fine as it is. It isn’t. It lacks content. It has repetitive posts. And as far as I’m concerned, growth will iron out those problems over time. It doesn’t need to be all at once, but I am looking forward to it. 60k active monthly users is nothing. Reddit has 450 million active users. It’s hard to overstate how much larger Reddit is. Even if you’re a hipster opposed to Lemmy growing to a Reddit size, it isn’t even remotely close to being that large yet. And as far as I’m concerned it still hasn’t reached the mass it needs to turn it into a super engaging community just yet. I’m rooting for it to become more engaging and I’m doing everything I can to increase that engagement, but we really don’t need the smug in denial “it’s perfect right now” attitude.
Reddit has 450 million active users.
Yes, but how many are bots? Trolls? Bigots? Spammers? Antivaxxers? There is some content that lemmy is better without.
I’m wondering if it’s possible to get the same level of broad esoteric discussion without also welcoming the same toxicity that made reddit the superfund site it is today. Is toxicity a function of size, or is it a function of an environment in which toxicity is encouraged?
I don’t want the r/funny people to invade this place, but quality middle sized to niche subreddits don’t yet have their active equivalent on Lemmy.
To add to what everyone else is saying, Lemmy is by definition a federated Reddit clone. It’s in the documentation and the initial commentary about this service, this place is meant to emulate Reddit to some extent so it makes sense that the two would be compared frequently.
because reddit has all of the content and ease of use while lemmy has neither and we want to see lemmy succeed.
Lemmy is succeeding just fine right now.
Reddit’s “content” is way more rage-baiting, fake AITA stories, culture wars both-sideisms, publicfreakout schadenfreude, and basic-tier iFunny memes, re-posted by waves of bots. All reddit is “succeeding” at is being a firehose of diarrhea.
I prefer Lemmy’s slant towards technology-related news, and polite discussion in earnest without painfully unfunny “and my axe” responses.
Both are true and there’s a difference between doing fine and excelling
I prefer Lemmy’s slant towards technology-related news, and polite discussion in earnest without painfully unfunny “and my axe” responses.
I used to think so also; but Red Hat’s earth shaking move to stop sharing its source w the public was a non-event in all of the fediverse instances I could find. I missed it’s since I don’t do Reddit anymore and became aware almost 2 weeks after the fact when my employer released a statement condemning it.
Was Lemmy not designed as a reddit clone? Community/post/comment system with upvotes and downvotes, volunteer moderators, generally the same sorting filters, crossposting - hell, they even display your date of join as a “cake day”. The influence is obvious.
That’s not a bad thing, take the good and leave the bad, but if anything I think Lemmy needs more unique features that Reddit never had.
If you want lemmy to be like Reddit, you’re not getting the bad without the good. When it grows in number, it grows in trolls, bots, fascists and pedophiles.
Take your pick.
Yes, it will have those things, and in fact already does. There are trolls, bots, fascists, and even pedophiles already. This is an extremely sad and disturbing reality of online spaces. The only thing we can do about it is ensure moderators and instance admins have the tools to deal with it.
I think we should prioritize SEO.
If you get a link to a Lemmy post you can’t see the contents nor the comments of the post until you click a further link. Or at least I can’t.
And that means google can’t either.
We need to get to the point where people are adding “Lemmy” to their search posts like they do for Reddit today.
Doing a google search for “best budget backpack Lemmy” should bring up results like “best budget backpack Reddit” does today.
I wonder how that’d work though. Like imagine you made a backpack focused Lemmy instance, say backpack.social. How would you get the SEO show up posts under that instance if they add “Lemmy” at the end of the search? It’s probably possible, but I dunno how it works or if that would cause problems. Also would we go with Lemmy? Because should kbin posts also show up, or should they just use Lemmy as an SEO tag?
Maybe “fediverse” might be better. All fediverse instances would have the context of fediverse in the scraped data. When someone searches “best budget backpack fediverse” the search engine would show the fediverse instances with the best seo score. Higher quality posts get a letter seo score just as they do today on Reddit. It does not matter which instance the post would be on.
The bigger problem is that search engines can’t even really scrape some parts of the fediverse (like Lemmy) because the default UI does not show any post or comment data.
It’s not so much the instances but the communities that are important on Lemmy, unlike most of the fediverse. If your community’s instance is federated with the big instances, it helps get people to your community either way if the post shows as a link on the bigger instance or the host instance. Hopefully crawlers will eventually add some smarts so we link the host instances eventually too.
What do you mean you cant see the comments until you click a further link? What do you see when you click on this https://lemmy.world/post/2383782 i see the post and all the comments?
It doesn’t help that the thread URLs are some old school “post/4268567”.
I also noticed that the markdown format is included (e.g. the hashmarks for headings, asterisks for bold/italics) in search results while every other site doesn’t look like that.
Dopamine reward loops, good content and a reasonable UX.
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If you gave a good, detailed answer with sources, you got rewarded for your effort with upvotes more than a low effort answer. This kind of appreciation motivated quality content generators to generate more content.
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as usercount grew to a certain threshold, you basically got users from all sorts of domains generating quality content covering pretty much all topics
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while official UX was horrible and 3rd party apps were needed, the basic system of sorting and indendation of answers allowed for long, detailed discussions which could be navigated and followed effortlessly.
