Please indulge a few shower thoughts I had:
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I wouldn’t worry about Lemmy having as many users as reddit in the short term. Success is not just a measure of userbase. A system just needs a critical mass, a minimum number of users, to be self-perpetuating. For a reddit post that has 10k comments, most normal people only read a few dozen comments anyways. You could have half the comments on that post, and frankly the quality might go up, not down. (That said, there are many communities below that minimum critical mass at the moment.)
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Lemmy is now a real alternative. When reddit imploded Lemmy wasn’t fully set up to take advantage of the exodus, so a lot of users came over to the fediverse and gave up right away. There were no phone apps, the user interface was rudimentary, and communities weren’t yet alive. Next time reddit screws up in a high profile way, and they will screw up, the fediverse will be ready.
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Lemmy has way more potential than reddit. Reddit’s leadership has always been incompetent and slow at fixing problems. The fediverse has been very responsive to user feedback in comparison.
Well said, but I will say reddit felt more like being out in public. So you kept your distance and didn’t really interact, but here feels more like being at someone’s house that you know. At the moment. The federation aspect is a different wrinkle but ultimately will lead to a better experience overall. No ads is a huge bonus!
I still have the community I moderate (!fitandnatural@lemmy.world) set to mod posts only, because I’m the only mod and don’t want to risk someone posting something bad while I’m not on Lemmy. We really need an approved user feature like Reddit so that vetted community members can also make posts in communities where “anyone can post” isn’t a good option.
That seems like it’d be pretty easy. Basically just like giving someone a moderators role but with extra tier of hierarchy below normal moderator.
Seems like a nice idea TBH … I’m generally all in favour of leaning into lemmy’s ability to create sorta blogging spaces that naturally federate (and therefore are easy to aggregate).
Lemmy and ActivityPub seems to have (nearly) everything to recreate a new blogosphere, but with federation beyond its own border over ActivityPub, comments, voting, aggregation, sorting and search built right in.
i joined and am using memmy, both this week. cant see how to post, only can see how to comment.
If you go to the community page, you’ll see a post button along with subscribe and about.
how do i get to the community page? and is that its name? do i look for “community page” or is it called something else? (i chose a random place to ask, its fine if you’re busy or don’t like to answer such basic stuff, i will eventually figure it all out.)
Agree! that’s what I’ve been doing: Trying to build critical mass for small communities : fediverse
Yeah. Ive picked /conservative. Ive been posting a mixture of fluff and actual posts. Early days, but it seems to be picking up speed. Just post, it works!
What’s the value of posting “fluff”? If you’re just trying to get engagement for engagement sake, why?
Trying to get engagenent, letting other conservatives know we exist, that sort of thing.
I’d check his post history before engaging. He’s trying to rebuild a spammy, dishonest right wing space in Lemmy.
He’s free to do so, but it’s just going to bring in trolls, bots, bad faith arguments, and extreme posting to sell shit.
I get that it’s inevitable, but let’s be careful what we’re encouraging.
Thanks! I hope you successfully build whatever community you’re building too!
My problem with Lemmy is the lack of activity in niche communities. You’re right that there needs to be a critical mass and arguably Lemmy has it, but only for the most mainstream, generic type of content. It doesn’t have the mass to sustain any sort of niche, outside of maybe tech related topics because of the way the userbase is slanted.
I find myself going back there often because of that, but I hope that the userbase for generic content enough to sustain and grow, from where more active niche communities can spring up.
I think things could get a lot more interesting if other software that is more like classic bulletin boards and forums would implement ActivityPub. I mean, such online forums are still able to thrive in their respective niches. If such forums would become compatible with Lemmy, Kbin or Friendica, it could bring a whole new dynamic to this part of the Fediverse. At the same time, it would help these niche forums get more attention (even though I’m not sure if all or even most of them are interested in that).
When I first looked into Lemmy, which was probably well over a year ago at this point, I saw that they had an alternative front end called LemmyBB which resembles the older style phpBB boards of the late 90s and early 00s. It looks like the demo instance is offline now, and it wasn’t federating to begin with, but it certainly looks like an interesting use of the tech.
Oh, I see you have zero posts, ever. Well why don’t you go and contribute to that niche community you are nagging about. Maybe that’s what it needs to grow.
Ad hominem
Wait let me do it right so you know I know it’s Latin
ad hominem
Lemmy needs both content generators and content consumers. Not everyone needs to do both if that isn’t what motivates them to come to the site.
I don’t really love comparing to reddit because what reddit became isn’t what I hope for lemmy, but to make the point… What percentage of people do you think made content on reddit? I’d guess it was a fraction of a single percent.
I’m trying to, reached 300 subscribers, but three of them posted once, several commented once and that’s it.
What community is it, maybe I’ll try to plug it whenever it’s relevant to my comments.
To me, the smaller userbase is actually a real problem. I’m willing to stick it out and hope it grows. But for over half of the subreddits I subscribe to, the corresponding lemmy communities have 0 posts this last week.
Yes, I don’t need 10k comments on my posts. But memes or mainstream news was never the big value of reddit for me - I can get these anywhere. Instead it is about the niche communities with a few thousand subscribers. And for now, I still have to use reddit for them.
Yeah the very top post on hot right now has 9 comments lmao.
There is no one here. I mean I love the platform and the apps. I don’t go to Reddit anymore on my phone. But there’s no one here.
If I don’t go to Reddit at least once per day I’m going to miss news and events that are important to me.
Just FYI hot is probably the worst way to browse for news and events, I’ve found top of 6h is far better if you check often, Active if you check every 24 hrs ish.
I’ve noticed that “Hot” turns the front page over pretty quickly, which means you see more in your feed, but posts are bumped down before the comments start piling up.
Whenever I’ve posted anything that has made it to the top of Hot, the majority of the comments come in after it has dropped down (which happens after like, 1hr).
If you sort by “active” there should be posts with more comments. The “hot” sorting is not really representative for how active users on lemmy are, since it favours younger posts over older posts with lots of comments. You can read the details of the reasoning here .
Reddit has a lot of international subreddits which don’t really exist here on Lemmy (they have like 10 users and they almost never post).
Reddit has huge lively communities. I’m having a ball here on Lemmy, but I too must check Reddit once a day to know if important stuff happened.
Sure, someone could say I should work on jumpstarting these Lemmy communities, but I’ve only been able to to what I can so far (that is, replying to posts and joining the conversation)
Ninja edit: fixed grammar
Yeah the issue is that with large online communities, your largest user group is always going to be that of least engagement.
So users who just read stuff is your biggest group. Then comes users who made an account. Then comes users who up and downvote. And last comes users who post.
It makes it very hard to grow a new social media platform.
Yeah, you need people to post and comment to develop a community. I’ve got one community where I post five times a week, but I’ve only had two posts from other people and only one person commented on a post.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !no_context_art@thelemmy.club
I follow damn near every community on lemmy that I followed on reddit. I follow 97 communities on lemmy with all communities active and none with 0 posts. I left reddit immediately and haven’t looked back. All the news, whether political or tech related, I get from lemmy. I think people just haven’t found the right communities. You have to put in some time to find them since you may have 5 or 6 with the same name. But, once you do, you should be good to go.
Comparing the two communities, reddit nearly always has way more quality content and news for me though for the time being. Often even with big news it’s just not here on Lemmy at all. Many posts also have 0 comments and you just wouldn’t see that on Reddit. Once Sync can create posts I will probably start x-posting more from reddit to lemmy for communities I am most interested in.
For now I think I will start browsing Lemmy and then visit Reddit for anything I missed. Keeping my posting and commenting over here mostly because I’d like to see this place grow.
for me, reddit nearly always has way more quality content and news for me though for the time being
It’s not just you.
As constructively as I can put this, reddit has been building community and goodwill for many years. Lemmy has only recently become an option and it’s done wonderfully in the short time it’s had.
The challenge is the catch 22. People go where there is more content, they produce content there, and then there is more content there. There no vacuum, reddit didn’t disappear. It became toxic and people apparently care less about avoiding toxicity than filling up on dank memes.
All I can say to that is we all need to be the change we want to see in the world. Adopt a Lemmy First mentality, and go to reddit only to pick up legacy slack. Continue the conversation from there over here. Link it up.
The key there is that it takes some effort to go find all the stuff. People are generally lazy so it’s hard to get them to do it.
Next time reddit screws up in a high profile way, and they will screw up, the fediverse will be ready.
And it doesn’t seem entirely impossible that our Elon Musk fanboy Steve will screw up again.
I won’t be surprised to read in the future:
- Reddit Introduces Its Own Version of X’s (Formerly Known as Twitter’s) Blue Checkmark
- Backlash After Reddit Strikes Exclusive Deal to Provide Trainingsdata to OpenAI
- Reddit Introduces Paid Membership Options for Communities
- Something Money Grabbing Reddit Related
I’ve been wondering if the API change was actually a move to prevent anyone but themselves from using Reddit’s data to train AI.
Likely so, though scraping will still yield the data. Maybe they will make scraping harder too.
That’s what I assumed from the beginning: think of the gold rush for generative ai and they are using Reddit data. Actually, it even seems fair to share in the potential (but what about the users who created it all?).
However if that was their intent, they sure screwed it up
Yes, they specifically have said they don’t want AI companies to get their user data for free. What’s interesting is that we as a culture have internalized and accepted the idea that our user-made content is something only tech companies have the right to profit from and fight over.
