I was looking for a Reddit alternative for years. I would have been cool with anything non-corporate, but figured it would take ages to build.
It’s incredible what Lemmy has turned into so quickly. A Reddit alternative went from being impossible to actually existing within a matter of weeks.
As much as that makes a great story… The groundwork for lemmy goes back years. It’s true that lots of issues were addressed and client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill, but a ton of work was done beforehand to make that all possible.
client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill
For me, this can’t be overstated. I don’t work in an office/at a stationary computer and 99.9% of my Reddit time was mobile. I checked out the “mobile apps” for Lemmy, and hated them. I probably wouldn’t be active here at all if it wasn’t for good dedicated apps like Sync.
I haven’t used Reddit since the blackout. Thankfully Sync for Lemmy was out within a few weeks. Sort by TopDay and there’s enough content on here to scratch my itch.
Voyager for Lemmy is really good and open source. You should try it, might get a better mobile experience.
Plus building it is kind of the easy part – the hard part is getting people to migrate over and having enough active posts / users that people feel it’s worth their time to stay and post as well. Migration will inevitably splinter communities as well, especially small ones, where not enough people move over (or don’t move quickly enough). I’ve seen so many alternatives where the userbase was too small or not posting enough or just right wing trolls or the site was unusably buggy. lemmy managed to be good enough in all those categories at the perfect time - when reddit spat in the face of their users.
It’s the niche topics that need more activity. I love science - mostly space/physics - and it’s mostly a ghost town. Once the unique corners grow their activity, it’s going to be great.
I wish there was a better way to port communities over here. There are people complaining that Lemmy shouldn’t copy Reddit (I say, why not?), but then there’s legitimate complaints about homesteaders running to Lemmy and snatching up all the popular subreddit names.
Regarding the content problem, I see the repost bots are still active, I wish they could be either turned off or have their rates severeöy limited.
At first glance they make Lemmy seem active and vibrant, but since they are just bots few people vote on the posts and fewer comment on them, they post so much the any original Lemmy content in those communities gets drowned out by the bots reposting Reddit threads.
During the influx of users after the apikalypse these bots where probably needed to not scare people that there was zero content from different subreddits, but now they just seem to be holding those communities hostage.
Plus building it is kind of the easy part
I mean… not entirely. I’ve been on quite a few reddit alternatives over the years. Most of them passion projects by indie devs, and start struggling the moment they hit 4 digit users. Ruqqus was nicknamed “dumpster fire” because it would go down every time a new wave from reddit came over.
It’s incredible what Lemmy has turned into so quickly.
This couldn’t have been possible without the help of Spez and all the board responsible for the APIcalypse, thank you very much!
I know this comment could receive some negative feedback, but Lemmy lacks diversity in its userbase, compared to Reddit (or Tumblr in the old times). It’s just a feeling, when I scroll through comments and posts on Lemmy, I picture most of the users as 16-46 yo white males.
EDIT: changed “45” to “46”, see comment below.
That’s the vibe I always got from Reddit. But yeah, the vibe I get from Lemmy is that there are two demographics.
19-45 white male tech enthusiast and 19-45 white trans female tech enthusiast.
Which is interesting. On the early days of Digg it was the same demographic, although more politically center. Then in the early days of reddit the same thing happened. It was mostly Linux and tech. So having the same starting demo is not a bad thing, but the question is, will it grow to adopt others
I think Lemmy skews towards the younger end though. Of course I could be very mistaken as this impression is entirely unscientific and is based solely on the levels of knowledge and general discourse that are prevalent on Lemmy.
To my eye, a large percentage of Lemmy’s users are both relatively low-information and lacking in real life experience. They also tend to be very ideological which in my experience is something that tends to diminish with age.
Again, I could be very wrong about this.
There’s also the leftists who decide very narrowly what opinions will be tolerated! Don’t forget them!
The only material I’ve seen heavily moderated by leftists is misinformation, regardless of political orientation (although American conservatism is more heavily moderated since much of it IS demonstrably misinformation currently).
I’m willing to be proven wrong if you have any examples you could recommend.
although i’m a white male in the age group i am neither of these… i know you didn’t say everyone is in these groups, just here to represent us anti trans folks who don’t know shit about computers. And they say commenting helps lemmy grow, so i’m doing that too.
“anti trans”
You mean “non trans” (‘cis’ being the technical term), right? “anti trans” implies hostility towards trans folk
That’s how Reddit was for a long time too, and Reddit still is more like that than the other social networks. For whatever reasons that demo is more likely to be early adopters of this kind of platform. Diversity comes with growth.
Because Reddit was made for nerds, until more recently it didn’t try to attract the mass with shiny interfaces and promises of social recognition like FB and Instagram.
This is where the major problem is. Most people simply don’t care about anonymously discussing stuff. It’s always about status. You simply have to show off your flashy avatar and your NFTs.
I mean the whole concept of the fediverse is inherently going to attract the more paranoid of people who don’t want to have big tech down their throat 24/7. The people most aware of this are those that work in/adjacent to big tech, and have enough understanding to be genuinely concerned about the state of the internet. Not that you have to be in tech to use/enjoy the Fediverse, but Lemmy is inherently inconvenient and less content rich than Reddit so it’s going to create more niche/less diverse communities who have common interests.
Tech also has a very large trans demographic compared to the general population, and you can see that reflected on Lemmy too. The whole platform is largely going to reflect tech demographics until it is well known by the general public.
I’m just glad most people here are nice and willing to have open discussions. I’ve seen more threads of people disagreeing and reaching common ground than anywhere else.
I also don’t really want Lemmy to get as big or have the same exact demographic as Reddit. I do want it to get bigger and more diverse than it currently is since there’s still not enough activity (although it’s way way better than it was) and not enough niches. There are only so many star Trek memes I want to see.
One issue with Lemmy is that it’s too anonymous that it doesn’t really support content creators who actually want to be known. I know influencer is a bad word, but platforms do need people to share original content, and there’s less motivation to do really high effort, high quality content when you can’t verify yourself. Lemmy has no lack of memes but nobody is using it as a platform for quality OC that takes more than a few minutes to create. I think that could be fixed by there being an instance dedicated to hosting verified users for people who want a non anonymous account, so when you see a user is from that instance, you know they’re the real deal, and that would encourage content creators to establish a presence. Right now, how am I supposed to know a handle is legit when there are thousands of instances that can have the same usernames, and people can even create their own instance?
I get more of an impression that lemmy is full of far left leaning programmers. I think that is a good subset of people to have on a social media platform. But if we had more subs on other topics it should bring in other types of people.
The reason you don’t get many “normal” people here is that the community is absurdly hostile to anyone on the “normal person” spectrum.
If you’re not a software-pirating techbro obsessed with “privacy,” a leftist, or a furry, this place generally shits on you.
I very frequently post incredibly lukewarm takes for any mainstream community, and literally get called a Nazi. I have stalkers lol.
I, personally, tend to have “normal” views but significantly more resilience to online communities than “normal” people - which is why I still come here. Most normal people left back before this place even defederated from Hexbear. They ain’t coming back.
Until mods of what are essentially “default” communities get serious about growth instead of wanting “their” spaces, Lemmy is never going to grow. Most people don’t find getting blasted with piss-takes by Marxists funny the way I do.
Case-in-point from this thread
https://lemmy.world/comment/6400270
Oh and one directed at me, right on schedule.
Posted the bigot using the device created and coded by nerds. Do you fail to realize that “nerd” is what idiots call the smart kids? Of course you do.
I block those people all the time here and it’s made the experience very enjoyable. It’s a small enough community where blocking is highly effective.
If you care about downvotes, then I could see your point about the Fediverse being hostile to some more mainstream opinions. I’ve made some pretty vanilla comments about markets/politics that have gotten downvoted for not being left-wing, but I don’t really care about that.
I’ve never been called a “nazi”, but I don’t go out of my way to antagonize anyone and try to add to the conversation and if my reply is something along the lines of “socialism sucks and you suck” then I don’t post it.
I think what it comes down to though is that the fediverse experience requires some curation and restraint compared to other larger platforms where you can go pretty much unoticed and can pretty much always find a group of people of similarly ideologically minds
Maybe you should try jumping on Truth Social and suggesting they’d have a larger userbase if they’re were more tolerant of left wing views?
Why is it always “leftists” who are supposed to welcome any and all political views with a warm mouth?
What exactly are you offering in return besides entitled posts complaining “these people I’m stereotyping with open contempt weren’t nice enough when they replied to my unsolicited opinion with opinions of their own”?
It doesn’t appear to be posts, moderation, money, code or insight.
You hit the nail on the head.
Honestly, I couldn’t even recommend it to anyone in its current state to normal everyday people.
If you have normal, moderate political positions you will get shit on constantly here. Doesn’t help that everything needs to be political on Lemmy.
Meme communities are like 50% “hurr durr normies bad” or “everyone nazi”
Add the Linux circlejerk and that’s about 90% of the content I see on here. I don’t care to engage a lot with that and I just hope more normal people migrate…
But if we had more subs on other topics it should bring in other types of people.
Is that actually desirable or just growth for growths sake? Rage comics and lolcats brought huge numbers of new users to reddit and the quality of content immediately began to decay.
Maybe a social media site that runs out of content is a good thing.
Is that actually desirable or just growth for growths sake?
It’s actually desirable. Without subs on more topics (which should also mean people discussing those topics), Lemmy is not a viable alternative for the people who want to focus on content. And this is particularly relevant for more niche subjects because of how the scale of conversation works. I should know. I created two communities (technically magazines on kbin, but same idea) but until people come to them, I’m mostly fully just waiting there, fingling fingers.
Well, I figure “growth” in this case means increased diversity in communities and users. Maybe it’s a double-edged sword, maybe the quality decay is avoidable - maybe not, idk.
I just think it’d be cool to see things other than linux, lefty, & star trek memes on here sometimes.
This comment will also receive some negative feedback but I don’t care about diversity in my social media platform. I actually want people to enjoy the same things I do, like Linux, technology, geek jokes, etc.
That’s the opposite of diversity I guess. More like a community where people have similar interests. That’s what I like about it.
Eh, that is kinda the appeal of Reddit, and its alternatives. Finding smaller communities of likeminded individuals that you can group into a tailored feed.
I always say the magic of this model is that it’s not just a firehose of every possible interest, it’s more like a shower of dozens of tiny handpicked jets. It just happens that on Lemmy, the “All” feed is still reasonably tailored to the main demographic here. That being tech nerds who dislike Reddit’s recent decisions enough to make a change.
Finding smaller communities of likeminded individuals that you can group into a tailored feed. the main demographic here. That being tech nerds who dislike Reddit’s recent decisions enough to make a change.
That’s exactly why I simply cannot not go back to reddit from time to time. Lemmy is nice and all but all communities that are not focused on tech stuff are complete ghost towns. Sure, one could say, that I should create the content and post it here. But I’m simply not that kind of person. I seldom come up with interesting stuff to share, but enjoy interacting with the posts of other people, writing a comment here and there. And I’d say many if not most others are similar.
Um, that isn’t the definition of diversity being used here. They were suggesting some demographic diversity not interest diversity. Unless you are suggesting only young white males are into Linux, technology, geek jokes, etc. In which case, fuck off with that bigotry.
No, only a subset of young white males are into linux if you exclude trans women
Haha it would be hard to know what everyone looks like behind the keyboards and I don’t care whatsoever. One of the best things about tech culture is that you are judged by what you actually know and how well you can work with others. :)
Do fledgling communities typically START diversified? I would imagine it always starts this way. You invent the thing. You send it to your like minded friends, they send it to their like minded friends, etc. I feel like diversity inevitably requires time and numbers.
there’s no way you could even guess the skin color of a person by reading their comment. i could be a 70-year old asian man for all you care.
maybe because “race” just isn’t discussed as much because it’s also basically a social construct besides minor evolutionary differences.
People of different background have more chance to have a bigger diversity of point of view. You may not be able to guess the background of a single commenter, but you can spot things missing. Also, I wasn’t actually thinking about race, but gender identities and sexual orientations as well.
Race is a social construct that impacts so many people in a very real way. The race that you’re sorted into affects so much of where you can go, what you can do, and how the government treats you.
I don’t feel like we’re ever going to get past that until we can make the sign up process very nearly effortless. Reading about signing up for an account on the fediverse can be a lot of new info. Choosing an instance can feel like a lot when new to the fediverse and at the point that it becomes something difficult or confusing, a lot of people just lose interest.
I agree. I am a techie, have been following Lemmy for quite a while before the Reddit exodus. When I made my account, first I had to understand that each instance manages its own accounts and there are many instances. My initial thought was to look for one of the higher population instances, but I read that this was not necessarily the best idea. Then I searched out why its better to pick an instance outside the high population ones and that whatever instance I picked, I could view/comment/vote on posts from other instances. I don’t have a problem doing research, but I don’t know anyone who is not a techie that would continue past my first question, and that is a serious problem for adoption.
It definitely lacks diversity. But at the same time it reminds me of the early internet where we had dedicated forums like IGN. Most people weren’t on these forums nor cared to be there. The problem here is sometimes Lemmy is not welcoming because of the way it is designed. You have to host and run your own instance or join someone else’s instance. That is good because we, the users of Lemmy, own it but bad because we become very protectionists. We want to protect our instance from bad actors but some users take it to the extreme and protect the instance from people who aren’t like them and think differently.
Younger for me. They’re either pro Palestine or really pro Palestine, which to me is the idealism of youth. I’d say mainly 16-30 first world or equivalent males.
You can’t say “Hamas are terrorists and Israel isn’t committing genocide” without 3-6 days of some nerd calling you a Nazi, which means your average joe has no interest in being here, because that’s the opinion of the majority of people and the majority of people are not, in fact, nazis.
Posted the bigot using the device created and coded by nerds. Do you fail to realize that “nerd” is what idiots call the smart kids? Of course you do.
Took less than 2 hours lol
It’s worth stepping back a moment to appreciate that it’s actually worked. Whether it will continue is another story, but Lemmy became a successful and viable alternative to Reddit. That’s worthy of praise and celebration, and it couldn’t be done without the admins and mods of .world who’ve made this place into what it is.
Lemmy is like 1/2 of what reddit was able to do for me. I haven’t gone back to reddit since the exodus, I deleted all my posts and my account and never went back. But even now when I need information on anything from a community it’s always reddit that pops up with the information that I need. I understand this is because of userbase and interacting with it but lemmy has not been able to do that effectively yet.
Granted I did post about a fish for my fishtank here and it was answered actually pretty quickly.
I think I’m just not understanding what instances and the feddiverse is. Most posts I’m interested in have like 1 or 2 comments, and half the time they’re not useful interactions. It just feels kind of dead here. And again I understand it’s because of the lack of interaction and userbase. But to say it’s better than reddit or the best alternative is being a little frivolous.
Feels kind of dead
The frustrating aspect is that it isn’t dead here. I’ve been on dead forums where you make a post and nothing happens. On Lemmy I’ve posted on seemingly dead or near dead communities, and received a flurry of response in the form of votes and comments. There are definitely people subscribed, and willing to comment, but very few people posting threads. It is a bottleneck to have users all waiting for somebody else to post something.
I hope anybody reading this comment understands that in a smaller ecosystem they can’t just passively wait for content to fill the feed. There needs to be more contribution in the form of posts, and hopefully posts that go beyond just memes (memes are great and fun, but Lemmy desperately needs posts that go beyond just that) or arguing about politics (politics are important, but exhausting). More activity on interest, and hobby communities, especially with original content adds uniqueness here.
The one thing I’ve noticed, at least on the lemmy.world instance, is that posts I make in whatever dinkum communities I’m in show up on the front page right there as bold as brass, which never happened on reddit. I think that’s where some of these comments and upvotes are coming from. After I started noticing this I looked to see what communities the other random stuff I’m seeing on the front page is coming from and in quite a few cases they’re also from tiny communities.
So that’s pretty cool. Making a post in your niche subcommunity of choice is not necessarily just shouting into the void, and some people might actually see it even if they weren’t looking for it.
Some of it absolutely is from the frontpage, but I consider that a reason communities need more posts. Posts from a niche community actually have a chance at wider visibility. People who interact with the posts are more likely to be the kind of people who would like the community I figure.
My new year’s resolution is to post more threads in “dead” communities I care about. Thanks for the perspective.
Rather than trying to find a specific community to ask a question. Ask it in a general community. Specific subreddits were only born when generic ones became too big. But as the generic ones are much smaller it makes more sense to ask your questions and make posts there.
That’s helpful thank you. If I had a question for example for a specific video game you’d recommend going to the gaming community over the game specific one?
Yes absolutely. Ask in the general game community.
For example I wanted to know about HaikuOS. It’s an open source OS. There’s no community for it but I know Linux users are the most likely to know about it and the Linux community is huge.
So I asked in c/Linux and found users of the OS.
If I didn’t get a response I’d ask in c/AskLemmy
I’ve done the same with anime and games.
That would work for asking, but it wouldn’t help if you wanted to discuss community specific things. For instance if I wanted to discuss the new Heroic lineup after Stabby imploded the previous core I can’t just post this into gaming. People are going to look at it, think “what the fuck did I just read?” and ignore it. That post requires a CS2 community and that community doesn’t exist yet. There have been attempts but it’s never taken off.
I think such communities are important for growth because those are the communities of you stick around for. I probably wouldn’t be on Lemmy if the Formula 1 community wasn’t active here. General communities are great for a general news feed, but the “niche” communities are the glue that keep people together.
You think the gaming community doesn’t have CS gamers?
See my other comment where I do just what you say you can’t:
For example I wanted to know about HaikuOS. It’s an open source OS. There’s no community for it but I know Linux users are the most likely to know about it and the Linux community is huge.
So I asked in c/Linux and found users of the OS.
If I didn’t get a response I’d ask in c/AskLemmy
I’ve done the same with anime and games.
This is insightful. Also some of the niche communities that came over have probably found it hard to recreate the experience with less participants - whereas when they were historically established on Reddit only when was enough traffic to justify splitting off from a more general topic.
Perhaps over time the members of smaller niche Lemmy communities will drift into more general topics. For example if there’s not enough participants to maintain a vibrant ‘wearing feathers in your hair’ community, those members would probably be welcome, and valuable participants, in the larger ‘head ornaments’ community. Since I’m slightly invested in the success of Lemmy, I certainly hope that’s what happens rather than people going back to ‘/r/featherhairwearing’.
My Reddit account is 16 years old but I have abandoned it. Lemmy is what Reddit was like 10 - 12 years ago. People were nicer for the most part and there was light discussion on random topics.
Yeah my account was about 15 years old. Reddit definitely decayed into worse and worse and I have no regrets leaving. But it did leave a little bit of a hole that’s yet to be properly filled. And lemmy is definitely doing a good job, just hasn’t filled it yet.
But even now when I need information on anything from a community it’s always reddit that pops up with the information that I need.
Lemmy devs should prioritize SEO optimizations to make the platform more visible on search engines. This will boost traffic and leads to a positive userbase growth.
Yeah, I think it’s just the critical mass that makes a space feel lively. The discussions I participated in felt great (actually felt like pre-digg reddit). It’s a trade-off. I similarly minimized my own reddit usage, but I still browse it on my desktop (much less than before). And that’s fine. I also stopped using Twitter, and Mastodon is a similar story: fewer, but better interactions. I don’t mind it, and it also might be by design. It’s not a for profit service and it does not need to make the engagement line go up all the time. I have more time to do what I actually want.
It isn’t about “winning”. Lemmy can coexist with any Fediverse application, and that’s the beauty of it. Everyone on the Fediverse wins.
