To follow-up on the Reddit thread yesterday, here are a few elements that can be interesting to discuss.
Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy
Just quoting “Lemmy” or pointing to join-lemmy.org can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance. Recent post by a new joiner 9 days ago, they had to change server 2 times to get a satisfying experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536.
Using something like
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions"
Can already point them in one direction, and avoid them getting lost in the too many options.
If people want to debate the choice of those two instances, I’ll add my thought process in the comments.
The Lemmy feed looks as depressing as Reddit’s All, and how to mitigate that
Some feedback I received when promoting Lemmy the way above
Just checked out lemmy to see if it’s different from reddit. Im very disappointed lmao.
First post I see is a comic about cultural appropriation with an ifunny watermark. Next are several posts about the proton vpn ceo “going full maga.” And finally a post I saw on Reddit days ago that is ragebait making fun of the cybertruck.
Yikes. It’s the same exact thing.
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Lemmy still has a pretty obnoxious tankie problem. Even if you block the .ml instance, pretty much every thread about US politics or world news on any major instance gets hijacked by the same handful of trolls and their associated vote bots. Hopefully this will become less of a problem as more sane people join, but just as a word of caution, be aware that you will be called western imperialist scum by a bunch of 14 year olds.
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Lemmy is utter rubbish, it’s as if their entire userbase consists of the top layer of scum carefully siphoned off from the Reddit cesspool. It got the worst of the annoying political echo chamber and “very smart” argumentative users from Reddit.
I just clicked on half a dozen random Lemmy servers, and all of them had at least one link about Trump in the top 5 posts. Even ones that seem like they’re supposed to be about tech.
Normal humans want the Reddit of 10+ years ago back. We don’t want to use a different site colonized by the same modern day Redditors we loathe interacting with.
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To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong. Open https://discuss.online , by default you’ll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.
What I try to do in such instances is to give something like
"While politics are important, you can still very much block them. Here are an example of some communities that can interest you:
- https://discuss.online/c/casualconversation@lemm.ee
- https://discuss.online/c/foodporn@lemmy.world
- https://discuss.online/c/superbowl@lemmy.world
- https://discuss.online/c/patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
- https://discuss.online/post/15026558 for 20 non-political communities"
I also wrote a long post about that issue that you can read here https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/
As a side note, I recently started a discussion on !fedigrow@lemm.ee about a potential political-free instance for new joiners, feel free to have a look: https://feddit.org/post/6819084
Lemmy is too small, 42k monthly active users is nothing
Discuit, the centralized alternative to Reddit, currently counts 181 weekly active commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/NlAdOWAp
You can also mention that NodeBB is now federating with Lemmy:
- https://feddit.org/post/7035166?scrollToComments=true
- https://community.nodebb.org/topic/71fe3f89-361c-4716-a79e-de02f94b3113/test-from-lemmy-to-nodebb
That’s all for now, happy to discuss in the comments.
Note: if you’re not interested in promoting Lemmy, feel free to hide this post, you are able to do this on specific posts if your instance is running 0.19.4 and newer
Rule. Clickbait or meaningful?
Yep, lemmy definitely has a problem with too much politics.
I propose that no post should include the head or face of any politician. Seeing a politician typically ruins your day. Best to either keep politics abstract (memes) or not do that at all.
I’ve noticed that people forgot how long ago the Reddit blackout was (about 19 months ago?), and Lemmy has improved a lot since then. Back then Lemmy was like pre-alpha, super buggy, and servers were very unstable. And we have way more 3rd party apps/frontends now.
Also, why not mentioning one instance when making that comment?
I still remember when federation was barely working. We’ve made good progress since then
Why not promote piefed?
@ericjmorey@discuss.online OP answered here: https://feddit.org/comment/4286281 (the lack of mobile apps, was the answer)
Thanks for the link.
This link doesn’t work. There’s only 3 communities for patientgamers: world, shitjustworks, and ml
It’s SJW, I’ll edit.
Fixed
Prevent opinion downvoting by disabling downvotes globally.
50 upvotes, 90 downvotes, that’s not problematic at all, but there is the huge total score of -40 in this case that could lead to the deletion of the post or comment.
By the way: My instance is one of the few with downvotes disabled. So, if you want to give me feedback on this, I can only see comments…
Opinion downvoting was the most toxic feature of Reddit and led to perfect echo chambers. We should have left it there.
Blahaj does it as well
Sounds like we’re filtering out the exact type of people I would never want to come from Reddit. Dunno why y’all want them.
I generally try to avoid political shit here myself, it’s too depressing and I’m not sure reddit-like forums is really a good format for that.
But for those who are out there posting cybertruck memes, thanks for scaring away the MAGAs for the rest of us. It is much appreciated.
Everyone else is already here or is not interested in text-based forums
Shoutout to lemmy.zip, y’all are a great instance!
To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong. Open https://discuss.online , by default you’ll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.
The fact that they (or you) complain about the “All” timeline having the same stuff in all servers shows they have no idea what they’re talking about: that’s the entire point of an All feed! (plusminus stuff like defederation). It would make more sense to compare the Local feed of instances, IMO.
Besides, the default sorts are active and popularity nowadays, so it only makes sense that stuff that we care about and have to have words with, takes the forefront. If you want to solve that the solution is not “let’s ignore what’s going on around the world”, it’s “post more cats” and “post more ich_iel”. Or just use the Scaled sort, I don’t understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.
And that’s right there with the complaint about the 42k users too. The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about. Complaining that for the next people to come in “I’m going to be called a westerner imperialist” is delicious hypocrisy on not noticing how indoctrinated they are.
The fact that they (or you) complain about the “All” timeline having the same stuff in all servers shows they have no idea what they’re talking about: that’s the entire point of an All feed! (plusminus stuff like defederation). It would make more sense to compare the Local feed of instances, IMO.
The complaint is not about the All timeline being the same everywhere. The complaint is that most of the All feed is US politics, a topic which is already massively dominant on Reddit. Some people are looking at alternatives because they want to avoid that. If it’s the same, why bother changing and not stay on Reddit?
I don’t understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.
Good point, could be something that could be change by admins.
The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about.
Well, that’s not the case for everyone. A lot of people came here because they wanted third party apps on Reddit.
The complaint is that most of the All feed is US politics, a topic which is already massively dominant on Reddit. Some people are looking at alternatives because they want to avoid that. If it’s the same, why bother changing and not stay on Reddit?
Well then the key is to not show the All feed. That feed, by its very design, is about showing the overview of what is going about “the known fedi”, and we can’t control what other people talk about, fedi or otherwise. If he current news is Luigi, exploded Starlink launches and double Nazi salutes, that’s what’s going to be talked about - and the presence of generalist instances is going to amplify that effect. Unless you have enough cats, enough Linux, or enough ich_iel.
A lot of people came here because they wanted third party apps on Reddit.
Well then they were told wrong: here it’s not about developing for Reddit. In fact, when someone tried to act on trying to bring people from Reddit or emulating “third party app” by bringing in the threads from Reddit, it was the lemmings who complained (even if rightfully so).
This is the best platform for constant live updates about what the people you don’t like are up to. Then there’s articles about everything that’s wrong in the world and also some memes - mostly political.
You forgot about the Linux memes
selection of 20 non-political,tech,memes communities: https://feddit.uk/post/22376629
The best promotion is to be awesome.
>Lemmy, is awesome (y/n)?: _y
I’m for the sink or swim mentality. Point them here and if they come up with an excuse to not be here then they probably weren’t going to be a good contributor anyway.
I’m fine with being selective. There is no reason we need 1M+ MAU for the sake of the network, we aren’t trying to turn a profit
There is no reason we need 1M+ MAU for the sake of the network, we aren’t trying to turn a profit
There’s also no reason a topic as popular as TV shows relies on 3 posters to keep the main community active: !showsandmovies@lemm.ee
We don’t need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement
We don’t need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement
Definitely agreed with this. And less always (understandably) angry political posters, more escapists that want to chat about movies, games etc. It becomes like that snake eating itself because people that want a break from real life come here and see nothing but the same 24 news cycle as everywhere else. And then, speaking for myself, searching up certain niche communities and finding them either non-existent or with 3 posts from 1 and a half years ago.
I’ve been thinking of porting a couple of my old review posts over here from my banned but not yet closed Reddit account. Just so that, for example, the next time someone visits the Ghibli community there’ll be 4 posts instead of 3.
And the Sonic communities are pretty disappointing too, considering I’m always seeing it mentioned in the wild these days. Makes me think (or hope) that there’s a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.
Reddit is sadly still unbeaten in searching up a TV show that you enjoy and finding an entire community built around it. And those communities never took a lot of members. So it shouldn’t be impossible here.
Makes me think (or hope) that there’s a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.
If you have a topic you would like to talk about, feel free to post about it in !fedigrow@lemm.ee. Not sure we have enough people for Sonic, but we can try.
I get the frustration with not having a lot of active posters in a community despite diligence in posting and promotion on !newcommunities@lemmy.world. I’ve had the same frustration trying to operate !fantasyfootball@lemmy.world the last two seasons. I am not going to keep it up this offseason
Sorry to hear. How are the NFL communities doing on Lemmy in general? I’m a bit active on !football@lemmy.world (the other one), it’s moderately active but still niche.
I don’t know if @GreenEngineering3475@lemmy.world has a bot that automatically posts news from a feed or is just a diligent poster but he is always posting relevant news to the NFL community.
For college football, @g0d0fm15ch13f@lemmy.world and @ToasterOverlord@fanaticus.social do a great job modding and make sure that community has content.
The CFB community has really active game threads and even a community poll, the NFL community is more for news but it’s very helpful for me to follow the news in the league and most posts get at least a few comments.
That’s nice. About fantasy football, did you promote in on the other NFL communities? I guess it’s too much of a niche topic. I had some success with fantasy football for the Euro 2024, but that was a continent-wide competition, not a regular season.
I’ve promoted it and it has plenty of subscribers, it just doesn’t have a lot of regular activity. It’s not my community anyway, I’ve just been trying to steward it the last two seasons. I think it’s more just become more of a place to chat about fantasy football than an active place ask for and give advice for fantasy football. I’m fine with that as well.
Honestly, there needs to be a setting for lemmy admins to specify the default comms displayed to not-logged and new users. Just the firehose of the /all or local is not particularly attractive to most people.
EDIT: Went ahead and opened a feature request
Agree. I’m of the opinion that the default view for guests should be Local, Scaled. Or alternatively, Local, Popular. But never All, and certainly not mixed with Active.
This is what I’ve been saying. I think it should go even further and give admins a default block list of users.
A lot of folks talk about how Lemmy became useable after they spent hours (or sometimes a month) blocking the right communities and users, but most social media users don’t want to work that hard, they just want to start doomscrolling.
give admins a default block list of users.
Usually obvious trolls are banned on their instance, so for everyone. There is also synchronization between admins to ban people on instances that admins can’t be contacted
Isn’t that what /api/v3/community/hide allows? https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35617930
Not really. That just hides it from /all. Just because not want new users to get dumped into /c/politics, or /c/slop, doesn’t mean I want to hide their existence from everyone.
The hard part is that for some people, News and Politics is actually what they are looking for. Others want only Memes and never not that, while still others want content types like Gaming or Arts and Crafts, etc.
So when Categories of Communities and/or Topic areas is implemented, this issue will be solved, but until then these are merely a best guess about what an “average” user desires to see, rather than allowing them to choose their own experience.
Sure. The suggestion I did for the devs is just to have another tab “suggested” which will be a feed of the preselected comms from the admins. Anyone can easily switch away from it
Ah, indeed. Thanks for the feature request
The thing I hate worst about Lemmy is that a lot of people are dickheads about their opinion, which often is barely different from the persons’ opinions you see them aggressively shitting on. In other cases the opinions are pretty different but start with the same basic premise, yet some users see no common ground at all. It’s become really disheartening honestly. There are probably more than 30 users like that which I had to block for my own sanity
It’s human nature. Mods can help with that, so it’s also community dependent.
Single topic forums are still doing ok out there on the wider Internet. Create more well moderated, single-topic, federated forums, and then promote those specifically to users who care about those topics.
Don’t sell Lemmy to end users. Lemmy is a solution for admins. Sell the specific websites to end users.
Difficult to sell a forum to people where most mods on Reddit are going to remove posts mentioning it: https://lemmy.ca/post/37657096
People on specific forums are probably happy where they are and aren’t going to switch from their established forums. The strength of Reddit and Lemmy is to be able to have several forums accessible from the main site.
The last place that’s left is /r/RedditAlternatives, where you just have people who want, well, a Reddit alternatives, and they usually don’t mention their preferences.
But I agree with you to an extend, !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com is a good example of focused forum. It’s a bit unique on Lemmy unfortunately.
