I hate big tech controlling social media. I desperately want social media to be federated.
I really love community-driven social media like Reddit. Lemmy feels… too small. I really loved that Reddit let me jump into any niche hobby, and instantly I had a community. Lemmy, you’ll be lucky if that community even exists, and if it does, chances are nobody has posted in ages.
On the other hand, Lemmy is full of political content lately. I’ve basically been doom scrolling everything US election-related, and it’s really starting to take a toll on my mental health.
I know I can filter content. I know I can post and be the change I seek. Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.
Not sure what the point of this is, or if it’s even the right community to vent about this. I just really want to replace Reddit, but I find myself going back more and more (e.g. r/homekit is very active compared to Lemmy version).
It’s still a tiny echo chamber like it was a couple months ago when I cut back on Lemmy use. It can get pretty repetitive and boring to read. I came back to Reddit because the user base was larger and there were more perspectives I could hear from.
Reading the comments here made me realize something.
It’s nice to have good content for niche communities that you enjoy but that’s always been a tall order. As in, a lot of things have to go right to get that organic community feeling and I’ve honestly always thought of it as a privilege and not a right.
I’ve seen plenty of communities die for various reasons or just been in a position where I didn’t have passion to go and talk about my niche interests.
So what’s my point? Niche communities are the icing on the cake of a good platform. When we mostly have for profit platforms and little main stream interest in standardized alternatives, you got to be more realistic.
Yeah I want to get off Reddit but this place is small and is very political. It’s a tiny echo chamber. A very very small one.
Imagine taking the technical and stubborn creme of the crop redditors and that’s who’s mostly on lemmy. It used to be those who wanted an open source community, but it got it’s user bumps during the reddit exodus. I would have never heard of lemmy if it wasn’t for the fact I used reddit exclusively through the redditsync app. And when that shut down I came here naturally on the backbone of the developer going here.
I’ve been here since. The community isn’t bad. I still get responses on niche things like gardening and fish tank related issues I had. It’s just 3 comments vs 30. But somehow it’s better. Because on reddit I can’t even get a post posted half the time, and the other half I find out I’m banned from that sub because of a comment I made years ago on a completely unrelated post on a sub I don’t even know.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way around it. Fediverse is small, and while we should always encourage people’s migration, it will probably remain small for the time being.
And freedom to express everything combined with people learning their behavior on algorithmic content will be an issue until a strong Fediverse culture is established. The times of pioneers are over, the times of “truly a place for everyone” are not yet there, and in between, we have a very weird mixture, sometimes bringing out the worst of many people.
I hope Fediverse will survive through this phase, and if yes, bright times will be ahead. But it will take a lot of work. Many non-political communities have already started blocking political content, and for the time being, I believe that’s for the better. People need a place to chill and have a corner of their own, not face what they ran away from in the first place.
Use one of the apps so you can filter out content. “Trump, Trump’s, Republicans, Musk” seems to take care of the problem so far.I think I have some communities blocked and maybe a user or two aswell.
I don’t want another app. I use lemmy exclusively in the browser, and that feature is missing :(
Try using one of the PWA’s, like Voyager. Just go to vger.app in your browser. It’s still a browser-based front end, but it has more features than the default interface
You should check out something like Tesserect, it’s a 3rd party front end for Lemmy that includes a lot of quality of life features, including word filtering. The demo is here: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/
If you like it, you could petition lemmy.world to offer it as an option directly.
Yeah, I withheld using an app until very recently for that exact feature. I miss the browser for other features though, not sure what to do. I’m using connect, maybe I’ll try a couple others or some other solution.
I know I can filter content. I know I can post and be the change I seek. Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.
It doesn’t look like you mentioned subscriptions, which gets you out of the ‘all’ / ‘filtering’ side of things entirely. But just as with Reddit, you’ll need to spend time building your personal feed over time and tweaking it.
The good news is that there’s no limit to your subscriptions (unlike Reddit’s cap of 50 displayed at any one time), but that you’ll need to use the right tools to search the Fediverse to find those communities you want to subscribe to.
The main tool I typically use seems to have a bug right now (based on the recent software upgrade?) but I suspect will be back up in a few days. You might take a look at this, tho, plus other resources.
I like it as a platform but the userbase just isn’t there.
Don’t let your desire for something you want right now ruin something you can have in the future. At one point r/homekit didn’t exist, didn’t stop you from not caring.
I know I can post and be the change I seek.
Imo, this is your answer. I’m not sure exactly what other solution you want. Content will not appear on Lemmy without someone first posting it. Advertising the platform to help draw people in is also important.
You have fallen for the ultimate trick: wanting a “big” community.
You only get that from big, centralized social networks that want to maximize the amount of content you are fed, because it maximizes your ad views, and their profits.
Embrace the smallness. Lemmy still has room to grow, and having lot of different options for communication that aren’t all owned by billionaires is a good thing. The fact that it isn’t constantly trying to earn your attention is a feature, not a bug.
I don’t think it’s that we want “big” communities, necessarily, as much as we want active communities. For instance, if there’s a niche game I want to talk about, it’s currently a roll of the dice whether or not there’s a Lemmy community for it, and then if it does exist already then it’s pretty much guaranteed to see 2, maybe 3 posts per week, tops.
That’s really the only thing I miss about Reddit, being able to pretty much always have a discussion on any topic you’d want, at any given time.
For instance, if there’s a niche game I want to talk about, it’s currently a roll of the dice whether or not there’s a Lemmy community for it, and then if it does exist already then it’s pretty much guaranteed to see 2, maybe 3 posts per week, tops.
Why not create a thread on a genre community like [email protected] or [email protected] ?
For niche things, you kinds have to go to reddit.
I mean the worst of reddit is on mainstream topics like politics anyways. You’re less likely to see toxicity in like a gaming subreddit. (Less likely than politics anyways)
Or to the category community. You might not find an active group dedicated to Dodge Ram transmissions, but there’s at least one group for Cars, or maybe even Trucks!
People wanting more activity than the small exclusive private club Fediverse has become isn’t a trick or capitalist fallacy, they just want other people to see their fucking posts. Is that so strange and wrong? Why post things if no one is going to see them? You’re seriously missing the point of a social media, if you really think having small nearly dead spaces is a good thing.
A while back there was some issue with the Lemmy code and people kept being served posts that were over 6 months old. Peple started replying and the original posters were often “wow, you found my post!” It was kind of awesome.
Yes Lemmy is smaller and doesn’t have instantly fully formed communities. Reddit has been around for almost 2 decades. Lemmy is newer, smaller, and actively fights the sorts of shenanigans that Reddit initially used to get big.
If you want more niche activity, make posts and interact with posts. Lemmy is user driven- that means you. It isn’t a giant megasite where you can just expect to be a passive receiver of endless content.
On Lemmy you feel like your voice is heard more because it’s smaller, IMO.
I once read somewhere that mentioned how Lemmy is actually bigger than reddit was at the same age. I don’t know if that is true or not but that’s pretty cool if it is and I think it means Lemmy is on a good track.
The difference was that Digg used to be the site. Then Digg ticked off all their users and 90% of them migrated to reddit, which was already available.
Reddit had its dumpster fire moment over the last couple years, but there was no available place for everyone to quickly migrate over to other than Lemmy, and it didn’t really happen. Lemmy is a bit harder to get used to and figure out, so we missed out on a huge migration.
So its doubtful that lemmy will ever expand out like reddit did. Not for a long time, anyhow. It will be great if we make it to a couple million active users. At that point, I’d be totally content. Things get too sloppy once you go over 10 million users, it seems.
I was their in reddit beginning. There were no initial shenanigans. It was a good place and existed at just the right time, when people wanted to leave Digg because it was turning into a dumpster fire, similar to what reddit has done.
When reddit started turning to shit there just wasn’t anything for the masses to migrate to that was available other than here. Problem is that here isn’t as simple to get into. In lemmy, the learning curve is slightly higher than “bare minimum”.
Sort of, but it didn’t really work. Reddit existed in 2005, but wasn’t popular. It only became popular in 2010 after all of Digg went to it, because it was pretty much a Digg clone, but with owners who weren’t Digg.
I’ve presented you with the proof that early Reddit was populated with large numbers of sockpuppet accounts by the owners, creating whole cloth communities to draw in users, which is not something that is happening on Lemmy.
The entire reason the Digg mass exodus was viable was people leaving Digg found these “preexisting” Reddit communities and felt more comfortable joining in.
Lemmy doesn’t have that socketpuppet population to springboard with, so growth is slower and unpopulated communities are not falsely full of fake users.
I hung out on reddit long enough over the previous couple of years when people were up in arms to leave. It wasn’t the lack of subs or community size that kept people away. It was simply that it was harder to figure out how to get up and going. You can’t just go to lemmy.com, create a name and password, and start doing stuff. Further still is that now people want an apk for phone browsing and particularly when the masses wanted to leave reddit, there was also no “use this apk and its easy”. Plus, creating an instance is much more work than creating a subreddit.
It was never about the size of the website already appearing to be in place. Lemmy just has a harder entry fee. It keeps lemmy at a lower user base in the same way every subscription service in existence knows it wants to make things super easy to sign up, but time intens8ve and difficult to cancel. Because it takes a bit of effort, lots of people don’t get around to doing it.
You can’t just go to lemmy.com, create a name and password, and start doing stuff.
Go to https://lemm.ee/
Have a look around, see if the content and the formatting is appealing to you, register an account if you want to be able to curate your feed further
Go to https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.
Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your “instance”, use “lemm.ee”
If you want more choices for apps, have a look at https://www.lemmyapps.com/
I think the Lemmy devs political stance and instances such as hexbear are more detrimental to the success of the platform than the entry bar.
Edit: Discuit is a centralized site, and now has 209 weekly active users: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/OiU8YjZ_
This is great for people looking now, but the info, the apks, and the knowledge to get there was less known or not very good a year or so ago.
Also, I’m personally a big fan of “thunder” for my phones lemmy apk. It’s awesome.
Jokes on you the political content here is from the redditors who pretended to quit their award fueled addiction by also joining lemmy.
Seriously though, compare c/Politics to c/Worldnews or c/News. There is a very large dissonance between the comments shared despite both communities posting the same news info…
Politics is the one thing we all have in common.
The good old days where everyone watched the same five TV shows and discussed them are over.
Yeah, I think it makes waaay more sense to complain about US politics infecting all of social media.
US Politics is the one thing
weyou all have in common.Do you come from a country with no politics?
No, but how interested are you in HK politics?
Actually, yes. I’m curious how it compares to western politics
The point is, Lemmy, Reddit, and other related platform are overwhelmingly American.
People often just assume things with American mindset. Especially for hard topic like religious harmony, ethnic discrimination, immigration, etc.
Yes Americans participate, but the person who posted 'politics," is something we all have in common I believe was saying it as in all humans need air, prefer to not drown, appreciate love and have politics in there life. Whether they choose to ignore the politics or not.
The point is, Lemmy, Reddit, and other related platform are overwhelmingly American.
Ironic as no large instance is managed by US citizens
Honestly, enough where I would read an article if it was posted but not interested enough to seek out articles that don’t appear on Reuters or the AP’s front page. It is depressing to watch my country fall to authoritarianism and it would be interesting to see how a formally democratic society is dealing with authoritarianism being imposed on it. An article on a new cat cafe or a dog parade would also be nice.
We Aussies doesn’t care less about who is out prime minister. As long as they can make more houses for us to live in without becoming bankrupt honestly
So politics. Like when I see people arguing about whether to keep the king around
firefly was mid, there I said it.
Straight to jail. Right away.
Everything Whedon has ever done was mid, and I’m going to be banned for saying that, probably.
If the BlueSky migration keeps up the pace, I think it will be a good bet that Reddit to Lemmy will be the next big user migration. There’s signs it’s already started, within the last year I’ve been here I’ve seen the community and sub-communities grow significantly and there’s been an increase of self-proclaimed converts over the last several months.
I don’t see the connection between Lemmy and Bluesky/reasoning, can you elaborate?
Probably the hope, not completely unfounded, that the migration from one “legacy” (from the 00s) platform to a more recent alternative service - twitter to Bluesky - will help inspire people in other legacy platforms to also realize that alternatives do exist now, they are part of a broader conversation that they weren’t a part of even two years ago.
Even a year and a half ago, this place felt like it hadn’t yet installed the drywall, the wiring and tubing was incomplete. Now it feels more seamless, ready for a spurt of growth.
“Hey… Bluesky isn’t all that bad, I’m glad to be out of the clutches of a billionaire asshole, and not feel utterly lost here”, now cue what OP believes a number of people will also think: “Hmm… maybe I’ll check out Lemmy, too. See what the alternative to reddit is like.”
Some of them could have tried it, didn’t like it, might come back and be like: “Hey, Lemmy’s not too bad since last I last looked a year ago”, and here’s a clincher that definitely wasn’t here a year and a half ago: “The app works pretty good”, and there are a lot of new apps, having a choice gives a sense and weight of legitimacy.
I still remember the DDoS attacks
Dreams.
The Fediverse is virgin territory. The trails aren’t blazed for you here; it’s your job as an early adopter to make it the way you want it to be. You want a community? Start it and participate in it.
I just realized, it’s no wonder much of Lemmy’s current base is in their 30s (and older.) The social aspects of the internet we grew up with was more forum-based. The slower pace we currently have here isn’t a deal breaker, because we knew a time where this was normal. We participated in and built communities because if we didn’t, they wouldn’t exist. There was no pre-made social media behemoth for us to get lost in.
But people who’ve grown up with modern social media didn’t have that experience. They’re accustomed to riding fast-paced rapids, where things quickly change, and where algorithms control their feed and direct the whole experience. That’s their normal. By contrast, Millenials and older came online to gentle, quiet streams. We had to learn to row the oars manually (creating novel communities and content.) That gave us greater control over where we’d go and what we’d see.
Lemmy is a gentle stream right now. People who come here expecting white water rafting are going to feel like something’s missing. People who grew up with pre-made online communities probably never took the steps to build one up before.
I’d love to see younger people taking up the mantle of building a new corner of the internet. Especially in an era where personal control is increasingly limited by powerful monied interests, learning how to create and run communities can be very empowering.
Enjoy being the only one posting.
Mass adoption is fundamental to make any social media viable; the fewer users it has, the less useful it is. Reddit has more users than Lemmy. It’s that simple. People won’t start switching until everybody else switches.
Bluesky is only barely starting to compete with Twitter, and that’s after Twitter drastically worsened. Lemmy is a long, long way from competing with Reddit.
To me, it’s a matter of time. The structural advantages of the fediverse mean that it’s more stable on the long run; what i mean by that is, for-profit Reddit will get worse while Lemmy remains good, leading users to migrate here, so Lemmy will eventually outlive Reddit. And then along the way there will be a few big moments where Reddit really fucks up and a wave of people washes up on Lemmy. This is already happening, i’m pretty sure all of us here made our accounts after the Reddit API changes.
Enjoy being the only one posting.
Pack it in now then. This platform isn’t going to see huge influxes. Normies are too stupid to pick a server. I don’t really mind it being somewhat of a niche space, maybe the advertisers will continue to mostly ignore us.
Mass adoption is fundamental to make any social media viable;
Forums used to be lively and self-sustaining with memberships in the low hundreds. You only need “mass adoption” if you want and unending stream of novelty bullshit that you don’t actially want to engage with to entertain yourself with while on the toilet.
Yeah and Lemmy and Mastodon at the moment but more so Lemmy seem to be working against that goal by opting for onboarding methods that are unintuitive and frustrating to normies. Opting to make people apply like this is a fucking club, and deny people if they are too boring.
Great job guys, you’re really gonna get lots of engagement that way. You don’t want engagement? What are you even doing wasting money on an almost empty site barely anyone is joining?
You seem overtly negative over the whole platform.
People are trying to keep communities active, as shown on [email protected] and [email protected]
I mean those efforts are great but if the flow of people onto the platform is bottlenecked it doesn’t do as much good as it could. And since a majority of all Lemmy servers are pushing for applications effectively turning all the current instances into clubs that will ultimately effect how many people will be here to have an interest in communities in the first place.
Joining an existing community is usually easier than starting a new one.
[email protected] can be a place to find an existing community?
Joining an existing community is usually easier than starting a new one.
There’s also the problem of management. Lots of Lemmy comms are abandoned and, while there are some I would like to exist, I just do not visit regularly enough to be responsible for moderating more and more and more communities across the fedi. So I don’t create new comms.
Definitely
