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can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance.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.
–
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.
–
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.
–
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
Just my opinion: No need to focus on reddit. The world is not focused by that platform, and there are other people on the Internet.
To attract an audience, you need exactly to attract an audience. Add indexing by search engines, Add SEO optimization for lemmy-ui, etc. People can find interesting instances exactly in google search after that without any provisioning. That’s why web search engines be created.
Lemmy is a very similar platform to Reddit, it makes sense to target those people.
web search engines
The sad thing is that search engines aren’t really at the best at the moment, and with Google and Reddit deal, it’s not like they are going to promote alternatives forums that much.
“Reddit but you can block the part that annoys you”
And then only with deeper knowledge of how the Fediverse functions under the hood - like how “instances” relate to “communities” and specific moderator names, especially when working from a remote account on a different instance than the community structure… Hey, where are you going? 😯
let’s just rebrand instances to superleddits and communities to subleddits 🤣
Just a thought I’m having, but rather than just spamming Reddit with Lemmy links maybe we should promote it more on Linux type areas, at least people coming from there will find their niche content here.
Isn’t every Linux user aware of Lemmy by now? I’ve seen a few posts about it on a few Linux forums during the API fiasco
I think one of the biggest barriers of the fediverse is decision paralysis.
So stop looking around! Go to https://lemmy.world/ and join :)
If you want to expend extra time, there are more servers and you can join a different one, if you are undecisive join the one above :)
Lemmy.world is known to be slow in some areas due to its size
Content is King. You can have a good chunk of people that manage to go through the UX issues. If they don’t find what they want, they will leave. The mirror bots (alien.top, lemmit.online) were meant to help with that, but the people here would rather complain about the post volume instead of learning how follow only the subscribed communities.
Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.
A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third. My proposal to separate user/local instances from topic-based instances has been rejected here, even after I offered to put them under the governance of a wider admin group.
Now, I’m tired of this culture and small thinking. Fine if you want to be proselytizing and convincing people “at retail”, but this will not be nearly as impactful if we had a dozen people who had the courage to setup a Lemmy instance with Fediverser.
no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.
PieFed solves all of that. It isn’t quite ready for the non-technical masses from Reddit, but those particular issues at least it does solve.
I kinda want to recommend people to simply visit https://piefed.social/ and see what will eventually become available as a standard Threadiverse software suite just like Lemmy and Mbin.
Sorry, what about PieFed specifically solves the issues?
- Does it allow people to sign up to the instance directly from their Reddit credentials?
- Does it provide a mapping between Fediverse communities and subreddits, so that when people sign up they are automatically subscribed to their groups of interest?
- Does it provide a separation between topic instances and user instances?
I sincerely don’t see how piefed relates to Fediverser at all…
Not Fediverser per se but the underlying concepts. In detail:
Content is King
Here, PieFed is no better nor worse than Lemmy. It uses ActivityPub to connect with Lemmy, as well as having its own communities, like Mbin (except unlike the latter it doesn’t have its own separate voting system, nor does it federate with Mastodon).
One thing PieFed does have though is the ability for someone to block all users from a particular instance of their choice, without requiring admin approval. This helps SO MUCH for certain instances that nobody wants to defederate from… yet I don’t want to read content from either.
Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.
There is a wizard where you choose what content you want to see - News, Politics, Arts & Craft, Technology, Movies & TV, Science, etc. - which then signs you up to communities in those Topic areas. You can later unsubscribe or subscribe to any individual communities that you wish, but the wizard helps the onboarding process so that you don’t have to simply stare at All bc your Subscribed feed is initially empty, as Lemmy does, bc on PieFed it would not be empty. It thus makes it much easier to find less prominent content, such as poetry, that would otherwise get swamped out by all the memes and politics and such.
A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third.
There are Categories of Communities that combine posts from all of the topic areas, whether you joined those communities or not. So if you don’t want any politics filling your feed, yet you occasionally do want to look up something related to politics, it is just one click away. So not quite mapping specifically to Reddit subs, but yes mapping to content areas - which imho is so much better, bc that would also help someone migrating not just from Reddit but from X, or Bluesky, or Mastodon, or Lemmy, etc. You don’t need an account to see this feature btw - just visit https://piefed.social/ and look at the top.
Or here is an example post showing the Categories above the post, hashtags below it, YouTube embedding of the link, a link to watch that rather on Piped, and if you scroll down note how the sidebar text appears below every single post (some apps make that exceedingly difficult to find on Lemmy, but it’s very often helpful to see not just when on the community page, and rather when in an individual post, e.g. to read the rules).
Does it provide a separation between topic instances and user instances?
No, there are extremely few instances so far and the whole project is still in late alpha as it adds features to catch up to Lemmy, although as detailed above it already has many features that Lemmy lacks. And I didn’t even begin to get into some of the best thoughts for how to democratize moderation practices to rely less on authoritarian control of “remove” vs. “allow” content, by expanding upon those binary choices to include user options to control their own experience - e.g. automatically collapse any comment with >20 downvotes (though it can easily be uncollapsed with one click), and labels next to usernames (e.g. “account <2 weeks old”, “may be an unregistered bot account that posts but never comments”, “controversial user receiving >50x downvotes than upvotes”, etc. - except these are icons not words as I relate here, plus you can add your own icons whenever and to whoever you wish, that only you will see, on top of these conditional-based ones), and even more than this besides.
When it catches up to feature parity with Lemmy, damn it’s going to be so exciting! Right now it’s more of a future thought, except I (who know how to fall back to Lemmy when the occasion demands, e.g. when searching for a post) already use it as my primary daily driver - not that I would recommend that mind you, just saying that it’s possible, if that gives you any indication as to how close it is to being ready for the masses. It’s very close, I do believe!:-)
The onboarding by topics is good, okay. For someone that is coming from Reddit, it would be even better if the the subscription was automatic and without having to think about it.
The other two, I think they improve the tooling a bit compared to Lemmy but they do not solve the problem of the Fediverse: content is still limited outside of the news/politics and that Federation makes it confusing to give a reference point when looking for content.
But overall, I think we keep making the mistake of building decentralized social media software focused on the server, replicating the corporate sites. We should be thinking about “switching instances”, but simply of switching/improving clients.
It’s been too long, but there might be a way to click all at once or some such. But those are details, compared to Lemmy that has All or None (and empty Subscribed), with nothing whatsoever in-between. It’s a step in the right direction I am saying.
Nothing will ever entirely “solve” anything at all - people even on Reddit complain about “lack of content”. There’s tons of content here though, it just gets really difficult to find it. However, check out this link for Arts & Crafts. There are lots and lots of posts there - PieFed shows like 5x more in a listing than Lemmy - virtually none of which would make their way to All bc of being swamped out, and yet if that is the content that people are TRULY looking for… this brings them straight to it, with one click! Why isn’t that a “solve”, at least for the issue of content discovery?
Then they can subscribe to the communities they want to see in their Subscribed feed, which is less relevant due to being able to use those Categories. Also you can trigger a Notification for anything at all on PieFed - a user account, a community, a post, and I especially love seeing that you can turn OFF notifications for a particular comment, if abusive trolls decide to spam you for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, which is a real story that has happened to me at least twice on Lemmy, once on hexbear.net and another on lemmygrad.ml - in either case, my consent ceased long before they eventually got tired of harassing me (in fairness, that is supposedly what communities such as !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net are for, so it’s not that I want the community to cease to exist so much as to not have its content promoted as if it were adopting the same standards of behavior as every other space that I was used to across the Fediverse, without at least a warning of some kind delivered, which is yet another beneficial capability that PieFed offers).
So in addition to Categories and Subscriptions, I also have Notifications sent to me for lesser-trafficked but highly desirable content for me to see like !tenforward@lemmy.world. And sometime this year there will be yet another method of handling all of this, in user-defined topic areas like a Favorites or other category of content that the user asks to be separated from all the rest.
And respectfully I disagree, bc depending on implementation, Categories of Communities has the advantage that it could make discovery of new communities obsolete - e.g. if there’s a !lotrmemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com and a !lotrmemes@midwest.social, it could put both of those into the same Category, and isn’t that what you are essentially asking: that wherever the content ends up moving, that the software go and find it and bring it to you, wherever you happen to be at?
Granted, the solution that PieFed offers needs to be improved upon:-), but at least it exists now.
@rglullis@communick.news No, I don’t there’s any overlap between PieFed and Fediverser either. The potential of Fediverser seems like it got cut off at the knees by how widely defederated alien.top is.
The issue with the mirroring, at least how it was done, is that it was too much content for not enough users, creating the feeling of a deserted mall. If my comment disappears in a flood of posts, it’s no better than when my comment disappears in a flood of comments (like it does on reddit). (Lets forget about the part when one guy started copying entire threads including their users, which was not well thought out)
A way of combining communities into “multilemmys” would be great. I can understand why there’s pushback for separating topics from users. A Lemmy instance is not just a basket for specific topics, it’s a expression of ideology, and as such ideological arguments about the moderation in your proposed structure are guaranteed. It also would reduce comments with minority viewpoints to a minimum.
A slow and steady promotion of lemmy is the best that can happen - from what i learned in the last year a slow and steady influx of people is preferred by the majority, and not a flood of people that can’t be handled by our culture.
I like efficiency too, but some things do get lost when speeding things up too much.
A way of combining communities into “multilemmys” would be great.
Don’t mbin already have this?
(Lets forget about the part when one guy started copying entire threads including their users, which was not well thought out)
That was me. ;)
And sorry to disappoint you, I thought about it a lot. Mirroring the entire thread was less about the benefit the (few) users that are here and more about the potential to bring the masses of Reddit users who are stuck there because they (rightfully) claim that they do not have any other place to find their niche content. Mirroring the entire thread was also a way to ensure that we were (a) breaking the monopoly on the conversation and (b) creating an incentive for app developers to create a hybrid Lemmy/Reddit client, that could read from Lemmy and post to both, which would effectively make the transition away from the siloed network completely transparent.
The one thing that I didn’t get to execute properly was that I should’ve completed the two-way bridging before enabling the full mirrors.
A Lemmy instance is not just a basket for specific topics, it’s a expression of ideology…
- This is booooooring. So boring. This is the kind of thing that keeps people away. To the absolute majority of people, social networks are about FFF: Friends, Family and Fucking.
- It’s not an exclusive option. If you are part of 5% of people who want to be in the small, niche group are still free to do so. The other 95% of people who just care about gorging in from the content hose would be perfectly happy by following from the larger topic-based instances.
A slow and steady promotion of lemmy is the best that can happen
This is what the Mastodon crowd would also say. Now they are seeing constant churn and watching Bluesky grow, and have to bury their faces in the sand arguing stupid things like “Bluesky might be winning, but they are not really decentralized”. Yeah, it is true. It’s not “really” decentralized. 99.98% of the world will say “so what?” and continue to use it.
I’m tired of consolation prizes and moral victories. I want the web to be free, and I want it to be free for more than just a tiny niche of ideologues. Slow and steady will not win against Big Tech.
Friends, Family and Fucking.
Agree on FB, IG, and Twitter, but which of those are on Reddit?
I missed another F, for Fun.
I know that you thought a lot about it, but you came to the wrong conclusions. But hey, since you seem still pretty grumpy about all of this and nearly a year has come and gone, maybe try again? This time users at least already have a working blocking feature, i think that wasn’t a thing yet last time. If a free alternative comes out of it i’m all for it.
The one thing that I didn’t get to execute properly was that…
… you didn’t ask anyone if they would be ok with it, neither on the fediverse nor on reddit, not thinking about possible legal trouble for all federated instances which automatically copied the “property” (ugh i hate IP laws, but it is what it is) of reddit from your instance, opening them up to possible lawsuits.
… your actions would impact the existing structures, which flooded the “all” channel - which made you demand that everyone else change their usage patterns to filter out the spam you created.
… the existing lemmy codebase was probably not performant enough for what you were planning anyway - damn, there are instances that can barely handle federating with lemmy.world; had all of this worked as you planned, i’m pretty sure that the fediverse, or at least most of lemmy would have come to a screeching halt.
This is booooooring.
To be honest, i am perfectly fine if the people who just want to flood their brain with content stay somewhere else. These people have a plethora of choices to get their dopamine flowing, and with pixelfed there is now one that grows pretty fast in the fediverse too.
It’s not an exclusive option.
But it creates a chilling effect, if the main community for a specific topic is under control of people who might not be as open or even just interested as needed. All discourse is ideological - a discussion about fascism will look very different depending on who has the last say regarding whats acceptable to say.
Mastodon’s issues, in my opinion, stem from something else - the name. Mastodon is a really crappy name. I tend to keep an open mind about most things, but i bounced off that name hard. I would choose a service named Bluesky over one named Mastodon 9 times out of ten even if it’s not really decentralized. Maybe now with the transfer to a new non-profit someone thinks of a snappier name that’s marketable.
i hate IP laws, but it is what it is
It is what it is because we are too afraid to challenge them.
which made you demand that everyone else change their usage patterns to filter out the spam you created.
I really don’t get this argument. Browsing by “all” is akin to drinking from the firehose, people are not using the affordances that the software provided from the very beginning and then the problem is with those who are bringing content to the network?
the existing lemmy codebase was probably not performant enough for what you were planning anyway
Au contraire!. One of the reasons that I was creating so many different instances was precisely to avoid concentration of communities in a single instance. In Lemmy’s currrent design, the communities are the chatty agents. Every comment and post becomes a message broadcast by the community. The reason that LW has become problematic in the overall network is less about the amount the user it has and more because of its communities.
But it creates a chilling effect
I just disagree, here. In fact, it feels like the opposite is the problem here. I feel like the Fediverse is so concerned about being a place for minorities and outcasts that it only accepts fringe opinions.
Mastodon is a really crappy name.
May as well be, but completely irrelevant. There are a dozen other projects providing microblogging and a Twitter-like experience. All of them failing to appeal to a more “normie” crowd.
This is booooooring. So boring.
If you are part of 5%
And yet it’s the point. If you just make Lemmy yet another place for the commercialized majority, all that results in is yet another cicle of people who care getting pushed out and have to create a new platform elsewhere. Wasted effort. Rinse and repeat.
You want the web to be free? Then you have to guard against the effects that make it unfree, one of which is the firehose of users who only have a mentality of “consoom” and who think “the internet” is the tiktok button on their smartphone.
Sorry, I reject the premise. The cartoon does not make sense in a decentralized/distributed system.
Lemmy/Mastodon/“The Fediverse” are not isolated places, but an ecosystem that can sustain many different niches.
A Lemmy community is a place. A topic-focused instance is a place. The minority here shouldn’t be worried about any tyranny from the majority because they can always have their boundaries established and they can choose how permeable they are.
Promote Mbin. The only bad thing it has going for it is that it cannot block entire instances, which is odd because one would think blocking domains would do this. It also has a number of pet peeves, but none I’ve found to be as bad.
Or just link to this: https://jointhefediverse.net/
That’s a good resource for people wanting to learn how it works behind the scenes. Most people don’t want that, they just want a link to click and see what the platform looks like.
The one issue with Mbin is the lack of mobile apps. I know there is !interstellar@kbin.earth, but Lemmy really is the best in that regard.
I had to read your title three times before I realised you weren’t trying to convince carpenters to join
Some personal thoughts:
about the content when you first open lemmy: I joined reddit some time around 2015 and it was not exactly the most welcoming experience with the type of content you see by default either. Still, I had seen smaller communities with cool content and I joined anyway and just learned to use it enough to tailor my feed. Lemmy becomes much nicer after awhile of hanging out and discovering new and cool communities!
In my personal opinion the “Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy” part is the most important. Fediverse IS confusing when you check it out the first time. It took me awhile to make an account because people kept telling to choose an instance that fits you. I know it sounds stupid but it really kept me away from making an account for awhile.
I instance-hopped a couple of times because I joined smaller instances (the recommendation everyone gives you) that then disappeared / were abandoned by the admin. That was not a very nice experience. I know lemmy.world is too big, but honestly it is a very easy and nice starting point to lemmyverse (so is sopuli!).
Also: really appreciate the effort you are putting into growing lemmy, Blaze!
Hello,
Thank you for your comment!
I joined reddit some time around 2015 and it was not exactly the most welcoming experience with the type of content you see by default either.
I think the main issue here is that Reddit in 2015 didn’t have to compete with modern Reddit. Nowadays, you create a Reddit account, you get a few subs suggested depending on your interest and your geodefault, so that’s enough to give you a first tailored experience without being first drown into All content.
We can’t really replicate that on Lemmy (hopefully one day we will), so the best we have is what I listed above: tell people they should focus on laid back communities.
That is interesting, I didn’t know that about modern reddit.
And I agree I hope that we do get something like that. I’ve been thinking for a while that merging https://lemmyverse.net/communities with instance specific account creation would be really cool, but it has just been a passing thought without much further thinking. I always recommend that link to new people on lemmy (also put it on my account description). But sadly it doesn’t have recommendations based on interests / geolocation, Although it does let you filter accessible communities based on your instance, but it could possible also have a tool “choose an instance for me based on my location / interests”.
have a tool “choose an instance for me based on my location / interests”.
https://join-lemmy.org/ kind of does that, but the results can be a bit off. I just tried “Technology”, and the first result was lemmy.today, which is fine, but doesn’t federate anything, so maybe not the best choice for a new joiner.
“Gaming” gave https://sub.wetshaving.social/ as the first result, not sure it’s the best recommendation.
I signed up on lemmy.today and can see and interact with I’m pretty sure everything, I’m not sure what is meant by doesn’t federate anything?
Sorry, typo, I meant “defederate”. Lemmy.today indeed shows you everything.
Yeah… I understand that we need to spread out more but honestly I think join-lemmy.org should not be the first stop for someone new to lemmy seeing the results you are getting. I agree with you Blaze, point them directly to an instance or an app.
Found this pretty cool that on the voyager for lemmy test web app you can specify the local feed of an instance: https://vger.app/posts/lemm.ee/local - although not sure if that is the best way to “market” lemmy, the local feed of lemm.ee actually looked nice.
Yes, that’s a cool features of Voyager
Thought process about discuss.online and sopuli as recommendations
There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/)
- Lemmy.world is too big
- Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )
- sh.itjust.works names contains “shit”, which can deter users: https://feddit.org/post/4255611/2825351
- lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric
- feddit.org, is German-centric (sidebar in German first, Matrix chat is in German, meta community is in German)
- dbzer0 federates hexbear
- programming.dev is topic-centric
- blahaj is queer-focused
- discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
- lemmy.sdf.org does not defederate anyone
- lemmy.zip is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad
- beehaw is way outdated
- infosec.pub is topic-centric
- aussie.zone is country-centric
- midwest.social is region-centric
I ended up with discuss.online and sopuli.xyz as they have
- neutral names
- long running history
- good downtime
- active admins
- defederate hexbear and lemmygrad
If people have other suggestions, feel free
What is with hexbear and lemmygrad…why are people calling these out
Propaganda focused instances, with deranged users that attack anyone who tries to fact check and they are protectes by their admins/mods.
They support the USs enemies.
That seems fine, if distasteful? Like I’m in support of free expression
join-lemmy needs to have a better interactive flow to select a server. What they have is difficult and slow to maintain and doesn’t take into account server stability or newness (new servers are more likely to stop working once the admin discovers they don’t like hosting, or they have a terrible mod experience). But the lemmy devs are not interested in either doing things like allowing servers to tag themselves, nor utilize sites like the fediseer which already does that. So we end up with a bad “join” frontpage which people like you end up just avoiding which goes to show how bad things are.
There used to be a very nice interactive lemmy server selection site at one point which guided you based on interest/subinterest as self-tagged in , but I can’t remember the domain anymore :(
There used to be a very nice interactive lemmy server selection site at one point which guided you based on interest/subinterest as self-tagged in , but I can’t remember the domain anymore :(
Yes, it rings a bell too but don’t remember it either :(
But the lemmy devs are not interested in either doing things like allowing servers to tag themselves
Indeed, that’s probably a whole topic altogether. If people want to try working on a better join-lemmy website, that would be great, but it seems like people are already spread too thin.
Yes, it rings a bell too but don’t remember it either :(
Ah found it: https://pangora.social/
Sadly it’s gone offline. sigh
@Ategon@programming.dev how come you took it down?
Nobody reported it as down to me, I can bring it back up
Been working on some other projects recently so havent really looked at that site much
Do you need to make it refresh or something? it still reports lemmy.dbzer0.com as being on 0.19.5
Ah yeah I need to refresh the data, ill do that later
Ah, well it’s down 😅 maybe it could be useful in onboarding users.
@Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com its’s up again. What do you think about using that to advertise lemmy?
Ah yes!
It probably depends on what audience you are talking to. Privacy advocates, Anarchists, AI-Imagegen-Fans and digital pirates are probably a good fit for dbzer0, even with hexbear federated, and a LGBT-positive audience would feel at home on blahaj. So while promoting generalist instances per default is a good move, if the subreddit has a well-defined audience, a recommendation for a “specialized” instance might work better.
Indeed, but usually I promote on /r/RedditAlternatives, and don’t have any way to know what the user’s interests are.
I am not entirely sure how appropriate my reply is since you name lemmy specifically, but since one can subscribe to particular topics in piefed, I am leaning towards it more than lemmy as an alternative to reddit.
Once Piefed will get Thunder as well as an iOS app, it will become an alternative. That’s the main blocker I have now recommending it. Besides that, it’s a quite good Lemmy alternative.
@blaze@feddit.org Thunder is written using Flutter / Dart - meaning that it’s cross-platform. I’ve compiled the version for PieFed for windows, linux and macos, so as long as I’m able to get it working for Android, it should also work for iOS. I’ll need to be someone else who does though, 'cos my mac is too old, and I don’t have an iphone.
Bonus screenshot:
Amazing! So what, the Piefed API is already there? I thought that was still ongoing
Still ongoing, but basic functionality is working.
As the developer himself states, and me as someone who uses it as my primary daily driver concurs, it is not quite ready yet. e.g. a good fraction of the Notifications I receive end up being dead links to posts that don’t exist anymore, or to users that I have blocked, etc. Also user tagging is not implemented yet and searching often does not retrieve things that you can find much more easily using Lemmy, plus tools for moderation of remote communities remain very primitive.
Soon now, it will be user-friendly enough to recommend to people, but for now it’s primarily for beta testing the software and those of us prepared to use an early adopter mindset when using it - e.g. switch to a Lemmy alt to do things that PieFed cannot yet.
Though more features get added seemingly weekly or at least monthly, it’s so exciting to see! I love the new inline comment feature, though inconsistently applied e.g. not yet available for edits. But it’s coming!
Good reasoning all 'round! Although Lemmy.ca doesn’t require you to be Canadian, so would be a decent recommendation for any NA user. As long as they don’t mind some more Canada posting in the Local feed.
I’ll mention my experience with a server from that list (that I won’t name)…
The server worked most of the time but federation kept breaking. The server was rather small. Since you use Lemmy from your home instance, this meant that only a few local communities showed any activity and this was a very low amount of activity. This would go on for days or even well over a week before things got better for a while and then everything started to break again.
It is one thing for a server to just go away. You then clearly know that something is wrong and you can migrate over to another server. It is another thing for the server to generally be online all the time with it just messing up in such a way as to make the whole Lemmy ecosystem seem rather dead.
Things would have been easier if most of the communities I want to interact with were on the same server as my account. The other server, with federation issues, was only home to 5 % of the communities I was following which left 95 % of the communities I wanted to follow as not updated due to federation issues.
There isn’t a clear indication of which servers are working great with a proven track record of working great as opposed to “zombie instances” not federating correctly or other instances which are moments away from randomly shutting down. The point is that I feel like my account anywhere will be able to receive and send information throughout the whole Lemmy network or sites. This reduces the concept of federation a bit down towards needing to have an account on a well known working server simply because account migration is such a headache. I can then interact with communities without issues (hosted on well working servers) but I can easily change my community subscriptions as I want to.
One thing that may help for someone is to try and see what communities they want to participate in. If the communities they primarily find interesting are in Lemmy.world then they likely should have an account there to ease any federation issues. The number of communities I follow here are 3 times larger than communities I follow with any other specific instance. This community subscription list is one I figured out when I was on “that other server” so it guided me here.
To give a counterpoint, the experience on LW in summer 2023 was horrible, due to the constant DDoS attacks on the infrastructure.
Discuss.online has a status page: https://status.discuss.online/
Sopuli.xyz is very stable, and transparent about how they operate: https://sopuli.xyz/post/13531
A few other instances have status pages:
Thanks for the information!
I’m not sure if the status pages accurately show federation issues though (not federating or well behind). I’m not sure if they can easily show that information either.
Lemm.ee definitely does:
If people want to have a better overview, they can use this dashboard: https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=programming.dev&var-remote_instance=lemmy.zip
That second link is helpful. For instance, it shows an server which I thought was ran well ( startrek.website ) being about 1 million activities behind in content from Lemmy.world
This means that the technology community here looks much different there. Here there are comments to our submissions. Shown there, the submissions seem to have no comments.
https://lemmy.world/c/technology
https://startrek.website/c/technology@lemmy.world
If a person there didn’t know better, they may think that Lemmy doesn’t have as much activity as it actually does.
Indeed. There’s also the issue of LW being so large that other instances can have issues to keep with its activities. That has been fixed in 0.19.6, but LW hasn’t updated yet.
There is just an absolute ton of nuances involved.
SOME types of Federation issues is due not to the local instance but rather Lemmy.World and overall lack of distribution of users and communities across the Fediverse (some of which is better now than the past, but not nearly enough).
Other types involve the instance, and in turn its hardware and even more so its number and skill of admin support. Like if you have to wait several days for a manual sign-up procedure (people say quokk.au was this way, at least sometimes) then you may have already moved on elsewhere.
Some of the issues have greatly improved - like I switched from Kbin.social to Star Trek.Website and for super frustrated with how often I would try to do something - like vote or comment - and so switched to discuss.online, which I have been exceedingly happy with. The thing is, Star Trek.Website’s technical issues got WAY better (still not perfect) in the past year, and also I still have had issues with discuss.online - again, most often I would guess that Lemmy.World’s lack of updates to the latest Lemmy software was to blame for that (even though I understand that there are a whole bunch of reasons for the delay).
Yet people also report that Lemmy.World itself can be quite slow to access from some parts in the world like Australia and the USA. I don’t know how much that has to do with method of access like an app vs. the web UI, and even then, would an alternate front end app like https://photon.lemmy.world/ further affect the speed?
A simple score isn’t going to come close to describing any of this. But if it would, uptime % might come the closest? Especially in conjunction with other factors like avoiding recommendation of an instance that has only a single admin.
Discuss.online is tried and true, and I unreservedly recommend it. Anyone who likes can make an alt or two and see tor themselves how good the experience is in comparison between them. Also the admin is quite responsive, both in reacting to requests and remaining on the ball proactively before even being asked - see e.g. the pinned post on that instance.
There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances
[proceeds to list pretty much all good instances, and complains about hexbear]
…I’m curious, what is your definition of “generalist”? Because I suspect it involves “not punching nazis”.
“generalist”
Something that is not linked to a country, a theme or a demographic
Non-generalist:
- lemmy.ca, feddit.org, programming.dev, blahaj, etc.
Generalist:
- lemm.ee
- sopuli.xyz
- discuss.online
Not sure what you meant with “not punching nazis”
I think they’re calling you a liberal because you used federation with HB and grad as a negative criterion for your list.
We could do a poll to see how people feel about those two instances, but the vast majority of posts on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com involving them show some clear power tripping
Note that LW can be sujected to the same criticism
I don’t disagree
How’s Lemmy.cafe? I believe they defederate the Big 3 Tankie instances. Dunno what their downtime or admins are like.
I have my main alt there. It’s pretty good, but there was an issue with the thumbnails that got resolved a few days ago. Also, the instance is much smaller than the two others (64 users per month), so I sometimes have to subscribe to some medium-size communities before nobody did before. Federation can get a bit clunky at times too, and I have to pull myself some posts or comments to “unclog the pipes”.
Discuss.online has 140 users per month, sopuli 496
Make the notion of different servers only visible to power users. It has an negative effect on tech illiterate gen z people who assume everything is as easy as signing up somewhere and getting guided by tbe algorithm.
Also the discovery of content needs to somehow be possible to make it all come together in one feed without having to go through different servers. I think maybe it gives the impression that users are missing out on content, while on platforms like Reddit everything is quite “centralised” (ow no xD).
In the past I used to only link to one instance (sopuli.xyz), but since the whole jury nullification story I thought it would be better to have both a USA and Europe servers.
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.
Echoing this, with some slight adjustments:
Promote the specific sites/communities to people, and on sites that permit it, share links back to specific posts/comments that you found interesting/amusing/etc. from said sites/communities.
Reddit got popular off the back of changes to Digg and people mentioning/sharing stuff from Reddit there. I’d imagine TikTok also grew in popularity from people sharing stuff from it on other major platforms like Instagram/YouTube/Snapchat/Twitter, much as now RedNote’s growing in popularity from people mentioning it on TikTok and other platforms.
sites that permit it
So Bluesky nowadays, based on Meta and Facebook recent removal of Pixel fed and Lemmy mentions
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.
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.
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.
Ah, indeed. Thanks for the feature request
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
“Curated” would be a better term I think. Suggested feels like it’s personalised while it isn’t.
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
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.
This is the twitter and reddit ethos. Everyone is Super Smart and You Are Wrong Ha Ha.
On reddit you can find smaller communities where people are more normal and it’s closer to having a discussion at a bar than it is going on to /r/politics or something.
People DEFINITELY don’t like showing up at a new place and posting stuff and people piling on with snark and stuff.
Oh, yeah. It’s still ongoing. You can track the progress at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/api/alpha/routes.py if you like. At the bottom of that page, things with a ‘Stage 1’ are what’s left to do.
The remaining stuff is mostly to do with chat / notifications. Once done, a basic app could be released, and then improved to include stuff that’s missing (things like uploading an image to post or a comment, and viewing reports)
Great, thanks!
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.
