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can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance.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
- 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
An official Android and iOS app called “Lemmy”. If you wanna go big, you need the mobile platform.
When you search for “Reddit” in the app store and it also shows an app for Lemmy, we are getting there.
Reddit is going to pay enough for this to never happen
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.
Why not promote piefed?
@ericjmorey@discuss.online OP answered here: https://feddit.org/comment/4286281 (the lack of mobile apps, was the answer)
This link doesn’t work. There’s only 3 communities for patientgamers: world, shitjustworks, and ml
It’s SJW, I’ll edit.
Fixed
I’ve noticed that people forgot how long ago the Reddit blackout was, and Lemmy has improved a lot since then. Back then Lemmy was like pre-alpha.
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
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
And again blaze doing the hard work for shaping fedi in positive ways while lemmy.world mods are busy censoring speech!
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.
Everyone else is already here or is not interested in text-based forums
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.
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).
Shoutout to lemmy.zip, y’all are a great instance!
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
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
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.
It’s human nature. Mods can help with that, so it’s also community dependent.
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!