This is not going to be a blogpost about “Why do people still use Reddit instead of everyone moving to Lemmy?”. I noticed that even with Mastodon users, who already understand and like the advantages of decentralized platforms, the usage of Lemmy is extremely small, and more people use Reddit. Most of them haven’t even heard of Lemmy. To be fair, the Reddit usage also seems to be fairly low.
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I’d say we have too many reposts and not enough original content here. I mean you probably need to think about the value proposition. What does the Lemmyverse offer to someone from Mastodon? A lot of what we do is post the news and memes. And we got some Linux computer support. Now they already got all of that over on Mastodon. Oftentimes it won’t even be a repost by some third party, but they get more original content because bloggers and comic artists post themselves over there. Along with some computer magazines and news outlets.
we also have science memes, showerthoughts and comic strips though!
I wonder if the comic strips community isn’t just frequented by way too many high drama people to be appealing to a general audience. 😂 It is one of the very popular communities, though.
I don’t use Mastodon or Twitter either. I never understood following specific people and prefer following topics instead.
People that do actual geolocations for the war in Ukraine are basically the primary sources. They figure out where and when videos were taken and do the actual work. Following the topic gets you to some big account that aggregates them
following people is nice if you know these people personally, like from real life.
Mastodon allows you to follow hashtags, which would be like following a topic.
Exactly. And with the advanced web interface on Mastodon or an app like Moshidon or Manfred, you can create custom timelines that show just a collection of hashtags.
I use that a lot—exclusively, really.
Exactly! I’d be curious to see the reverse poll, asking Lemmy users “Why does nobody use Mastodon?” (and include Bluesky and Twitter in the poll.)
I use Lemmy (and in the past Reddit) because topic based conversation is what makes sense to me. Anytime I try to use Mastodon or Bluesky I lurk for a bit and then just come back here.
I don’t generally like the Twitter model and rarely use it, but I will say that one thing that it does do well, better than the Reddit/Threadiverse model, is very rapidly assembling information about a specific, temporary topic.
Like, the Reddit model is about letting a community assemble over time and letting people find their way there and moderators be chosen and all that. That works quite well for a lot of things, and lets people with expertise in the field arise and all that.
But let’s say that there’s a huge natural disaster and people are putting up video clips from their cell phones and stuff like that. They can coalesce around a hashtag or a couple of hashtags pretty quickly and relevant material from people who have had no contact with (and maybe no time to) assemble a community or anything gets drawn together. The topic probably won’t be active for long. The rapid setup and teardown can be really useful in that case.
Of course, that’s really following a hashtag, rather than a particular user…
I also dislike the “short comment” model that Twitter uses (though over the years, the comment length has been increased and workarounds added), but one thing that it does help with is to help deal with inexperienced users unfamiliar with quoting etiquette. In email or in traditional forum systems, it’s conventional to quote a bit of relevant text before responding to it. This requires knowing syntax for doing so and when it’s appropriate. Twitter deals with that by forcing everything to be broken up into bite-size chunks as a property of the system, so someone responding to something is forced to respond to only the relevant bit. I think that that probably helps make Twitter more-approachable.
The real answer, that we all know but dare not speak, is that it’s miserable here.
Once you’ve blocked the tankies, porn, and militant dweebs, it’s wall to wall politics and titty memes.
I’m here because I’m also a miserable asshole.
There was beans before there were titty memes, also there’s a lot of owl and cat pictures, and random comics
Moths, off and on.
There was a glorious few months before Reddit enshittified even further, before the bigger migration of users. After that it turned into 90% American politics.
PieFed helps with this
How?
Honestly I do look at American politics with amusement. When I was younger I always thought my country was shitty and western world is a shining palace, and reddit and Lemmy broke that illusion of mine.
More I look at your politicians, I realised yours and mine aren’t as different as one might think they are. Like yes, you got better infrastructure and civic sense, yet in some ways we’re in same boat.
My main reason for looking for alternatives. Wanted to stop my morning coffee doom scrolling to consist of only US politics… if you can call it politics that is… Lemmy fits the bill.
As someone has said before, I agree with a bit of lack on on-boarding, you need to be a little bit more insistent on setup to ensure you get the communities you want. Not hard, but can definitely imagine that would stop some from trying out lemmy any further.
Yeah that was a big part of why I swapped, but it’s getting flooded again.
I didn’t downvote your comment but I’m American and most of us are sick of it too. We’re trying. I vote in every election.
That’s terrible! Outrageous! Where can I find these titty memes so I can block them?
It’s been a thing on !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world for the past days or two…
… but it’s more meme than titty.
Conservatives did this to you. I’m sending you some “cheer up” tiddies.
You can be in the left and know this place is filled with the most broken progressives we have 🤷
Conservatives did this to us. We’re gonna need some more “cheer up” tiddies.
Soapy Titty memes are a breath of fresh air compared to recurring bean memes TBH 🫘
to block all the politics communities should be an option at sign-up, or better yet, even when you browse without being signed in.
yeah, having tags for each community would be great.
I really don’t know why I’m still here, because I’m not a miserable asshole, at least not in the way that makes you enjoy being around Lemmy’s userbase.
I want the technology to succeed but it feels like a victim of who’s likely to even be interested.
Well, as the saying goes, be the change you want in the world - if you find a community that you’d like to see more posts on, and you can contribute, then by all means, please do so
Let’s state plainly: the title is false. I use lemmy; you’re using lemmy; the other commentators are using lemmy.
There’s a concept I’ve been mulling over for a while–and economists probably have a term for it of which I’m ignorant of–that is that free software fails in capitalist market economies. I expect that statement to create a knee-jerk reaction. The truth is free-software is everywhere and as computers become ever more embedded into our economies free-software’s presence will only grow exponentially. It’s often the foundation for computerised economies.
Free-software enthusiasts understand that its become endemic to the economy. However businesses and consumers still ignore it even when it might be prudent to select or fund free-software. To ignore it seems contradictory to a lot of ideals. A capitalist business should use free-software as the monetary cost is zero: it’s a free product. Revolutionary organisations should adopt free-software is it aligns with their ideologies. Yet we know they don’t. These actors are acting irrationally.
Free-software lacks something that is a prerequisite to participate in an economy: capital. It has no money to propagandise itself. To phrase it another way: it has no money to buy ads. Without ads it doesn’t exist to entities who do have capital.
In Australia Reddit brought ad-space inside shopping-centers. Commercial software has revenues from which a portion can be spent on advertising and its through this advertising that growth can occur. The reason why lemmy has a small user-base is because it has no revenue streams. It’s an economic sink.
If we were to imagine that the user-pool was to dramatically increase what would actually occur? I imagine many instances would be overwhelmed with traffic, knocking them offline. For those that remain a lot of traffic would be perceived as spam. There is no revenue stream that’s attached to that user-base. If there was you would–absolutely!–see lemmy’s user-base increase as there would be a profit incentive: more users would equate to more profit. The current reality is that more users equates to more debts.
The market for ‘internet-forums’ has already consolidated into the big-players we know of. Maybe someone could take lemmy’s code and usurp the established vendors. That behaviour is already underway now; it’s why we have a multitude of lemmy instances. Maybe the next titan of ‘internet-communities’ will be running a lemmy stack. Not all operators are hosting lemmy with ideology/charity being at the fore. Some site operators are asking themselves, “how can I monetise this?”
From my perspective the issue isn’t why people don’t use lemmy, it’s why is hosting so expensive? The prerequisites to self-hosting (whether it be for personal use or for an established group or organisation) are costly. One has to pay rent on a DNS, static-IP, hardware and data connections. These prerequisites are commercial in nature and are priced as if every buyer has a revenue stream from which these rents are payed from.
If an individual/group wants independence and decides to self-host they’re taking on these rents that have been priced at commercial rates. Those are the monetary hurdles. There’s an intellectual hurdle too: a group needs to have members that know how to administer and maintain servers. The prerequisites are rather burdensome. It should then not come as a surprise that a group of young people who play video-games with each other elect to have their community on discord, or whatever commercial-entity takes on the economic and intellectual burdens. These commercial entities hide the complex nature of computer systems and the economic relationships that exist. In exchange they’re chasing speculative profits. They have revenue coming in from which they can apportion to advertising and paid programmers. They have the incentives to grow.
Lemmy is reactionary software. It pines for the day’s of webmaster superiority… Where a webmaster ruled a personal fiefdom and brought and sold other fiefdoms. Users should be able to host and maintain servers for themselves and their communities. Economic rents and knowledge-specialisation are high hurdles to overcome. If they are overcome they’ll find a wasteland where users have already been captured by existing market players—not only that! They’ll exist side-by-side commercial vendors that pay to have their software blasted from every ad outlet they can afford. The enthusiast or ideologue has sparse capital to attract new users away from their existing ‘digital-home’ whilst the current players have enormous war-chests and if non-economic forces somehow push new-users towards them (e.g. something ‘viral’) they have insufficient economic resources to accommodate them.
I would advocate for technology like GNUnet, i2p and hyphanet (GNUnet being my personal favorite). Software such as those abolish the major economic-rents that would otherwise be required for the ‘clearnet’. (DNS rents are unjustifiable and I would like to direct readers to the OpenNIC project.) However the intellectual burden is increased.
I would like to take a jab at the idea that Reddit (or whatever third-party is used) takes ownership of a community and their user-generated content. They certainly do, but the community leaders voluntarily gave it up. They also neglected their responsibilities. There’s no reason why users couldn’t have a local-mirror of their community even if it is hosted on a third-party platform. That would negate the reality of a third-party purge and therefore the ‘destruction’ of their community. These communities are irresponsible with irresponsible users. How does one make an irresponsible user responsible? I don’t think it can be done.
The autism is this comment is thicker than Earth’s mantle. Which is a layer of silicate rock between the crust and the outer core. It has a mass of 4.01×1024 kg (8.84×1024 lb) and makes up 86% of the mass of Earth. It has a thickness of 2,900 kilometers (1,800 mi) making up about 46% of Earth’s radius and 84% of Earth’s volume. It is predominantly solid but, on geologic time scales, it behaves as a viscous fluid, sometimes described as having the consistency of caramel. Partial melting of the mantle at mid-ocean ridges produces oceanic crust, and partial melting of the mantle at subduction zones produces continental crust.
The easier way to say what you said is that there’s no marketing and no money.
I’m just going to hop in here to remind folks to donate to your instance if you can afford to do so!
Social networks live and die by network effects. People don’t use Instagram because it’s the best. They use Instagram because that is where their friends are. Either everybody uses a site, or nobody does.
In other words, you’re saying I use Lemmy because I have no friends. If that’s what you mean, you’d be right.
The UX still has a long way to go.
I’m very tolerant of shitty tech and like a struggle, and even I am often like wtf.
Signed up to piefed.zip the other day, and the default feed is just horrendous
Most users will just quit instead of trying to figure out how to fix it manually.
No proper onboarding
When you onboard onto Reddit it asks interests and points users to subreddits. I don’t think anything like that exists on Lemmy, but could be a good thing for the less tech inclined.
definitely, it would help setup default subscriptions, and even default blocks would be very nice
Default blocks are difficult, one of the things the dev of the Tesseract frontend got absolutely roasted for a few months ago was for how aggressive the block list was and blocking Blähaj just reeks of transphobia. (The primary issue was his lack of disclosure of the existence of the block list.) There is no low controversy way of making a default block list beyond what we already do with most instances defederating a couple of the most egregious instances.
Tesseract didn’t disclose it, if you make the messaging clear then it can work. A button like “Block political communities” with a full list of what’s being blocked and a link to the page to edit your block list.
Alexandrite is pretty great
Lemmy and Reddit usage are relatively low compared to their respective social media siblings. I’ve always believed the reason is in the difference in how they’re structured. Most other social media is wired around people as the primary structural unit. “Who’s saying what?” Reddit and Lemmy are instead wired around topics. “What are people saying about this?” And I assume the difference in popularity is evidence for how most people themselves are wired.
Having seen and experienced the different platforms, I’d say Facebook and Twitter/X have much larger userbases but vulnerable to manipulation, while Reddit is supposedly for people believing themselves to be “smarter” and above those social media platforms, and then Lemmy and Mastadon definitely more niche and heavily on the activist progressive side.
The grouping is something that should have been solved long ago. Also removing/merging duplicate posts in the feed, it’s crazy it doesn’t do this yet.
Also removing/merging duplicate posts in the feed, it’s crazy it doesn’t do this yet.
This does exist in the default Lemmy UI, it’s just a bit inconsistent. Also it’s hard to notice when it is working, for obvious reasons lol.
Since a few weeks I actively post lots of news in several mostly already existing communities. But it is frustrating. I do not see much user growth. If it just would be 1-2 new users per week I’d be happy…
I tried to post regularly in a few existing community. View were up, engagement null. I didn’t knew what to do either.
“nobody”, nearly 50k people.
Asking people on mastodon if they use lemmy also doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t use mastodon because it’s not threaded, people on mastodon probably don’t use lemmy for a similar reason. I’m not sure how many people use both threaded and unthreaded platforms, but it feels to me like the two layouts attract different people.
Then there are psychos like me who use both, and Bluesky, and other social media and have a personal blog.
Bag 'm and tag 'm folks, get this psychopath out of here. If we allow this, what’s next? We’ll allow people who use friendica?
Me too! It’s interesting how different they all are.
I haven’t logged into my bluesky account since like ages. Mainly because I’m using my real Identity there, which I’m not comfortable with talking online. I love anonymity. I speak a little more off my mind because I’m anonymous.
Finding communities can be confusing: There can be multiple communities about the same topic on different servers: For example: Linux@lemmy.ml and Linux@lemmy.world
I agree that finding communities can be confusing, but I don’t think the problem is the naming.
For example on Reddit if you wanted to talk about video games you’d look at /r/gaming. However over time, since that was a “default sub”, it became a bit of a mess and instead /r/Games was the community to have real discussion about video games. But of course over time that too became a bit of a mess and /r/TrueGaming was the best place to talk about video games. In fact for a long time /r/True<topic> was a common way to find the better community.
Of course the name of a community might be confusing to an outsider. On Reddit if I’m a fan of Game of Thrones there is /r/GameOfThrones, but what if I’m looking for something a bit more meme worthy, well that’s /r/freefolk.
And that’s true even on Lemmy. What if I want Star Trek memes? Well that’s !tenforward@lemmy.world
I think discoverability is something that can be improved. Of course at the moment so many communities are so small, so looking at all of them isn’t really much of a problem. You can usually find what you’re looking for.
Reddit has like 8 different Dragon Ball communities lol, and 3 for the show “From”
Because it’s a carbon copy of reddit and it replicates all of its problems in miniature. Also because everyone in here is extremely exclusionary and hateful of anyone who isn’t wholesome 100. Also because it’s decentralized but not peer to peer, which means that it’s basically feudalism.
Damn dude, who hurt you?
I don’t like the way they said it, but I do see their point.
I don’t get banned from places often, but I’ve literally had a guy just decide they didn’t like my face and ban me from an instance.
And people 100% do sometimes act like you have to be completely in their comfort zone or you’re a terrible person.
I was about to respond ‘I’ve never been banned from an instance’ but then realized that I don’t know how I could verify it. 🤔
The people love algorithms, even if they don’t admit that. Reddit and the other platforms invest a lot of money to make people more addicted, and it works. Lemmy on the other hand… well people quickly engage with lemmy.ml and think what the fuck is this place
Mastodon doesn’t really have those types of algorithms, it’s all just the people you follow in the order they posted, like Twitter in 2008
Well it’s an ml account that made you go what the fuck is this place so I guess it’s an appropriate response.
Or they meant to post this in another thread, I don’t know how it happens but I see it like once a month or so.
oh it was intentional
Maybe because they’re spread out over a bunch of different instances?
