Hi, do you think lemmy would be as popular as Reddit ? I mean, many subreddits have much more posts compared to communities on lemmy… sometimes I scroll through Reddit sub top of month and see no end. At lemmy mostly I see 10 posts monthly… I do like concept of moving to lemmy, but it might make no sense if people’s are no active here and tbh I see the trend of disappearing activity
With the userbase we have now, there’s not enough active communities. We don’t need to be as big as reddit but we need to attract more user that are not just lurkers
Exactly. The amount of /r/adviceanimals level pure shit content on Reddit is high, paired with the bots that repost things until they start hocking some crypto bullshit links.
But I have kept using Reddit for years because every once in a while, you see someone write thoughtful posts about some niche subject you didn’t even know existed. That’s always interesting.
Lemmy is at a state where it needs more users writing about things that interest them.
Relay Pro just went to subscription, so the last 3rd party Reddit app is gone. I will probably read Lemmy much more on mobile from now on and hope it picks up steam.
I don’t think any site should ever reach that point again. The internet should not be four big sites and maybe three social networks. It should be a diverse blend of sites, so if the lemmy creators ever get bored, or mark Zuckerberg gets hit by a car, or Google runs out of money, the entire internet doesn’t go tits up for the next six years.
Probably not, the vast VAST majority of average internet users are basically brain dead and want maximum convinence at any cost, including privacy and being treated right by the service as a user. They quite simply don’t care what happens as long as they can still get their garbage content drip fed to them without any work, learning, or inconvinece on their part. Lemmy is great, but its nuanced and we all kboe how well the general population handles nuance. Decentralization and the fediverse can be hard topics for some people to mentally digest.
Comments like this are exactly why people aren’t gonna wanna join Lemmy.
For reference: I’m one of the brain dead convenience seeking idiots you’re describing. Lemmy isn’t that hard to understand. What sucks about Lemmy is pretentious users like you treating it like something it isn’t when in reality it’s just another in a long list of average to middling message boards.
Anyone who doesn’t join a service because they don’t like someones opinion they saw should stay out of internet fourms to begin with. You think im being a pretentious prick for thinking most reddit/internet users don’t have the technical knowledge to understand the backbone of lemmy’s decentralization/federation and that they want mindless convinence at all cost? Good, its the truth regardless how much you don’t like it or me for saying it. Eat shit and go find another ‘average to middling message board’
I don’t have the technical knowledge to understand lemmy’s decentralized federated nonsense and I’ve been using it just fine. You think you need to understand how something works to use it? Or do you think idiots like me are too scared to use something we don’t understand? Because I’m saying you’re wrong on both counts. And if you don’t like average idiots like me taking over your beloved platform then maybe you should just suck it up because I’m not going anywhere, and if this site continues to grow then pretty soon the average user will be a lot more like me than like you.
Its been growing in average users ever since reddit started with the spez nonesense and im fine with average non-technical people using the service. I never once said they couldn’t. It takes all kinds of people to make a community after all. I just personally don’t like being called pretentious for stating an obvious fact about the nature of average people and think you’re being an argumentative asshat that took personal offense to a general fact of life. Regardless of how much new people come in, it will always be a drop in the bucket compared to the ones who will stay behind no matter what. Just like youtube, it doesn’t matter what they do to the users because they provide a convinent service with 100% uptime and that is most popular in userbase.
the vast VAST majority of average internet users are basically brain dead and want maximum convinence at any cost, including privacy and being treated right by the service as a user. They quite simply don’t care what happens as long as they can still get their garbage content drip fed to them without any work, learning, or inconvinece on their part.
If you don’t want to be called pretentious then maybe you shouldn’t spout pretentious nonsense like this
This is fair, I could have and should have used kinder and less insulting ways of phrasing it even if the overall message is about the same. I apologize for the pretentious dickishness on my part.
And I apologize for being an asshole in response. I would say that I hadn’t had my morning coffee yet but I’ve been trying to hold myself more accountable so instead I’ll blame my overall addiction to caffeine
I think it doesn’t have the same problem a challenger to other social media sites would have.
A Facebook killer has to contend with everyone’s friends already being on Facebook, same for Twitter, Instagram, and so on. This problem is probably why threads links to your Instagram account, to try and convince users that their friends are all technically already on the site!
With reddit though? Nobody’s on Reddit because of who they know, in fact people discovering each other’s handles will sometimes lead to frantic account deletions and reinstallations.
For this reason, I think Lemmy will do much better than other killer sites, however, it’s probably still not going to surpass Reddit by a longshot, mainly because while nobody cares about their friends already being on Reddit, they will care about not wanting to go through the bother of creating a whole new account and navigating how the fediverse system works for a maybe better version of what they’re already getting.
Reddit’s overall quality would have to drop into the damned abyss to cause enough of a mass exodus for a competitor to take it out for good.
The discussions on Reddit also were so cliche, and low-effort comments were rising to the top (chain threads). It has gotten worse since.
I’m also hoping discussions are more honest here, where facts and science is used, whereas on Reddit, my biggest issue was it got to the point, that evidence wasn’t important in a discussion (but I’ve already noticed the same in some Lemmy communities. Literally had a discussion with someone recently whose argument revolved around insulting everyone they disagreed with, and they had all the insulting buzzwords to support their argument)
Thats actually the beauty of the ability to defederate from crappy communities here on Lemmy too, we can avoid toxic servers, and we can produce high quality discussion.
I think ultimately though, we don’t have to be as popular. Quality, not quantity is important.
That being said though, anyone who moved to Reddit from Digg, knows how quickly things can change. I suspect popularity here is ultimately growing though. But not hopefully at the expense of quality. If Truth Social gets shut down, unfortunately, I suspect that will lead to growth of lemmy, but things will turn to crap :(
Yeah I’m on Beehaw, so a lot have been blocked. My concern would be if they choose to just use the normal servers. Last thing we need is a bunch of people running around turning Lemmy into an echo chamber. But, I have no issue if they want their own server
Biggest issue is that a lot of features are missing, it desperately needs better moderation tools, and onboarding needs to be so easy that you’re technically challenged grandma can figure it out.
If it solves those, then I do think it’s possible. But if it actually did, companies would come in and try to become popular instances and probably try to cannibalize it.
It should be clear already that the majority do not care about morals, but just want entertaining content regardless of how badly they’re being treated. Even if fedi became dominate, it can be replaced by centralized media just as quickly since they can simply innovate much faster and with way more funding. Lemmy is like two guys doing it full time, so compare that to Reddit’s employment userbase when you compare quality.
As long as algoritmically driven centralized content pipelines remain popular, the Fediverse in general will not capture the mainstream.
Say what you will about Lemmy and Mastadon et al being “straightforward and easy to use”. I’m sure it is for you. But there’s a reason most mainstream platforms treat their users like absolute cretins: the majority of mainstream users are, and they both enjoy and expect being coddled and catered to by the platform.
The very notion of Lemmy being sharded into “instances” and what that means is so antithetical to the common preconceived notion of what a social media platform is to most people. “Oh, it’s not just all here in one place?” And yeah, federation greases the wheels a lot so no one even has to think about instances… until a community you like is suddenly rendered inaccessible via defederation.
Also, content discovery on the Fediverse is admittedly kind of ass. Only those who both know what they want going in and where to look for what they want really get anything out of it. Most centralized social media platforms are relentless content recommendation engines because people don’t actuslly know what they want until they’ve had it brought to them. An algorithm that at least attempts to adapt to what you want to see more of is a key part of that. Lemmy does not have this (nor should it).
All that said, the fact that Fediverse platforms like Lemmy filter “common people” in these ways is, from what I can tell from here and elsewhere, a feature, not a bug. By being here at all, you prove a kind of baseline competency and a willingness to put in effort to learn the system that sets you at the forefront of most social media users. Most of us like it that way and are happy to keep growth of the community stunted in exchange for it.
Of course, all of the major platforms were in those shoes at one point. Will the Fediverse be the ship everyone leaps to next when the current platforms become so enshittified that even the main stream hates it? Maybe. But wherever the main stream goes, enshittification inevitably follows. The mainstream success of the Fediverse will synonomously be the death of the Fediverse as we know it. I for one would like some more time to hang out here before then.
I completely reject the notion that the mainstream success of the fediverse will be the death of the fediverse, what are your reasons for believing that?
Enshittification happens to monetized platforms because they tried to capture as many users as possible and then profit off of them, lemmy instances show no profit motive, and are volunteer run. There isn’t a route to enshittification with federation, because even if YOUR instance enshittifies, there’s still many others that will not, and due to federation, you won’t miss out on any content (as long as your instance doesn’t defed), so it won’t matter.
I also believe the issues you call out, aside from algorithmically driven content, will be solved eventually, as mod tools improve, there will be less of a need for defederation.
Even algorithmically driven content is partially solved by “hot” and “best” being improved, it’s just not personalized.
With the rate of lemmy development being as rapid as it is, these things will eventually be solved, but that takes a lot of time. Lemmy is still barely even beta.
Your points about the Fediverse being immune to enshittification feel like echoes of what we’d say about the world wide web twenty five or so years ago. The web itself is somewhat of a federated platform. Websites are analogous to instances. And while it would be dubious to claim that the entire web as an infrastructure has enshittified (though Google sure seems to be trying…), I think it’s not controversial at all to claim that the biggest players alive on the web have.
Yeah, you can always make your own scrappy little website. But you’ll be an island few to no users will want to visit and support if you’re competing with the other players. That, or you catch on and grow to the point where you yourself become the villain.
I see two roads for the Fediverse. Either it never grows past some filter and remains scrappy, or several large instances for the biggest platforms will dominate, sap up the market share of attention, and then use their weight to pressure how the protocol is maintained in the future, embrace-extend-extinguish style.
Also, “no profit motive”? Where critical masses of people gather, entrepeneurs surely follow. Someone will figure out a way to monetize hosting a Fediverse instance. Hell, Threads tried, sort of. That alone won’t immediately enshittify the whole Fediverse. But given enough time and growth, well, see above.
Yeah, you can always make your own scrappy little website. But you’ll be an island few to no users will want to visit and support if you’re competing with the other players. That, or you catch on and grow to the point where you yourself become the villain.
that’s exactly what federation prevents… you can be a scrappy little website and federate, and then you don’t need a massive infrastructure that would cause enshittification later. If you enshittify, people will just leave to other parts of the fediverse, the model causes enshittification to just be the failure of your website.
This is different from the world wide web in that the content is not partitioned. I can get the same lemmy experience if I go elsewhere, and not lose out on content. If there’s a major new privacy concern on my instance, i’m going to say fuck them and leave, and I’ll lose nothing.
Also, “no profit motive”? Where critical masses of people gather, entrepeneurs surely follow. Someone will figure out a way to monetize hosting a Fediverse instance. Hell, Threads tried, sort of. That alone won’t immediately enshittify the whole Fediverse. But given enough time and growth, well, see above.
Except they’ll inevitably fail aside from the people who legitimately don’t care, and quite frankly, if they don’t care, who does? Just go to another instance if that happens, you’ll lose nothing, and it won’t even be a problem.
Federation makes the part of enshittification where you box in your users not work. The reason facebook could enshittify is because if you left facebook, you’d lose ALL of facebook. They trapped people. You can’t trap people like that on the fediverse. The first step fails inevitably, you’ll just make everyone on your instance hate you and they’ll leave for literally any other instance and it will die.
The fediverse doesn’t work well with profit motive because of that, the only real way to profit without causing anybody who knows anything about what you’re doing maliciously to leave is… what exactly?
When leaving has no cost, there’s no way to force people to stay if you do something shitty.
Even if you keep some users, meh, they won’t keep me, and i’ll lose nothing by switching.
I mean, eventually? If lemmy keeps getting more robust and people keep creating quality content, then eventually lemmy would get mainstream. 8-10 years ago I was very surprised when I saw reddit on the news for a rare moment. Reddit is too mainstream now. Hope lemmy never gets to that stage.
Lemmy is currently suffering from the network effect.
People aren’t hanging out as much because there’s not a lot of content. Less content gets posted because there’s not a lot of people hanging out. Repeat ad infinitum.
What Lemmy needs is people that are brave enough to post in empty communities.
Also, it’s suffering from what programmers call premature optimization. Reddit has hundreds of thousands of subreddits breaking down topics into incredibly niche subtopics. It’s good, because the volume of posts is so high that talk about e.g. a particular indie game would get buried in a general videogames subreddit.
So, it seems like Lemmings want to copy that structure, and create a community for every tiny niche right away. But there aren’t enough of us. It’s like trying to start a nuclear chain reaction with your fuel all spread out. We’ll never reach critical mass that way.
Instead, we need communities for general topics, so people actual see and engage with posts. So, for example, instead of hoping that c/whatisthisthing will get going, post such questions in c/asklemmy. There’re not so many posts that it’ll bury other topics yet, but if requests to identify objects really start taking off, then branch off a new community. That’s how Usenet grew back in the day.
The core concept here is to get people talking to each other. That’s more important than rigid categorization. That comes later, at this stage it’s premature optimization.
(Also, for myself, I’d rather see Lemmy develop its own culture and communities, rather than try to be just a not-Rdddit Reddit.)
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