You know what I’ve noticed though. The chat here is absolute fire. Being able to chat in real time and not see my replies 2 hours later makes it so much more pleasurable and personable to have discussions.
Lemmy is not only like Reddit, but it is open source and funded with donations and decentralised. It can't be shut down and is the closest thing so far to a social media in the hands of the user. If anything, it's better than what Reddit could dream to be.
To add, naming your 'Reddit' after Spez kinda smells like bad break up and 'Reddit clone' and not its own thing. It will forever live in the shadow of Reddit with Spez being a constant reminder to anyone that would use it. If you're looking to join a clone there are quite a few floating around waiting for more users to help gain traction.
The problem is with them and your idea: what happens when you start hitting over a million users and your server costs skyrocket and you need to pay for that? Ads, shareholders, subscriptions.
Why don't you explore Lemmy a little further, you may be sitting on your solution already.
I noticed my feed on Lemmy was pretty dry today, even for Lemmy. Took me a while to realize lemmy.ml has been going up and down all morning, and isn't federating new posts....
Yeah, I think it has a certain charm. However I fully agree, without it being addressed this will lead to issues and setbacks in the future trying to build communities. For now I'm subbing to all and trusting the process that creases will eventually iron themselves.
I think, kept this way, instances should be more clear what kind of 'country' they want to form. For example a group that has tech as the primary interest, should go about starting the instance as such, and setting ground rules for communities therein. Tech related, even if loosely, and differentiated from the masses. Or a better example would be, a European - English Instance could require a suffix like EU or UK like newsUK or photographyUK simply to attract the more locally relevant audiences.
A more involved solution could be to tag your community like Twitter into topics it wants to show up in feeds for (as well as tags that exclude it).. like 'technews' tagged in the 'news' and 'technology' but excluded from 'politics' and 'finance' and 'onion'
Another one could be to allow communities to federate with one another. If a news community spots some large news audiences in other instances, the moderators for each community could federate with one another and create a supercommunity (like a multi on Reddit), allowing the super to operate on both instances but share hosting of something along those lines.
You could also have moderators agree to join forces by migrating one community over to the larger server and closing up shop. This may happen naturally with time.
Yeah good point actually. Independent servers is a strength but not future proof. Allowing larger servers to store back ups that other instances can link to in the event of down time, or allowing themselves to be absorbed if they shut down would keep the place running, there would just need to be a system in place where an instance can nominate another instance to hold a spare set of keys, so that duplicates don't start fracturing the system.
Think of an email address. Accessing a community is like accessing an email address (that’s why communities have handles @ a server.
So unlike Reddit where you could have r/memes in the Fediverse you can have memes@lemmy.world or memes@lemmy.ml each host can host a bunch of communities and a bunch of users and we all connect to one another in a similar way that email works.
The plus side of this is that no single company has all the power like a walled garden, rather the whole system functions in a decentralised manner. It is also run open source by a community of developers. So while the whole system works in a very similar way to Reddit, you cant just search for the official memes community, rather you can subscribe to many, some may be large and some may be small and niche. Hopefully the downsides of this will get ironed out, organising communities into super communities or sorting by tag or something, but on the bright side, being open source and decentralised, development of Lemmy will likely proceed at a rapid pace and soon catch up and overtake corporate sites in useability, as they increasingly look to stifle useability and freedom for profit.
I've noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like 'cats' will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list....
Well yes and no. I think the point is to avoid 500 arbitrary half dead Cat communities, or to help users find there niche for their town or interest so you aren't left with multiple dead communities reposting questions all over the place hoping to find the community with the answer by sheer dunb luck while also thinking that Lemmy is dead.
Finding out that the official photography sub lives on glasgow.xyz is a big ask. So maybe it would be a good start to keep things fractured but allow an easy way to group them into a feed like the way multis work. Looking at my subscribed list is a horror show right now and I shudder to think of the infighting when three growing communities butt heads trying to spam each other's users to grow there own. If I can organise my coms into categories and folders that would be a start. Maybe creating feeds by tag? And subscribing to tags?
Maybe using tags? A community can tag itself in areas it wants to both be included in and excluded from. And allow users to surf tag feeds to comment and upvote on, also allow us to organise our communities within groups in our own way?
We're opening our resort to the general public on the long weekend of the 16th, if you are in the Pretoria area and you would like to see what our resort looks like without taking your clothes off (maybe next time) come and visit us coming Saturday! Feel free to AMA in the comments.
I'm loving the wild west of it so far and how quickly it all seems to be growing. One big thing I've noticed though: How will communities combat the fracture? For example, take 'photography' when I searched around yesterday I found and subscribed to one com. Now there's one on most of the larger instances, each individually only has a couple of subscribers. We will need to find a way to let our communities stay informed of the other communities as they pop up around the Lemmy verse so that we can unify, otherwise all the communities will remain trapped in their own individual bubbles. This isnt a problem if there was an easy way to group communities into supercommunities.
Maybe Lemmy needs a method of putting your community in a list and allowing people to join the list as a community in of itself thus syncing all like minded groups together into a single feed.
So I'm in the same boat, been trying to figure out the search.. what I've discovered for adding communities, search using the Lemmy world web browser instance, not the app.
Often you will see under the community header !communityname <this is what you type in the search bar on the web browser for Lemmy.world once you have done that you can return to the app and search again and it should show up allowing you to join.
Sometimes you can long press directly on the link in the community and click 'open in app'
Just had a look at my Screen Time and realized I am probably staying here
Over the last several weeks, according to my Screen Time, I roughly average 20hrs using Apollo weekly. Don't judge me....
If they only knew - "the only true way to get change is to have a viable exit." (www.spezless.com)
" Reddit is a complicated product. Can it really be built from scratch, without much funding? "
Federation is pretty cool
I noticed my feed on Lemmy was pretty dry today, even for Lemmy. Took me a while to realize lemmy.ml has been going up and down all morning, and isn't federating new posts....
A Seaside Station (lemmy.world)
What is Lemmy?
I know there are posts out there explaining this quite well, but I would love an ELI5 version. What is Lemmy and the Fediverse?
The Elder Scrolls 6 Announcement Trailer is Officially Five Years Old (gamerant.com)
Is there a way to create Super Communities?
I've noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like 'cats' will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list....
The rumours were true (lemmy.world)
We live in a future of AI and tennis rusks. What a time to be alive
Textile weekend at SunEden Naturist/Nudist resort! (lemmy.world)
We're opening our resort to the general public on the long weekend of the 16th, if you are in the Pretoria area and you would like to see what our resort looks like without taking your clothes off (maybe next time) come and visit us coming Saturday! Feel free to AMA in the comments.
Welcome reddit refugees!
how are yall feeling about the website?
Lemmy.world improvements and issues
In this post I will list the known issues or possible improvements for Lemmy.world....
Welcome
Welcome to the ZAR group!!