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can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance.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
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)
EDIT: sorry, this was meant to be a reply to another comment. Still getting the hang of NodeBB. Now will this edit work …
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
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: Went ahead and opened a feature request
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
“Reddit but you can block the part that annoys you”
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 defederate 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.
Edit: defederate, not federate
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
I had to read your title three times before I realised you weren’t trying to convince carpenters to join
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
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
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 fediseer, 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?
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
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
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
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.
Google and Reddit deal, it’s not like they are going to promote alternatives forums that much
There is more than one search engine in the sea.
And that would be an argument if it weren’t for a completely broken CEO headers in the web interface. I can’t attach a screenshot because I changed the web in my copy to the Photon. In general, there are tons of SEO mistakes. At least according to Yandex Webmaster page.
UPD: for example api don’t have robots.txt method. As result I generate new pages lists for best search optimization with self written script…
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.
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.
