It's no secret that Lemmy is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Reddit. The issue it faces however is that it's still relatively niche and not many people know about it. I propose that we change this. By contacting the mods of large subreddits and asking them to make and promote relevant Lemmy communities we could substantially increase the amount of people who discover the fediverse. What's more, I don't think this is would be a hard sell considering many mods are already pissed off with Reddit due to their API changes. I believe that this is the time to act, so this is a call to arms, to help grow the fediverse into the future of social media!
Do we actually care about "beating" Reddit? As long as a friendly & knowledgeable community exists on Lemmy, do we really care about also being the largest?
Have a look at this post, we had a similar discussion there: https://lemmy.world/post/3074361
Long story short, the platform still needs a bit of work before being able to really move communities. Some examples exist (lemdro.id, piracy, startrek) but those are tech savvy audiences, there would be a lot more friction with more generalist communities
I do agree, however I would argue that an increased user base would help accelerate progress on improving lemmy
To be honest, people who are tech savvy and bug tolerant enough to be on Lemmy are probably already here. There were quite a few discussions about it (and still now on Reddit)
I'm really not interested in this being a Reddit clone. Several of the subreddits I wanted to be rid of have already popped up, here, while the better side of Reddit isn't really showing up, especially since Reddit re-opened and purged pesky mods so they could all get back to their scrolling.
Oh, yes lawd, that's what I need. I need fucking antiwork to shit up the place with their misery vibe while 196 goes skipping back to Reddit and takes all the fun times with her. Sign me up.
I wanted to become involved with a completely different community, with different mores, a different feel, and its own vibe. Fuck Reddit. I left that place looong before the blackout thing, I got tired of its toxic culture that sucked the life out of me after a few minutes.
Now that's starting to leak into Lemmy and I'm frankly eyeing the door.
If you liked Reddit, you need to go back there. I didn't like Reddit. I don't want to go back there. I don't want there to come here, either.
The joy of the Fediverse is that growth is nice but we don't NEED growth. A lot of you can't understand that. You can't understand that the platform will NOT fail if it doesn't get the kind of exponential, runaway growth that you associate with social media success. We do not actually need to hit TikTok numbers, ever. We need steady, slow user growth from people wanting something different, that's what. If the Fediverse becomes the Linux of social media, fine.
So no. No to this idea. Let Reddit stay on Reddit, thank you.
Disagree with this take in general (growth is worthwhile if only to shift communications platforms in general to open and federated protocols) but I don't think Lemmy is quite where we need it to be in order to sustain a migration. Finding a good instance is still tough, the idea of federation isn't easy to grasp for a new user yet, and the UX is still hammering out bugs. (Big thanks to all the devs that already work on Lemmy and all those that shifted over with the Reddit exodus for driving it to new heights so rapidly.)
An ideal migration from my perspective would have them find instances that cater to their interests and views and would allow easy defederation if undesired. Also, more control for the end user in what communities they see on their feeds when going through discovery (new/hot/etc feeds).
With better user controls for self moderation and better distribution of users across multiple instances I think we can have our cake and eat it too: growth towards a free world of communications without bogging us down by dealing with the folks/attitudes we find repugnant.
Honestly, I would rather Lemmy attract its own community naturally rather than it be the place all redditors pipe into. I think most people who have already come from there can agree the culture is not really conductive to quality discussion, and we've started to see some of that leak into Lemmy as well.
Rather than just copy/paste reddit's users and culture, we should try to develop both on their own. Create an environment that users want to spend their time on. Then through word of mouth on other platforms they entice people here. I don't think just being the place redditors flood after every fuckup is healthy for the growth of the platform. As a Mastodon user, I'm kinda glad it isn't the primary platform Twitter refugees are flocking to.
What is "naturally"? I heard about Lemmy through reddit during the exodus. Was that unnatural?
Much the popular posts in lemmy are memes, shitpostings, or politics/technology news which we can easily obtain from other media. The way I see it, lemmy lacks experts, scientists, doctors etc that that can bring interest and credibility to the posts or threads. They can help generate quality contents, what lemmy lacks till now.
IMO the biggest thing Lemmy needs is a better onboarding experience and an official page that recommends mobile apps/alternate front-ends. One of the Lemmy devs said they wanted to overhaul https://join-lemmy.org/ and it's on their list, which is a good first step. Until then I think it's best to wait before trying to capture the average audience and have them leave in confusion.
Yes I never thought plastering it with screenshots of your rust codebase made a good first impression. I get it, open source is awesome, but come on guys. That shouldn't be the first description of your product that people see.
In all honesty, as much as I want non-profit Reddit alternatives to succeed, I think Lemmy is a tough sell to Redditors. Here's roughly how I think that'd go.
Lemmy user: "You should try Lemmy"
Redditor: "Sure, what's its website?"
Lemmy user: "There are many"
Redditor: "Wait what"
Lemmy user: "You have to pick one"
Redditor: "Why?"
Lemmy user: "See, Lemmy is not a website, but a network of federated instan-"
Redditor: "That sounds complicated. I just want a website like Reddit"
Lemmy user: "But don't you care about how Reddit has treated its mods, app devs and the general community?"
Redditor: "Yeah but all this Lemmy and Kbin stuff is confusing. Can I just use a website without reading up on all this Fediverse stuff?"
Lemmy user: "Okay, just go to Lemmy.world"
Redditor: "It seems to be down"
Lemmy user: "Hmm, maybe try Lemmy.ml?"
Redditor: "This website looks a little... hard to wrap my head around"
Lemmy user: "There are alternative frontends"
Redditor: "What now?"
Lemmy user: "Do you know about Alexandrite?"
Redditor: "Nevermind, I'm out"
If we want to convince a wide range of users to use Lemmy, we have to make using Lemmy a no-brainer for everyone.
I'm trying to contribute by building a new opensource web UI that I hope will provide a better UX for the average Redditor. It's not ready to become a daily driver yet, but I'm hoping to get to a point where it's nice enough that instances will want to host it on their domain. Maybe I'm delusional in thinking this web UI will appeal to users that don't like the current ones. But there's only one way to find out, and that is to build it.
Nice strawman.
Lemming: You should try Lemmy, it's a way to have reddit style content, but without a company controlling it.
Redditor: Wow cool, Fuck Spez. Where do I join?
Lemming: it doesn't matter, every domain that participates has the same content, here's a list of places to choose from.
Oh, we're promoting our open source web UI now? Well, ngl, mine's kinda lean; it's Leanish!
Heck yeah, share your work with the world.
We should probably compile a regularly updated list somewhere. It's great that people have so many options. Now we just need to make it easier for them to find a web UI that suits their needs.
"Hello we are from the Church of the Fediverse, have you a moment to talk about our Lord and Saviour Lemmy? No not the tankies one"
I've been a reddit user for at least 15 years. I've been a Lemmy user for a few months. Lemmy has a long way to go before it's a "viable Reddit alternative". Right now it's barely usable.
Not this again...
Lemmy isn't everyones' cup of tea. Reddit, despite the API shenanigans, still does what people want.
People are not moving here from Reddit if they haven't already. They'd sooner go to Discord. Less cognitive load, and their subs already have servers set up. Lemmy has a 5 communities different servers for each sub and most will be inactive, so it's already a losing battle.
Make Lemmy it's own thing, rather than aspiring to be the 2nd head of the Hydra. Organic growth is good, sustainable. Boom and bust wholesale migrations look like failed hostile takeovers.
I think you're grossly overestimating the ability of FOSS to reach "regular" people. 99.9% of Redditors haven't even heard of Lemmy. There are assuredly very many people using Reddit who would be very happy to switch to something better.
You're not wrong with any of your points, I'm just saying there's no reason to discourage a "get the word out" campaign. People can make their own choices, but only after they know what the options are.
Hmmm. So I think I posted on Reddit maybe a half dozen times ever? I didn't get the appeal. It kinda felt like shouting into a thunderstorm... I'm not sure I "get" Lemmy either, though it feels more like talking in a crowded room than everyone shouting at a cloud. :p More seriously though, I've had a few interesting conversations here, but miss the feel of forums of the 2000's where people just talked about stuff that they were making. Lemmy feels like everyone is striking up a conversation, but still trying to be careful about talking about their own interests because that's "self promotion". :-\ I dunno, maybe I'm looking for something that just doesn't exist anymore.
So, for my two cents: REDDIT was my go to for very biased but usually non-corporate info. For example, Baldurs Gate 3. In the past, I would research 'BG3 builds reddit' and just check out different builds people tried. It was always much better than going to a crappy corporate owned 'gaming mag' type website, where most of them just copy/pasted info from reddit anyway. It was a pretty good repository for info like that, and reddthat (or lemmy I guess) has not reached that level yet. I tried doing some searching on here for bg3 builds, almost nada.
People "all already know about Apple computers", but they keep reminding us anyways! It seems to work. I think there are a lot of people who have been meaning to check out Lemmy, and could use a reminder. Or people who came and left before it was as worth staying.
