Just a little rant. When I first visited Lemmy Sites a couple of months ago it felt empty. Besides the really mainstream community pretty much everything else just felt empty.
Meanwhile though traffic has increased a lot and I feel well entertained by the traffic in c/hfy c/noncredibledefence c/keepwriting c/worldbuilding and so on. It is certainly less than Reddit but often quality is substancially higher and is “enough” to keep me entertained.
Also I like that you can actually post something without running into a bazillion deletes, bans and moderator shitshat because your post was two words to short, not NCD enough and so on.
Sure, the C64 community on Lemmy is laughable. So is the ARMA community. I still use REddit for that. Also I often check up stuff on r/hfy and r/NCD but since one week I have been prefering Lemmy for that.
Also my longer posts don’t get eaten up any more. God, three weeks ago most posts with 3k an more just got lost without feed back. Nowadays I have even manges posts around 20k without breaking them up. Though the editor is still lacking for longer posts. On Reddit I can copy-paste pretty much anything from Libreoffice into Reddits Editor (which is also pretty lacking but differently lacking). On Lemmy I have to run most text through a little perl script to get them even using correct line breaks perl -pe ‘s/\n/\n\n/’ and different sizes for Headlines are much to few to select from.
Not perfect, not even very good but definitely promising.
Slowly? Lemmy is easily as entertaining as Reddit and it is just getting going.
I don’t think people really understand that reddit is an 18 year old product. Their original site was iterated on for 10 years before they stopped building on it.
Lemmy will get there and beyond. As the fediverse attracts more users, it will also attract more contributors. I’m starting to learn Rust myself in hopes I can contribute to the project at some point down the line.
Yeah Reddit 10 years ago was very different than Reddit now. Too many people demand* a 1 for 1 replacement right now.
*You don’t even need all those people. It was plenty good 10 years ago.
I was on reddit before the digg exodus, and the current state of lemmy feels somewhat reminiscent of those times. When communities are smaller there is just a completely different feel than the 1 million+ subscriber goliaths some subreddits became.
That was the best era. The source code was open sourced, subreddits members know each other pretty well, the most prolific reditors are not reposters or super-mods. Actually fun AMAs and community-initiated events (meetups, secret santa, etc). Now it’s all gone, replaced by a TikTok clone.
The flip side is there are some people who have been here a long time tho…
But they’re almost exclusively rightwingers who were ip banned from reddit. Like the exploding heads instance is/was over a year old, and those people were insanely annoying before everyone defederated.
The more time goes by, the more regular people join and water down that extremism
Yeah I mean looking at the stats of new users, that watering down has already happened to the point where any extremeist shit is statistically insignificant by now. 99%+ of people here are just looking for a replacement reddit and that’s all, rather than some censorship haven where they can chat their extreme views.
I also think you’re going to see Lemmy continue to grow overtime because it does not need to be a Comercial success. It doesn’t need to go through the new owners, whims or financial needs. It’ll just continue to slowly grow until someday it overtakes Reddit. The mere fact that it can’t be taken down is in itself a huge advantage/defense.
I’ve been spending a majority of my time on here when I do my “Redditing”. I only visit the old site for niche topics. I spend as little time as possible there, I don’t upvote or downvote anything, and I don’t comment either. It’s read-only for me out of principle. I save all interactions for the fediverse.
I doubt all the communities will rebuild elsewhere, but I’m okay with that. Some fragmentation is necessary. Smaller communities make individual voices louder, and you have less ugly “sidedness”. When humans get into a critical mass IRL they can start to do strange things, I think we see this in social media as well.
Its getting there, and there is some entertaining content on here (comments and posts). But I think we are still missing the super high end responses. No matter what the topic, one or two people would jump on and have deep specialised knowledge of the field - be it naming an insect from a blurry image or commenting on a geopolitical situation. I still see lots of posts that generate nothing more than “huh” or “wow” type comments.
When that starts appearing more broadly, I think the quality here is going to take another leap.
I think that’ll only really start to happen once you start getting more of the general population on here.
Reddit always had a reputation for being dominated by techy people, that is significantly more so the case here.
Signing up for Lemmy, even knowing where to start is a bigger leap than it is over there. Personally I’m hoping third party apps will be able to help with that by offering some kind of setup wizard with easy options of suggested instances to join.
I certainly hate the people here a lot less. I like how it isn’t the same garbage comments on every post where they hyper analyze videos frame by frame just to call things fake.
On the opposite end it seemed like there was an inflooding of low quality “FB-type” posts. Non-interesting wedding and new baby in /r/pics followed by hundreds of “congrats!” and a sprinkle of “who gives a shit go back to FB” response posts. Predictable dichotomies once reddit got too mainstream.
Please for anyone reading, just be patient. Keep posting and commenting and it WILL grow. There are only like 1.2 million Lemmy users versus hundreds of millions of redditors.
If you follow the 90-9-1 rule, that leaves very few actual contributors and still Lemmy has a lot of good content daily. Just be patient and it will come.
I think its 90% of users lurk, 9% comment, and only 1% create new posts. Or at least something like that
Ah, that makes sense. In my case though, I used to never post on Reddit but on Lemmy I feel good contributing to this community. I hope a lot of the other Reddit refugees who lurked feel the same way
Where are you seeing 1.2m users? This site says that it tracks all instances and only shows 0.96m users total and 62k users in the past month.
I usually look at FediDB and they show about half that in total users but twice that in active users.
I can’t find it now. The number that I saw was 1.09 million, but I can’t find the site I saw it on now. I think a bunch of them must be purged spam accounts maybe.
I stopped posting to Reddit because frankly it felt like throwing a pebble into the ocean.
I love the smaller approach here
My posts will get no engagement, negative engagement, and very rarely do I get upvotes. Here in lemmy, there’s lots of quality posts and nice people who engage with my posts.
I can insult you, down vote your post, then say something confidently stupid before refusing to engage with this thread ever again if it makes you more at home.
Actually, that sounds like a lot of effort; best to leave that on Reddit.
I agree somewhat, I think Lemmy has a way to go though because there are some real big headlines that seem to be missing from Lemmy on certain communities, and often a lot of posts with 0 comments or very few. I know it’s early days but until Lemmy is a reliable source of news for my various hobbies I’ll still be using Reddit alongside. At least on Reddit for all it’s flaws, if there is something big happening in a certain scene, it’ll be there. It’s a one stop shop for all my information.
And clearly that’s what is so dangerous about reddit. Being a one stop shop. Their algorithm totally controls what people see, specially people whose only browsing All.
Maybe someone here already said this but if you find a community with not a lot of traffic here, make sure to post in it. Others might go looking for it and find nothing, just like you did. Perpetual cycle of I see nothing, I leave. If someone’s active, maybe someone else will be active with you. And then two turns to four to 8 and so on. Even if it feels like you’re screaming into the void, keep screaming. The void is infinite and someone’s bound to hear you eventually.
To add on that, I’m trying to figure out how people can easily find those small volume niche communities, and it seems like it’s a hassle.
So I set up a community on my server : https://lemmy.mindoki.com/c/sharingiscaring@lemmy.mindoki.com
Post your small community there, and I’ll have a user sub to it.
Why?
Because if at least 1 user on a server subs to a community (on another server) then that community will show up when filtering with All (All + new should show even small posts, at least sometimes).
If this is a good idea, maybe everyone running a small (read: low volume) server could do this to really get Federation going!
Cheers
Loulou / Valmond @ lemmy.mindoki.com
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !sharingiscaring@lemmy.mindoki.com
I think community consolidation/aggregation is something that might want to be looked at. It’s possible to have a gardening community on multiple servers with different content. This will confuse people. So having a way to merge posts from two communities into a bigger community per server may be a good idea. So if you set up gardening communities on two servers you can choose to have posts show for each of them in your community. And making this a server or community setting still gives the ability to either have this or not have this if the communities are truly supposed to be separate. This would also give some kind of redundancy where the original community server can go offline but multiple different servers can still exchange messages that eventually make it back to the main community. Truly decentralized.
I have to disagree. Consolidation seems almost never to improved anything. Take Reddit, for example. I once found a sub called HikingAndCamping. Since I’m a hiker, I looked it over. The top mod only allowed discussions of hiking and camping on Mt Everest (or some equally nonsensical narrow topic). Since I actually wanted to discuss hiking and camping generally, I tried to create CampingAndHiking as a more accessible community. But that same top mod had already claimed that name as well under an alt. Reddit refused to do anything, but when they notified him that I had requested the dead sub (no posts and the alt hadn’t logged in for years), he jumped in and created a single “Go away” post. Then he sent me a private message to the effect of “I’m squatting to keep traffic flowing to my other sub. You want to talk about hiking and camping in general? Sucks to be you.”
Here, I’d just go to another instance and create the c/ that we wanted and move along. That’s part of the beauty of federation. Users can then join the one(s) that appeal to them and everyone gets to have their community.
I don’t understand the “slowly” part at all. I joined Lemmy about a month ago when Reddit third party apps went dark. Lemmy was largely a ghost town then, with most of the relatively mainstream communities I sought out having newest posts that were days or even weeks old. That desolation was gone after the first few days, with a ton more engagement from others who migrated over and a steady stream of new content. The communities I frequent have grown by leaps and bounds since then. “Slow” isn’t a word I’d use to describe Lemmy’s growth.
Tildes is staying the same. And I like it that way. Lemmy is getting busy and I also like it that way. I go to tildes or lemmy depending on my mood. Haha
I totally forgot about squabbles. I haven’t gone there for weeks now. I don’t know the reason why, I’m just being pulled to lemmy and tildes much more.
Tildes was nice if you wanted to just circle jerk each other on a topic…but if you had any disagreements, the users there would just tag your post as malicious and then the single admin would delete it…then if you got to many people who disagreed with you, he will just ban you. It’s his platform and all but fuck that authoritarian shit. I left reddit because of the level of mod abuse and admin abuse there.
Since the spike in content that came with the Reddit migration, I feel like things have slowed down. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t have any stats to back that up.
Maybe “plateau’d” is a better phrase. There has been growth since the Reddit migration, but it has decreased since the spike. Not that that’s a bad thing
It started to slow down, or at least in my instance. People still post and people from another instance visit frequently, but the hype seems to already slow down. I don’t mind though, i don’t think any instance can take the heavy load, it will kill lemmy faster if the instance constantly facing down time.
