This is not going to be a blogpost about “Why do people still use Reddit instead of everyone moving to Lemmy?”. I noticed that even with Mastodon users, who already understand and like the advantages of decentralized platforms, the usage of Lemmy is extremely small, and more people use Reddit. Most of them haven’t even heard of Lemmy. To be fair, the Reddit usage also seems to be fairly low.
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Lemmy as a name is very poor branding. It’s almost as bad as Mastodon.
Disagree. This is a case of the brand actually not meaning much. “Reddit” isn’t great either, but people think it does because it’s well known.
I’m reminded of the person who said Mario was a character designed from the ground up to be marketable, when it was literally created to make a graphic of a person readable in a 16x16 sprite with three colors.
I think it’s pretty good. Two syllables, easy to say, no similar sounding competing platforms. What do you think’s wrong with it?
Naming something after a famous person means you’re starting off on the back foot in terms of SEO and brand clarity.
Digg worked well because it came out of an era where adding a second G was enough to sound techy, but it also played into the dig/bury aspect of voting. Reddit works because the name is “read it” while also being a unique string you couldn’t mistake for anything else. Both have a lot going for them that Lemmy just doesn’t.
Until I read this post I had never heard of this “famous” Lemmy.
Until I read this post I had never heard of this “famous” AC/DC.
That’s what your post reads like to me.
My experience is the only (valid) one.
That’s what your post reads like to me.
Eh not that famous, I bet most people dont have any name associations with Lemmy except that it sounds kinda like “lemming”. Which is sort of unfortunate though because lemmings (the de facto name for lemmy users) generally means crowd-following idiots. But as far as factors that inhibit the growth of lemmy go Id put the name way down the list.
It’s this plus onboarding. Reddit is easy to remember. It tells you exactly what you are getting. Lemmy sounds like a new lemmings games. It gives vintage when it should do the opposite.
It’s a bad name and will never become popular because it’s stupid to say outloud and on top of it onboarding is unnecessarily complicated.
I think its okay the way it is. Too much attention leads to many reposts, karma farmers, bots, now AI bullshit etc.
I say this in all of these threads: more users does not mean a better experience.
Instead, focus on making our communities the best they can be.
I think that’s only true after a certain amount of users.
I joined Lemmy a couple of years ago and I already notice more user engagement. I would like a little bit more, such that more niche communities can have an ecosystem of posters instead of a single one doing most posts. But not much more indeed
I say this in all of these threads: more users does not mean a better experience.
It does when your current amount of users is functionally equivalent to, like, “2”.
I think it’s too empty a lot of times. Mainstream topics are nicely populated but a vast amount of specific communities are just one person posting links over and over with a handful of upvotes and zero comments. Sometimes I see posts here and have to go to Reddit to see what the community thinks about it, because on Lemmy the post is completely dead.
To be fair, karma farmers aren’t really possible on Lemmy.
nobody
I’m somebody!
I’m nobody.
Also: Happy Cake Day!
Thanks!
I’m not!
the predicted commie red wave revolution are all here in their dozens, actually about 2000 of them
revolution!
everytime an instance, or a community goes down or recieves too much drama(like how some users dint like the "political stance of a specific instance owners(not tankies)), they scatter to other platforms thats why. some went to piefed, and others. the last instance that went down, there was much more people lemmy, especially in some categories(not much but more than now)
Just you wait. Growth will happen in shocks. Basically people probably haven’t heard about Lemmy yet.
Plenty of people heard about Lemmy and bounced off. PieFed is the one people haven’t heard about yet, there’s some hope that they get a big growth spurt
Reddit started out small too, you know when it was actually good.
I don’t use Mastodon or Twitter either. I never understood following specific people and prefer following topics instead.
following people is nice if you know these people personally, like from real life.
Exactly! I’d be curious to see the reverse poll, asking Lemmy users “Why does nobody use Mastodon?” (and include Bluesky and Twitter in the poll.)
I use Lemmy (and in the past Reddit) because topic based conversation is what makes sense to me. Anytime I try to use Mastodon or Bluesky I lurk for a bit and then just come back here.
People that do actual geolocations for the war in Ukraine are basically the primary sources. They figure out where and when videos were taken and do the actual work. Following the topic gets you to some big account that aggregates them
I don’t generally like the Twitter model and rarely use it, but I will say that one thing that it does do well, better than the Reddit/Threadiverse model, is very rapidly assembling information about a specific, temporary topic.
Like, the Reddit model is about letting a community assemble over time and letting people find their way there and moderators be chosen and all that. That works quite well for a lot of things, and lets people with expertise in the field arise and all that.
But let’s say that there’s a huge natural disaster and people are putting up video clips from their cell phones and stuff like that. They can coalesce around a hashtag or a couple of hashtags pretty quickly and relevant material from people who have had no contact with (and maybe no time to) assemble a community or anything gets drawn together. The topic probably won’t be active for long. The rapid setup and teardown can be really useful in that case.
Of course, that’s really following a hashtag, rather than a particular user…
I also dislike the “short comment” model that Twitter uses (though over the years, the comment length has been increased and workarounds added), but one thing that it does help with is to help deal with inexperienced users unfamiliar with quoting etiquette. In email or in traditional forum systems, it’s conventional to quote a bit of relevant text before responding to it. This requires knowing syntax for doing so and when it’s appropriate. Twitter deals with that by forcing everything to be broken up into bite-size chunks as a property of the system, so someone responding to something is forced to respond to only the relevant bit. I think that that probably helps make Twitter more-approachable.
Mastodon allows you to follow hashtags, which would be like following a topic.
Exactly. And with the advanced web interface on Mastodon or an app like Moshidon or Manfred, you can create custom timelines that show just a collection of hashtags.
I use that a lot—exclusively, really.
I don’t like the title cause there’s a decently sized userbase here, but the article is good. If the article was something like “Why don’t more people use Lemmy?” then I would share this on Reddit, but as-is most people will just read the headline and skip it.
Does anyone else find the font on this uncomfortable to read is that just me?
It is not just you
Your browser likely has a “reader view”. In Firefox, by default, this can be toggled via clicking the little page icon in the URL bar. Remote styles won’t be applied in that.
I have to be that guy and point out that the Threadiverse isn’t just Lemmy, and microblog-Fedi isn’t just Mastodon.
Oh ok
The real answer, that we all know but dare not speak, is that it’s miserable here.
Once you’ve blocked the tankies, porn, and militant dweebs, it’s wall to wall politics and titty memes.
I’m here because I’m also a miserable asshole.
Well, as the saying goes, be the change you want in the world - if you find a community that you’d like to see more posts on, and you can contribute, then by all means, please do so
There was a glorious few months before Reddit enshittified even further, before the bigger migration of users. After that it turned into 90% American politics.
Honestly I do look at American politics with amusement. When I was younger I always thought my country was shitty and western world is a shining palace, and reddit and Lemmy broke that illusion of mine.
More I look at your politicians, I realised yours and mine aren’t as different as one might think they are. Like yes, you got better infrastructure and civic sense, yet in some ways we’re in same boat.
My main reason for looking for alternatives. Wanted to stop my morning coffee doom scrolling to consist of only US politics… if you can call it politics that is… Lemmy fits the bill.
As someone has said before, I agree with a bit of lack on on-boarding, you need to be a little bit more insistent on setup to ensure you get the communities you want. Not hard, but can definitely imagine that would stop some from trying out lemmy any further.
Yeah that was a big part of why I swapped, but it’s getting flooded again.
PieFed helps with this
How?
I didn’t downvote your comment but I’m American and most of us are sick of it too. We’re trying. I vote in every election.
There was beans before there were titty memes, also there’s a lot of owl and cat pictures, and random comics
Moths, off and on.
That’s terrible! Outrageous! Where can I find these titty memes so I can block them?
It’s been a thing on !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world for the past days or two…
… but it’s more meme than titty.
to block all the politics communities should be an option at sign-up, or better yet, even when you browse without being signed in.
yeah, having tags for each community would be great.
I really don’t know why I’m still here, because I’m not a miserable asshole, at least not in the way that makes you enjoy being around Lemmy’s userbase.
I want the technology to succeed but it feels like a victim of who’s likely to even be interested.
Soapy Titty memes are a breath of fresh air compared to recurring bean memes TBH 🫘
Conservatives did this to you. I’m sending you some “cheer up” tiddies.
You can be in the left and know this place is filled with the most broken progressives we have 🤷
Conservatives did this to us. We’re gonna need some more “cheer up” tiddies.
I use Lemmy every day!
Lemmy ist for talking about topics, mastodon is for following brands and entering parasocial relationships.
No you’re thinking of Threads
Mastodon is a source for links to post to Lemmy. :P
