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, reddit, and other forum type websites are primarily text based. Microblogging and social media are short form and have plenty of pictures and videos, which catches and retains the attention of users more. Their algorithms are also more intense and curated compared to say reddit’s front page which is more generalized to all its users. Forums mean you have to spend time reading and typing while you can doomscroll and press a reaction button on social media and microblogging.
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 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 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 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!
I’m a 31 yr old dude that just found out about this along with what the fediverse is. When I found out, I was researching this stuff so it took me some time to understand it all and I still don’t think I fully understand it all
Part of the problem is there’s a lot less to it than it feels like there is. The analogies we use to teach to non-tech people don’t quite match up.
It’s simply a structured way to log in and send messages back and forth.
You can use it to stitch together forums, link shares, social media, video sharing, or image sharing sites.
But we really don’t bind things together all that tightly. At best you can follow someone on pixelfed or mastodon. Since there’s truly no minimum wiring, a lot of services don’t even really fully communicate with each other. So we end up mostly with mastodon <-> mastodon links and lemmy->piefed<-lemmy links.
activitypub is a protocol. like email.
instances are just what provider you want to use, gmail, hotmail, outlook, etc.
and the ‘platform’ lemmy, piefed, mastroton, pixelfed, is just the aesthetics
Unlike like email the fediverse servers defederating / blocking each other more.
dogmail can send to birdmail but not to catmail.
the predicted commie red wave revolution are all here in their dozens, actually about 2000 of them
revolution!
Lemmy as a name is very poor branding. It’s almost as bad as Mastodon.
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 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.
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’m offended now 😱
I think you guys have a great chance to capture Reddit’s exodus. I used it for about 16 years and me and all of my friends have realized how awful it’s become. People are looking for a new platform. I’m going to try and help by opening PRs against the repos.
Reddit has been exodusing for multiple years now. At some point, people are going to have to stop caring about the gorilla down the road and just be good, and I think Lemmy is good. Posts that make it to the front page often have over 1K reputation! It’s far from Reddit big, but it’s still big!
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.
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.
following people is nice if you know these people personally, like from real life.
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.
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 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?
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.
It is not just you
The irony:
You are askinf people on Lemmy why people don’t use lemmy?
Brother, don’t you own a mirror? Go get high and existential on reddit.
This is a blog post. The link was merely shared here by OP.
I have to be that guy and point out that the Threadiverse isn’t just Lemmy, and microblog-Fedi isn’t just Mastodon.
