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can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance.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/[email protected]
- https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
- https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
- https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
- 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 [email protected] 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
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's also no reason a topic as popular as TV shows relies on 3 posters to keep the main community active: [email protected]
We don't need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement
Definitely agreed with this. And less always (understandably) angry political posters, more escapists that want to chat about movies, games etc. It becomes like that snake eating itself because people that want a break from real life come here and see nothing but the same 24 news cycle as everywhere else. And then, speaking for myself, searching up certain niche communities and finding them either non-existent or with 3 posts from 1 and a half years ago.
I've been thinking of porting a couple of my old review posts over here from my banned but not yet closed Reddit account. Just so that, for example, the next time someone visits the Ghibli community there'll be 4 posts instead of 3.
And the Sonic communities are pretty disappointing too, considering I'm always seeing it mentioned in the wild these days. Makes me think (or hope) that there's a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.
Reddit is sadly still unbeaten in searching up a TV show that you enjoy and finding an entire community built around it. And those communities never took a lot of members. So it shouldn't be impossible here.
If you have a topic you would like to talk about, feel free to post about it in [email protected]. Not sure we have enough people for Sonic, but we can try.
I get the frustration with not having a lot of active posters in a community despite diligence in posting and promotion on [email protected]. I’ve had the same frustration trying to operate [email protected] 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 [email protected] (the other one), it's moderately active but still niche.
I don’t know if @[email protected] has a bot that automatically posts news from a feed or is just a diligent poster but he is always posting relevant news to the NFL community.
For college football, @[email protected] and @[email protected] do a great job modding and make sure that community has content.
The CFB community has really active game threads and even a community poll, the NFL community is more for news but it’s very helpful for me to follow the news in the league and most posts get at least a few comments.
That's nice. About fantasy football, did you promote in on the other NFL communities? I guess it's too much of a niche topic. I had some success with fantasy football for the Euro 2024, but that was a continent-wide competition, not a regular season.
I’ve promoted it and it has plenty of subscribers, it just doesn’t have a lot of regular activity. It’s not my community anyway, I’ve just been trying to steward it the last two seasons. I think it’s more just become more of a place to chat about fantasy football than an active place ask for and give advice for fantasy football. I’m fine with that as well.