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Why Does Nobody Use Lemmy? (byte21516.xyz)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 29 points 1 week ago (20 children)

Boiling it down to 3 things:

  1. Content Scale & Variety - Lemmy has a lot of content but it's very tech/political heavy. It doesn't have much to offer outside of that domain. Meanwhile, there's a whole shitposting subreddit dedicated to an NFL conference -- I don't even closely follow professional American football, but it's glorious.
  2. User Experience Friction - You can't just sign up, you need to pick a server. You've already lost a significant amount of people in that step.
  3. User Base - There's nice folks on here, but some really sour the experience for the rest of us by being straight up hostile if we don't agree on every little detail.
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  • [–] 11 points 1 week ago (6 children)

    Step 2 is dead right. Before you can proceed, we're going to need you to make an apparently important and irreversible decision that you didn't even want to make, based on incomplete information.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    I feel like this is an issue of (either accidentally or incidentally) putting focus on something that doesn't really need it. Picking instances should not matter; not in the sense of "it's federated blah blah" but more in the sense of "it's 2026, there's password managers, noone uses their real identities for everything; having multiple accounts wherever it's convenient should be normal".

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Number 1 is the reason I rarely visit Lemmy. The choice and wording of political posts and reactions to them create a very negative atmosphere and sometimes it is combined with rather unrational doomerism. Threads just feel angry and hostile too often for me to have fun on here. This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.

    That's so much extra work

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  • [–] 3 points 5 days ago

    That's why you are supposed to pick an instance that does most of that work for you: one that will have already blocked what you don't like.

    The banlist is public but is essentially a hassle of an Excel spreadsheet to crawl through, what would be nice would be having some sort of public "moderation trends" (broad-strokes view of what have we been blocking and will continue to do so) and "moderation commitments" (eagle view of what will happen when you report a post to us).

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago (6 children)

    User Experience Friction - You can't just sign up, you need to pick a server. You've already lost a significant amount of people in that step.

    I think this can be improved if there was a better way to explain the identity of each instance and why you might want to join other than just "generic Lemmy server for everyone to use"

    Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they're not gonna have a good time.

    I suggest a map that shows which instances are federated/defederated from eachother and lets you find which one has the closest identity to what you like. And possibly a disclaimer before joining one of the trifecta instances.

    Or just say fuck it and join the one literally called "shit just works" like me 😂

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Ideally, I think instances ought to be something the casual user can be unaware of. Like the default experience should be instance-independent and the choice of instance should be some trivial thing that you can change on a whim carrying your entire user identity and chat history with you. I don't really get any functional sense of community from my instance anyway

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Being able to migrate an account between instances would help a huge amount. I am almost wishing we could agree on a default instance for all newcomers, but this would work to just centralize the user base so it's not a good solution. However, if account migration were implemented, there could be a sort of "first steps" or "training ground" instance that accepts all new users by default and only allows accounts to remain there for a set period of time before asking them to find a new instance to call home. This would let users who aren't interested in the technical details of federation get their feet wet and figure out which instance aligns with them before needing to make the choice.

    This scheme would definitely require that new users have the option of signing up to a particular instance right away; no need for the default instance to be the only sign up option.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they're not gonna have a good time.

    It's worse than that. Lemmy just as reddit is mostly American. American election results were kinda... interesting. And Lemmy is very-very-very polarised. So there's likely 33% chance that new American user will get to "politically their" instance, 33% chance they'll get to the instance on the other side of the spectrum, and 33% chance it doesn't matter what instance they'll end up at, they'll be terrified by both sides. So at best it's 33% chance for user to find their hivemind, realistically it's probably much less because even people technically from "your side" might find Lemmy to be way too radical. And that's just Americans, imagine how the rest 96% of the world react to Lemmy.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    To expand on 3, there are no (that I'm aware of) official community channels for businesses in the Fediverse compared to Reddit. The default avenues to interact with them are usually Discord, Reddit, and even Twitter.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    Haha there are in fact 8 different NFL shitposting subreddits, one for each of the 8 different divisions. And each one is as active as just about any Lemmy community.

    I agree on the other 2 points as well. Not only is it weird to have to pick an instance, the names and descriptions are off putting as well. You scroll through and several of the top ones are openly Marxist/leninist/leftist. 95% of people see that and are immediately put off. It sends a message that Lemmy is fundamentally for leftist agenda-posting, and a lot of users treat it that way. Click on any completely non-political-sounding community (like Movies or something), sort top all time and you will usually be greeted immediately by posts about Israel/Palestine or Donald Trump. Its exhausting honestly.

    Edit: also, why does join-lemmy.org not show .world (one of the largest coms if not the largest) anywhere on the popular instances page? What kind of drama is going on there? This is exactly the kind of shit Im talking about.

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