Also, if you have doubts about brigading, Discuit have a brigading post on their meta community: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/pTyw2MZw
Edit: as you can see, the post has been deleted
I would be interested in helping with a coordinated effort to promote Lemmy instances on Reddit. Sometimes I check in on /r/RedditAlternatives and it’s clear 90% of the people who would be happy with Lemmy have already left for Lemmy. But there are many threads where a simple “maybe check out Lemmy I like it a lot” could do a lot of help. It’s not like users need to quit Reddit but every post on a Lemmy instance (even if it’s also on Reddit) helps make our instances more appealing.
Perhaps setting up a community here to link to such threads could be a useful idea? And we could get talking points aligned as well.
Perhaps setting up a community here to link to such threads could be a useful idea?
Sounds like a great idea! Any reason these couldn’t be posted right here in [email protected]? I think promoting the fediverse and growing the userbase falls well within the scope of c/fedigrow.
Certainly would fit here but a dedicated space I think would function better for coordinating a specific task.
[email protected] should definitely work, I’ll have try to see if there were recent posts and try to link them there
However, be aware thar most of the mods are going to remove mentions of Reddit alternatives.
I was a mod for over a decade, believe me even if it gets removed, a quickly-upvoted comment will still get tons of attention 😈
The annoying part is getting banned and not being able to comment anymore 😔
My guess is: Both were recommended, admins deleted the one mentioning Lemmy, since it’s an actual threat.
I don’t even think so. My post about the latest version of Voyager explicitly mentions Lemmy and is still up, but with only 22 points
Mentioning an app update isn’t exactly a “call to action”.
“Lemmy Now Supports [New Feature]! Come join us now!” that is what might get removed
This post from 6 days ago is very similar to the one about Discuit today “I like this alternative, I hope more people will try it out” : https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1hftcn1/i_am_happy_with_the_alternative/
Still up at this moment. I know Reddit mods have a very bad reputation, but I genuinely believe the ones on that community are not silencing Lemmy.
Mods aren’t, admins are.
Admins are obviously gonna keep an eye on subreddits like r/Lemmy r/RedditAlternatives, and delete anything that is “too far out of line”.
Oh yes, admins are a whole other bunch, but I mean, they are Reddit employees.
Still, this post calls out Reddit censorship, the most upvoted comment there still available is about Lemmy: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1hf84n6/redditors_are_waking_up_to_the_censorship_after_a/
I just found what was the body of the post that got removed: https://feddit.org/post/5876016/3775185
In this case it’s probably a mix of directly calling out Spez, and calling out Reddit practices.
I’d rather have people migrate over organically. I think Reddit was spoiled for me when it went from a niche collection of interesting people and topics to Facebook in a forum format. Almost anytime I go on r/all now i couldn’t tell if the posts were recent or bot reposts from 5 years ago. The smaller subreddits still keep the spirit of the place going but the general community is just another social network.
What makes this non organic? I learned about reddit on digg and Lemmy on Reddit. Seemed organic to me.
Maybe they just expect users to accidentally type in the name of a Lemmy instance into the URL bar? Is that organic enough?
Because OP is suggesting we brigade that subreddit and actively encourage people to use Lemmy. I believe eventually the users more like the OG redditors will come naturally on their own. Like with content from Lemmy shared on Reddit or other social media. Wait for the content and audience to bring them over than to self-advertise too much too early.
Reportedly Reddit has >500 million accounts, 73.1 million daily active users (DAUs) globally, and estimates for monthly unique visitors around 1.2 billion - the latter must be like non-account holders then? (I dunno how many are bots)
I seriously doubt that our tiny place even could “brigade” them if we tried in earnest (using humans rather than bots I mean).
Even so, I agree it’s best to be friendly and therefore sensitive to the subject to not let that happen.
Well that seems like an idea tailor made to make this site never expand. Content follows users. If it weren’t for people saying come use Lemmy I wouldn’t be here. Nor would 99% of people. Same with reddit.
Nothing actually seems real on Reddit anymore. Comments are fake and every story someone tells is fake too. News is just pushed by propaganda algorithms. It’s all gone to 💩
I’ll enjoy it here while it lasts.
Most popular thread
only 94 points
I say let them try the website themselves. If they liked using that website, then it’s okay. If they don’t like it then it’s okay too, maybe they’ll try lemmy out.
A comment saying
Lemmy is federated, with communities scatered around different servers. If someone is gonna search for an alternative to reddit, I doubt they want to have to learn to navigate the fediverse.
Currently has 15 votes, while my comment suggesting people to try Lemmy as it’s bigger is down to 2.
I’m not sure if Lemmy just has a very bad reputation over there in general, or if Discuit people are brigading the comments
People find the “which ‘Gaming’ community is the real one?” issue very frustrating, because they currently have the illusion that they have access to everything all in one place. The idea that you can’t have a discussion with a million other people is meaningless to them, totally crushed under the weight of FOMO.
They look at Reddit, and they look at Lemmy, and they see that they’re different, but don’t really care why. They see that different (not more, just different) effort is required to navigate the space. They don’t care that they just need a different mental model to understand the space – they don’t want one. And the design language of the space communicates to them that they don’t need one.
I’m not going to get up on my soapbox and rant and rave about this today – I’m too tired, and it’s too busy of a week – but this is what I mean when I keep saying we can’t win against centralized social media by aping the UI. “Lemmy” just isn’t a Reddit replacement in the same way that another centralized service is. A Lemmy-based website, sure. But not the network of them.
totally crushed under the weight of FOMO.
Wouldn’t they have FOMO by not following /r/Gaming, /r/Games, /r/Videogames, etc. as well?
And the design language of the space communicates to them that they don’t need one.
They don’t really need one. They can just open https://vger.app/ , see that it’s quite similar to what Apollo used to be, then have a look around and see if they like it. They don’t need to understand federation to lurk. They don’t need to understand federation to install an app.
If they click on the vote or comment buttons, Voyager suggests them to register an account on Lemm.ee. Again, no need to understand what federation is to get it running.
I thought your parent comment to it was very well stated and succinct.
e.g. you don’t have to know how it works anymore than someone needs to know how email or a combustion engine works - you simply click to go there and start reading stuff, if you like it then make an account and start participating as well.:-)
Lemmy requires heavy curation to block extremist content if one is so inclined (as I am), but wasn’t Reddit becoming that way too when we left it? And on X I think it simply can’t be done at all. It would be neat if we could add a “political” tag to filter by (like NSFW/NSFL), but meh, it is what it is.
Unlike some other instances, the default there is All, so they’ll see the entirety of the Fediverse (minus Lemmygrad + Hexbear) even without an account or having to click anything at all. It’s the perfect instance to recommend to the Reddit audience that is so heavily American (according to similarweb, 51%:-).
You are doing great work making sure that people are aware of what choices they have available to them - what they do with that is ofc up to them.:-)
I think it could be the “Tankie Devs” FUD coming into play. People don’t understand the devs don’t control anything other than lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml, if they start injecting BS code, we could always fork it.
But one “Devs are Tankies” comment would just scare the neolibs and centrists away. (conservatives are never joining, that’s not just a dev PR issue, its the userbase being too “left wing” for them, also, I doubt conservatives care about corporations controlling everything)
one “Devs are Tankies” comment would just scare the neolibs and centrists away.
I tried to mitigate that with a post a few months ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/
I use it as a reference every time someone brings it up
Reddit could be manipulating votes that mention Lemmy, or otherwise shadowbanning mentions of it.
It could be that a first glance at lemmy is total shit. The “front page” is a hot mess, half in German with piles of pervy anime and Linux posts. It might be hard to believe, but not everyone likes that stuff. It takes heavy curating to get a moderately personally interesting feed and very few people are going to do that.
But that’s just it, “Lemmy’s” front page isn’t like that. There’s no “Lemmy” front page. There’s a thousand different ones.
Reddit is a website. Lemmy is a potentially unlimited, constantly changing, number of websites. They’re not directly comparable.
There’s a thousand different ones.
I just opened the following instances without being logged on
- https://lemm.ee/
- https://lemmy.zip/
- https://discuss.tchncs.de/
- https://sh.itjust.works/
- https://lemmy.world/
The same posts are there. You would only get a very different All feed on something like https://beehaw.org/, but they are quite unique in that regard.
So, what we mean by “Lemmy”, then, is the circle of 5 - 10 largest, unfocused “general interest” Lemmy-based sites?
Because front page of startrek.website and ttrpg.network look quite a bit different. The All page of ttrpg.network is meaningfully, though not radically, different from the All pages on those sites. And you’ve already mentioned beehaw, which probably should be seen as a better model for how to operate a Lemmy-based website. leminal.space also has a fairly long block list, and its All page is also meaningfully different and less grating than seen on the Big 5.
It looks different depending on which site you’re using. Unless you restrict yourself to the sites that do everything the same as one another.
startrek.website
Looks similar to the other instances except if I missed something
ttrpg.network
They have indeed hidden the LW communities somehow, interesting. However, they only have 131 monthly active users.
Leminal.space
If that’s just the theme, users of that instance using Voyager or any other alternative frontend wouldn’t see any difference. Or am I missing something else?
So, what we mean by “Lemmy”, then, is the circle of 5 - 10 largest, unfocused “general interest” Lemmy-based sites?
I would rather say it’s the other way around. On top of the 5 instances I picked, my statement is true for the All feed of most of the instances except the few ones you picked. So on top of the 5, there is at least
- feddit.org
- lemmy.ca
- lemmy.dbzer0.com
- https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/
- https://programming.dev/
- https://lemmy.sdf.org/
- https://sopuli.xyz/
- https://infosec.pub/
- https://slrpnk.net/
- https://feddit.nl/
- https://lemmy.today/
- https://lemmings.world/
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy provides a list you can filter by monthly active users.
Most of the instances offer the same All feed, and the ones who do not are the exception rather than the rule.
beehaw, which probably should be seen as a better model for how to operate a Lemmy-based website.
How is defederating the 2 largest instances, and not updating beyond 0.18.4 a better model?
You get an ENORMOUSLY different feed checking out lemmy.ml though.
Also extremely relevant: the top instance hit by a Google search of “Lemmy” is that instance (even though DuckDuckGo pushes Lemmy.World higher).
Therefore, to a non-tech enthusiast, “Lemmy” = that instance. We can argue that it should not be, but it is what it is.
As always, that’s why people should always give one of the instances above when they mention Lemmy, to avoid people having to look up themselves
Exactly this. Lemmy isnt that great if you’re not into few specific topics. My ban/blacklist is HUGE. It took a ton of work to make it so every other post isn’t anime porn/fantasy fulfillment and suggestions to switch to Linux. If I’m being honest I still browse reddit in an app because otherwise I’ve run out of things to see on Lemmy in about 20 minutes each day.
It is interesting how people get different results. My process has been to simply block a user or instance when it’s obvious nothing from there will ever be interesting to me. I haven’t had to do that a lot though, and I don’t see any of what you suggest. Then again, while I see mostly Lemmy content, I use Mbin, so perhaps that’s part of it as well. Some instances might preblock better than others.
I do think the learning curve is higher than traditional social media. Not that it’s hard, but the average person wants a plug and play without having to do anything. The caveat of having a preset curation of “safe” feed is that most people don’t explore past that, and it’s the random stuff that wanders in that makes things more interesting.
I think a difference between us is you block instances. I agree with the idea, but I’m hesitant to block whole instances for fear of weeding out some actually good people. I will block communities that I have zero interest in tho.
An instance block in your user settings just filters out all of the communities from thst instance. So, if you’re worried about not seeing comments from users on those sites, don’t be.
You are on an instance running Mbin, which iirc sorts things entirely differently, using Mbin (& Kbin)-only “Boosts” that ignore the external upvotes that Lemmy uses.
But more importantly, it looks like a lot of the most extremist content is being removed from your instance even before you have to make that call on your own. e.g. without an account I can see that the last post from https://fedia.io/u/@[email protected] was a month ago, wheres if you follow the link you’ll see that they made two posts and two more comments within the last hour. They are extremely prolific!!!
So e.g. you can read posts about those posts - like this one: https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/1454997/Tankie-believes-women-s-rights-in-Afghanistan-are-the-same-as - but if you search for the title you won’t see the actual post, as your instance seems to have banned it. The rest of the community is there (https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]), minus this account. I don’t see anything about this in a Lemmy modlog, but I don’t know how to check that for Mbin (especially without an account?).
This is one of those times where how the Fediverse works is not just like email:-) - unless like Google would refuse to send or receive emails to/from Tim Cook of Apple 🍏🍎:-).
It takes heavy curating to get a moderately personally interesting feed and very few people are going to do that.
That’s a valid point. We should probably get a Chill feed, and as much as some people would hate to not see news, politics and tech in there, that could help.
A small list I just curated that could be in there
There is https://piefed.social/topic/chilling:-). It is too early to be recommending PieFed for a mainstream non-technical person to make an account on, but perhaps you could use that as an example to represent what such a feed could look like?
Though I for one am loving PieFed so far:-). I do have to fall back onto Lemmy quite often for tasks such as searching or performing mod duties or previewing how content will look prior to posting, but there are so many things that PieFed can do that Lemmy cannot. Like resolve 50 notifications with one button press, and either enable or disable notifications on a per-item basis (a comment or post or even an entire community, whatever), and block all users from an instance, and it embeds YouTube to show a preview and watch without leaving the site (in fairness, Tesseract likewise can do the latter for Lemmy, and also uniquely adds doing that for Loops videos as well - see it in action here).
For people who like to fine-tune the control of their environment, regardless of whether they use Arch Linux btw, PieFed is really awesome… so long as you know how to fall back onto a Lemmy (Mbin?) when you need it. i.e. for the early adopter mindset it’s a great (almost) daily driver already. And this even without knowing how to code, but for someone wanting to run their own instance it’s even more amazing since it uses Python rather than Rust for the back-end. (There’s also Sublinks that uses Java, but no developments have been announced for a long time due to family issues by the main developer).
Like resolve 50 notifications with one button press
Lemmy has a “mark all read” button, I might be missing something here?
Hrm, I don’t see it - does it only show up when there are (multiple) notifications? If so then it is me who is missing something here.
Oh, Voyager has such a button I see. Above, I meant the base Lemmy web UI.
I just had a look at https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta, the thread there has been deleted too.
Not sure what happened, maybe they were afraid they were getting trolls from the post on Reddit?
deleted by creator
Oh damn I assumed they were different spellings for the same thing but I see what you mean, sorry.
No worries, I also had to double check that it wasn’t a federated setup similar to lemmy! haha
Hey thank you so much for letting me know btw:-).
I wasn’t on Reddit for over a year but from what I’ve heard about /r/redditalternatives is that it’s a shitshow.
If somebody is still on Reddit, direct recruitment over DMs might be better if there’s a candidate who might be interested.
Are we hazing people on entrance? I didn’t get the memo that we’re running a cult over here.
I don’t use Reddit, but getting DMs from people telling me to use other platforms sounds like a great way to get me to not try those platforms.
This thread made me go see what’s up with Discuit, though, so… food for thought about social media dynamics.
Sorry, I’m not a native English speaker, but I don’t think that hazing is the correct term here.
I know were you coming from of course, but I don’t really see the harm telling people who are clearly dissatisfied with reddit about Lemmy.
Lol, they’re certainly not forced to join it.
It’s the right word in context, as in for an initiation ritual.
But still, you get the point. It’s not like we’re on an evangelical mission. There’s a bit of a difference between posting about it and DMing people, it feels… spammy? Your mileage may vary, of course, but I would find it a bit intrusive and kinda creepy, myself.
Nah, I think your choice of words in both cases (hazing and initiation ritual) is pretty hyperbolic and not at all correct, sorry.
But you are of course right, being spammy or obnoxious is obviously counterproductive, I agree!
I wasn’t on Reddit for over a year but from what I’ve heard about /r/redditalternatives is that it’s a shitshow.
It’s quite okay to be honest. Not that active, but that’s mostly it.
If somebody is still on Reddit, direct recruitment over DMs might be better if there’s a candidate who might be interested.
The issue is that to DM you have to know who is actually interested, and you’ll miss most of the lurkers. Also, this could be reported as spamming and get you banned.
Ah, thanks for the info and very good point. Good to hear that it’s not that bad.
I made a comment elsewhere in this thread, but I would be interested in helping out with a recruitment effort! Maybe it’s time to set up a Lemmy “get the word out” community?
Yeah, good idea. At least some organised effort would be helpful.
The other guy was right so, we should only inform and be helpful. Coming off as zealots would be counterproductive.
Yes absolutely, it depends on the context. The overall goal of such a community I think should just be to “put it out there”, and have people on reddit at least casually aware that Lemmy exists the same way people on Twitter are (now) aware of BlueSky and Mastodon.
Could have been paid for.
