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can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance.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

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.

–

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.

–

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.

–

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:

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:

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

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    6·
    11 hours ago

    An official Android and iOS app called “Lemmy”. If you wanna go big, you need the mobile platform.

  • Ben Matthews@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    1·
    10 hours ago

    Two thoughts:

    • I’m subscribed to 160 communities, most very small, but see interesting stuff due to the Scaled option - also deliberately avoid the big news communities. Evidently, it takes time to join 160 small cs, so to get started it could be handy to have an all/local except list, and remove the biggest news /memes unless people tick a box saying they like such. Or make an algorithm that prioritises stuff related to what I upvote (which is how other social sites seem to get people started - e.g. i just tried rednote and it quickly learned i like mountains and trains) - but i guess that’s hard to implement as each instance would need to work out ‘related to’.
    • 2nd point - there are other user-interfaces - I’m using Alexandrite which has a better layout than lemmy default, but how to make this easier (instructions suggest docker, how many casual users will do that …)?
  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    3·
    13 hours ago

    Yep, lemmy definitely has a problem with too much politics.

    I propose that no post should include the head or face of any politician. Seeing a politician typically ruins your day. Best to either keep politics abstract (memes) or not do that at all.

  • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    11·
    18 hours ago

    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.

    The fact that they (or you) complain about the “All” timeline having the same stuff in all servers shows they have no idea what they’re talking about: that’s the entire point of an All feed! (plusminus stuff like defederation). It would make more sense to compare the Local feed of instances, IMO.

    Besides, the default sorts are active and popularity nowadays, so it only makes sense that stuff that we care about and have to have words with, takes the forefront. If you want to solve that the solution is not “let’s ignore what’s going on around the world”, it’s “post more cats” and “post more ich_iel”. Or just use the Scaled sort, I don’t understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.

    And that’s right there with the complaint about the 42k users too. The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about. Complaining that for the next people to come in “I’m going to be called a westerner imperialist” is delicious hypocrisy on not noticing how indoctrinated they are.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      4·
      18 hours ago

      The fact that they (or you) complain about the “All” timeline having the same stuff in all servers shows they have no idea what they’re talking about: that’s the entire point of an All feed! (plusminus stuff like defederation). It would make more sense to compare the Local feed of instances, IMO.

      The complaint is not about the All timeline being the same everywhere. The complaint is that most of the All feed is US politics, a topic which is already massively dominant on Reddit. Some people are looking at alternatives because they want to avoid that. If it’s the same, why bother changing and not stay on Reddit?

      I don’t understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.

      Good point, could be something that could be change by admins.

      The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about.

      Well, that’s not the case for everyone. A lot of people came here because they wanted third party apps on Reddit.

      • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        4·
        17 hours ago

        The complaint is that most of the All feed is US politics, a topic which is already massively dominant on Reddit. Some people are looking at alternatives because they want to avoid that. If it’s the same, why bother changing and not stay on Reddit?

        Well then the key is to not show the All feed. That feed, by its very design, is about showing the overview of what is going about “the known fedi”, and we can’t control what other people talk about, fedi or otherwise. If he current news is Luigi, exploded Starlink launches and double Nazi salutes, that’s what’s going to be talked about - and the presence of generalist instances is going to amplify that effect. Unless you have enough cats, enough Linux, or enough ich_iel.

        A lot of people came here because they wanted third party apps on Reddit.

        Well then they were told wrong: here it’s not about developing for Reddit. In fact, when someone tried to act on trying to bring people from Reddit or emulating “third party app” by bringing in the threads from Reddit, it was the lemmings who complained (even if rightfully so).

  • lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.comEnglish
    4·
    14 hours ago

    Prevent opinion downvoting by disabling downvotes globally.

    50 upvotes, 90 downvotes, that’s not problematic at all, but there is the huge total score of -40 in this case that could lead to the deletion of the post or comment.

    By the way: My instance is one of the few with downvotes disabled. So, if you want to give me feedback on this, I can only see comments…

    Opinion downvoting was the most toxic feature of Reddit and led to perfect echo chambers. We should have left it there.

  • thoro@lemmy.mlEnglish
    8·
    18 hours ago

    Sounds like we’re filtering out the exact type of people I would never want to come from Reddit. Dunno why y’all want them.

    • aasatru@kbin.earth
      7·
      17 hours ago

      I generally try to avoid political shit here myself, it’s too depressing and I’m not sure reddit-like forums is really a good format for that.

      But for those who are out there posting cybertruck memes, thanks for scaring away the MAGAs for the rest of us. It is much appreciated.

      • thoro@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        10 hours ago

        I’m sure there are fine people on Reddit who don’t know about Lemmy, but your quoted examples consist mostly of certain type of faux-“apolitical” person and that’s where the solutioning is stemming from.

        I don’t think bringing the average default sub Redditor over would be a net positive for the platform.

  • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    19·
    22 hours ago

    Honestly, there needs to be a setting for lemmy admins to specify the default comms displayed to not-logged and new users. Just the firehose of the /all or local is not particularly attractive to most people.

    EDIT: Went ahead and opened a feature request

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      5·
      18 hours ago

      Agree. I’m of the opinion that the default view for guests should be Local, Scaled. Or alternatively, Local, Popular. But never All, and certainly not mixed with Active.

    • Aa!@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      20 hours ago

      This is what I’ve been saying. I think it should go even further and give admins a default block list of users.

      A lot of folks talk about how Lemmy became useable after they spent hours (or sometimes a month) blocking the right communities and users, but most social media users don’t want to work that hard, they just want to start doomscrolling.

      • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        4·
        22 hours ago

        Not really. That just hides it from /all. Just because not want new users to get dumped into /c/politics, or /c/slop, doesn’t mean I want to hide their existence from everyone.

        • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
          3·
          19 hours ago

          The hard part is that for some people, News and Politics is actually what they are looking for. Others want only Memes and never not that, while still others want content types like Gaming or Arts and Crafts, etc.

          So when Categories of Communities and/or Topic areas is implemented, this issue will be solved, but until then these are merely a best guess about what an “average” user desires to see, rather than allowing them to choose their own experience.

          • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            5·
            19 hours ago

            Sure. The suggestion I did for the devs is just to have another tab “suggested” which will be a feed of the preselected comms from the admins. Anyone can easily switch away from it

  • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
    15·
    22 hours ago

    Single topic forums are still doing ok out there on the wider Internet. Create more well moderated, single-topic, federated forums, and then promote those specifically to users who care about those topics.

    Don’t sell Lemmy to end users. Lemmy is a solution for admins. Sell the specific websites to end users.

    • ElectroVagrant@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      10 hours ago

      Echoing this, with some slight adjustments:

      Promote the specific sites/communities to people, and on sites that permit it, share links back to specific posts/comments that you found interesting/amusing/etc. from said sites/communities.

      Reddit got popular off the back of changes to Digg and people mentioning/sharing stuff from Reddit there. I’d imagine TikTok also grew in popularity from people sharing stuff from it on other major platforms like Instagram/YouTube/Snapchat/Twitter, much as now RedNote’s growing in popularity from people mentioning it on TikTok and other platforms.

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        1·
        59 minutes ago

        sites that permit it

        So Bluesky nowadays, based on Meta and Facebook recent removal of Pixel fed and Lemmy mentions

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      5·
      22 hours ago

      Difficult to sell a forum to people where most mods on Reddit are going to remove posts mentioning it: https://lemmy.ca/post/37657096

      People on specific forums are probably happy where they are and aren’t going to switch from their established forums. The strength of Reddit and Lemmy is to be able to have several forums accessible from the main site.

      The last place that’s left is /r/RedditAlternatives, where you just have people who want, well, a Reddit alternatives, and they usually don’t mention their preferences.

      But I agree with you to an extend, [email protected] is a good example of focused forum. It’s a bit unique on Lemmy unfortunately.

  • Lazycog@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    19·
    23 hours ago

    Some personal thoughts:

    about the content when you first open lemmy: I joined reddit some time around 2015 and it was not exactly the most welcoming experience with the type of content you see by default either. Still, I had seen smaller communities with cool content and I joined anyway and just learned to use it enough to tailor my feed. Lemmy becomes much nicer after awhile of hanging out and discovering new and cool communities!

    In my personal opinion the “Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy” part is the most important. Fediverse IS confusing when you check it out the first time. It took me awhile to make an account because people kept telling to choose an instance that fits you. I know it sounds stupid but it really kept me away from making an account for awhile.

    I instance-hopped a couple of times because I joined smaller instances (the recommendation everyone gives you) that then disappeared / were abandoned by the admin. That was not a very nice experience. I know lemmy.world is too big, but honestly it is a very easy and nice starting point to lemmyverse (so is sopuli!).

    Also: really appreciate the effort you are putting into growing lemmy, Blaze!

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      12·
      23 hours ago

      Hello,

      Thank you for your comment!

      I joined reddit some time around 2015 and it was not exactly the most welcoming experience with the type of content you see by default either.

      I think the main issue here is that Reddit in 2015 didn’t have to compete with modern Reddit. Nowadays, you create a Reddit account, you get a few subs suggested depending on your interest and your geodefault, so that’s enough to give you a first tailored experience without being first drown into All content.

      We can’t really replicate that on Lemmy (hopefully one day we will), so the best we have is what I listed above: tell people they should focus on laid back communities.

      • Lazycog@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        4·
        22 hours ago

        That is interesting, I didn’t know that about modern reddit.

        And I agree I hope that we do get something like that. I’ve been thinking for a while that merging https://lemmyverse.net/communities with instance specific account creation would be really cool, but it has just been a passing thought without much further thinking. I always recommend that link to new people on lemmy (also put it on my account description). But sadly it doesn’t have recommendations based on interests / geolocation, Although it does let you filter accessible communities based on your instance, but it could possible also have a tool “choose an instance for me based on my location / interests”.

        • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
          7·
          21 hours ago

          have a tool “choose an instance for me based on my location / interests”.

          https://join-lemmy.org/ kind of does that, but the results can be a bit off. I just tried “Technology”, and the first result was lemmy.today, which is fine, but doesn’t defederate anything, so maybe not the best choice for a new joiner.

          “Gaming” gave https://sub.wetshaving.social/ as the first result, not sure it’s the best recommendation.

          Edit: defederate, not federate

          • Lazycog@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            6·
            22 hours ago

            Yeah… I understand that we need to spread out more but honestly I think join-lemmy.org should not be the first stop for someone new to lemmy seeing the results you are getting. I agree with you Blaze, point them directly to an instance or an app.

            Found this pretty cool that on the voyager for lemmy test web app you can specify the local feed of an instance: https://vger.app/posts/lemm.ee/local - although not sure if that is the best way to “market” lemmy, the local feed of lemm.ee actually looked nice.

          • smokebuddy [he/him]@lemmy.todayEnglish
            2·
            1 hour ago

            I signed up on lemmy.today and can see and interact with I’m pretty sure everything, I’m not sure what is meant by doesn’t federate anything?

  • Free_Opinions@feddit.ukEnglish
    8·
    19 hours ago

    This is the best platform for constant live updates about what the people you don’t like are up to. Then there’s articles about everything that’s wrong in the world and also some memes - mostly political.

  • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
    22·
    24 hours ago

    Thought process about discuss.online and sopuli as recommendations

    There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/)

    • Lemmy.world is too big
    • Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )
    • sh.itjust.works names contains “shit”, which can deter users: https://feddit.org/post/4255611/2825351
    • lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric
    • feddit.org, is German-centric (sidebar in German first, Matrix chat is in German, meta community is in German)
    • dbzer0 federates hexbear
    • programming.dev is topic-centric
    • blahaj is queer-focused
    • discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
    • lemmy.sdf.org does not defederate anyone
    • lemmy.zip is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad
    • beehaw is way outdated
    • infosec.pub is topic-centric
    • aussie.zone is country-centric
    • midwest.social is region-centric

    I ended up with discuss.online and sopuli.xyz as they have

    • neutral names
    • long running history
    • good downtime
    • active admins
    • defederate hexbear and lemmygrad

    If people have other suggestions, feel free

    • IronKrill@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      13 hours ago

      Good reasoning all 'round! Although Lemmy.ca doesn’t require you to be Canadian, so would be a decent recommendation for any NA user. As long as they don’t mind some more Canada posting in the Local feed.

    • A Wild Mimic appears!@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      8·
      23 hours ago

      It probably depends on what audience you are talking to. Privacy advocates, Anarchists, AI-Imagegen-Fans and digital pirates are probably a good fit for dbzer0, even with hexbear federated, and a LGBT-positive audience would feel at home on blahaj. So while promoting generalist instances per default is a good move, if the subreddit has a well-defined audience, a recommendation for a “specialized” instance might work better.

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        3·
        23 hours ago

        Indeed, but usually I promote on /r/RedditAlternatives, and don’t have any way to know what the user’s interests are.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      6·
      21 hours ago

      join-lemmy needs to have a better interactive flow to select a server. What they have is difficult and slow to maintain and doesn’t take into account server stability or newness (new servers are more likely to stop working once the admin discovers they don’t like hosting, or they have a terrible mod experience). But the lemmy devs are not interested in either doing things like allowing servers to tag themselves, nor utilize sites like the fediseer which already does that. So we end up with a bad “join” frontpage which people like you end up just avoiding which goes to show how bad things are.

      There used to be a very nice interactive lemmy server selection site at one point which guided you based on interest/subinterest as self-tagged in fediseer, but I can’t remember the domain anymore :(

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        2·
        22 hours ago

        There used to be a very nice interactive lemmy server selection site at one point which guided you based on interest/subinterest as self-tagged in , but I can’t remember the domain anymore :(

        Yes, it rings a bell too but don’t remember it either :(

        But the lemmy devs are not interested in either doing things like allowing servers to tag themselves

        Indeed, that’s probably a whole topic altogether. If people want to try working on a better join-lemmy website, that would be great, but it seems like people are already spread too thin.

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      24 hours ago

      How’s Lemmy.cafe? I believe they defederate the Big 3 Tankie instances. Dunno what their downtime or admins are like.

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        5·
        24 hours ago

        I have my main alt there. It’s pretty good, but there was an issue with the thumbnails that got resolved a few days ago. Also, the instance is much smaller than the two others (64 users per month), so I sometimes have to subscribe to some medium-size communities before nobody did before. Federation can get a bit clunky at times too, and I have to pull myself some posts or comments to “unclog the pipes”.

        Discuss.online has 140 users per month, sopuli 496

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      2·
      18 hours ago

      There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances

      [proceeds to list pretty much all good instances, and complains about hexbear]

      …I’m curious, what is your definition of “generalist”? Because I suspect it involves “not punching nazis”.

    • gt24@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      18 hours ago

      I’ll mention my experience with a server from that list (that I won’t name)…

      The server worked most of the time but federation kept breaking. The server was rather small. Since you use Lemmy from your home instance, this meant that only a few local communities showed any activity and this was a very low amount of activity. This would go on for days or even well over a week before things got better for a while and then everything started to break again.

      It is one thing for a server to just go away. You then clearly know that something is wrong and you can migrate over to another server. It is another thing for the server to generally be online all the time with it just messing up in such a way as to make the whole Lemmy ecosystem seem rather dead.

      Things would have been easier if most of the communities I want to interact with were on the same server as my account. The other server, with federation issues, was only home to 5 % of the communities I was following which left 95 % of the communities I wanted to follow as not updated due to federation issues.

      There isn’t a clear indication of which servers are working great with a proven track record of working great as opposed to “zombie instances” not federating correctly or other instances which are moments away from randomly shutting down. The point is that I feel like my account anywhere will be able to receive and send information throughout the whole Lemmy network or sites. This reduces the concept of federation a bit down towards needing to have an account on a well known working server simply because account migration is such a headache. I can then interact with communities without issues (hosted on well working servers) but I can easily change my community subscriptions as I want to.

      One thing that may help for someone is to try and see what communities they want to participate in. If the communities they primarily find interesting are in Lemmy.world then they likely should have an account there to ease any federation issues. The number of communities I follow here are 3 times larger than communities I follow with any other specific instance. This community subscription list is one I figured out when I was on “that other server” so it guided me here.

    • astro_ray@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      22 hours ago

      I am not entirely sure how appropriate my reply is since you name lemmy specifically, but since one can subscribe to particular topics in piefed, I am leaning towards it more than lemmy as an alternative to reddit.

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        4·
        22 hours ago

        Once Piefed will get Thunder as well as an iOS app, it will become an alternative. That’s the main blocker I have now recommending it. Besides that, it’s a quite good Lemmy alternative.

        • freamon@community.nodebb.org
          3·
          21 hours ago

          @[email protected] Thunder is written using Flutter / Dart - meaning that it’s cross-platform. I’ve compiled the version for PieFed for windows, linux and macos, so as long as I’m able to get it working for Android, it should also work for iOS. I’ll need to be someone else who does though, 'cos my mac is too old, and I don’t have an iphone.

          Bonus screenshot: