I feel like the best reddit posts are going to make their way over here anyway, the same way the best tweets, tiktoks, or tumblr posts made their way to reddit.
I don't think there needs to be a bot reposting everything that gets posted over there, considering all the mod removals and malicious compliance protests mean that overall content quality will likely decline going forward. I can see it getting very spammy very quickly.
I have mixed feelings towards the repost bots. I see no value in pure reposts from Reddit, but I also have no issue with them IF they only post on dedicated instances and mark the account it’s posting from as a bot. Those posts have no engagement. Most people either disable bot posts in settings or block then once they see them. There is nothing wrong with growing communities slowly, but with organic content or only reposting the most interesting stuff.
This question gets asked every day almost. We don’t need to do that. Just be active here and post. Browse under all and not local and you will see posts from other instances and see way more content.
The content porting really only means something when it’s not overwhelming and the person doing the content porting is actively planning to participate in the submissions.
The easiest way to get someone to not comment on something is a wall of submissions with a fair number of upvotes and few to no comments. At this point, it’s just a glorious RSS feed rather than an actual community.
Driving user growth actually requires putting in the leg work to make meaningful submissions, following-up on them, commenting on submissions, and upvoting content. All of this takes actual effort though. A bot content porting content from Reddit to Lemmy doesn’t do much and for a number of people, looks much more like artificial engagement rather than any meaningfully sincere attempt at growing a community.
Some of the (World/US) News and Politics related communities are so barren of comments despite the deluge of content porting submissions, while other communities have blown up into their own distinct thing because people are making sincere, organic (enough) submissions.
Very insightful points. I totally agree about the intimidation factor of spamming posts with no comments or organic interaction. But it's also a fine line, someone needs to be posting something to get the ball rolling.
I also want to continue spreading the word about federation issues. I've been on Lemmy for a month now and it's going great. But that whole time, it's essentially been impossible to comment on kbin magazines. The comments simply don't show up. I'm not seeing most of your comments when browsing here from Lemmy, but I am seeing Lemmy comments.
I obviously have this account, but its annoying to keep switching between accounts, plus I haven't really gotten the hang of the kbin interface yet.
Point being, I suspect much of the sluggishness of organic growth is not due to a small userbase, but rather due to the fact nobody can actually find the threads and comment on them efficiently. We need to remain steadfast and trust that the developers will fix this stuff up soon. I really feel that simply making Lemmy and kbin federate perfectly would immediately make this platform 10 times more active. We have plenty of people but right now we are fragmented into parallel communities. This isn't even getting into the server overload at a number of Lemmy instances.
I just don't want people to write off the platform before we can see how it's actually meant to work. I've seen a ton of brilliant comments on kbin and I haven't even had the chance to really mix it up with you guys yet.
Smaller communities may mean fewer posts, but once a community hits a critical limit, it's still more posts than most people will read in a day.
This is only really an issue for really niche communities that haven't migrated here yet, and if all they find here when they come to explore is the exact same posts as on Reddit, but with no comments, then what's even the point of moving?
If they didn't come out of the principle of what Reddit is doing, then it will be the content that ultimately makes them move. And that content needs to be different, and better, than what they can get on Reddit. Not the same, but with zero comments.
crossposting is great to spread the word. what sucks is that reddit built the feature, and then calls it bRiGaDiNg when you make use of the feature and crosspost something the advertisers/overlords don't approve (like bad reviews, reddit criticism) and ban you for it. they're coding these buttons and then forbid you to use them, it's mental
Exactly this. Looking at the top response it details it's hard due to a ton of costs like operating costs and hosting costs and stuff, but with federation these costs can be spread around so that it's more manageable for each individual instance (as content doesn't need to be viewed from the original instance but gets spread around).
The mass-scale casual interaction producing flashes of surprising relevance can't happen when the conditions aren't pulling in so many people that the 1 in 300 million person with the answer doesn't casually happen across the question that only he/she can answer. That's the unique content from Reddit.
Link aggregation, message boarding, messaging, all that stuff is merely tech that lots of other places have. Reddit's moat is the user presence which other platforms can't just replicate. Reddit needs to die first so that 1 in 300 person stops going there and goes to other places and somehow runs into the question there, hopefully in a way that they turn up in Google search.
Is the fediverse where that happens? Seriously asking because I'm no expert on it. It doesn't seem like the concept can scale distribution at that level. There will be pockets of interaction, but not everything is shared everywhere.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Even with federation off it feels like it's already turning into a smaller version of what we had before. Not so much with post content or comments per se, but more for the already established "power users" and recreation of the exact same garbage, popular subs. I can't believe how many people I've already blocked that I got sick of seeing on every single post.
Yup. Moreover, i want clients and implementations that help summarize and reduce doomscroll behavior. Social networks have value (imo), but they also have a cost and i'm tired of paying that. Reddit built a habit in so many of us to go back to it during any downtime, doomscroll more time than we wanted or expected, become overly invested in karma, arguments, etc. Reddit also has zero incentive to fix any of this, as it was perfect for engagement. Reddit is Facebook is Twitter, and i'm tired of those applications drugging my brain.
I definitely do not want Reddit. I want the value we got from Reddit, without the cost.
Just to say, I 100 percent would pull RIF up in downtime but doomscrolling is not ubiquitous; I would pop into really specific communities to read about specific interests and shit that didn't expose me to current events. I am an extremely politically plugged-in person, despite avoiding it almost entirely on reddit (unless I was in the mood), but I found shit like RIF actually allowed me to be more selective about what content I want at any given time. That kind of fine-tuned control of my information intake, of course, is completely lost on New Reddit with its barrage of random recommendations.
Yea and i don't mean to imply this is something everyone needs to see as a problem. Plenty of things are addictive for some and not for others. Even regardless of addiction, i just want (to explore) a set of features that is kind of anti-reddit. Explore anything that can help me feel like i didn't miss anything, while not needing to visit more than once a day, once a week, etc. That i felt informed but that the random stuff was filtered out. etcetc
From a developer, often these features don't scale well either. Either complex to define (if customizable) or too costly to run, but Fediverse tweaks that a bit. We have the potential to have smaller servers with less concern for scale, etc. Fediverse has potential here, for me at least
Buddy, doomscrolling is your own issue. Are you old enough to remember "doomscrolling" cable television for hours at night? We're all choosing to distract ourselves from something else or we're just bored. It's nothing new.
I mean, if you're having trouble stepping away from something, it almost sounds like you're describing an addiction problem. Everyone should make it a practice to step outside themselves for a moment and assess all their habits.
You're not seriously suggesting that a platform prevent its users from using it, are you? LOL where have I seen that in the news this week?
You're not seriously suggesting that a platform prevent its users from using it, are you? LOL where have I seen that in the news this week?
Jeez, this feels quite hostile.
I'm a developer. I'm working on this problem myself. You can craft features which promote a behavior or inhibit it. For example focusing only on live oriented features, making sure that posts show up constantly and with little ability to see what previous came, i would argue, focuses behavior on addictive FOMO. Features that help summarize historical posts to leave you with less of a feeling of FOMO does the opposite. Quite difficult to get FOMO if the summary of posts only changes once every 5 hours, right? You should see the ideas here. All of which i want to explore.
Features promote behavior. Some drive engagement, some reduce engagement. I seek features which reduce engagement by way of inhibiting FOMO and promoting the feeling of being informed on what it is you were seeking.
I'm suggesting a platform which focuses on features that help users avoid what i feel are negative outcomes. Which is wholly different than saying that all platforms need to do this. Why is this controversial to you? Should i, and users like me, not be able to use a platform which tries to eradicate (as best able) FOMO? Is FOMO other people experience somehow essential to you?
You can have whatever platforms you like. Just because an option exists does not mean it is hostile to your preferences. To me your reply seems short sighted, entirely focused on your individual use case and ignorant of a wide array of methods people want to use to interact with these products.
I am focused on my slice and my pie. You can have yours too, it's okay.
Seconding everything here — hostile/destructive platform design is so normalized for users (of Reddit and in general) that designing services that don’t encourage doomscrolling/“anger-tainment”/FOMO/etc feels completely foreign to them, or even impossible. But it’s gotta happen, otherwise we’ll just repeat the worst parts of Reddit (and other platforms) all over again.
This argument that a social media platform not doing evil things also exclusively means it cannot attract an audience in some other way is a false dichotomy.
@UnshavedYak for real. It's so refreshing not having to see loads of wasted awards on the most facile, idiotic comments. Or the obnoxious avatars people made in place of their pfp. It seems so hyperbolic but it genuinely feels great not having to see all that anymore.
RedditMigration
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.