It’s because when you go to /c/books , the default view is not every /c/books on every server. But one /c/books on one server. Therefore Lemmy is doomed and the dev refuse by principle to fix it.
Ideally, the user should search for “books” communities and the top result should be the largest/most active community. If they don’t like that community, they can try the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th result to see if they are better. Unfortunately, the Lemmy sort algorithm needs a lot of work.
For the communities I have searched for, both “Hot” and “Active” sort are bad (the main community about a topic is barely top 5, no other relevant results at the top of the list). When I switch to Top Year, I start to get good results.
You end up with one community with 8000 user , second community 17.
Unless there a major fuckup, only the biggest community is viable and gets seen by anyone. It sucks the air out for everything else. Because nobody is going to manually subscribe to 50 microscopic /c/books communities on as many servers.
That recreates Reddit mod power problem and it will kill Lemmy in the same way.
Maybe Lemmy simply already isn’t viable, just a Reddit clone with meaningless federation feature that only decentralize unimportant stuff but not the strangleho lady that moderators have on communities.
The second community will never be viable because even if the first community messed up as bad as Reddit, we know less than 5% would even change their habits.
Lemmy is not spez proof, it empowers the spez as much as Reddit.
Except even on Reddit we saw large communities split due to some issue (for example r/questionablecontent and r/QContent, one has 13k and the other has 5.3k subs).
Yes, many communities have these kinds of fuck ups. In the best case scenarios you have a new community half the size and with its attention split. The newcomers still get split between the schism after it happened. The result is multiple weaker communities.
And it take a really monumental fuck up to even get this low level of user action.
Look at reddit, the admins fucked over absolutely everyone and they’ve made it clear they’re only starting. Look how hard it is to get people to come over.
While on the other hand, if most users go to /c/books and by default they see every /c/books on every federated server, then the problem is sidestepped entirely.
No single mod team can get a stranglehold on a community.
Each user gets to choose, by applying or subscribing to a blacklist/while of users or servers. Or they can raw dog it with the click of a button.
But if most users who go to /c/books end up on the “one big /c/books instance” then every other /c/books community except the biggest one, will be a desert that is not worth your time to post to.
Assuming you merge instances, how would moderation work, especially if mods cannot agree on rules or interpretations? What about instance specific rules? Would a post be moderated by whatever instance the OP posted from?
If the mods have to agree on rules, you have the same exact asshole mod problem but now with extra name squatting.
A system like that can’t have a second books community, let alone a second or third. The current books community has 133 user. They’re not going to have 13 communities split between them.
Instead they all have to accept, whoever is the biggest, (realistically, whoever is first) community, gets to shape the books discussion on lemmy forever. That’s just how first mover advantage, compounding advantage works in this obviously broken system.
This will certainly spell the end of Lemmy. You think defederation is a problem, You’ve seen nothing yet.
what do you mean refuse by principle to fix it? the solution that comes to mind is for a whitelist that is implemented either in federation broadly or lemmy specifically for certain categories (think TLDs) which are agreed to have a certain focus, like on literature or video games or music, where the instances themselves can join or link to.
kinda bypass a community being held hostage (or kept isolated) by an instance, the whitelists can be determined through a simple majority (first past the post) or any other method by members of communities rather than instance moderators/admins.
i get that many folks don’t like hexbear and i have nothing against them, i certainly don’t want to force them to see content they don’t want; giving granular control over specific content (not just a blacklist like per-user instance blocking) seems ideal.
When you go to “/c/books” on any server, the default should be an agglomeration of all /c/books on all federated servers (notwithstanding the already ongoing defederation wars)
The -USER- then decides if they want to filter by whitelist or blacklist, the user decide what server or community@server goes on the list. Realistically, users will just follow other user’s lists, which should be sharable easily. You might even subscribe to someone else’s blacklist/whitelist and get updated automatically.
But none of that is possible if the baseline view is not the ability to “see all /c/book on the entire fediverse in its raw unedited form”. You can filter out data you can’t access.
Whitelists, of course, are poison were just just deem everything to be garbage except “the chosen ones”, usually handed down from above by your betters.
A public blacklist model would be much better. You could then build your own blacklist by scanning all user profile for what is on their blacklist and use that as a basis for building your own blacklist, this is mostly how spam filters work. Because in the world of email, if you say “everyone I don’t already know is garbage” well, then you might as well just abandon email entirely.
The difference is that Lemmy is an answer to Reddit, not Discord. If a Reddit user wants to see if there’s a community for woodworking, he can search for “woodworking” and find it.
If a Lemmy user searches “woodworking” and the biggest woodworking community isn’t on your instance, you have to leave Lemmy and use an external service to search more instances and even then you might not find what you’re looking for.
I don’t use that spyware but it’s probably the same as every tech bro Reddit like.
Everyone flocks to the one big “books” community and that sucks the air out for any alternative.
Lemmy’s one thing going for it was that it’s was supposed to be decentralized and prevent concentration of power.
But you end up with one big community, and a unaccountable minority owns that community and does what every they want with it. Just like Reddit, they can sell your grandmother, we know users don’t care enough to do anything about it and they’ll just stay. The 2nd biggest will never matter.
This means there isn’t a lemmiverse books community, there is one big books community, on one person’s server, moderated by one guy and his disciples and that’s it forever as far as Lemmy is concerned, the same end as Reddit.
Lemmy is whatever we make it, except for the communism posts that love communism until they realize workers need representation. I half believe those are Chinese bots or high school kids who are stupid enough to believe the Chinese bots.
Right. Magically, everyone on the Internet has become infatuated with communism out of thin air over the last few years. Must just be my paranoia to surggest influence from a hostile government.
its almost as if consistently worsening material conditions make people more desperate to look for an alternative to neoliberalism as their rent skyrockets and the cost of food just keeps going up and up but wages stay stagnant - the idea that some foreign government is whats secretly puppeteering socialists / progressive social democrats like bernie, corbyn, lula, etcetera into relevance when there’s plenty of perfectly good reasons to slide to the left all around is just QAnon but for moderates
How do you account for the vast amount of anti-CPC Communists, Socialists, and Anarchists, if this “influence from a hostile government” is so effective? Might it be simpler to see that Capitalism’s increasing failure has driven more people in developed countries towards radicalization, especially as generations are further removed from the Red Scare?
Homie did you repress COVID? Anyone that wasn’t removed about wearing a mask was discussing why this system isn’t working for them. Sorry you weren’t invited to the discussion.
It only takes a few convincing sock accounts not even 0.1% of there resources and woosh half the userbase of this site.wants a violent uprising and to eat the rich. Especially with a site like lemmy as it already has a really small suspectible and easy-to-manipulate userbase whom will believe anything there spoonfed
I believe and there’s evidence to suggest that both China and Russia both have an industry based upon spreading political propaganda for there own self-gain and interest on the western Internet. Entire office cubicles filled with monitors displaying social media sites big and small.3.5 hard drives filled with tankie memes and "stopping the intolerant " posters computer keyboard’s tapping away while groups of highly intelligent people spread highly sophisticated pieces of propoganda and attempt to silence there opponents and spread lies about them but this is just a conspiracy a CONSPIRACY THEORY
This took me 5 seconds of research. If were being passive aggressive here ive gotta say. are you sure you didn’t get dropped on the head as a baby or eat copious amounts of lead
Haha naw I just kind wanted some one to post this information.
Honestly I still don’t think there’s much to gain from influencing lemmy users. But I know it’s a game of attrition you have to do it everywhere on as many social networks as possible to cast the widest net.
I don’t believe there are any states trying to influence. Lemmy although you just can’t be certain these days. I do think it’s possible lemmys the perfect breeding ground for propoganda especially considering a good chunk say 40% of lemmy are tankies tankies is a term to decribe someone whom holds marxist/stalinist/Communist politcal views and are very suspectible to propoganda.
If people left Reddit and then went back, then they are just proving to spez that they are the addicts he thinks they are and is counting on abusing. No thanks. Fuck Reddit.
tbh its true: apart from my french instance where i like to hang out, most of Lemmy is just memes, Linux related posts, or self hosting posts. No meaningful content for ur average person really. In fact i scroll throu ‘All’ in new and reach yesterday’s posts in just few minutes, given the amount of ‘not so meaningful content’ i am filtering …
Exactly. also inputs from experts who chime in on the subject are really useful, like a semiconductor engineer suddenly replying in a comment section. There’s not much of it here thou. Yea there is sorta this lag time between Reddit and Lemmy in whichever get wind of the news first, i even, used to be a reddit reposter just to somewhat help seed this place
Yep, I’m jaded in my expectations knowing what Lemmy was prior to the massive expansion through June and July…
It was still a fun place, but it was a couple dozen posts a day across all servers, by a handful of people from the bigger servers.
We still have a lot of fixes to make on Lemmy, especially on the moderation, management, and content filtering side of things (though apps have been thankfully filling the gaps on some of these issues). Niche communities still need more participation to get off the ground. I’ll see again where we are in a few months from now.
Hi, they aren’t. I browse by Hot on All or Local specifically to discover niche and active communities. The memes I see on Lemmy are actually higher quality compared to Reddit, mostly due to the older user base here. Bonus points that we don’t have extremely toxic communities like dankmemes yet. So overall, that’s much much better for me. Even if the content was dog water, I’d still be happy about the absence of toxicity and everyone enjoying a semi-lame repetitive joke.
I am still on Lemmy. It’s still my primary timewaster. I was clean from Reddit until a few weeks ago and I relapsed. The app is shit. Lemmy feels more like what I loved about Reddit but without the content. Reddit still has content but the app doesn’t feel good to use.I m stuck going back and forth. First to Lemmy then to Reddit. I’ll stick with Lemmy until it gets better or it dies.
When I don’t feel satisfied with Lemmy I try to go back to Reddit too, but I was so mad at them a couple weeks ago I uninstalled their app and now when I tried to install the app, they give me a list of my former BANNED usernames as an “option” to log in but they offer no option to log in under any of my VALID usernames. (Yes I do have some accounts that haven’t been banned but they won’t let me login to my good ones.)
The only options they give me are to sign in with Google or a previous banned account. They clearly don’t want me there. which is probably a good thing because this evening I went to the gym instead of wasting time on this… What should we call it… discussion format?
I completely disagree. What this place needs is a bunch of bot accounts that endlessly spam the top comments from when whatever’s posted was on the front page last week.
Gonna build spezify_bot which will do that, copy over comments and comment “this” and “finally someone said it!” below the top comments. Maybe even some “I came here to say this, too!” at some points?
Yeah I wish I could silence the star trek instance. I don’t want to block them though, they’re nice people. I just have never watched star trek so I have no idea what any of their posts mean, so having them in my feed is not desirable.
Now I understand how my friends feel when I talk about Halo lore.
I love star trek, so I love that instance, but Lemmy.world feels like its replicating the toxic discussion style from reddit. I’m not here because I loved reddit but hate what they did to it. I have hated reddit for years, I am here for a completely different thing from reddit. The slrpnk instance and the Lemmy.ml are the main instances I want to interact with. If there are other anarchist instances in the future, I’d like to interact with those, but ideally keep the toxic bullshit to a minimum.
For sure no disrespect to star trek fans. I’ve just never watched it. I don’t want to block the people I just want to filter out the memes I don’t understand.
Why does this matter? Do we need to appease the shareholders or something? Do we need endless month over month growth, lest the world completely stops turning?
It just signals that this platform is flawed to the point where it’s bleeding to death. Keep in mind, a bigger userbase = more active community = better platform.
If there are no users, there will be no new contents added.
If there are a lot of users (many more than there are now), there will be enough people around to support all sorts of niche communities, like Reddit had.
Active user count is probably the single most important metric to whether a platform is successful and stays alive. Even above quality of content, as proven by many other social media platforms that thrive despite being flooded with trash content.
As a Lemmy shareholder, I’m outraged. If Lemmy doesn’t get more users soon, I am going to stop the thrusters that keep the world turning. You have been warned.
While that’s true, I find it a bit sad that I have posted a question in the community of a 200000+ population city 3 months ago, and it’s still the most recent post.
Honestly I still use Reddit quite a bit because Lemmy just doesn’t have the content that Reddit does.
Lemmy’s left-leaning communities and tech communities are active but past that it is a ghost town. I think that’s why a lot of people did not stay.
I have also experienced bullying and harassment here that I had never experienced on Reddit and I do wonder if other people experienced similar and left because of that.
I prefer things without powermods, corporate and government influence, profit motives, censorship, groupthink, karma farming, excessive banning, etc etc.
If people really miss an endless content feed then they can just switch to one of the social media giants - it’ll only take a couple of clicks - and Keep Lemmy Good.
Out of privacy/tech bros and far left extremists, there’s nothing else on this site. This place doesn’t appeal to the general public because there’s nothing here for them.
I like it here because of the far left anti-capitalist bs. The internet is full of edgy incel nazis and it’s pretty relieving to have some safe spaces 🤷♂️
Yep, it’s been a massive improvement for me over Reddit on that end. No more doomscrolling, no more literally endless fights with strangers (still some ofc, but grass touching is back on the menu).
Less content, that is spread across multiple instances that can have duplicate communities.
on top of that, there redundant communities that are unnecessary even in the same instances. For example there is the android@ and the askandroid@. The first one has a decent amount of subscribers while the second one has a single digit number. I wanted to ask a question, I posted in the first one since it would make sense to reach more people. The post got deleted and I was told to go to the other one. In the first one they were posting only news articles.
This is ridiculous. Splitting communities in such way was the result of the huge traffic that such communities had in the past in other platforms. This makes sense only when the traffic is so huge that it is practically chaotic to navigate and moderate between news/articles and support questions. When both communities combined have 50 subscribers, such split only harms the platform and the users.
Everyone wanted to migrate by bringing an identical environment to what they had used to. However this should be adaptable to the current situation instead of directly copying it.
The post got deleted and I was told to go to the other one. In the first one they were posting only news articles
Ill call it garbage reddit-brain moderation. The reason for an /ask~ comm is cause your main comm is flooded with repeated questions that would stifle discussion. It’s also not a good solution to that problem, not too mention they don’t have enough users to be having that problem.
The way you form a community is to discuss the same things over and over until a hivemind develops, it’s a good thing to have a group consensus, not that individuals can’t disagree. Now the crappy moderation is gonna cultivate a crappy subreddit vibe instead of something better.
I actually found that I really like the “hot” scrolling so much better. On Reddit, everything I came across had ~hundreds of comments and everything was multiple hours old. I didn’t feel like I could contribute at all. But here… it feels a lot smaller, and most of the “hot” posts are not rubbish, so I feel like I can actually contribute!
As someone who posts a ton, I’ve noticed that a lot of people seem to check the top posts once a day or so. Posts can be slow to get engagement and traction, but the ones that become super active still seem to hit similar peaks as before (1-2k upvotes, hundreds of comments).
But yeah, people aren’t as actively engaged and commenting on everything all day like they used to on reddit. The framework is here, and I think if there were another big exodus, Lemmy is set up to be a great landing point.
I think part of it is that if someone comes here looking for a Reddit substitute, they will be disappointed, but if they come here looking for something extremely distinct from Reddit, they will also be disappointed. A lot of fediverse stuff is basically an inferior Reddit clone and that problem was compounded by the huge wave of Ledditors basically hijacking the culture of multiple instances to just exercise their Reddit habits, making the comparison even more obvious and poor.
Lemmy needs to eat populations that aren’t too big in order to metabolize them properly. Anything beyond that is going to get ejected along with some of what it could have handled if it was just that, and this will remain how it works until Lemmy figures out how to push people much harder to engage differently with it than with Reddit.
Yeah, I much prefer Lemmy to Reddit, it’s nice to be in a thread and not just see people repeating a load of dumb jokes they’ve all seen a thousand times back to each other like it gets any funnier the 1,001st time they hear it. And like that’s leaving aside how right wing it is and there was always a certain current of racism just below the surface in basically any politics sub and a load of popular seemingly apolitical subs
This. Quality over quantity. There are much more walls of text, but it’s filled with information and humanity. Reddit just became another Meta platform, but for niches. Lemmy has great communities, but all are tech and anti-big-corpo related, I feel right at home :p, but I understand that most don’t.
I find this all very irrelevant. I deleted reddit, account and all, and have never felt better. If I need to tell you you’re great more to keep people here, then I will.
I love lemmy but I was researching some home audio receivers this weekend and had to resort to Reddit. There’s just not nearly as much information on lemmy. But for some quick entertainment it’s entirely replaced Reddit for me.
I see more people complaining on Lemmy about problems than I do the actual problems they’re complaining about.
Just use the thing, and put the content and comments you want on it? You don’t have to be a passive observer just staring out the window as monkeys dance for you. Be the monkey. Dance how you want. Eat a banana. Fling poo if that’s what you want. Just stop expecting everyone else to create your dream routine and then having a sook because they step-pause-turn-pause-pivot-step-paused when you wanted them to step-pause-turn-pause-pivot-step-step.
I believe I have the same experience you have, I think others have a different experience and it makes me curious as to why, I think there might be something interesting there and ignoring it or treating it minimally doesn’t seem to be ideal. If there’s a different kind of lemmy experience or set of interactions, I want to know, what is it?
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