This is normal. Most “alt” services, rely on outrage and shit to grow user base. Reddit will do something stupid and we’ll get a huge influx again, some people will stay, others will leave.
Ha, I like the meme. Maybe replace the N word with “commie” or an Anime tankie chick. I’m with that last Redditor that stuck around, I’m liking this place. Certainly not the same as Reddit, but it’s got it’s own charm to it that a lot of others have already commented about
The overwhelming majority of users who came from Reddit seem to be ~19 and lack any degree of EQ, for better and worse. It’s homogenized into the old Reddit crowd but slightly more progressive, which has perplexed me. I still prefer it here, it’s an objectively better time sink than Reddit, especially since they switched their algorithm to cater to fake stories and celebrities. When AITA comes here, I’m moving to mastodon.
Edit: you’re welcome to downvote, it doesn’t change the very noticeable inability to recognize “stallman was right”
The fake stories on reddit were the absolute worst. The #1 reason I stay on lemmy is because I believe most of the stories here and the comments seem like real people.
Why on earth would someone spend their time reading fake stories that pretend to be real, and then have full discussions with bots.
I’m here because reddit is fuck and my favorite reddit app converted to Lemmy, and I’m certain that was a bigger reason for lemmy’s popularity growth than instances ever was
No it got popular because Reddit pissed a lot of people off temporarily. The only thing segregated instances does is confuse and upset the average person. Hell I host like 10 different alternative open source front ends for various websites and I fucking hate Lemmy instances. It makes Discovery new content unbelievably tedious.
What if I just want to browse communities? I can only do that on a per instant spaces, I have to go to that instance go to its communities tabs to browse and then if I find something I want I have to take its address and then go back to my own instance so I can subscribe to it with my account. That pisses me off and makes me not want to bother with it let alone the average user.
The sad state of reality is that centralized systems will always eventually get turned into corporate greed money machines but decentralized instances are by their very nature just shit and hard to work with and no one wants to put up with them.
Agreed, it was a steep learning curve just to even figure out how to use it. The concept of Lemmy is amazing but like you said, finding content is very unintuitive.
I think if there was some kind of database or reference for instances and the communities they have, it would be way easier to find what you’re into. Somebody way smarter than me should look into that ;)
If it wasn’t for instances, lemmy would just be lemmy.ml, filled with tankies, and unable to handle more than 10K people. You would never have joined.
The reddit exodus only caused people to leave reddit, not join lemmy. There have been dozens of reddit alternatives over the years and many of them were around at the time of the reddit exodus. Why do you think they all failed?
That sentence makes no sense. That’s like saying “this ‘website’-shit isn’t helping the internet grow tbh.”
Instances are Lemmy. They’re all seperate platforms that just so happen to share stuff and use mostly the same code. It’s just people hosting their own social media sites.
The main reason lemmy isn’t growing is because of the userbase. Alot of the things I say are opinions. But this is just a fact the userbase is incredibly toxic. Especially folk from lemmygrad and prehaps lemmyml lemmyworld instances as well. A good marjority of 4channers are less toxic than a good chunk of lemmy users I would say
For me personally, I have less connection to specific subs than back in the reddit days, given its federated nature and all that. I enjoy scrolling through the homepage, but don’t really have that specific moment of ‘I thought of something nice! That would fit nicely into this one, specific subreddit!’
Which, don’t get me wrong, can be a good thing in the long run. But it takes a bit of getting used to.
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.
Learning curve is huge compared to other social media
The sad thing is, is not really that more complicated, it’s just got a bumpy on-ramp. join-lemmy.org is a lot better than it used to be, but it’s still got this anxiety-producing step where you have to select a home server.
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.
It was always bound to happen after a massive user gain. Frankly, we should be quite happy we can get over 400 comments in a thread. That’s not insubstantial for a very niche platform.
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.
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