I honestly think we need to revive many communities related to questions, interesting topics, and overall “lets-have-a-chat-on-something” (preferably not related to what I mentioned above, or at least that touches a broader audience).
Have you subbed to the various AskLemmy/Ask[instance]/NoStupidQuestions/Out of the Loop communities across here?
To my own amusement, I found sh.itjust.works has several question communities that I tossed some posts to here & there.
Also although I haven’t sorted out what I might want to post in them, there’s these chat communities for other discussing other topics besides those you highlight getting plenty enough discussion:
That doesn’t work, though. If I add posts and comments to, let’s say, a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu community on Lemmy, that’s just one more number. That isn’t going to improve.
Reddit had a huge boost from Digg, and even then, it was a different time when fewer numbers were fine, and people were more willing to engage in social media at lower numbers.
If Lemmy instances are to grow, that engagement needs to be directed. It needs popular communities to be highlighted, and once consistent interaction is there, growing communities need instance owners to direct traffic/engagement their way. That’s how subs like /r/soccer got off the ground, and it’s probably the only way it’ll happen on Lemmy.
Many of the subs I spent a lot of time posting on are completely dead, bar maybe a few people that contribute 90% of all posts and comments. Others simply don’t exist, and given that they were quite niche (local subs, anime subs) there’s absolutely no way that they’ll ever get noticed on Lemmy if something like pro wrestling has next to no posts/comments.
IMO, the only way this will improve is a combined effort from Lemmy instances to highlight great communities, and to drive people towards ones that are growing.
Reddit also had the ability to just type in my address bar “/r/obscurefandom” and be taken directly to the subreddit for it. Lemmy doesn’t have those smaller subs yet and you have to hunt for the right instance if it does.
I feel like there needs to be instance aggregation for Lemmy to really work in the long run (and really this is probably true of the fediverse in general). Having to add communities across multiple instances, and not being able to browse them in a centralized way, really detracts from the experience. On Reddit, I subbed to the stuff I wanted and just lived off that feed. With Lemmy, I feel like I have to stay in unfiltered view to get anything of interest–the fragmented niche communities are just too limiting.
This right here. Reddit started with very general based topics and only later did smaller niche subs take off.
Lemmy will get there. It’s just a matter of time and it’s only been a few months since the Great Reddit Migration of '23.
By this time next year, or maybe 18 months out, once instances become normalized and settled, with user tools to help find and organize them, Lemmy will then start to cause large dents in Reddit’s user base.
I see some Linux but I’m subscribed to a lot of techy communities. Self host, programming etc. So it’s kinda normal.
Could be the default view on each instance… On my first account I subbed to a lot of different communities on different instances so I saw all the crap. Eventually due to all the politics bullshit I just migrated to my current instance which has hexbear and lemmygrad blocked so it’s been a lot better.
But even so, I always see a bunch of politics crap on the memes community.
Hopefully all the different clients will soon support good blocking. With connect for android I can block instances and keywords, but I most just continually block on a community basis what I don’t want to see from All. I’m sure there are hundreds in there. This keeps it quite relevant for me but I’m still in the flow of seeing new subs. I do subscribe to all the ones I really like.
So it’s a curation process, but a more active one vs trying to hunt subs down like I used to do with Reddit.
Watched Louis Rossman today, and he’s part of the team behind a new app for watching online video content - not just youtube, but nebula, peertube, twitch and more....
I really, really suspect that the big Lemmy instances are being run by Reddit admins or spooks or some-such. They’re moderating their instances in the exact same way Reddit did minus the profiteering. The censorship is the exact same.
It’s just the reality of online content moderation. The good mods/admins are people who are passionate about a topic and want to provide a space for discussion and community building. When it comes to the “power mods” or whatever, like those we saw on reddit who moderated 100+ subs, they’re just in it to stroke their own egos.
I was an Invidious user until I found out about Libretube, and the fact that on Libretube and even on a Piped website you can login to get your subs from other instances. That is crazy useful.
I keep my subscription proxied through Piped, and I back it up when I change my subs. Also if you create an account on one of the Piped instance you get an RSS feed of your subscriptions.
I actually hope that some dev work goes into providing "premium features" for paying subscribers. Things like profile cosmetics, awards, "superlikes", gif embeds, maybe sub only communities/threads. I view all of these as perfectly acceptable premium features that folks pay for on platforms like Discord that don't deter free users. If it helps make instances sustainable and keeps high quality admin & moderation in place, I would argue it would be a big community benefit.
Another possibility is instance - as - affiliate where the admin sets up affiliate accounts with services like VPN, Amazon, a web host, etc. To enable users to buy things they would already and give a kickback to the instance.
I only filter by subbed and (to not miss) also wanna see all the tech news I can get so I will sub to multiple.
I would like a design like crossposting but instead of either or the other make it a feature.
With your feedback in my mind I’d propose this idea:
Share the discussion as a user to another community like crossposting. As a visitor/browser of the communitx it was posted on, you can now set a switch to either see all content discussed by all communities in one post (and somehow federated to all other instances) or filter by a specific one because one instance is always the toxic one.
If a mods decides it doesnt fit, he doesnt delete/take down the post but instead defederates the instance from this one post.
With that design it should combat spam posting the same post as it can’t be spoofed.
It would also respect user blocked instances.
Sort of a federated post in the fediverse.
I don’t know how that would be solved in lemmy nor the fediverse protocol but it sounds plausible as a standout feature.
Is HEVC (8-bit)/AAC a good, modern CODEC combination for rebuilding & reducing my library size without compromising quality? Helpful feedback would be appreciated.
Yes, you’re completely correct. There’s something to consider though.
CPU encoding gives the best results possible, in terms of quality and size. Decoding, unless you have a very weak CPU, isn’t necessarily the bottleneck it most transcoding applications eg plex, jellyfin, etc.
So you can do things to make the media as streamable as possible for instance encoding your media in AV1 using the mp4 container rather than mkv. If you make it web optimized aka ATOM upfront it makes playing the file much easier and less resource intensive. Now when a client that can’t use AV1 requests it your transcode can do SW decode and HW encode. Not as efficient as pure HW but IMHO it’s a worthwhile trade off for the storage space you get in return.
You can make things more efficient by disabling subtitles and/or burnin on the media server side. If you have people like myself who need subs in everything then you can burn them in while you’re encoding the media to AV1 or only using formats like UTF8 so you can pass through them as m4v/mp4 doesn’t support subs like mkv does.
That’s essentially what the optimized versions do on Plex. Only it sticks with x264 rather than AV1.
If your media is only 720p then none of this would really make a difference for you. If you’re using 1080p+ rips then this will make a SIGNIFICANT difference. It’s made such a difference that I’ve started redoing my rips in 4K.
Unless that is you got a SAN in your closet and free electricity that is…
give it time, people will come to their favorite instances with time. The best thing you can do is make your own posts to your favorite subs and cross post posts you see to other subs they fit into as well.
I do have to worry about federation of my instance mods decide to have a feud with another instance where I subscribe to subs. Also the UI is wonky for linking to different instances, like I’m never logged in when clicking on a link to a different instance. It’s just very crude right now. Plus discovery is kind of a pain, topics get spread over different instances…
It needs more memes and less edgy teenagers screaming about politics (that they clearly don’t understand and take way too seriously).
Seriously I come to websites like this to get a mix of news and humour, not get yelled at by children who advocate for totalitarian regimes to “own the libs”, I am on the verge of changing instances because lemm.ee won’t let me block all of the two offenders at once, and I have to constantly remove every bullshit new sub they create, not to mention them infesting the comments section of anything news related to scream about “libs”.
Literally they are indistinguishable from reddits T_D crowd, they act just as hateful and use the same language, they seem more concerned with “the libs” than any other political group, and they worship mass murdering dictators while being holocaust deniers / apologists. They can call themselves leftists as much as they want, all I see from them is hatred so they might as well be Trump Qanon Cultists.
When a lemmy instance federates, does it connect to one big lemmy network, or can there be multiple disconnected, yet locally federated instances? What I’d like to know is, can I simply join any Lemmy server and choose “All” to view everything Lemmy has to offer, or is there still hidden content?...
and then it will reach out to other instances to grab content from every external community that at least one local user has subscribed to
It’s the other way around. The local user subscribes to the community on the remote instance, which causes the remote instance to then push you every action that occurs on that community as it happens. The pull method is only used once and doesn’t bring in comments, it’s meant as a preview for when a remote community is used for the first time.
And this is why their content won’t make it to your instance: it expects the other instance to send it to you, but they’re refusing to. Similarly, they won’t accept content from your instance, even though it’s trying to.
Local and remote communities are pretty similar internally, federation happens as a separate process in a queue system.
This leads to this:
you can still subscribe to subs on defederated instances, it’s just the interactions that don’t get passed back and forth.
The way I think it works is that your local instance hosts its own communities, and then it will reach out to other instances to grab content from every external community that at least one local user has subscribed to. “All” mode is limited to that set of content.
So I think the only way to see the entire set of all content on lemmy would be to meticulously subscribe to every single community on every single instance.
And someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you can still subscribe to subs on defederated instances, it’s just the interactions that don’t get passed back and forth.
ive been using kodi (xbmc was better moniker) since google killed sagetv. i recall attempting plex, but it seemed to lack some open/extensibility (its been awhile)....
Because I paid for a lifetime sub like a decade ago and my parents and a few friends connect to my instance. I can’t be arsed to move myself and everybody else to a new system when this shit just works.
Hi there, I’m quite new to this digital hygiene thing. I try to avoid apps on my phone that tracks useless data for their initial purpose. How do you guys read news ? Would love a “respectful” app that doesn’t track too much data, but I’m open to any solution. Would like to browse international and french news.
NetNewsWire supports multiple methods for accounts – local, various cloud services, and self-hosted. And it is free. I highly recommend someone interested in RSS check the app out and subscribe to a few feeds.
Hosting your own FreshRSS instance is totally optional, and is absolutely a proper option for someone privacy-focused. It doesn’t have to be a big, scary monster – simple options exist, e.g., using fly.io to host FreshRSS, as someone wrote about on this blog.
Why? Are we not doing enough? (file.coffee)
by fedidb.org
those ppl... (feddit.de)
Oh no ... (jlai.lu)
A better Revanced (grayjay.app)
Watched Louis Rossman today, and he’s part of the team behind a new app for watching online video content - not just youtube, but nebula, peertube, twitch and more....
rules for thee, but not for me (lemmy.ca)
To be clear, not talking about this community, obviously 😛....
Invidious vs Piped. Which is better?
How do these work?
deleted_by_author
Is Lemmy as a platform sustainable?
I’m wondering how are all those different Lemmy instances financed? I know some rely on donations, but is that all and is that sustainable?
Forgive me, but… (lemmy.ml)
It’s my hope to see unity and cohesion is the Lemmy-verse. Looks like asklemmy@lemmy.ml has over 39k subscribers....
deleted_by_author
Library Rebuild Suggestions
Is HEVC (8-bit)/AAC a good, modern CODEC combination for rebuilding & reducing my library size without compromising quality? Helpful feedback would be appreciated.
Don't get your hopes too high (lemmy.world)
Let's decentralize the web together. (articlesgallery8543.blogspot.com)
What do you think about Lemmy, so far?
I happen to like it very much.
Skeletor is a doomer (startrek.website)
Does federation connect to a single lemmy network, or can there be multiple?
When a lemmy instance federates, does it connect to one big lemmy network, or can there be multiple disconnected, yet locally federated instances? What I’d like to know is, can I simply join any Lemmy server and choose “All” to view everything Lemmy has to offer, or is there still hidden content?...
i gotta ask... why so many plex over kodi users? (moist.catsweat.com)
ive been using kodi (xbmc was better moniker) since google killed sagetv. i recall attempting plex, but it seemed to lack some open/extensibility (its been awhile)....
Suggestions for an iOS News app (or way) that doesn't track (much) data ?
Hi there, I’m quite new to this digital hygiene thing. I try to avoid apps on my phone that tracks useless data for their initial purpose. How do you guys read news ? Would love a “respectful” app that doesn’t track too much data, but I’m open to any solution. Would like to browse international and french news.