I think the platform is now just a playground for AIs and has integrated lots of ways to make money (prenium subscription, NFT, way too many ads for my taste).
What really made me take the plunge was Reddit's interface. Seriously, go to the website, what's with the attrocity? It's like Fandom but as a social network?
Now why am I on Lemmy? Because in my opinion, it's the first step towards a mainstream Fedivers! Mastodon, Peertube and Pixelfed aren't very widespread, but when you see the number of people active in Lemmy communities, it's really impressive! It's also free and Open Source which is always great, but also as open as possible, I mean, Reddit killed Apollo on iOS, I can now have lots of apps on my iPhone with Lemmy!
Now what do I expect from Lemmy. For this universe of instances to grow, but also to add a bit of personality to the platform! Do a bit of Reddit and add customization options for each community, like on the Minecraft Subreddit of old Reddit that I've always smiled at.
I deleted my reddit when they backstabbed their 3rd party app devs. Came to Lemmy around the same time - have had no reason to look back. You'll love it here!
For this universe of instances to grow, but also to add a bit of personality to the platform! Do a bit of Reddit and add customization options for each community, like on the Minecraft Subreddit of old Reddit that I've always smiled at.
For sure! We don't talk enough about how much customization there is for Lemmy. There is a wide variety of mobile apps that do things in different ways, and userscripts/userstyles to customize the desktop interface. A lot of instances are also running multiple frontends, each maintained by a different dev or team.
If you're on mobile, there's a ton of apps to choose from at https://join-lemmy.org/apps , or if PWAs are more your thing, your instance has the Voyager/Mlmym interface setup at https://m.lemmy.world/
Finding communities used to be difficult, but it should be straightforward now just from the search, seeing as it is the largest instance.
Now why am I on Lemmy? Because in my opinion, it's the first step towards a mainstream Fedivers! Mastodon ... [isn't] very widespread, but when you see the number of people active in Lemmy communities, it's really impressive!
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Mastodon has an order of magnitude more active users than Lemmy - and the whole rest of the Fediverse - if not two orders of magnitude.
Lemmy's a great platform, but Reddit is already the niche social media site among the mainstream, and the kind if niche interest forums that ultimately built Reddit just haven't reached critical mass here yet, and that means Reddit remains very sticky. Pile on people being kind of uncomfortable with the local namespaces for both users and communities, and I don't know that Lemmy's really the killer platform for the 'verse.
Fediverse adotion is going to be a collective effort. Loops has a good chance of attracting people. It would be nice if Mastodon would actually use a standard ActivityPub implementation so it played nicer with neighbours. And microblogger discovering something other than Mastodon would be nice.
But it's not going to be just one platform. If it is, then the fediverse idea has totally failed.
I've recently gone back to using reddit regularly because it's the only place with sensible news, lemmy is such a bubble it's a terrible place to get opinions and ideas from.
Eh, anything linked on Reddit has it's own link on here in regards to News. I get news from multiple sources offline and on so putting up with Reddit's negative aspects isn't worth it for me. I also enjoy the discourse on here a lot more, Reddit responses seem more of a "bubble" than the entire Lemmy community you're labeling.
I'll share 2 semi-recent posts I read as an example of why I'm on here instead of Reddit. Btw, both of these posts are about the same BBC article but obviously paint a completely different picture.
This shit is extremely weird and happens all over. For some reason sailors are just absolutely not allowed off their shitty falling apart ships and have to stay on board even after the owners vanish and leave them hanging in the wind. There are sailors trapped in this situation in ports all over the world - the ships are too damaged to sail, or the owners vanished without paying port fees and the ship is impounded, or whatever. Weird shit. And all these sailors, mostly from global south countries, are trapped. The country they’re stuck in won’t let them off the ship, they have no way to pay for port fees or fuel and sometimes even food or water. It’s utterly fucking bizarre. I don’t think it’s a large number of ships in absolute terms, but it is common in the sense that at least a few ships are trapped in this limbo all the time. There’s this whole world of ultra-shady shipping with ships that are registered in sketchy tax haven countries, or have no registration, and they get abandoned all the time. And sailors in general just get treated like shit. A lot of sailors come from poor global south countries and get treated as disposable. Terrible conditions, bad or no support from the ship owners, if something goes wrong they can be stranded and totally fucked. It’s a mess, like a serious problem for workers. @Frank@hexbear.net
the FBI still has their seized phones and shit, so not only are they stuck on a damaged ship they might be unable to reach out to family and friends (not sure what the communication/internet situation is on a ship like that). @nat_turner_overdrive@hexbear.net
If you think this is wild you should read some stories about stowaways. I know a guy who sailed with a dude who had been a stowaway on danish ships for a couple decades, and that was a nice story. A lot of the stowaways get tortured and/or killed and then dumped in international waters. A stowaway is any person who is not on the ships’ manifest. Lot of refugees that just… disappear.
Stowaways can be made to work while they’re on your ship, though you have to provide them lodgings and food. There’s a lot of people who get found on ships, are made to work and then are unable to leave the ship because no country will take them. Then they’re just stuck there forever. @Egon@hexbear.net
How the fuck is “you have to let people on cargo ships into your country at least temporarily” not in any of the treaties we have regarding international shipping? @ClimateChangeAnxiety@hexbear.net
I just don't have the time to read through 1300 joke comments to get to the 30 or so of actual discussions I'm interested in. The fact that the top comments are just arguing over terminology semantics used in a title (and not the conditions or situation these people were forced into) isn't something I wish to waste my time on.
If lemmy.ml gets to be like Reddit, I just have to move to a smaller instance and I'm done.
I completely agree. Every so often I get an itch to have a look at Reddit, and though the niche subs still seem alright, the comments of anything near the front page are beleaguered with low-quality jokes and karma grabs.
God forbid you're actually interested in discussing the subject, any comment that takes more than a few seconds to write or read gets buried under a thousand others like your first examples.
A lot of what you list, particularly the bot playground, are reasons I hated Reddit. What I really hated was that people just spammed a bunch of rote responses and these guys
Lemmy is great, but it takes a while to figure out
I mean, you just have to check out my profile to see that I did.
Unfortunately I travel for work, when I'm home I don't have much time to create worthwhile content, so at most I can contribute a few pictures of prints.
Seconding this @Damage@fedd.it Lemmy has really shown me this first-hand multiple times. For example !connectasong@lemmy.world started out with a few regular posters but then there was couple mo th period where we all seemingly forgot. Once I remembered I went back and decided to just connect songs with my self each day until it came back. Turned out it worked in under a week.
But it can also take time. I made my own community was the only poster there for months, posting maybe average once per week. Subscribers trickled in slowly and then I found its subscirbers growing exponentially and now others contribute.
Remember, people are abandoning reddit slowly all the time, it's not all grand exoduses, I see it as building a relatively active community for future users to find. !fedigrow@lemm.ee was recently created for more discussion in this area.
Welcome and enjoy your stay. Here are a lot of communities with similar interests, but still a bit less content. It's growing however. I sadly still visit Reddit too often, but I always open Lemmy Connect app first.
I hate the ever growing hidden ads on Reddit. I spot them daily now. Threads created to clearly sell you a product or software, with astroturf comments "wow this is freaking amazing. I'm downloading it right now." sure you enjoyed this okayish post so much and it totally doesn't sound obvious, that there are 10 more comments in this 15 comments thread, all saying the same. Or this unnatural amount of votes. 🤢🤮