Lemmy is slowly getting better
Lemmy is slowly getting better
Just a little rant. When I first visited Lemmy Sites a couple of months ago it felt empty. Besides the really mainstream community pretty much everything else just felt empty.
Meanwhile though traffic has increased a lot and I feel well entertained by the traffic in c/hfy c/noncredibledefence c/keepwriting c/worldbuilding and so on. It is certainly less than Reddit but often quality is substancially higher and is "enough" to keep me entertained.
Also I like that you can actually post something without running into a bazillion deletes, bans and moderator shitshat because your post was two words to short, not NCD enough and so on.
Sure, the C64 community on Lemmy is laughable. So is the ARMA community. I still use REddit for that. Also I often check up stuff on r/hfy and r/NCD but since one week I have been prefering Lemmy for that.
Also my longer posts don't get eaten up any more. God, three weeks ago most posts with 3k an more just got lost without feed back. Nowadays I have even manges posts around 20k without breaking them up. Though the editor is still lacking for longer posts. On Reddit I can copy-paste pretty much anything from Libreoffice into Reddits Editor (which is also pretty lacking but differently lacking). On Lemmy I have to run most text through a little perl script to get them even using correct line breaks perl -pe 's/\n/\n\n/' and different sizes for Headlines are much to few to select from.
Not perfect, not even very good but definitely promising.
Please for anyone reading, just be patient. Keep posting and commenting and it WILL grow. There are only like 1.2 million Lemmy users versus hundreds of millions of redditors.
If you follow the 90-9-1 rule, that leaves very few actual contributors and still Lemmy has a lot of good content daily. Just be patient and it will come.
Maybe someone here already said this but if you find a community with not a lot of traffic here, make sure to post in it. Others might go looking for it and find nothing, just like you did. Perpetual cycle of I see nothing, I leave. If someone's active, maybe someone else will be active with you. And then two turns to four to 8 and so on. Even if it feels like you're screaming into the void, keep screaming. The void is infinite and someone's bound to hear you eventually.
I don't understand the "slowly" part at all. I joined Lemmy about a month ago when Reddit third party apps went dark. Lemmy was largely a ghost town then, with most of the relatively mainstream communities I sought out having newest posts that were days or even weeks old. That desolation was gone after the first few days, with a ton more engagement from others who migrated over and a steady stream of new content. The communities I frequent have grown by leaps and bounds since then. "Slow" isn't a word I'd use to describe Lemmy's growth.
Not to sound like a jerk but I don't understand what most people expected. All new sites start slow. Facebook was slow at the beginning. Reddit too. It's not like they had millions of users and subs day one. We have the responsibility to build up this community. We want a site like Reddit but without the u/spez crap. So we better start building it up and complain less. Criticism is ok but saying "it's slower than Reddit" is kinda useless and obvious.
I reckon after all is said and done, the biggest issue I had with Reddit is that people felt they had to be heard. Like, we just needed to know that you also thought that certain thing (“came here to say this”) or that you are morally superior to everyone else (“oh but I don’t do it that way OP”). It’s 90% of the reason the content on Reddit had deteriorated, because people crave the attention, and thus the imaginary number going up.
Now I’m not saying Lemmy is different. In fact, I fully expect it to go the same way. But right now, there are far fewer people here who just have to give their opinion (I see the irony), and therefore less shit to wade through to get to actually good content.
As an example, look at the top comment on any default sub post on Reddit. It will have heaps and heaps of replies that are just valueless crap. This is what makes Reddit seem “faster” than Lemmy. The reality is that most of it is fluff, most of it is irrelevant to you.
I'm regularly seeing hundreds of comments on posts now and only a month ago it was rare to see a dozen comments on a post. I really don't need more engagement on a post, that's plenty. Lemmy still needs more users to sustain more niche communities, but in the places that people are it's already great.
As of this last month, Lemmy is my new “go to” for scrolling social media. My Reddit usage is probably 20% or less of what it used to be.
A part of this was Voyager’s Progressive Web App (https://vger.app), it made me feel right at home after Apollo shut down.
haha it's funny i felt the opposite - when i got here at the beginning of the 'exodus' i already felt like Lemmy was a small but thriving little community that i enjoyed much more than reddit.
not sure why some want it to be just like reddit but the fediverse. i don't and i'm glad it's a smaller bunch of people and hope it stays that way.
I'm hating all the Reddit spillover commenters that take the internet way too fucking seriously. They were easily the worst part of Reddit.
When I first seeked asylum here, people were being sarcastic in the comments and everyone knew, dark humour was being pushed, and there were no Well Actually Guys around. Now there's a big uptick in petty "discussions", know-it-alls, and those losers that break your comment up gaslit straw man style, to just put words in your mouth to try make you look like an asshole.
I'm hating all the Reddit spillover commenters that take the internet way too fucking seriously.
Says the person ranting about Reddit users destroying Lemmy. Maybe you're part of your own problem.
They were easily the worst part of Reddit.
That would be /u/spez, but okay, bro.
When I first seeked asylum here, people were being sarcastic in the comments and everyone knew, dark humour was being pushed, and there were no Well Actually Guys around.
First of all, it's not your internet. Not everyone is as "intelligent" as you think you are and sarcasm is actually hard to detect in text.
Second of all, not everyone appreciates dark humour because it can be very.offensive, just like using derogatory terms like "Well Actually Guy". If you want people on Lemmy, you need to make it a safe space for all.
Also, your account is only 5 weeks old.
Now there's a big uptick in petty "discussions"
So, now you're just anti-discourse? How is Lemmy meant to grow if comment section are empty, you bigot?
know-it-alls
Again, derogatory.
and those losers that break your comment up gaslit straw man style, to just put words in your mouth to try make you look like an asshole.
Oh, shit.
Is anyone else having trouble with the "show context" button? When someone replies to you, it only shows what they said. When you click "show context", it.... only shows what they said. The only way to see what you said is to copy their reply and "show rest of comments" and then search for it - that is if it isn't on an instance that hides replies after the second level.
Best thing is, lemmy is open source. You can submit your feedback and code to the devs.
old.lemmy.world is a God send, haven't been back to reddit since!
Enough of the subreddits I enjoyed are here in some variation, enough so I haven't been to Reddit in weeks. I'm fine with that.
I've only seen one thread which felt completely like Reddit. The community was for the alien comics, and the comics were taking a dig at imperial units vs metric units. Nothing wrong with that, it was all in good fun and jest.
The comments though were toxic frankly. If you said you liked both systems and provided reasons, you were buried in downvotes. If you discussed some upsides of the imperial system, you were ridiculed to be a child. Even if you were an engineer and you provided a lengthy explanation, it was met with derision. And then there were all the logically inconsistent arguments and the notion that Americans were simultaneously idiots but also apparently complete geniuses with how complex they made the imperial system out to be.
I'm thankful it was just the one thread. All of the politics threads I've viewed have been more civil and open to discussion (and I consume a fair bit of political news). Lemmy, until that thread, felt like a place where nuanced opinions and discussions were encouraged and upvoted. I hope it's just a one off.
I have to disagree about Lemmy not being very good. It is, IMHO, already very good indeed. It will only improve with time.
Well, a couple months ago there were nice reddit apps. If it weren't for that, lemmy would probably still be a ghost town. Now that being said, I'm happy I'm here and will continue to contribute and I'm so happy that I was able to get the username I did!
Remember when all the discussions were happening in just a couple top posts, mostly meta posts? We've come a long way for sure and I'm proud of everyone.
I feel like I'm stuck between two times periods.
To me it feels like reddit 10/12 years ago when still was pretty niche and a meme could take the entire plataform for a week, the Atheist memes are also a blast to the past.
I've been noticing the same thing.
It's been impressive how good lemmy has gotten in such a short time.
At this rate, Lemmy will be good as Reddit in less than 5 years.
I find that I can fill in the gap for a lot of dead Lemmy communities by following hashtags on mastodon but it doesn’t have the same level of engagement as niche Reddit communities
Yeah, Lemmy can in some part fill that void reddit left for me, but It's going to be tough for it to be mainstream. The thing that makes Lemmy in my opinion still niche is that subreddits centered and endorsed by popular franchises haven't migrated and I doubt they do it anytime soon. Maybe some day, but I'm not holding my breath.
It genuinely is getting better. I like the kind of garage rebel feel of it, pretty fun- really reminds me of reddit's early days, but all good things must come to an end, and even if Lemmy does take off, it will meet the same fate inevitably.