Let's discuss how to efficiently promote Lemmy to potential new joiners
Let's discuss how to efficiently promote Lemmy to potential new joiners
To follow-up on the Reddit thread yesterday, here are a few elements that can be interesting to discuss.
Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy
Just quoting "Lemmy" or pointing to join-lemmy.org can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance. Recent post by a new joiner 9 days ago, they had to change server 2 times to get a satisfying experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536.
Using something like
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions"
Can already point them in one direction, and avoid them getting lost in the too many options.
If people want to debate the choice of those two instances, I'll add my thought process in the comments.
The Lemmy feed looks as depressing as Reddit's All, and how to mitigate that
Some feedback I received when promoting Lemmy the way above
Just checked out lemmy to see if it’s different from reddit. Im very disappointed lmao.
First post I see is a comic about cultural appropriation with an ifunny watermark. Next are several posts about the proton vpn ceo “going full maga.” And finally a post I saw on Reddit days ago that is ragebait making fun of the cybertruck.
Yikes. It’s the same exact thing.
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Lemmy still has a pretty obnoxious tankie problem. Even if you block the .ml instance, pretty much every thread about US politics or world news on any major instance gets hijacked by the same handful of trolls and their associated vote bots. Hopefully this will become less of a problem as more sane people join, but just as a word of caution, be aware that you will be called western imperialist scum by a bunch of 14 year olds.
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Lemmy is utter rubbish, it's as if their entire userbase consists of the top layer of scum carefully siphoned off from the Reddit cesspool. It got the worst of the annoying political echo chamber and "very smart" argumentative users from Reddit.
I just clicked on half a dozen random Lemmy servers, and all of them had at least one link about Trump in the top 5 posts. Even ones that seem like they're supposed to be about tech.
Normal humans want the Reddit of 10+ years ago back. We don't want to use a different site colonized by the same modern day Redditors we loathe interacting with.
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To be fair, you can't say they're wrong. Open https://discuss.online/ , by default you'll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.
What I try to do in such instances is to give something like
"While politics are important, you can still very much block them. Here are an example of some communities that can interest you:
- https://discuss.online/c/casualconversation@lemm.ee
- https://discuss.online/c/foodporn@lemmy.world
- https://discuss.online/c/superbowl@lemmy.world
- https://discuss.online/c/patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
- https://discuss.online/post/15026558 for 20 non-political communities"
I also wrote a long post about that issue that you can read here https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/
As a side note, I recently started a discussion on !fedigrow@lemm.ee about a potential political-free instance for new joiners, feel free to have a look: https://feddit.org/post/6819084
Lemmy is too small, 42k monthly active users is nothing
Discuit, the centralized alternative to Reddit, currently counts 181 weekly active commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/NlAdOWAp
You can also mention that NodeBB is now federating with Lemmy:
- https://feddit.org/post/7035166?scrollToComments=true
- https://community.nodebb.org/topic/71fe3f89-361c-4716-a79e-de02f94b3113/test-from-lemmy-to-nodebb
That's all for now, happy to discuss in the comments.
Note: if you're not interested in promoting Lemmy, feel free to hide this post, you are able to do this on specific posts if your instance is running 0.19.4 and newer
Unfortunately, everyone of your quoted feedback is spot on. Lemmy got the worst of reddit's political echo chamber combined with the "I am so smart" crowd. To make Lemmy barely tolerable, I've had to filter far too many words and block far too many communities. Most people aren't going to jump through hoops to make a platform usable.
Honestly, there needs to be a setting for lemmy admins to specify the default comms displayed to not-logged and new users. Just the firehose of the /all or local is not particularly attractive to most people.
EDIT: Went ahead and opened a feature request
Some personal thoughts:
about the content when you first open lemmy: I joined reddit some time around 2015 and it was not exactly the most welcoming experience with the type of content you see by default either. Still, I had seen smaller communities with cool content and I joined anyway and just learned to use it enough to tailor my feed. Lemmy becomes much nicer after awhile of hanging out and discovering new and cool communities!
In my personal opinion the "Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy" part is the most important. Fediverse IS confusing when you check it out the first time. It took me awhile to make an account because people kept telling to choose an instance that fits you. I know it sounds stupid but it really kept me away from making an account for awhile.
I instance-hopped a couple of times because I joined smaller instances (the recommendation everyone gives you) that then disappeared / were abandoned by the admin. That was not a very nice experience. I know lemmy.world is too big, but honestly it is a very easy and nice starting point to lemmyverse (so is sopuli!).
Also: really appreciate the effort you are putting into growing lemmy, Blaze!
Thought process about discuss.online and sopuli as recommendations
There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/)
- Lemmy.world is too big
- Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )
- sh.itjust.works names contains "shit", which can deter users: https://feddit.org/post/4255611/2825351
- lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric
- feddit.org, is German-centric (sidebar in German first, Matrix chat is in German, meta community is in German)
- dbzer0 federates hexbear
- programming.dev is topic-centric
- blahaj is queer-focused
- discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
- lemmy.sdf.org does not defederate anyone
- lemmy.zip is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad
- beehaw is way outdated
- infosec.pub is topic-centric
- aussie.zone is country-centric
- midwest.social is region-centric
I ended up with discuss.online and sopuli.xyz as they have
- neutral names
- long running history
- good downtime
- active admins
- defederate hexbear and lemmygrad
If people have other suggestions, feel free
Single topic forums are still doing ok out there on the wider Internet. Create more well moderated, single-topic, federated forums, and then promote those specifically to users who care about those topics.
Don't sell Lemmy to end users. Lemmy is a solution for admins. Sell the specific websites to end users.
I've noticed that people forgot how long ago the Reddit blackout was (about 19 months ago?), and Lemmy has improved a lot since then. Back then Lemmy was like pre-alpha, super buggy, and servers were very unstable. And we have way more 3rd party apps/frontends now.
To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong. Open https://discuss.online , by default you’ll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.
The fact that they (or you) complain about the "All" timeline having the same stuff in all servers shows they have no idea what they're talking about: that's the entire point of an All feed! (plusminus stuff like defederation). It would make more sense to compare the Local feed of instances, IMO.
Besides, the default sorts are active and popularity nowadays, so it only makes sense that stuff that we care about and have to have words with, takes the forefront. If you want to solve that the solution is not "let's ignore what's going on around the world", it's "post more cats" and "post more ich_iel". Or just use the Scaled sort, I don't understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.
And that's right there with the complaint about the 42k users too. The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about. Complaining that for the next people to come in "I'm going to be called a westerner imperialist" is delicious hypocrisy on not noticing how indoctrinated they are.
Shoutout to lemmy.zip, y'all are a great instance!
A thought that just hit me in the shower.
I don't feel like lemmy is too small. It quite comfortably fills all my lazing on aggregator time without getting stale. The thing is, like many here, I'm a libertarian leftist politics nerd that's into linux and self hosting.
That description describes a sizeable chunk of this project's userbase so enough content is being posted enough to saturate the feed.
If you want the project to expand into other niches, you will have to post into the void about whatever you're into. Seed forums with TV shows or photography or hiking or warhammer or whatever you're into and encourage others to do the same.
All forums are dead at first but if you want people to come and talk about pottery, you're going to have to make that forum cozy before it gets enough interaction to become self sustaining.
The thing I hate worst about Lemmy is that a lot of people are dickheads about their opinion, which often is barely different from the persons' opinions you see them aggressively shitting on. In other cases the opinions are pretty different but start with the same basic premise, yet some users see no common ground at all. It's become really disheartening honestly. There are probably more than 30 users like that which I had to block for my own sanity
I think one of the biggest barriers of the fediverse is decision paralysis.
So stop looking around! Go to https://lemmy.world/ and join :)
If you want to expend extra time, there are more servers and you can join a different one, if you are undecisive join the one above :)
The youngest couple generations don't really do writing (or reading) they watch videos to learn things. Pixelfed.org just pushed Lemmy onto fourth place.
Promotion of Lemmy should be to millennials and older, say.
I’m very new to the fediverse but I am trying to learn what exactly I am doing. I joined lemmy through a link my relative sent me and somehow I did not get to select an instance, it seemingly auto-assigned me to lemmy.cafe. Which, tbh it’s working out I think, but what did I do for this to have happened? I’m also on pixelfed and am awaiting an email from loops. Meta is too frightening to stay, I deleted TikTok and Reddit. I just long for the community I felt in those places.
The best promotion is to be awesome.
>Lemmy, is awesome (y/n)?: _y
Just my opinion: No need to focus on reddit. The world is not focused by that platform, and there are other people on the Internet.
To attract an audience, you need exactly to attract an audience. Add indexing by search engines, Add SEO optimization for lemmy-ui, etc. People can find interesting instances exactly in google search after that without any provisioning. That's why web search engines be created.
Prevent opinion downvoting by disabling downvotes globally.
50 upvotes, 90 downvotes, that's not problematic at all, but there is the huge total score of -40 in this case that could lead to the deletion of the post or comment.
By the way: My instance is one of the few with downvotes disabled. So, if you want to give me feedback on this, I can only see comments...
Opinion downvoting was the most toxic feature of Reddit and led to perfect echo chambers. We should have left it there.
To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong.
Most of them are. Some of them are even plain old factually wrong, not just condescending or exaggerating.
It's important to understand that many of these instances were raised by people who didn't like reddit's widespread US-defaultism (including people claiming reddit is left-of-center because it swings Democrat) and its tolerance of bigots and trolls. Now if someone wants to set up their own instances to clone reddit and keep all the bad parts, sure, all we can really do is ignore them or get ignored by them. But when those people complain that this is "a bunch of 14 year olds" with "vote bots" or a "political echo chamber", that's just plain old ignorant, or shocked that they're suddenly in a place with a different culture and struggling to believe it's mostly just normal nerdy people like reddit is.
Content is King. You can have a good chunk of people that manage to go through the UX issues, they will still leave if they don't find what they want. The mirror bots (alien.top, lemmit.online) were meant to help with that, but the people here would rather complain about the post volume instead of learning how to follow only the subscribed communities.
Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.
A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third. My proposal to separate user/local instances from topic-based instances has been rejected here, even after I offered to put them under the governance of a wider admin group.
Now, I'm tired of this culture and small thinking. Fine if you want to be proselytizing and convincing people "at retail", but this will not be nearly as impactful if we had a dozen people who had the courage to setup a Lemmy instance with Fediverser.
Yep, lemmy definitely has a problem with too much politics.
I propose that no post should include the head or face of any politician. Seeing a politician typically ruins your day. Best to either keep politics abstract (memes) or not do that at all.
Oh, yeah. It's still ongoing. You can track the progress at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/api/alpha/routes.py if you like. At the bottom of that page, things with a 'Stage 1' are what's left to do.
The remaining stuff is mostly to do with chat / notifications. Once done, a basic app could be released, and then improved to include stuff that's missing (things like uploading an image to post or a comment, and viewing reports)
EDIT: sorry, this was meant to be a reply to another comment. Still getting the hang of NodeBB. Now will this edit work ...
Promote Mbin. The only bad thing it has going for it is that it cannot block entire instances, which is odd because one would think blocking domains would do this. It also has a number of pet peeves, but none I've found to be as bad.
Or just link to this: https://jointhefediverse.net/
I had to read your title three times before I realised you weren't trying to convince carpenters to join
Make the notion of different servers only visible to power users. It has an negative effect on tech illiterate gen z people who assume everything is as easy as signing up somewhere and getting guided by tbe algorithm.
Also the discovery of content needs to somehow be possible to make it all come together in one feed without having to go through different servers. I think maybe it gives the impression that users are missing out on content, while on platforms like Reddit everything is quite "centralised" (ow no xD).
This link doesn't work. There's only 3 communities for patientgamers: world, shitjustworks, and ml
Rule. Clickbait or meaningful?
Two thoughts:
- I'm subscribed to 160 communities, most very small, but see interesting stuff due to the Scaled option - also deliberately avoid the big news communities. Evidently, it takes time to join 160 small cs, so to get started it could be handy to have an all/local except list, and remove the biggest news /memes unless people tick a box saying they like such. Or make an algorithm that prioritises stuff related to what I upvote (which is how other social sites seem to get people started - e.g. i just tried rednote and it quickly learned i like mountains and trains) - but i guess that's hard to implement as each instance would need to work out 'related to'.
- 2nd point - there are other user-interfaces - I'm using Alexandrite which has a better layout than lemmy default, but how to make this easier (instructions suggest docker, how many casual users will do that ...)?