Half the success of Lemmy is not becoming the three ring circus of Reddit.
How long will it last? Idk. I've already seen people complaining about AI bots blowing up their instances with requests, mining for data. I've already heard complaints of bots manipulating votes on certain subs and accounts.
If that gets worse, Lemmy gets worse.
But for the time being, we're mostly just a large community of terminally online nerds doing our things and sharing amongst one another, which is what Reddit was supposed to be about.
Decentralized control is probably the biggest asset we have to fight back against these issues. Each instance host has motivation to keep their community in the best shape possible, for users and visitors.
If one instance is having struggles, you can migrate to another - and instance hosts could share tactics and information about the process of management.
Decentralization is more adaptable and brings resilience.
It is easier to compromise one instance, but it is a lot harder to compromise all of them. Meanwhile for centralized social media, if the one is compromised all is compromised.
We might eventually have to get more exclusive, or have separate "public" and "private" modes/communities, maybe like how masto handles post visibility...
I'm not sure if the open internet can ever be fully trusted, especially now with roving packs of predatory crawlers scraping for genuine human OC for their plagiarism machines.
I heard a guy at a restaurant the other day talking about someone who was "reddit famous". His party had no context for what that meant. I felt bad for that guy
It is usually pretty clear when someone is a recent “refugee”, expecting everyone else to hate Reddit as much as they do, like there’s a feud between Reddit and Lemmy. When it seems to me that most folks around here are just content to be our own little space
While that’s true. I have seen neutral places where people were resistant on trying out Lemmy in the first place. I wish they saw the full value of this place but they said they “don’t care if it’s open-source, decentralized and has good third-party apps. I haven’t heard about it before! Everyone just uses Reddit”
At least I got one guy to check out Lemm.ee a few months back.
I find there is new content but so often a lot of it is US politics based. Some other stuff does exist but its hard to filter out the stuff I don't care about at times.
Sure I can subscribe to other communities, but finding them can be difficult and searching for all is swamped by Trump and Musk.
The problem with Lemmy is that the demographic that uses it is too specific: nerdy, atheist, college educated (usually in computers) Gen X and early Millennial left-wing political hobbyists.
Like, there's a reason the one of the only specific media franchises that can sustain an active community here is Star Trek.
Nah, Reddit front pages didn't few fresh since 2021 for me, and recently it became worse by the bots posting the same post i saw 5-10 days early again.
That’s the beauty of it - it doesn’t matter, since it’s all the Threadiverse. Lemmy, Piefed, mbin, whatever else may come along. As long as they all use ActivityPub, they’re all interoperable, and people can choose whichever one suits them best. Afaik, though, Lemmy is still far and away the most popular right now
And here's a problem. Even I, pretty tech savvy user, can't keep up with all this. I look away for a moment, and you'all on a new meta already, all the old servers are bad now and all the cool kids on a new system already. I can't imagine anyone with an advanced grass-touching ability being able to keep up with all this shit.
In theory it really shouldn't matter. You choose your instance, and it's up to the instance admins to make decisions about backend software choices. It's possible that we'll get to a place there it's possible for admins to migrate a server from Lemmy to Piefed or back again without loss of content, in which case all the user would see about it would be a change of default interface.
I'm on Feddit.uk, which has several different web interfaces to choose from, and I mostly browse using a mobile app (Boost). It really makes basically no difference to me whether it's running Lemmy or Piefed.
I ditched Reddit 2 years ago and haven't been back. This is a self-solving problem: as more people use and contribute, there will be more content and engagement.
But as a heavy user of Lemmy (and previously of Reddit), there's things you can do. Chief among them is switching from the "Active" list to "Hot" when you want to see new stuff. I pretty much never run out of content, and that's without even dipping into "New"...
I remember being on reddit and complaining thr everything was political. And holy shit Lemmy is like 10x more political. Like, I get it, they are important issues. But I don't wanna see it for every single post.
Different strokes for different folks, as they say. That's precisely one of the things that I value most in social media— exposure to people and ideas outside of my day-to-day experience. I don't understand the femcel memes, or c/ich_iel, for example, but that's what makes them so fascinating. I was thinking of leaving Reddit even before the API fiasco, because the feed changed daily while not changing at all. I didn't find it valuable to see the same breaking news story posted to 15 different subreddits, nor the same "Men of Reddit: Do you pee through the underwear flap, or over the waistband?" question posted (literally! I watched and counted one day!) every 5 minutes. I didn't replace Reddit with Lemmy, I just stopped using the former when Apollo stopped working. Lemmy drew me in over the course of a couple of months. It's quiet, but you can have conversations instead of shouting into the void.
I see a lot of yard-sticking with Reddit, and frequent comparisons are 1) more of Reddit should migrate here and 2) not enough content is generated in Lemmy. These are both confusing to me. Anyone else?
Reddit is a cesspool. Its users are often toxic. Administration and moderation is burdensome. With self-hosted and decentral-hosted Lemmy instances, why would we want more of Reddit to come here? Other than the philosopher king meme, I don't feel the urge to bring R. communities and users to L. Separation is good, no?
Content follows users. Users follow content. Lemmy has less content. Fewer social games and participants who are seeking a dopamine relationship with the internet. If you come to Lemmy seeking dopamine fandom, you will be disappointed (narwhal bacon and my axe this amirite lol). That shite is generally absent, and users aren't constantly jerking themselves off to get a spicy comment in for votes. This is good, no?
I guess I don't understand the attraction to Reddit, or the urge to think of Lemmy as a replacement. It is similar, but shouldn't it be different? If it isn't different, defederated or no, won't it eventually slide into toxicity? I understand why people like things about Reddit, but... There's Reddit for that. This doesn't have to be that.
Thinking of two groceries: one is a little odd spot that is run by an eclectic family, has some stuff you want, some odd German snacks you don't understand. It's cool, but it doesn't have everything.
The other is a giant stucco nightmare warehouse that mostly sells deep fried heroin and also ten extremely useful things. It's run by absolute creeps, and the customers are standing uncomfortably close, and being uncomfortably irritating. Maybe one of them is waiting to follow you home because they didn't like what you bought.
Does the community want to put a sign out front to woo those people over? Does Lemmy perish without them? I'm relatively new here, but my own answer to both is no. IMO, Lemmy does not need to be an engagement addiction machine, and the people who want that might just really be wanting Reddit deep down.
Sorry for the diatribe! I tend to like that it's kinda sleepy here and often more authentic. I like seeing what Germany is doing on a memie wemie from time to time. I've got other shit to do beyond my phone, and don't want to have a pack of digital ultra nicotine with me at all times. Peace, homies.
A social network needs enough users to actually function. In the early days, Lemmy/kbin/associates were too quiet to be appealing, so there was a constant push to bring in new users. As this is a Reddit clone social network, inevitably that means hoping that Reddit users will come across.
I would argue that Lemmy et al is already at a high enough number of active users that there's a basic critical mass; that there's enough activity here such that a new user would find plenty to keep them engaged. It could certainly stand to be much bigger still, but the pressure to grow is much less intense.
There's a formula I'm confident we could come up with that focuses on the amount of users you have, how shitty your userbase is and how fresh/niche/true your content is.
Lemmy is on one end, decent userbase, not so fresh, mid content. Reddit is massive, shitty and riddled with bad actors and poor information but offers more niche and fresh content
It's shutting down, but the fediverse is healing around it. Piefed.social has seen a huge influx, and people are moving accounts slowly but surely.
Lemm.ee shutting down isn't ideal from a service stand point, but it is showing how robust the fediverse is. It's acting like the internet used to, routing around damage to continue to work. That's amazing, and hopeful.
My Lemmy experience has been better than Reddit ever was, but that honestly sounds like cope. Vast swaths of people couldn't even be bothered to figure out an instance to pick, now the few that bothered are having to migrate. I think this will be a big net loss for Lemmy.
I'd even say that this illustrates the success even more...
lemm.ee shuts down, iirc, because it took too much time and effort to run the instance. Not really a sign of inactivity.
the platform keeps going! The whole idea of a federated network works, as a single instance going down doesn't impact other ones. As it happened before, see e.g. feddit.de.
So Lemmy as a whole is alive and healthy - and successful.
Yes, in many ways lemm.ee shutting down is a great example of the intention of a federated network at work, but it is also somewhat of a cautionary tale when it comes to centralisation. Ideally the load would be spread as such that any single instance shutting down would be reasonably painless to adjust for. There were already too many users and communities on .ee, really. Imagine what a disaster .world shutting down would be in the current state of things.
there isnt enough porn on Lemmy. and despite that there isn't enough porn, theres like 100 specialized sites for specific body parts, with very low activity and the same person posting everything