As Reddit's enshittification reaches new heights their attempts to suppress attention for alternatives, like federated Lemmy, has the opposite effect as this Hacker News discussion shows.
Reading criticisms of Lemmy from Reddit and other platforms like HackerNews reminds me of reading criticisms of Reddit from Digg back in 2007-2010, except they're more based on architecture instead of "it looks ugly".
Now there are things that will turn away users. There's obviously a strong leftist culture here, there are less users so less content, and obviously federation is a stumbling block for many people.
But I really think that's ok similar to what people are saying in that Hacker News thread. I wouldn't want all of Reddit to come over, and I think it's better for the culture and growth here to get a self selected trickle/stream of users instead of a deluge.
I don't think Lemmy will necessarily have the same issues as Mastodon because Twitter/Mastodon requires you to know people or know accounts to follow to be useful. Lemmy just requires communities you're interested in and a critical mass of users to drive posting and engagement. We're already seeing greater activity as more users arrive
I also see it as a feature. If instances have a natural active user cap, then server-based communities can't get so big as to outpace moderation. And admins have the ability to moderate local users' behaviour on off-site sublemmies by enforcing their own codes of conduct.
The internet used to be small, but expansive. It became big, but concentrated.
I liked the former. I know many people like the latter. Those people are welcome to their corporate slums.
While it keeps the willfully ignorant out, it can also keep people with learning disabilities out. Accessibility should always be worked on. That being said, Lemmy is certainly easy to access, Even more so than Mastodon IMHO because Mastodon you have to know people whereas lemmy all you have to do is sign up for a community
Problem: organizations pushing a political or commercial agenda will train their agents to overcome modest technical hurdles. Spammers, in particular, will go to extreme lengths to overcome technical hurdles, including hiring people to solve CAPTCHAs.
That depends on what instance you create an user on. For example, Lemmygrad.ml and Lemmy.ml are not the same thing, despite both belonging to Lemmy. The issues I see are having a tankie culture, and not having more points of view.
There are less users so less content
That's something we can help with, although it's not so easy. I mean, the users that are already here, we can create more content and interact more with each other, so eventually more users will come. It can be boring and tiring, but it's not impossible.
Federation is a stumbling block for many people
That's something absolutely new for the vast majority of people. I felt myself confused the first time I joined the fediverse too. But after some time, I felt myself less confused. Some clarifications, tutorials and support can do the real trick.
I have to hope that main instances will stop federating Lemmygrad at some point. There's no place, IMO, for genocide denial/affirmation and authoritarian extremism on platforms like these. Or any platforms.
What will the next social media trend be? Seems like the centralized options are done for (FB, TW, Reddit), but they’re not being replaced by any single solutions. Tiktok took mainly genZ. Professionals have been wanting a twitter replacement to move to since musk and have yet to figure it out (bluesky, tribel, post social, takes, mastodon, etc has no apparent frontrunner). Political apps segmented some off like parler and the right stuff. Decentralized and foss apps have all kinds of solutions but won’t likely ever attract a huge crowd. So are we seeing the end of of an era of massive centralized social media?
The most disturbing thing I've seen is the evidence that Lemmy.ml is controlled by a genocide-supporting red fascist/third positionists. If that's true, its a massive issue and makes the platform hard to trust.
Very open to learning that this isn't true, if it isn't.
Yeah, but none of the Twitter people were using hashtags, and a lot of them where hyper-fixated on finding their Twitter mutuals. They were just trying pretend Mastodon was a drop-in replacement for Twitter.
They didn't want to create their own space in the new place, and they didn't want to integrate with those who were already there. They just kind of wanted to ignore the fact that anything was happening, while still, I guess, engaging in slacktivism.
It's not like there's not a strong leftist culture on reddit either so I don't really see that as a problem unique to Lemmy. If Lemmy can provide a centralized-like decentralized platform, I think it can succeed.
There isn't at all. Reddit is liberal at the very best and even then it's mostly Obama liberal, which is center right outside the most conservative parts of the world.
The leftist communities are much smaller, easily ignored, and often ridiculed in the mainstream subreddits. The gaming spaces complain about "wokeness" and criticisms of female representations among others. Thinly veiled racism and explicit transphobia abounds.
In contrast, Lemmy is full of anarchists, communists, socialists, and other anti capitalist. It has been and remains a dominantly leftist community.
The strong leftist culture is a plus. I know I'm not going to get flooded with nazi shit like so many of the prior iterations of the reddit exodus (e.g. voat).
Hilarious that a #HackerNews top voted comment on a post wrt #Reddit censoring mentions of #Lemmy effectively argues that the latter is "too geeky and hard to use" and that the former two won't be displaced because they're well known and easy to approach.
These people have ZERO self awareness. Never mind understanding about the legacy of their forums.
@osma@humanetech the same will happen with kbin, even tho its interface is hyper similar to reddit. pretty sure that's gonna be another case of "too geeky, unusable, unstable, useless, sh!tty reddit ripoff and bad".
the "useless", as one guy said (not on here) when i mentioned lemmy: "Another sh*tty reddit ripoff? Useless" is very funny
I saw a similar thread on Reddit itself. They had several sources that claimed mastodon had "failed to convert Twitter users", and therefore the fediverse was a waste of time and would never catch on.
I just chuckled because the longer they stay away, the better the fediverse will be (for me).
I think to an extent that depends on how much effort/funds the devs are willing to put in to keep sites online. Say 100k people want to come and have a look on the 12th. ~1/10 of those would create accounts, if the server falls over at 11am and stays down then only 10k people will see the site, maybe 1k sign up.
If the server is up all day then I think you'd see much larger adoption.