I have both Lemmy and reddit.
The front page on Lemmy changes every week.
On reddit it changes daily.
The only new posts I see best the end of the day on Lemmy are all in German.
Don’t get me wrong, Lemmy is great, but it’s got a LONG way to crawl to get to reddit’s level of success.
I only have Lemmy but I consume way less social media since that’s all I have… Which is a good thing.
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 don’t mind the fact that Lemmy changes at a slower pace. Gives me less to scroll through
Reddit is people reposting stuff from Twitter, so what you are saying is that we need to repost more stuff from Twitter.
We do the EXACT same thing here already.
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.
Oh, and let’s not forget thr .ml users…
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.
For me, Lemmy is far more successful.
Bit of a community question on the OP theme:
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?
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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?
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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
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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.
As evident with the owner of X trying to pressure Steve Huffman to burn down Reddit as well.
terminally online nerds
I am offended and in agreement
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.
Private communities will be in 1.0, along with some other visibility modes.
Legendary.
I doubt they’re crawling stuff over AP, you usually need a HTTP signature for that, and no bot is going to bother with those.
Most crawling would just be spamming the web interface.
If by HTTP signature you mean an SSL certificate signed by an authority, those do not present a burden for bots to obtain any longer.
I do not, ActivityPub uses HTTP signatures to make sure messages and requests from other servers are legit,
Essentially, it adds a “signature” header which contains a link to a users public key, a list of headers in the message and a signed hash of all the headers and the request.
There’s a better explaination here: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/spec/security/
A delicated bot to scrape ActivityPub posts is possible, but generic bots shouldn’t work. If a delicated bot is made, people can block its keys or server anyway.
Signatures are only used to deliver activities to inboxes. The Activitypub json data of posts is usually available without any auth.
A lot of servers require signatures on GET requests as well, for private posts and to block specific people/servers.
Sorry, forgot to whom I was speaking.
Why mine for data when you can just set up your own instance?
To me, one of the really big issues with Reddit is moderators/admins on power trips who randomly ban users for no clear reason.
Sadly, this is very much an issue on Lemmy too. Just read a post about some dude who got banned from some community for downvoting the wrong post.
But at least you can always create a new account on a different instance.
The main problem with Lemmy, is I see the same 20-50 posts for 3-4 days until there is a new front page…
I fucking hate Reddit, but the front-page is always fresh, so I always end up going back…
Sorting by top day and hiding read posts gives me more than enough “fresh content.” If you’re craving more, maybe that’s just the Reddit addiction.
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.
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.
It helps if you block all those communities you don’t care about. Or even block some instances.
Sometimes you don’t want to completely block them though, just see something else right now
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.
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
Be the change that you want to see
Is it really though?
Yes. We don’t need millions of users to be successful. We come on here for a reason, we enjoy it. And to me that’s all that’s needed for success.
I still wouldn’t mind 100k monthly active users, or even 75k.
That should mean one additional active poster on all the community where I’m alone, and that would be cool
I come here because I am fairly positive most are actual humans. A lot of the real idiots on reddit are bots looking to increase engagement.
People really do seem much more down to earth and talkative here.
I would agree with the second half. I see a lot of insane takes on economics that are driven by hopes and dreams rather than reality.
The real advantage is I suspect if I reach out to an instance owner about problematic material on their instance they will address it whereas Reddit has gone out of theor way to make it harder to let reddit know about problematic material eg non-consensual sexual materials.
Yup!
I really dislike the notion that every website needs to aim to gather everyone on the internet to it - one platform to rule them all.
Can’t we just have lots of smaller sites that have their own communities, cultures, and histories?
Some people made reddit their identity and anything that threatens it scares them.
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
Redditors really do embarrass themselves often.
I throw lemmy into the discussion like we matter with zero explanation.
“BROS, DID YOU GUYS SEE THAT SHIT THAT BLEW UP LEMMY AND REDDIT?!”
no, what was it?
haven’t heard, do tell!
In my friend group that might work but my family, not so much.
What’s sad is there’s people here that still make reddit their identity.
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
why would they throw all those beans away?!
In exchange for jeans (on Taylor Swift’s jet?) of course:-)
Is it still Lemmy, or is PieFed close to overtaking?
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
most posts on the piefed feed are posted by lemmings so nahh
but we can be successful collectively ;)
but we can be successful collectively ;)
that’s the spirit!
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.
It shouldn’t, and yet. When I joined, I spent non zero amount of time choosing an instance. Then one of the instances I chose shut sown. The second one defederated from a bunch of others and now I couldn’t read any comments because if the thread contains a comment from defederated instance the whole thread disappears. Then I moved to .world and then discovered the reason all those instances got defederated so I switched again, and now one of my instances is very slow because money run out, and now there is a new kid on the block so inevitably I will have to move again at some point.
Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in all this Fediverse thing, but boy does it make it hard to do sometimes
Either way, it is successful.
…same-same
Has anyone come up with a name for the corner of the Fediverse that includes Lemmy, mbin, and PieFed?
Yes, “threadiverse”
Collectively, they’re part of the Threadiverse, which is a subset of the Fediverse that focuses on threaded content. Technically, though, Mbin is not strictly a part of the Threadiverse, as it also allows microblogging.
The c’s? (for the /c/ links for the communities here, and it sounds like “the seas”)
I’m pretty sure I got shadow banned twice for just linking Lemmy?
AFAIK it’s mostly not Redditors themselves, but the system they’re stuck in.
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.
Well, after 2034 Lemmy can actually be sucessful
Is 2034 the year of Lemmy?
right after the year of linux
They’re both successful by non-capitalist metrics.
Seems like a cop-out to call “usage rates” a “capitalist metric”
The whole point of federating is to make those metrics obsolete. What matters more is maintaining the community you have, not infinite growth.
Thank you for clarifying what you previously meant
Some people make thier whole identity “capitalism bad”.
To be fair that’s a much more easily defensible position.
✋
What color socks you rockin
Lemmy will become a superpower by 2034
Explorer guy hates when words are misspelled.
i dont quite know what it means, but lemm.ee is shutting down… so… successful ?
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.
I think it is typical human behavior to congregate to large groups.
Especially to the 2 big groups in the area.
Honestly I wonder, hypothetically, if .world shutting down right now would actually be better for the fediverse.
If it continues to be seen as the “default instance” it just becomes a bigger point of failure. And arguably more pernicious, becomes the cultural equivalent of a reddit.
Then I start to think crazy thoughts like what if private capital took an interest in a giant instance. Idk, I’m being way too paranoid I know I know
Could happen. Imagine the hosting costs of .world exploding if it becomes too big a target.
I think it only costs lw $300 a month to host their instance.
What if they need to hire to fight spam? What if they need to pay for legal?
Just saying, it can get complicated real quick.
Not exactly cheap for a project without intrinsic funding. From what I can tell, all funding they have is donations.
It’s alright https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45977837
Because of a lack of admins/mods not due to low users or money
I mean while yes it’s a tragedy. People have just moved to the other instances such as Piefed.social and Lemmy.zip.
