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can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance.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.
–
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
An official Android and iOS app called “Lemmy”. If you wanna go big, you need the mobile platform.
When you search for “Reddit” in the app store and it also shows an app for Lemmy, we are getting there.
Reddit is going to pay enough for this to never happen
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.
I still remember when federation was barely working. We’ve made good progress since then
Also, why not mentioning one instance when making that comment?
Why not promote piefed?
@ericjmorey@discuss.online OP answered here: https://feddit.org/comment/4286281 (the lack of mobile apps, was the answer)
Thanks for the link.
This link doesn’t work. There’s only 3 communities for patientgamers: world, shitjustworks, and ml
It’s SJW, I’ll edit.
Fixed
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.
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.
The complaint is not about the All timeline being the same everywhere. The complaint is that most of the All feed is US politics, a topic which is already massively dominant on Reddit. Some people are looking at alternatives because they want to avoid that. If it’s the same, why bother changing and not stay on Reddit?
I don’t understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.
Good point, could be something that could be change by admins.
The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about.
Well, that’s not the case for everyone. A lot of people came here because they wanted third party apps on Reddit.
The complaint is that most of the All feed is US politics, a topic which is already massively dominant on Reddit. Some people are looking at alternatives because they want to avoid that. If it’s the same, why bother changing and not stay on Reddit?
Well then the key is to not show the All feed. That feed, by its very design, is about showing the overview of what is going about “the known fedi”, and we can’t control what other people talk about, fedi or otherwise. If he current news is Luigi, exploded Starlink launches and double Nazi salutes, that’s what’s going to be talked about - and the presence of generalist instances is going to amplify that effect. Unless you have enough cats, enough Linux, or enough ich_iel.
A lot of people came here because they wanted third party apps on Reddit.
Well then they were told wrong: here it’s not about developing for Reddit. In fact, when someone tried to act on trying to bring people from Reddit or emulating “third party app” by bringing in the threads from Reddit, it was the lemmings who complained (even if rightfully so).
Shoutout to lemmy.zip, y’all are a great instance!
Rule. Clickbait or meaningful?
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.
Blahaj does it as well
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.
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.
Echoing this, with some slight adjustments:
Promote the specific sites/communities to people, and on sites that permit it, share links back to specific posts/comments that you found interesting/amusing/etc. from said sites/communities.
Reddit got popular off the back of changes to Digg and people mentioning/sharing stuff from Reddit there. I’d imagine TikTok also grew in popularity from people sharing stuff from it on other major platforms like Instagram/YouTube/Snapchat/Twitter, much as now RedNote’s growing in popularity from people mentioning it on TikTok and other platforms.
Difficult to sell a forum to people where most mods on Reddit are going to remove posts mentioning it: https://lemmy.ca/post/37657096
People on specific forums are probably happy where they are and aren’t going to switch from their established forums. The strength of Reddit and Lemmy is to be able to have several forums accessible from the main site.
The last place that’s left is /r/RedditAlternatives, where you just have people who want, well, a Reddit alternatives, and they usually don’t mention their preferences.
But I agree with you to an extend, !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com is a good example of focused forum. It’s a bit unique on Lemmy unfortunately.
This is the best platform for constant live updates about what the people you don’t like are up to. Then there’s articles about everything that’s wrong in the world and also some memes - mostly political.
You forgot about the Linux memes
The disrespect is palpable
selection of 20 non-political,tech,memes communities: https://feddit.uk/post/22376629
The best promotion is to be awesome.
>Lemmy, is awesome (y/n)?: _y
“Reddit but you can block the part that annoys you”
And then only with deeper knowledge of how the Fediverse functions under the hood - like how “instances” relate to “communities” and specific moderator names, especially when working from a remote account on a different instance than the community structure… Hey, where are you going? 😯
let’s just rebrand instances to superleddits and communities to subleddits 🤣
Hehe go for it then:-).
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
Good reasoning all 'round! Although Lemmy.ca doesn’t require you to be Canadian, so would be a decent recommendation for any NA user. As long as they don’t mind some more Canada posting in the Local feed.
How’s Lemmy.cafe? I believe they defederate the Big 3 Tankie instances. Dunno what their downtime or admins are like.
I have my main alt there. It’s pretty good, but there was an issue with the thumbnails that got resolved a few days ago. Also, the instance is much smaller than the two others (64 users per month), so I sometimes have to subscribe to some medium-size communities before nobody did before. Federation can get a bit clunky at times too, and I have to pull myself some posts or comments to “unclog the pipes”.
Discuss.online has 140 users per month, sopuli 496
What is with hexbear and lemmygrad…why are people calling these out
Propaganda focused instances, with deranged users that attack anyone who tries to fact check and they are protectes by their admins/mods.
There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances
[proceeds to list pretty much all good instances, and complains about hexbear]
…I’m curious, what is your definition of “generalist”? Because I suspect it involves “not punching nazis”.
“generalist”
Something that is not linked to a country, a theme or a demographic
Non-generalist:
- lemmy.ca, feddit.org, programming.dev, blahaj, etc.
Generalist:
- lemm.ee
- sopuli.xyz
- discuss.online
Not sure what you meant with “not punching nazis”
I’ll mention my experience with a server from that list (that I won’t name)…
The server worked most of the time but federation kept breaking. The server was rather small. Since you use Lemmy from your home instance, this meant that only a few local communities showed any activity and this was a very low amount of activity. This would go on for days or even well over a week before things got better for a while and then everything started to break again.
It is one thing for a server to just go away. You then clearly know that something is wrong and you can migrate over to another server. It is another thing for the server to generally be online all the time with it just messing up in such a way as to make the whole Lemmy ecosystem seem rather dead.
Things would have been easier if most of the communities I want to interact with were on the same server as my account. The other server, with federation issues, was only home to 5 % of the communities I was following which left 95 % of the communities I wanted to follow as not updated due to federation issues.
There isn’t a clear indication of which servers are working great with a proven track record of working great as opposed to “zombie instances” not federating correctly or other instances which are moments away from randomly shutting down. The point is that I feel like my account anywhere will be able to receive and send information throughout the whole Lemmy network or sites. This reduces the concept of federation a bit down towards needing to have an account on a well known working server simply because account migration is such a headache. I can then interact with communities without issues (hosted on well working servers) but I can easily change my community subscriptions as I want to.
One thing that may help for someone is to try and see what communities they want to participate in. If the communities they primarily find interesting are in Lemmy.world then they likely should have an account there to ease any federation issues. The number of communities I follow here are 3 times larger than communities I follow with any other specific instance. This community subscription list is one I figured out when I was on “that other server” so it guided me here.
To give a counterpoint, the experience on LW in summer 2023 was horrible, due to the constant DDoS attacks on the infrastructure.
Discuss.online has a status page: https://status.discuss.online/
Sopuli.xyz is very stable, and transparent about how they operate: https://sopuli.xyz/post/13531
A few other instances have status pages:
Thanks for the information!
I’m not sure if the status pages accurately show federation issues though (not federating or well behind). I’m not sure if they can easily show that information either.
Lemm.ee definitely does:
If people want to have a better overview, they can use this dashboard: https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=programming.dev&var-remote_instance=lemmy.zip
That second link is helpful. For instance, it shows an server which I thought was ran well ( startrek.website ) being about 1 million activities behind in content from Lemmy.world
This means that the technology community here looks much different there. Here there are comments to our submissions. Shown there, the submissions seem to have no comments.
https://lemmy.world/c/technology
https://startrek.website/c/technology@lemmy.world
If a person there didn’t know better, they may think that Lemmy doesn’t have as much activity as it actually does.
Indeed. There’s also the issue of LW being so large that other instances can have issues to keep with its activities. That has been fixed in 0.19.6, but LW hasn’t updated yet.
I am not entirely sure how appropriate my reply is since you name lemmy specifically, but since one can subscribe to particular topics in piefed, I am leaning towards it more than lemmy as an alternative to reddit.
Once Piefed will get Thunder as well as an iOS app, it will become an alternative. That’s the main blocker I have now recommending it. Besides that, it’s a quite good Lemmy alternative.
@blaze@feddit.org Thunder is written using Flutter / Dart - meaning that it’s cross-platform. I’ve compiled the version for PieFed for windows, linux and macos, so as long as I’m able to get it working for Android, it should also work for iOS. I’ll need to be someone else who does though, 'cos my mac is too old, and I don’t have an iphone.
Bonus screenshot:
Amazing! So what, the Piefed API is already there? I thought that was still ongoing
Still ongoing, but basic functionality is working.
I’m for the sink or swim mentality. Point them here and if they come up with an excuse to not be here then they probably weren’t going to be a good contributor anyway.
I’m fine with being selective. There is no reason we need 1M+ MAU for the sake of the network, we aren’t trying to turn a profit
There is no reason we need 1M+ MAU for the sake of the network, we aren’t trying to turn a profit
There’s also no reason a topic as popular as TV shows relies on 3 posters to keep the main community active: !showsandmovies@lemm.ee
We don’t need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement
We don’t need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement
Definitely agreed with this. And less always (understandably) angry political posters, more escapists that want to chat about movies, games etc. It becomes like that snake eating itself because people that want a break from real life come here and see nothing but the same 24 news cycle as everywhere else. And then, speaking for myself, searching up certain niche communities and finding them either non-existent or with 3 posts from 1 and a half years ago.
I’ve been thinking of porting a couple of my old review posts over here from my banned but not yet closed Reddit account. Just so that, for example, the next time someone visits the Ghibli community there’ll be 4 posts instead of 3.
And the Sonic communities are pretty disappointing too, considering I’m always seeing it mentioned in the wild these days. Makes me think (or hope) that there’s a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.
Reddit is sadly still unbeaten in searching up a TV show that you enjoy and finding an entire community built around it. And those communities never took a lot of members. So it shouldn’t be impossible here.
Makes me think (or hope) that there’s a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.
If you have a topic you would like to talk about, feel free to post about it in !fedigrow@lemm.ee. Not sure we have enough people for Sonic, but we can try.
I get the frustration with not having a lot of active posters in a community despite diligence in posting and promotion on !newcommunities@lemmy.world. I’ve had the same frustration trying to operate !fantasyfootball@lemmy.world the last two seasons. I am not going to keep it up this offseason
Sorry to hear. How are the NFL communities doing on Lemmy in general? I’m a bit active on !football@lemmy.world (the other one), it’s moderately active but still niche.
I don’t know if @GreenEngineering3475@lemmy.world has a bot that automatically posts news from a feed or is just a diligent poster but he is always posting relevant news to the NFL community.
For college football, @g0d0fm15ch13f@lemmy.world and @ToasterOverlord@fanaticus.social do a great job modding and make sure that community has content.
The CFB community has really active game threads and even a community poll, the NFL community is more for news but it’s very helpful for me to follow the news in the league and most posts get at least a few comments.
That’s nice. About fantasy football, did you promote in on the other NFL communities? I guess it’s too much of a niche topic. I had some success with fantasy football for the Euro 2024, but that was a continent-wide competition, not a regular season.
I’ve promoted it and it has plenty of subscribers, it just doesn’t have a lot of regular activity. It’s not my community anyway, I’ve just been trying to steward it the last two seasons. I think it’s more just become more of a place to chat about fantasy football than an active place ask for and give advice for fantasy football. I’m fine with that as well.
