• The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.worldEnglish
    153·
    4 months ago

    I think it’s much less intimidating to new users now compared to when I joined last year. The barrier to entry has been reduced significantly.

    There are tons of active communities now, mobile apps that work great (this is a big one), and many more tools to block content that you don’t want to see.

    • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
      571·
      4 months ago

      there is also more diverse content than the crap that was on here six months ago.

      when 50% of the frontpage is linux memes… you’re not going to gain the interest of most new users. now it seems to be down to about 20%

    • Got_Bent@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      4 months ago

      I still have no clue how instances work but whatever I’m doing has been working fine for nearly a year

      • Stovetop@lemmy.worldEnglish
        24·
        4 months ago

        From an end user perspective there’s not that much to think about, thankfully.

        Basically, it’s like having two websites that mirror each other’s content. You can sign up for Forum A and be able to read and write posts that users on Forum B can also see. People’s names are tagged with the name of the forum they are registered at, but otherwise everything you do and see happens on your own site of choice and there’s no difference where it comes from.

        If Forum A doesn’t like Forum C, but Forum B doesn’t mind, Forum A can choose to disconnect from Forum C and hide their users and posts, while Forum B can still see both. It only gets tricky when someone from Forum B makes a post that people from both Forums A and C are in, but all of the posts from C users are invisible to A users.

      • A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        4 months ago

        It’s like how there’s loads of different email providers but they can all still email each other.

        Just like Gmail can send mail to Outlook and any other @EmailProvider.com, lemmy.world can populate it’s feed/comments from lemm.ee and any other @LemmyInstance.com

      • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
        71·
        4 months ago

        Most often I’ve seen instances use as super communities. Largely revolving around a bigger topic. KDE runs their own with their own subcommunities for instance. They are far from the only ones. Just the one I use the most and a came to mind first. Having your own instance slap server allows you far more control over your communities then just hosting on someone else’s server. But from an end user perspective very largely transparent. not even being noticeable oftentimes.

      • tal@lemmy.today
        English
        3·
        4 months ago

        I still have no clue how instances work but whatever I’m doing has been working fine for nearly a year

        You have a user account “Got_Bent”, on an instance (you can think of this as a “server”), lemmy.world. That’s your home instance. Thus, you are @[email protected].

        You can view communities on that instance. This post, in fact, is on a community on the lemmy.world instance, [email protected].

        You can also view communities on any other other instances that lemmy.world is federated with (which is most of them). For example, [email protected]. By-and-large, you can use them the same way you can communities on your home instance.

        Reddit is pretty similar, just that with Reddit, there’s only one “instance”, Reddit.

        Instances might go down (so users with that instance as their home instance can’t log in and communities on that instance aren’t accessible. Some have certain rules about what users who use that instance as their home instance can do. Others have certain rules about what communities on their instance are allowed to do. For example, my home instance, lemmy.today, wants to avoid defederating with other instances (which means that people with that home instance can see all other content). Some instances, like beehaw.org, want to keep some content that might be objectionable to their users out, and will tend to defederate with other instances if they consider them to be problematic. Some instances allow hosting communities that have pornography (like lemmynsfw.com) and some do not (like sh.itjust.works). Same thing for communities dealing with religion or extreme political views, and so on.

        In general, it’s helpful to have a home instance in the same rough part of the world as you, as it’ll make things more-responsive.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      61·
      4 months ago

      New user here…what? Easy to use? I’ve gotten to the point where I know how to do things, but, it’s still needlessly complicated. Yes there are many active communities, but there are also not very many of them. The ironic thing is, you need to be discussing mainstream topics on the non-mainstream platform. If I wanted to talk about my favorite band? Nobody is here to do that. And if I do find a niche community here, but it’s on another instance? NOW I know what to do. But when I first got here, I was ONLY subscribing to sublemmys on .world because it’s the only way I knew how.

      For this platform to grow, we’re going to have to make it easy. Like, braindead easy.

      Make it so you just click “join”. Make it so you’re logged in across ALL of Lemmy. Your posts may originate from Lemmy.World, but a non-techie wouldn’t know or care about any of that. I see Lemmy making a big deal about the seperate instances. Like it’s a selling point. It’s only a selling point for people smart enough to understand it.

      But imagine Britney. Now Britney is a fictional person I just made up to represent your bottom of the barrel intelligence level of people these days. Britney is just some pretty valley girl. She doesn’t know what RSS is. She’s never heard of Linux, despite having an android phone. Britney is who you cater the site to. Because Britney is America. She wants sublemmys about “The Voice” and “The Masked Singer”. She wants a sublemmy for Taylor Swift. I think you’re starting to get the type of person I’m talking about.

      You can still operate Lemmy almost exactly how it is now. Just make it so even if you know NONE of that stuff, you can still operate it freely. I will use MySpace as an example (for the brief 4 years it was the top social media). There was a default MySpace look. If all you did was sign up, and do nothing else, you still had a myspace account, and you could still customize it to an extent. It’s the basic profile everyone thinks of when you think of a myspace profile. The colors, the layout, the look. It was still usable. Then you had people using CSS and HTML and I think Javascript was available. Now suddenly you have 50 different profiles, all looking completely different. All functioning exactly the same, but you could go as deep or as shallow as you wanted.

      THATS what this site needs. Don’t take away the stuff for the techie people. Let them go nuts. Let them do crazy things with this platform. But also, to increase userbase, make it as shallow as possible unless the user changes things. America wants shallow and not challenging. America doesn’t want to think. Britney just wants a place to type “I LOVE TAYLOR! I LOVE TAYLOR! I LOVE TAYLOR!” over and over. You can keep her happy, and keep yourselves happy. And I’m somewhere in the middle. It needs to be a platform that conforms to the user. Because if the user needs to conform to the platform, they will not join that platform.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      471·
      4 months ago

      They have bots roaming the site, banning people, seemingly at random. I went from never having been banned on reddit on a 10 year account, to banned for 3 days twice, and then permanently banned all in the span of a month.

      And when did this happen? The week after the IPO went public.

      And what kind of messages got me banned? Well one of them was in /r/Cleveland where a guy posted a security camera picture of the guy who stole his bike. I made the comment that the theif looks like a guy who stole MY bike in the early 90s, and that maybe this was his son. Keeping it in the family business.

      I was banned for that comment for “Harassment and abuse of reddit users”. The action was performed by an AI bot. If I wanted an appeal I could appeal. So I did. It SAID the appeal was handled by a real human. They still sided with the bots decision, which tells me that it wasn’t handled by a real person.

      So now I’m here. Just don’t steal my bike, ok guys?

      • ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.worldEnglish
        24·
        4 months ago

        Hey dude, I’ve been looking for you for so long, since my Dad stole your bike and that was a turning point in my life, since I made a point of stealing your son’s bike.

        It is said that this will continue for generations until the seventh son of a seventh son, who’ll transform into an upside down toothless vampire who likes garlic.

        In order for this prophecy to come true, please ensure all your progeny keeps buying bikes.

        PS Welcome to Lemmy!

      • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        20·
        4 months ago

        I made the comment that the theif looks like a guy who stole MY bike in the early 90s, and that maybe this was his son. Keeping it in the family business.

        That’s hilarious. They don’t deserve you.

      • ripcord@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        4 months ago

        Just don’t steal my bike, ok guys?

        I won’t!

        …but what kind of bike and where is it, just so I know what I’m not stealing and where I should avoid stealing it from

    • mesamune@lemmy.worldEnglish
      301·
      4 months ago

      reddit is about the same in my opintion, but I do see a lot more activity on the lemmy side. I think its a combination of:

      1. Less rules around communities. The barrier of entry is much lower here to post, and things dont get auto-removed because of trigger happy mods.
      2. 2% of users post 90% of content. And a lot of them moved over to lemmy.
      3. Servers can be brought into existence and removed at will. This may seem like a bad thing, but what it means is that the best lemmy servers can evolve and be successful in a way reddit cant. Some have different modifications to make them more user friendly, some have excellent uptime, etc…etc…
      4. People from mastodon/misskey/other fediverse instances can comment/post. Even if that is not what a vast majority of us do, it does help the numbers and will continue to help engagement.

      Also to @[email protected] Do you know if the sats above take into account the generally banned instances of lemmy? I know that a lot of instances earlier this year decided to become de-federated from the general fediverse. Do you happen to know if the website take into account those servers?

      • Blaze@reddthat.comOPEnglish
        9·
        4 months ago

        Also to @[email protected] Do you know if the sats above take into account the generally banned instances of lemmy? I know that a lot of instances earlier this year decided to become de-federated from the general fediverse. Do you happen to know if the website take into account those servers?

        Not sure about this unfortunately

    • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      19·
      4 months ago

      The cracked apps using personal API keys stopped working a few days ago. Already fixed now I think.

        • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          8·
          4 months ago

          Have you heard of ReVanced? Most commonly known for patching youtube to allow more features, mainly adblocking. Well they have patches for a ton of apps now so if you have a reddit account and say you’re a developer you get your own API key they can be injected into some apps. It didn’t work for me for a while but I eventually got it to work for the random search result from reddit.

        • Remorhaz@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          4 months ago

          Not all of them, Dystopia for example was allowed to stay as is because of accessibility features that the native app lacks. It was even working just fine during the recent outage.

        • Klaymore@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          4 months ago

          I use Geddit occasionally, I don’t know if it supports voting or commenting though since I just browse.

  • Lexam@lemmy.caEnglish
    1011·
    4 months ago

    I think more people are coming here for my comments and delusions of grandeur.

  • Mountain_Mike_420@lemmy.mlEnglish
    89·
    4 months ago

    Hi I’m new here. My friend has been trying to get me in for ages. The reason I am here is because my Reddit account of 10 years and one of 3 years got permabanned. And it was really for no reason. I tried to make a new account and that also got instantly permabanned. That’s when I found out that my 10year account also got banned. So yeah fuck what happened on Reddit.

    I’m really liking lemmy and my iOS app (mlem) and enjoying the community. The only thing I miss from Reddit is the video integration.

    • PlantJam@lemmy.worldEnglish
      39·
      4 months ago

      What I don’t miss from reddit is the bot comments. Not the novelty bots that reply if your comment is in alphabetical order or something like that, but actual chat gpt responses to regular posts or comments.

      I have no idea what the point of them is, but they’re awful.

      • uhN0id@programming.devEnglish
        34·
        4 months ago

        Those were getting so out of hand.

        u/OP: “What’s a good mouse for a mix of productivity and gaming”

        u/DefinitelyNotABot: “A good mouse for a mix of productivity and gaming is something you should be looking for if you need a mouse that is good for work and play. A good mouse for productivity and gaming will have a good balance of performance and features. Fortunately, finding a good mouse for a mix of productivity and gaming is not difficult due there being plenty of mouse options available to you[…]”

        • PlantJam@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          4 months ago

          What’s the point of those types of bots, though? I guess they’re just trying to have vaguely genuine looking accounts to use for some future purpose, maybe political or advertising related.

          • uhN0id@programming.devEnglish
            18·
            4 months ago

            My best guess is karma farming so they can sell them off. Probably create hundreds of accounts they can sell off. If some brand buys an account that looks reputable for $20-$100 to use it for astroturfing then that’s a pretty good deal for both sides. Shitty deal for everyone else.

            • SeattleRain@lemmy.worldEnglish
              5·
              4 months ago

              That and building convincing personas for propaganda and PR. An account agreeing with pro corporate policies is more convincing if it has a long post history.

      • SomeGuy69@lemmy.worldEnglish
        61·
        4 months ago

        They’ll sooner or later appear here too, that’s sadly a reality all social media will suffer from now on. No filter can detect AI replies for long.

        • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          4 months ago

          Do you think users, moderators, and admins on Lemmy could be more equipped (or at least more incentivized) to combat malicious bots compared to Reddit?