This is not going to be a blogpost about “Why do people still use Reddit instead of everyone moving to Lemmy?”. I noticed that even with Mastodon users, who already understand and like the advantages of decentralized platforms, the usage of Lemmy is extremely small, and more people use Reddit. Most of them haven’t even heard of Lemmy. To be fair, the Reddit usage also seems to be fairly low.
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lemmus.org As I understand it, lemmus.org was launched only 5 years ago. reddit has been established for 21 years, nobody was looking for alternatives until the reddit mods became synonymous to political dogma groups and began to deteriorate into one of the most toxic, divisive and counter productive platforms on the internet. people aren’t finding lemmus because google refers to reddit as default provider for answers/results. I only found this because I looked through articles particular for FOSS and decentralization, normies don’t know what that is to look for it.
@squirrel there may also be people following topics in Lemmy from another Fediverse service but not having a Lemmy account (i.e. which actually use Lemmy, but may not be counted there). Thats my case for the moment, while I still try to figure out if I can keep it like that or need to create an account
Just because they know the Fediverse, doesn’t mean they know Lemmy.
For more than 50% of all Mastodon users (that’s more than 25% of all Fediverse users), the Fediverse equals Mastodon. For large parts of the rest, if it doesn’t behave like Mastodon, it’s disturbing.
Besides, how are they supposed to learn about Lemmy anyway? Yes, in theory, Mastodon and Lemmy are federated. In theory.
In fact, however, they’re almost completely incompatible. Lemmy is all about groups. It doesn’t support any interaction between users directly. Mastodon, on the other hand, is about users interacting with each other directly. It has no support for groups whatsoever. At all. Nada. Zilch.
One of many reasons why there’s almost no interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy that’d demonstrate to Mastodon users that Lemmy exists by confronting them with Lemmy content.
By the way, the latter won’t work anyway. Mastodon doesn’t show you what software a message came from. Thus, most Mastodon users assume that everything they see comes from Mastodon.
217 comments on this in 24 hours says to me that there must at least a few people using lemmy
on reddit it would be 6000.
30K users is small potatoes. even niche subreddits have userbases larger than that.
With most of the replies from bots…
What would it have been if asked on 2010 Reddit?
I’d wager not much more than here.
Yea, once a post is up on reddit for even 3 hours its not worth interacting with because no-one will see what you have to say anyways. Honestly its what makes Lemmy better to me.
This is exactly one of the reasons I like this more. Writing anything of reddit is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean. This comment here might only be read by 10 people, but 10 good, real people will actually read it.
Thank you for the compliment ☺️
Yeah but thats better than most niche message boards back in their heyday. Probably better than y incubators message board to.
A big chunk of reddit traffic and users are bots. Another large segment are more recent arrivals from India (check out how many Indian topics make the front pages on the weekends when USA/UK traffic is low.) While I can’t prove it I have a hunch that Spez hired a bunch of Indian clickfarms to pump the numbers before the IPO. Maybe he just promoted in India more to get an influx of users for the IPO or maybe they are mostly “social media marketers” hired to sell health/peptide supplements (seriously there are services that do that on Reddit so be careful ever taking any such advice from them.)
But my point is that the quality of users is pretty weak and I’m certain American advertisers have noticed by now. 300ish real, quality users is a better engagement metric than 6000 bots.
the predicted commie red wave revolution are all here in their dozens, actually about 2000 of them
revolution!
I think its okay the way it is. Too much attention leads to many reposts, karma farmers, bots, now AI bullshit etc.
I think it’s too empty a lot of times. Mainstream topics are nicely populated but a vast amount of specific communities are just one person posting links over and over with a handful of upvotes and zero comments. Sometimes I see posts here and have to go to Reddit to see what the community thinks about it, because on Lemmy the post is completely dead.
I say this in all of these threads: more users does not mean a better experience.
Instead, focus on making our communities the best they can be.
I say this in all of these threads: more users does not mean a better experience.
It does when your current amount of users is functionally equivalent to, like, “2”.
I think that’s only true after a certain amount of users.
“nobody”, nearly 50k people.
Asking people on mastodon if they use lemmy also doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t use mastodon because it’s not threaded, people on mastodon probably don’t use lemmy for a similar reason. I’m not sure how many people use both threaded and unthreaded platforms, but it feels to me like the two layouts attract different people.
Then there are psychos like me who use both, and Bluesky, and other social media and have a personal blog.
I haven’t logged into my bluesky account since like ages. Mainly because I’m using my real Identity there, which I’m not comfortable with talking online. I love anonymity. I speak a little more off my mind because I’m anonymous.
I mean, you can make a new/second account.
Boiling it down to 3 things:
- Content Scale & Variety - Lemmy has a lot of content but it’s very tech/political heavy. It doesn’t have much to offer outside of that domain. Meanwhile, there’s a whole shitposting subreddit dedicated to an NFL conference – I don’t even closely follow professional American football, but it’s glorious.
- User Experience Friction - You can’t just sign up, you need to pick a server. You’ve already lost a significant amount of people in that step.
- User Base - There’s nice folks on here, but some really sour the experience for the rest of us by being straight up hostile if we don’t agree on every little detail.
Step 2 is dead right. Before you can proceed, we’re going to need you to make an apparently important and irreversible decision that you didn’t even want to make, based on incomplete information.
YOU HAVE MADE A BLOOD PACT WITH WORLD.
ML HATES YOU NOW
i feel like it’s usually the opposite. some people just really insist on getting upset about anyone on .ml
I love everyone!
Removed by mod
and which instance you start out on… is going to heavily influence your experience/content and get you branded/blocked by a lot of the userbase
User Experience Friction - You can’t just sign up, you need to pick a server. You’ve already lost a significant amount of people in that step.
I think this can be improved if there was a better way to explain the identity of each instance and why you might want to join other than just “generic Lemmy server for everyone to use”
Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they’re not gonna have a good time.
I suggest a map that shows which instances are federated/defederated from eachother and lets you find which one has the closest identity to what you like. And possibly a disclaimer before joining one of the trifecta instances.
Or just say fuck it and join the one literally called “shit just works” like me 😂
I thought ML was machine learning🥴
Big same lol
Ideally, I think instances ought to be something the casual user can be unaware of. Like the default experience should be instance-independent and the choice of instance should be some trivial thing that you can change on a whim carrying your entire user identity and chat history with you. I don’t really get any functional sense of community from my instance anyway
Being able to migrate an account between instances would help a huge amount. I am almost wishing we could agree on a default instance for all newcomers, but this would work to just centralize the user base so it’s not a good solution. However, if account migration were implemented, there could be a sort of “first steps” or “training ground” instance that accepts all new users by default and only allows accounts to remain there for a set period of time before asking them to find a new instance to call home. This would let users who aren’t interested in the technical details of federation get their feet wet and figure out which instance aligns with them before needing to make the choice.
This scheme would definitely require that new users have the option of signing up to a particular instance right away; no need for the default instance to be the only sign up option.
I really like your idea of “baby’s first instance”. And then they are sent off the nest.
Number 1 is the reason I rarely visit Lemmy. The choice and wording of political posts and reactions to them create a very negative atmosphere and sometimes it is combined with rather unrational doomerism. Threads just feel angry and hostile too often for me to have fun on here. This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.
This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.
That’s so much extra work
That’s why you are supposed to pick an instance that does most of that work for you: one that will have already blocked what you don’t like.
The banlist is public but is essentially a hassle of an Excel spreadsheet to crawl through, what would be nice would be having some sort of public “moderation trends” (broad-strokes view of what have we been blocking and will continue to do so) and “moderation commitments” (eagle view of what will happen when you report a post to us).
I use Lemmy. And you do. And 1000 other people do. So I’d say it’s big enough.
And Reddit was small for years and years when it started. I don’t even think I really started using it till around 2013-2014. Didn’t have a username or anything just came across it through Google searches. All websites take a while to build a userbase.
This I think is the main problem to adoption. It’s very hard to come across Lemmy results on a search engine even if I’m trying to specify Lemmy. (Not that search engines matter for most people these days what with the LLM executive summary pushing out real web pages, who needs resources when you have slop, am I right? \s)
It took me a long time before I signed up. I think I lucked for at least a year. I didn’t want to join an instance and then regret it. And all instances have their own small novel of rules, that I need to read through to know if I agree with. And even if you do, you have to send an application and get approved as well.
It almost scared me away - I’d imagine the same goes for a lot of people.
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Few people like to be the first(ish) one on the dance floor.
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It’s slightly harder to sign up for than Reddit, so people interested in this kind of thing usually just sign up for Reddit (or stay there).
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Most people don’t care about the advantages Lemmy affords us; they care about what’s on TV tonight or which celebrity is dating which celebrity.
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I have to be that guy and point out that the Threadiverse isn’t just Lemmy, and microblog-Fedi isn’t just Mastodon.
Oh ok
If I had to guess: the culture here seems unusual, and unwelcoming — sometimes even hostile — to diverse opinions (i.e. people who aren’t similarly unusual).
I haven’t met many people IRL who would fit in here. For some visitors, that’s okay (I don’t fit in here, myself), but I think most people would just move along and forget that Lemmy exists.
Being federated, Lemmy is technically capable of being more diverse. It’s a bit ironic that it still ended up being like this.
Also, some images don’t load. I just ignore those, but still people might be put off by broken UX
I blame some of the toxicity in the fact that a big chunk of lemmy users came here because they were banned from Reddit precisely for being hostile.
About the images thing: half the posts on reddit are just [content removed by moderator] when you click into them
How is that related to Lemmy though?
It’s because everything that becomes popular starts with people in the 14-20 year range.
Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Tiktok…
The Fediverse will eventually grow once something triggers a snowball effect due the nature of connectivity and federation. Until then, the way to make it grow is to have young people make it popular.
Edit: There also needs to be more “fun” here. I think the Fediverse is a more “serious” place which isn’t what those other social media sites offered. “Serious 24/7” isn’t that enticing for young people.
The other day I was imagining a game or game service that has you make a Fediverse account of some kind. You get people to signup with a username that automatically creates a “@fedi.games” account. That account can have access to Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed etc.
what, you don’t think it’s fun endlessly memeing about doomerism and murder?
There’s not enough politics IMO. No fun at all.
People need to spend more time on lighthearted issues like Palestine and the evils of capitalism
I don’t use Mastodon or Twitter either. I never understood following specific people and prefer following topics instead.
Mastodon allows you to follow hashtags, which would be like following a topic.
