So this Lemmy place is pretty awesome, and I see it growing by the hour! Just like others link external sites for content here, we should really also share Lemmy content to external (e.g. Reddit, Twitter, etc.) to show others where the users are going now.
Redditors will talk about Lemmy and moving communities here, but it is really best shown that the communities are rebuilding here. Thoughts? I’ve started with a few memes and am starting a new community here as well!
Sign ups in many instances becoming application-only certainly does not help Lemmy grow.
I think that’s mostly temporary because v0.18 disables captchas which will only return on v0.18.1
Has this been confirmed yet? I saw some discussion in GH but last I checked they didn’t reach a resolution.
From the announcement post:
Captchas are not available in this version, as they need to be reimplemented in a different way. They will be back in 0.18.1, so wait with upgrading if you rely on them.
Best marketing is the perfect use case that didn’t exist in people’s lives beforehand. The Reddit threads with nurses helping elderly people do AMAs were extremely endearing.
Young kids being able to shitpost nonsensically was also cool.
Make something original happen and it draws in people that recognise something new. Otherwise it’s all cats and homies doing narrative subscription.
Could you please add a “Why YSK:”? It’s rule #2. :)
If content is good enough, it will escape containment. Let the system do its thing.
I think everyone needs to wait and see what kind of migration happens after July 1st. Seems like these places are better suited for slow growth from my observation.
I’m happy with the amount of users and activity Lemmy currently has. It doesn’t really need go grow though any means other than organically imo.
I dunno if “organic” is enough, but I don’t think the fediverse could handle the entire Reddit use base today. I’m also not certain it will ever be as normy-friendly as Reddit has been. For better or worse.
Eh, it’s still missing a ton of smaller and even medium sized communities. Pick video games and TV shows for example. A bunch don’t have a community or only have a dead one with zero or one posts.
It’s debatable whether a lot of these smaller communities really provided much value outside the tiny userbase they have.
Besides, if someone wants to pick up the mantle on Lenny they are more than welcome to as well.
I don’t follow what you’re saying. I love the shit out of many of my smaller communities. Reading TV subs after a new episode dropped was my favourite (and required a lot of active people). I wanted to discuss the Horizon DLC when I beat it the other day, but the Horizon sub here is super tiny. I tried to post on a generic gaming sub instead and did not get the discussion I wanted.
Similarly, Pokemon Go subs on Reddit were super detailed places to discuss the game, including with detailed analysis of any change, data mining for upcoming stuff, etc. Here, there’s two subs that have just the sub creator trying to populate the sub. No actual discussion.
It sucks and I miss those kinda communities.
What I’m saying is that while tiny communities are great, the fact that they haven’t moved to a federated platform yet doesn’t really matter. Anybody, including yourself, can start up those communities on the Fediverse and curate them if there is enough of a reason to do so or just continue to engage them on Reddit too.
It’s really hard to get them started though. Especially when I want a discussion on the topic now. I actually did try and start my local city sub and it was me shouting into the void as the only poster. It’s not very fun posting stuff without ever getting replies.
Yeah indeed, discoverability is lacking in Lemmy at the moment.
On Android, link people to Sync for Lemmy, and Jerboa which is quite similar to RIF.
And Memmy for Lemmy heavily inspired by Apollo on iOS.
People mad about apps will move; they can’t if they don’t know where those apps are going.
We’ve got a good “seed community”. We need to move on from “anti-Reddit” and towards “Lemmy-community building”. This is a hard step forward.
We don’t know what each other’s interests are, we don’t know how many #RedditBlackout communities existed (I mean, we have some ideas. “mtgzone.com” and “programming.dev”)… but we don’t know if we can create say… an Advance Wars community (Nintendo Game), or if we need to stick to just Nintendo as our topic.
I think keeping to !Newcommunities, and trying to organize ourselves into our different branches of knowledge / discussion is the near term goal. What DO we have as a community? Clearly we’re all willing to leave Reddit (and some of us here were willing to leave Reddit last year, long before #RedditBlackout), but for long-term sustainability, we need to get deeper connections than that.
Ideally, we can grow some of these communities to be the best place on the internet for that subject. For example, /r/Factorio was one of the premier places to study Factorio strategies (Video game). But Reddit wasn’t the best at say, AVR (AVRFreaks was a better site for that). That’s fine, having a 2nd tier or lesser site is still useful for an overall hangout spot that’s more casual.
I think Lemmy has a lot of opportunity in community building because of its Reddit-like structure (more similar than Mastodon was to Twitter). With some custom GUIs, we can build new video game communities with custom GUIs (ex: Chess .pgn viewers: https://github.com/mliebelt/PgnViewerJS) to further discussions in ways impossible to the original Reddit (more akin to PhpBB), but still with the advantages of single-sign-on / federation to join up a bunch of other communities.
That’s the direction we should be going, IMO anyway.
Yea we need to all start engaging content we like as if it was reddit. There will probably be another influx of new people come July. As such we need their first impression to be that lemmy has an actual community beyond being burned by reddit.
I kind of agree, but it needs to be done in a nice way like if you have already written an answer on lemmy to a question which also shows up on reddit then post a link to it instead of copy and pasting it there.
This is the way. I think of it as offering breadcrumbs to those on other platforms. Since the posts are freely viewable without signing up, it’s no different than a news or web link.
You can also turn this around. If you are still monitoring reddit, consider making a post in the appropriate sub answering the question (assuming it’s a generic-ish request) and then link back to it in the community here.
I like this, sharing when there’s value to share, rather than just sharing
An iOS and android app would be helpful in making lemmy more accessible
Lemmy already has a few apps for Android like Jerboa,Connect for Lemmy,and Liftoff. IOS has mlem and probably a few more. They’re not yet as good as reddit TPAs but they’re there and being actively developed.
I think it’s kbin that needs an app rn as it’s growing rapidly and the only app i know for it (Artemis) is still in alpha.
Apollo for Lemmy or kbin, made by the same dev, would be absolutely wonderful. Unfortunately, I think he’s given up on social media apps entirely.
I’m using Memmy, whose UI is inspired by Apollo. It’s not perfect, but functional and looks great! You can use it through TestFlight
Memmy is my vote as well. It’s actually wild how quickly it’s come into shape
Voyager is amazing, and works on both iOS and Android
Yesterday I searched a question and for the first time google linked a Lemmy thread with the answer.
Asking and solving questions will bring users.
How does someone search Google?
Using a browser, navigate to the following URL: www.google.com
In the search bar, type the query you would like to make and hit ENTER
Then you’re done!
Thanks!
Don’t forget to add lemmy on the end and replace the url with your instance or have a browser extension that does it automatically for you
You forgot the step where you have to scrolls to at least 2 pages of ads disguised as results
Step 0: install an Adblock like UBlock Origin on your browser.
How do I install an adblock?
This. The reason I originally joined Reddit was because it solved a problem I had (easily aggregating answers on various topics). That’s how we get people on Lemmy.
I don’t think there should be a big push until more polished apps come out that make the whole process as dead simple as possible. No need to know what instances are. Right now this is how imagine the average person would react after trying it out.
Oh my god, lmao. Yes. How is there even a video so perfect for this situation. I joined kbin instead because having a website demand I pick an instance in order to even sign up when I barely understood what that meant or how they worked was quite genuinely making me panic, and taking my time with it was not helping like it was supposed to.
It’s so normal to me now that I almost forget until I have to explain any part of it to someone. “Oh, don’t worry about joining this one over that one, you’re technically joining every site and also twitter and instagram. That button? It’s the reblog button. It functions as an upvote but some people don’t have it. Other people don’t have a downvote, but it might still be visible on your screen anyway. If there’s a site you hate, you can mute the whole thing, or maybe you can’t. If there’s a site you love, your admin might disappear them and you’ll need a second account to see it again. Have fun!”
Horrible. Why do I love it.
Myself, I had no problem with picking and instance. But the one I mostly randomly picked had approvals turned on. Once I realized I wasn’t gonna get to use my account immediately, I abandoned it.
It’s utterly critical that manual approval is not part of the sign up. I tried another site, but many users won’t. Nor will they necessarily come back when their account gets approved in a week (that’s how long mine took).
Honestly shocked you were willing to wait that long. I guess if I saw the notification, I would, but my email is mostly a place to store spam. If it’s not there in three days tops, I stop checking. That is a solid issue, and it’s not like any instance has the manpower atm to delegate approvals to a person/team as a full-time job (which it absolutely would be).
I have to admit, seeing the influx of bots on some lemmy instances makes me nervous about Ernest keeping ours open. It’s really the best defense right now and despite the comparable lack of content I’ve been breathing pretty easy not having seen one single bot in two weeks now.
No astroturfing yet. No vote manipulation. That “vaccines cause autism” bot poster I used to see all the time is still on reddit. I think I’ve seen someone being a shithead twice. Any reposts are people crossposting to other instances or just trying to transfer content here.
But the only way to keep it this way for good is not the kind of culture the internet currently has. Checking everyone’s ID at the door would mostly solve the bot issue that made reddit an untrustworthy, insufferable plague, but in practice it’ll make people look elsewhere. They haven’t been raised to wait.
Having some open instances for the noobs and some walled gardens for anyone sick of it may be the best we can do. Unfortunately, they would have to be very walled, basically only federating with each other. Their necessary pushback would make them seem like snobby elites to non-members and like very tantilzing targets for ad companies to worm into or destroy.
I didn’t wait that long. I immediately tried kbin and it worked. A week later I did see the email though. I actually thought they had rejected me prior to that (I only did a short one line response to the lengthy question that was asked during sign up, as I wasn’t sure if it was just to filter out bots or what).
This is perfectly stated. Lemmy, which I dearly love, is not ready to replace Reddit for the vast majority of users. Which is fine. I won’t really miss the vast majority of Reddit users.
It’s never a good idea explaining the whole idea to someone right at the start unless they ask.
I’ve always just directed people straight to a big instance with lots of home communities, like lemmy.world or kbin.social. After they jump in and have questions, that’s the right time to talk about instances, not before.
Exactly. The more shit you throw into someone’s face, the more confused they will be. Give ‘em enough of a taste that they can see the positives, and let ‘em slowly work through the quirks as they find ‘em.
Besides, I personally think having a bit of a ‘filter’ is good anyway; the scroll zombies at Reddit who’re siding with the admins sorta make me worry about this place getting too big.
There’s even a scene talking about decentralized internet which is so perfect for this attempted push to the fediverse too.
Ok, I’ve never heard of Silicon Valley in my life, but I’m going to start watching it tonight. This seems really good
The video is from a TV series which is a bit cringe but quite close to reality of IT startups called Silicon Valley https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/ it’s a comedy.
Sending people to the largest servers is how you bog down the largest servers.
There has to be a better way than just stuffing everyone onto the same 2 websites. Not only does that create huge loads and increase syncing times, it recreates the same issue that led to everyone coming here: Power over the whole thing in the hands of just a couple of people.
The network becomes more resilient the more spread out we are, not the more concentrated.
Plus, if people find the idea of multiple websites existing to be confusing, maybe they shouldn’t use the internet?
More polished apps and more fleshed out features. Lemmy has potential, but there are so many quirks right now it’s like a chore to actually utilize.
haha. I just got through watching Silicon Valley. Great show. Y’all should check it out
The video is so perfect for the situation.
I am kinda missing my favorite communities from Reddit:
- vinyljerk
- blackmetalvinyl
- lolgrindr
- vinylreleases
I wish those will receive a counterpart one day or just move here.
One of the few small communities I’ll be sad to lose is HyruleEngineering. Can’t believe Reddit decided to shit the bed right when I found it.
Someone recreated that community here!
For what it’s worth, they also have an active discord server
I don’t really get discord. Does everyone just kind of talk at once? Like a giant group chat instead of topical threads?
Lol. I get that. I’ve felt the same way but I’m trying to find a good place for communities and that was one venue I was playing around with.
You can be the change you want to see in the world. if you search the communities and can’t find the one you’re looking for, make it.
I’ve been posting to my work slack.