we need more users
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I think part (though not all) of the issue is discoverability. There's other communities where this isn't as prevalent, but a) they're not always easy to find, and b) for this as well as other reasons, they might not be super active (if people don't know it exists, who's posting?)
I get around the first bit by trawling All New once and a while. One feature I will say I liked on reddit was the random community function. But while I like that it's a smaller userbase here for some reasons, it does mean less diversity of interests.
PieFed offers a number of options to aid in discoverability - like Topics, Feeds (user-customizable and shareable), and combining together all replies from all cross-posts (at which point you can be like "oh hey, I didn't know that community also existed?! Subscribed!!").
Sorry for being salty, but I've given up on Lemmy ever catching up to have even remotely close to as many features as PieFed.
Anyway you are definitely correct, community discovery has huge flaws when using Lemmy (and it's about to get worse, where lemmy.ml gets veto power in showing communities to newly-created instances - it is easy enough to get around that by simply adding them manually, but that will increase the authoritarian control factor even more than it is now, further strengthening the ties between the Lemmy sourcecode and the Lemmy.ml instance, where already maintenance of the latter siphons off a great deal of funding away from efforts to develop the codebase further).
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Let's stop working on "Lemmy app" , "mbin app", "PieFed app", "Mastodon app" and just embrace ActivityPub as the single API.
I think that would just increase the fragmentation LOL. It's like that XKCD comic
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Posted as a reply because this will certainly upset many but...
On the instance wars:
I constantly see nonsense about the horrors of the '.ML' instance, and 'hexbear', primarily from 'Lemmy.world' users, but I have never once actually come across these horrors.
Hexbear is just a troll instance, ala 'cumtown'.
To an outside observer, '.world' users seem to be US propagandists intent on wrecking the platform. "Tankies this, cowbee that", when I've never seen a cowbee post that wasn't entirely reasonable.
And the vast majority of 'tankies' are just people who criticise the US rightfully while not sharing the same breathe to criticize China.
Ngl, fuck Russia, the US and Russia are the greatest evils. China is not anywhere near the same level. You can praise elements of a foreign state without being a 'tankie'.It's the same thought terminating cliche cult bullshit that all right wingers do. And it seems to come from Americans being upset their myopic views aren't babied by people who literally specifically went to an instance to avoid them?
Idk I'm not a user of any of the three, but I've only ever had an issue with lemmy.world users in the past, as a UK citizen who is far from a tankie.
If you've ever actually discoursed with Cowbee, note how they ignore the large majority of what you say and hyper-focus exclusively on the talking points that they are trying to convey. It's not a "conversation", it is evangelism.
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I've been here a few years now and I can say Lemmy's got issues. You can't come on here and have a good time anymore when all it's about is trump trump trump and Linux Linux Linux it gets old. I wanna escape from reality a bit sometimes and there's few areas to subscribe to that gives any joy anymore.
I just got on to lemmy and im already over all the political news in here.
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I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
Damn there's barely anyone here
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Hot take: the biggest issue is actually ever entering a community and seeing zero comments. Most reddit addiction stems from wanting to read comments, so I think people should add a comment to something if they're upvoting and they see that the thread has zero comments.
Nothing eliminates enthusiasm like seeing 0 comments on every post in a community, especially if that community is driven by bots.
I think this is it. Posting is reinforced by getting feedback on posts, both up votes and comments
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I posted in an ADHD community about how I'm fed up with managing my symptoms and I think I finally need to talk to a professional. Someone tried to blame my symptoms on capitalism.
As someone who simply left Reddit because they took away RIF and only stays here because I'm stubborn, Lemmy is the left wing version of Truth Social. A great deal of the users here are the absolute embodiment of the people from Sanfrancisco in South Park huffing each others farts about how progressive they are.
Like, I get it and I do agree in principle on most things with Lemmy which is the only reason I dont leave, but make no mistake THE FEDIVERSE IS AN ECHO CHAMBER.
I know there tends to be a disagreement about this on Lemmy, but this is also what I have observed.
For example, If someone has a computer problem and its windows, there’s a good chance the top comment will be “Stop, use linux”. Almost any conversation can turn into “you’re supporting capitalism”. It discourages people from wanting to post and engage, because of the likely hood of something turning into an argument. Not everyone has the mental bandwidth for it, and they just want a place to come and chill.
Hell I used to be active in making Cassettefuturism grow when lemmee was a thing, and we’d get people coming into that niche community to argue with us about our hobby.
The difference between Reddit and Lemmy was that niche communities would usually not hit the front page and you could be off in your own little corner. Here since things are smaller, you are more likely to run into some niche communities through discovery.
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After trying to convert a friend who heavily uses reddit, multiple times, I recommended him again the other day to leave the hellsite (reddit).
I didn't recommend Lemmy but have a while back.
He himself specifically brought up that he 'didn't vibe with Lemmy as much as reddit' and that he believes he would 'miss stories he would otherwise have liked to see' by switching to Lemmy.
Reddit has kept him more up to date than not over the past year - he believes had he not been using reddit he wouldn't have found out about [specific events in iran] as early as he did.
The other main pain point I've encountered is the small and niche community problem, which I'm sure we are all aware of - certain information feels like it can only be found on such small subreddits.
Therefore I have two suggestions:
- create a Lemmy instance that mirrors reddit, rather than have bots post reddit posts onto main Lemmy instances, create an instance that mirrors specific subreddits on request, including the comments of their posts, and allows Lemmy users to comment and reply back, where those comments are also propagated to reddit so that replies and discussion are mirrored also.
This would struggle due to reddit API and compute power requirements but the subreddits on request and a specific instance for these posts would eliminate the bot spam problem from earlier attempts at the same thing.
- potentially allow the user to associate their reddit account with the instance so comments etc can proliferate without bot recognition.
The other suggestion would be:
- set up trackers for major (and newly popular) subreddits, tag posts by priority, and use this set of posts to determine what content and types of content are missing, but don't just automatically post everything as the spam problem gets out of hand.
Finally, my biggest gripe with my Lemmy use is the constant instance wars.
I have had my comments removed for being rightfully critical of Israel by lemmy.world mods. They appear intent on recreating the problems of reddit here.
This would struggle due to reddit API and compute power requirements
IIRC the EU released a law a few months ago that forces big internet communication platforms to open their API to third-party clients.
this applied to whatsapp i think, i'm not sure whether it also applies to reddit but it might be worth investigating if somebody has too much time on their hands
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Hot take: the biggest issue is actually ever entering a community and seeing zero comments. Most reddit addiction stems from wanting to read comments, so I think people should add a comment to something if they're upvoting and they see that the thread has zero comments.
Nothing eliminates enthusiasm like seeing 0 comments on every post in a community, especially if that community is driven by bots.
Yep. Engagement drives more engagement.
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For me I had so much issue actually making an account, I almost gave up. I think it is cool how Lemmy looks, very simple and very direct, but it does need a bit of more user experience.
Which instance gave you trouble? I think some instances are just bad at handling signups
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I've been here a few years now and I can say Lemmy's got issues. You can't come on here and have a good time anymore when all it's about is trump trump trump and Linux Linux Linux it gets old. I wanna escape from reality a bit sometimes and there's few areas to subscribe to that gives any joy anymore.
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I think that would just increase the fragmentation LOL. It's like that XKCD comic
It's the complete opposite of that.
"Use ActivityPub directly for interacting with the social web graph" is the same as saying "Use HTTP and HTML directly to interact with the world wide web".
The reason we don't see different websites using different versions of HTTP, or that someone can open a HTML document on pretty much website and read its contents is because we are building the application on top of the protocol layer.
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I think part (though not all) of the issue is discoverability. There's other communities where this isn't as prevalent, but a) they're not always easy to find, and b) for this as well as other reasons, they might not be super active (if people don't know it exists, who's posting?)
I get around the first bit by trawling All New once and a while. One feature I will say I liked on reddit was the random community function. But while I like that it's a smaller userbase here for some reasons, it does mean less diversity of interests.
I made one of those communities:
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I do. But every other comment is about how the thing this community is about sucks.
Lemmy really has a problem with "fun". Everything is bad and you need to be told about it.
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Let's stop working on "Lemmy app" , "mbin app", "PieFed app", "Mastodon app" and just embrace ActivityPub as the single API.
There is a difference between Mastodon and Lemmy because Mastodon is user-centric and Lemmy is content-centric. I wrote about this here
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I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
Tell your musician friends to find me here:
https://lemmy.world/c/IndepthIndie
Actually, you know what? I'll give a free guitar lesson to the first 10 people to make a post in that group.
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Lemmynsfw coming in clutch
I thought lemmynsfw hid their content for unregistered users as well so not really
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I do. But every other comment is about how the thing this community is about sucks.
Lemmy really has a problem with "fun". Everything is bad and you need to be told about it.
What communities, out of interest? Piefed has a wider range of options for following comms.
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I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
I’m feeling very burnt out. Lemmy is kinda an endless stream of political doom and gloom. For context, I’m in the US and already stressed out by our political situation. But I don’t come here to see more doom and gloom. It’s getting to the point where I think I need to get off for my mental health.
Then there are all the people who if you don’t agree exactly with their opinion they downvote you to hell. You have left leaning politics but not my flavor of left? Downvote! You hate enshitification and big tech privacy practices, but you use a single piece of software that isn’t FOSS? Downvote!
It’s so exhausting. I absolutely hate Reddit but I miss going on there and just laughing at how someone’s TV is too high. I miss laughing at how some restaurant serves food of shovels instead of plates.
And that’s not even getting into the lack of content. That part I understand requires users like myself to be as active as possible. But it’s hard being active when I feel so burnt out from the other stuff here.
Tbh, idk if these issues are specific to Lemmy or just the internet as a whole. I can only speak to the slice of the internet I find myself in. But I just wanna see people that are excited about things: photography, 3d printing, weird keyboards, etc. And that exists here, but it’s drowned out by all the doom and gloom.
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status. part of the impetus of the development of piefed was a frustration with how the lemmy devs treated people who tried to get onboarded to help with the development of lemmy. i can go into more depth about how this is a reflection of how the lemmy devs see the world, but i don't necessarily feel like hashing all that out when i have bigger fascists to fry
Piefed seems to have its own share of issues, not using ActivityPub protocols which play nice with the rest of the Fediverse (Lemmy, Mastodon etc) for new features and instead prioritizing on their own platform and seeing the Fediverse as a secondary thing.
![Cowbee [he/they]](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/c18ce632-5fb5-4888-8226-3dc55a07acc4.jpeg "Cowbee [he/they]"){kind=avatar}
