we need more users
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The hurdle of registration and getting into the Fediverse is, in my view, too high for many people.
I had to guide my brother step by step to get him into the Fediverse.
I think that’s where it often fails.
It needs to be much easier to join — then more people would probably come in.Lemmy specifically needs UX improvements in signup. I've seen many Reddit users get stuck or confused when trying to signup for a Lemmy instance.
I think this should be a big focus of v1.1 (v1.0 is already a victim of scope creep and needs to get finished)
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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
me the next time i see some reddit user
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Someone in here already said it, but ‘Lemmy’ is a horrendous name. That alone was the reason why I didn’t bother to try it at all for a long time. Only recent events pushed me towards it but tbh I’m not sure I’ll stay.
You can say that again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LemmyReally muddles up the search results about lemmy.
Lemmy standing for "Marxist-Leninist" surely is off-putting to some. Might be better to re-brand it as "Feddit" (federated Reddit).
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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
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Edit Actually after taking a step back and looking at how many thoughtful comments and conversations have happened on this thread, I am heartened.
There is a lot of passion here, we are just fighting against unbelievably strong currents.
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I agree. New user introduction is very poor. Took me ages just to choose an instance - and that was in no small part because I'm here not only to escape the enshittified chokepoint capitalism of american big tech, but also because I'm utterly sick of the domination of US centric points of view and censorship. Even though i know communities are not instance locked, I wanted an instance that is not likely to be managed in the same way. Time will tell if I chose well or poorly
Fwiw that's a very popular instance you are on, so I think you will likely enjoy it? But if not, then that is the beauty of the Fediverse: you can always hop over to some other one if you wanted.
Like email providers: if gmail doesn't suit you, then switch to another one, or even self-host your own if that sounds appealing:-P.
Note here there is zero advertising: none. Therefore, no incentive to try to "(ab)use" you as the product. Conversely, features offered to you are significantly slower to be developed (honestly PieFed is so very far ahead of Lemmy in that respect, e.g. offering keyword filters such as "Musk" or "Trump", and advanced AI slop detection, etc.). So instead of thinking how different platforms will fall over themselves trying to compete for your "business", think along the lines instead of how you can match up with other like-minded folks. And at some point you'll want to contribute - perhaps code development, or donations, though what the Threadiverse needs most is just participation, as in content posted to it, the more thoughtful the better.
So far you are off to a fantastic start, welcome!
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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.
Communities driven by bots should die
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How about bridging over to bluesky? If they could follow and comment threads, the userbase explodes 10-fold (compared to the current exposure to mastodon).
See this thread: https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/372
Wow that could be huge for us! I subscribed to that issue, eagerly awaiting the day that's enabled
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Damn there's barely anyone here
There's good, actually.
Smaller communities don't fill up with annoying bots and toxic personalities
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I'm a very new user who wanted to give this a chance, here are the friction points from my point of view:
- The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn't help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.
- Content discovery sucks ass. My feed stayed mostly the same since I started using Lemmy. I'm presented the same shit over and over again. I'm not sure if it's something that I do wrong, if there is just no content or if that's a side effect of 'no tracking at all' but either way the experience is just bad
- Someone in here already said it, but 'Lemmy' is a horrendous name. That alone was the reason why I didn't bother to try it at all for a long time. Only recent events pushed me towards it but tbh I'm not sure I'll stay.
In short the user experience is abysmal.
@dessalines@lemmy.ml for the love of god please fix the onboarding
Also go full Elon Mulk and artificially boost lemmy.sdf content they have a lot of good OC
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How about bridging over to bluesky? If they could follow and comment threads, the userbase explodes 10-fold (compared to the current exposure to mastodon).
See this thread: https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/372
i think the main issue is that bluesky/mastodon are user-centric (like Twitter) while Lemmy is content-centric (like Reddit) i wrote about this here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/52567886
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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.
On a long enough timeline, every Lemmy thread eventually becomes one of the following:
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ACAB
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Trump bad
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FOSS good
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Reddit bad
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Socialism (generally, via vanguard party) good
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Tankies (i.e. #5) bad
Not that I disagree with most of the above, but we need some normies in here to balance things out, so invite them and don't demonize them. That's made trickier by Reddit banning people for talking about the Fediverse/Lemmy, so you have to be clever about it.
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ml is run by the devs of Lemmy so unfortunately that's not realistic, you could be missing on a ton of information if you want to subscribe to Lemmy development or information related communities
those posts get crossposted anyways, you wouldn't be missing much
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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
Reddit would probably sooner just lop off their entire EU userbase than comply.
No offense to Europeans because I love y'all, but you are a drop in the bucket for global (English) internet usage.
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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.
Here's my Amateur Coder waving the Wand of Coding idea:
What if we had a FOSS browser extension that scraped Reddit passively, uploading everything you see as you browse (except PII like your username and PMs and such) via bot to Lemmy (on a delay so they can't pinpoint your identity as easily?)
I can't be the only one who splits their time between Lemmy and Reddit, and would much rather participate here than there, but there's much less to comment on here.
My favorite subreddit (/r/tampa) recently perma-banned me for extremely petty reasons, but /c/tampa is a ghost town.
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Fediverse is changing. People used to put the text of images, like comics, in the body of the OP to be more accessible, but I haven't seen that in ages. It's something I noticed.
People used to put the text of images, like comics, in the body of the OP to be more accessible
I argue that that's a perfect use case for AI because it can do that well and reliable and it doesn't need to be done by humans manually. You're just annoying users that way when a machine can do it perfectly fine.
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Couldn't say it any better. If stagnant popularity is what is necessary to stay unattractive for botnets and bad actors I personally am all for it.
But we aren't "stagnant", we are decreasing.
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What communities, out of interest? Piefed has a wider range of options for following comms.
c/nintendo@lemmy.world is quite notorious for this
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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.
But ActivityPud is very barebones so you will need to implement a lot of features. In doing so you are effectively creating a new Lemmy.
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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 completely agree. To attract more users, you not only have to create higher quality content, but also content that elicits an emotional response from users, as they well know at Reddit.
On Reddit, it is bots that are constantly posting controversial topics. On Lemmy, fortunately, it is humans who can participate in more controversial discussions to attract more humans. For me, as a Linux and Firefox user, controversial discussions include comparisons between Windows vs Linux, Firefox vs Chrome, etc. -
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
To the user mines!
I actually don't mind a smaller community of more intelligent people. Too much riff raff and the quality degrades.
