we need more users
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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.
Funny enough, a lot of that ends up feeling similar with the move to Linux (and its many distros). It got a very good shift because of Microsoft voluntarily deciding "This OS will be horrible for everyone now." but Reddit hasn't had anything so egregious. Even Linux has a few issues with content/apps from not having enough contributors.
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This site is seemingly for hardcore left-leaning people. Center and right wing are censored, banned, without violating rules, just like reddit mods. So it's no wonder people are leaving.
this site
This isn't a site. It's a collection of sites (instances).
If there is an instance that doesn't tolerate your kind of speech, then choose another instance that does.Be aware that two of the largest hardcore left-leaning instances (hexbear, ml) have been widely defederated (instance-blocked), so it's not fair to say that this only happens to right leaning or centrist ideas.
The beauty (and point) of Lemmy and fediverse is that if you feel like you're being censored, you can join or make an instance of like-minded people, while still having access to the other area if you want it.
Lemmy is uncensorable, but doesn't force people to listen to you. -
Agreed lemme is probably one of the most negative places on the Internet. I joined because I was hoping this place would grow to be a proper alternative for Reddit, with fun niche content, and its own culture of obscure inside jokes. Instead even after several years it still feels like we are the angry trolls living under reddit's shadow.
One of the biggest things I've found that helped me avoid the politics was to leave lemme.world and fill my personal feed up with subscriptions to content that fits my interest. Politics has ways of working its way into content none the less, but at least I've got a fighting chance.
I really do believe lemme is going to struggle to find people who want to stick around unless it starts to embrace fun light hearted content. I'm not sure how we'd do that as a platform, but I do believe that's one of the big reasons people will struggle to adopt this corner of the Internet as their own.
Agreed lemme is probably one of the most negative places on the Internet
parts of lemmy are. cool rocks is pretty positive. there are other positive places. it's one of those GIGO things.
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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.
oh hey, i'm a comment dude. I rarely think up something worth posting, but i'll chat your fingers off. everyone has a place 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
I think part of the issue is new users not understanding or feeling comfortable with the fediverse (myself included a while ago). Even after searching for a bit and looking it up I can barely get how it works, but there's really no guide with the common terms anywhere, how to get started, the difference between platforms and what they have in common etc.
The benefits are the first thing you hear about, but they seem more like jargon terms than actually anything functional.Reddit has better accessibility and user retainment, alongside with a library of old posts that are good for searching some niche stuff up.
For example, if I were to get a friend into lemmy, I'm not really sure how I can explain it to them, or where to start other than the copy paste "decentralized" "federated" stuff. It doesn't really answer stuff like who moderates it, develops it, owns it, or what's the difference between lemmy, piefed mbin, how do they interact with each other.
I believe that an introductory "oficial" post on the front of each platform in layman's terms would be great to get new users to stay. -
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!
Thanks for the kind reply.
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In doing so you are effectively creating a new Lemmy
Indeed, I am. But to be perfectly honest, I'm doing a lot less work that I original thought in the server side, and when I get to start working on Mastodon compatibility, I will probably just change the internal implementation of mastodon's js sdk.
Right but you understand how this makes fragmentation worse right?
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The reason why you haven't seen these horrors is because to you they just look like others like you.
Regardless if you agree with this post, for example, it's propaganda, no different than the american apologists you can accurately identify, the bible thumpling catholics educating the uncivilized people that hadn't heard the healing words of our lord and saviour jesus christ or those who believe everything should be privatized/converted into a free market due to orthodox economic doctrine.
It is propaganda because it operates under the framework that someone who disagrees with a positive association must have not understood a specific sacred text or heard a sacred doctrine, or if they have they must be morally defficient, leaving no room for debate whatsoever.
It's extremely difficult to identify propaganda that caters to our own emotional needs and positive associations.
One of the easiest ways to spot propaganda is the "no room for questioning, let alone disagreeing" aspect. In healthy societies with healthy ideologies there is a legitimate space for disagreement and debate. If there wasn't, power would always remain in the same hands which is one of the aspects most criticize about both capitalism and communism.
And believe it or not, there is more to the world than the right-left west-east dychotomies.
If you look at history, similar ideologigal schisms have happened time and time again in times of shifts in the balance of power, such as when the printing press was invented and the the catholic - lutheran division that came from it. or during the decadence and later fall of the roman republic with the equestrials vs patricians (which originally shared ideological vision).
These largescale violent power struggles always end up boiling down to "you're either with us or against us" which in my opinion is the true poison.
Feel free to disqualify or label me now and have a nice day.
Oh hey, it's worth noting that that particular screengrab is taken out of context and was deliberately intended to make me appear that way. I even concede that one can disagree with Marx and Engels, my point was more against those who claim to agree with them but strongly disagree with the socialist market economy of China. I oppose anyone that tries to treat theory like gospel, that's why I usually don't reference theory directly unless it's directly relevent like it was in this case.
That's the thing, people propagandize about us as well, like the MeanwhileOnGrad crowd that took that snippet out of context. You're doing the same here, by extrapolating an entire behavior of me from a single, out-of-context snippet hosted in a Nazi bar. What's important is that we actually pay attention to what others are saying, because everyone is guilty of thinking they are correct.
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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.
I don't really think this is true, I engage with the entirety of what people say. As far as I know, you have Lemmy.ml blocked on your piefed account, and we haven't interacted in years, so I'm not sure where you're getting this idea from.
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I did not make this up, nor do I think that the sign-up procedure is inherently difficult. But this is something cited by many people over in the bad place, e.g. in r/RedditAlternatives. So it seems relevant to the OP, asking for more users, to cite why they claim that they do not want to come here. Yes the cost may be low, but there still is a cost.
And here I presumed that you meant "signing up", but if we meant to fully switch... yes that is actually super destructive to the Threadiverse in particular, but also is precisely what happens, on all of Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and nodeBB too I would presume.
I'm just going to restart my point for clarity.
Any barriers to bringing on users into the fediverse at any level is destructive to the future survival of the fediverse. This is specifically an issue that came up during any of the waves of migration we see from the bad place.
At various times there have been bans, both temp and outright, for all kinds of reasons, for both agreeable and disagreeable reasons, but regardless the impact is destructive to the fediverse.
Social networks thrive on users and through scaling aquire different properties. It's more about the math of what it takes to keep a stable network and there is no getting around that. The "come one come all" approach things like the bad place use allows them to capture that kind of growth and without it, it's just not possible to have the kind of detailed and varied and populated network you would get otherwise.
There have been specific moderation choices that have significantly curtailed and hurt the growth of the fediverse on all sides. Defederation is a huge one. Overly dogmatic moderation is another.
Like I agree that I don't want tankies content or their spam, but realistically the "tankie"-verse versus the rest-of-us-verse has crippled the projects growth.
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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
Sure, these are two very different usability paradigms, but I think they are very well integrated by treating both groups and users on Lemmy as users on Mastodon. Mastodon and Lemmy are the vanilla examples, but a.gup.pe and mbin in show that the two coexist quite smoothly. It is "only" a question of how to map this onto BridgyFed.
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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.
aw damn i'm a commenter more than a poster. I could use a good resource on theory beyond the circle of fifths though i'm a total novice.
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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
My two cents is that more users oughta establish new communities when they find the absence of one. Even if they don't have the time to devote for fully moderating it, as people join the responsibilities can be allocated among the early adopters. Especially those with strong political and moral backgrounds (to mitigate abuses of power like those infamously cultivated at Reddit).
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…I am drifting away from Lemmy myself.
Political communities are echo chambers like Reddit, in a different color. Discussing tech or helping others is better, but still feels like talking in circles.
Wholesome subs like /c/SuperBowl are sublime, but I mostly lurk there.
Information hygiene is awful. Big subs upvote tabloids and Tweets to the sky, as long as they align with their beliefs. I just saw a discussion on a not-obviously AI generated photo with the community sentiment of “misinformation? Who cares. It’s a pro-lefty meme, so spread it.”
Anyway, all this scrolling and impulse commenting eats time. I get the same feeling of shouting into a black hole that I get on corporate social media.
Much of this is my fault, though.
I have several niches I intend to make original posts for, but never do.
It’s somewhere in the giant pile of my IRL executive dysfunction :’(
I don't like how broad Lemmy assumes default interests are, though then again showing everyone the average interests may statistically be the best initialization point.
Every time I'm shown a community I'm totally uninterested I make sure to go in and block it from my feed. Likewise with aggressive or otherwise pathological users. It gets better.
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Yeah, and at least Reddit sent notifications to tell people that their content was removed. Also there's a modmail allowing people to ask questions. Also a post was merely removed from the community stream, but allowing discussions in it to continue including answers as to why it was removed, rather than deleted entirely and for all eternity, destroying all of the conversations that had taken place therein, even between users unrelated to the person posting that supposedly triggered the removal, i.e. innocent bystanders.
Lemmy has turned out to be just as if not more authoritarian than Reddit - not to the instance admins tbf but to the individual users. And moreover, the amount of such seems to mainly increase over time, e.g. mod names are now obscured in the modmail even if you go looking into it, and soon Lemmy.ml will become baked into the codebase as the source of new communities, giving it veto power if it wants a new instance to not sign up to anything defederated from lemmy.ml. Centralized, authoritarian control is not what most of us signed up for when attempting to flee Reddit.
Fortunately PieFed is fighting that trend mightily, e.g. allowing democratization of moderation features. Though even PieFed does not send a notification when someone is banned or their content removed (in this case though likely just low priority as it is still being developed, at a much quicker pace than Lemmy, rather than with lemmy.ml being an actual choice to do things a certain way).
We can create our own Lemmy instances though, and with piefed, we are on our way to a better Reddit!
And with America rouge, Reddit will go up in a Mushroom cloud anyway.
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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.
well it seems they are not using Industry Standards
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Aww man i would really like that guitar lessons! But i don't have enough knowledge/context to post in that community (yet)
Don't worry about it. Honestly. Just post a song and tell us what you like about it. That's good enough. Maybe later you can keep us updated on your guitar progress!
(Hmmm... I always suspected the "In-depth" in the group's name was maybe a little intimidating haha)
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aw damn i'm a commenter more than a poster. I could use a good resource on theory beyond the circle of fifths though i'm a total novice.
I've used this one quite a bit: https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/
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Names are a discrete and contested domain and honestly I don't see how Lemmy being also a person is a hindrance. Coke is also a drug yet no one complains, certainly not the big corpo.
Protip: you can search for more than one word on search providers. Something like "lemmy social" or "lemmy server" for example.
It just makes it more annoying to search for anything lemmy related
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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
Wait till Reddit fucks up again, there will be an influx of users.
![Cowbee [he/they]](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/c18ce632-5fb5-4888-8226-3dc55a07acc4.jpeg "Cowbee [he/they]"){kind=avatar}
