Don’t be a vote connoisseur here please. Redefine how you think about voting and participating.
Do you miss your communities from elsewhere. Well guess what, you are that core community now. If you want it back, the only thing holding you back is you. Don’t wait on someone else to start posting. You don’t need to worry about the perfect polished quality of your content or if it has been done before elsewhere. The current bar is, umm, poorly defined. No one is judging you. Call it practice. EVERY time you see something interesting, get in the habit of posting it please. Maybe go out of your way to grab a reference or two and post them.
Along these lines, think of how unsure and uncomfortable this may seem to most of us former lurker connoisseurs. You can play hard and thick skinned all you want, but you know exactly what post or comment you posted elsewhere that got the most votes or interaction. Why? Because it matters to you. So upvote everything you can. It matters to someone else too. Don’t upvote just for the value or interest you have in the content. Do it just to say “hey, thanks for making the effort to participate and make this place a few lines longer.” Please rethink how you handle voting, at least for now, think of a down vote as FU for participating, no votes as I wish you weren’t here. We are all likely accustomed to a lot more interaction and validation in our own little niches. This is really an underpinning value of social media, we are here to engage with people, so tell people who are new and unsure about a new and different place, “hey, thanks for participating.” You may not know or really appreciate their interests, but you can help us grow a core that can evolve into your favorite niches as the community grows. You are the core community. We can all make it grow if we make it a place people want to be.
I think putting effort into actively participating is also the best way to truly quit reddit.
I mean, now everyone is angry because of what’s happening and we’re flooding alternatives with enthusiasm because of this particular moment, but will it last?
When you’re so angry about something it’s because you deeply care, and as long as we care there’s always the risk of going back to it when the “anger moment” will pass, because let’s be honest, it will pass sooner or later.
So we need to stop caring, and the best way to do it IMO is being involved as much as possible here, find new people, make new connections, create/participate in new communities, so there’s no chance we’ll miss anything of what’s “on the other side”.
I’ve been ready to leave Reddit for a long time. I’m not angry at Reddit… It’s more just continued disappointed. The site was built off of effort from the communities but the corporation won’t listen to us for guidance and changes.
The only thing I worry about is that most people won’t even hear of alternatives like Lemmy and that will impact adoption. I fear that only the degenerates and extremests will be the ones to make the changes. I hope that isn’t how it plays out.
most people won’t even hear of alternatives
I’m still active on reddit, a lot of people are worried about the future of the platform, they’re asking questions about alternatives and where fellow redditors are going, lemmy and kbin are mentioned everywhere, people are also directed to r/RedditAlternatives.
We’re trying to answer questions as best as we can, we’re still very new to the fediverse but the little we know is enough to get people started. Some people are even actively reaching out to others to let them know alternatives exist.
And those who don’t ask (or don’t lurk) most probably don’t care, those are probably the ones that would go on using reddit no matter what, and that’s ok, each individual has to decide for themselves.
Dumb question but was is the difference between Lemmy and Kbin?
I don’t know all the details sorry, I’m still very new to it all, but it seems they’re just different software implementing more or less the same thing, they’re also connected with each other.
I think of it - for example - as LibreOffice and Softmaker Office, they’re different software implementing the same thing (an office suite).
Other people can answer much better than me as what the differences are in terms of functionalities, though from what I’ve seen so far (I joined both), it doesn’t seem they differ much, just minor details.
I wanted to add that Kbin has better integration with Mastodon if you’re into that.
(Some people may also have ideological issues with Lemmy devs, so that could be a reason for choosing Kbin)
Ah yes, there’s a tab specific to mastodon posts, so that’s a reason.
But joining kbin only because you have issues with the devs doesn’t make sense, they’re federated, you see all lemmy posts there and you can interact with them like your account was on lemmy.
IMO it’s better to join a server that blocks main lemmy and lemmygrad if you don’t want to see their political views, there are a few who block them.
I fully agree with you, but for full transparency some people do have a problem with it still (e.g. https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110476830253102884 )
That’s the nail on the head, and what has stopped most alternatives in the past. There needs to be a saturation point of usage, what that is for a platform varies.
Not to mention adapting to the new norms and styles. Reddit was fairly open in general, but specific subs had some very ironcald rules about style and usage. old school forums like SpaceBattles are even more ‘soft’ rule specific simply dictated by the community and the old guard on it.
I’m so excited to see actual people posting real comments and it’s feeling like I’m part of an actual community. This is pretty cool - and I’m going to try and participate a lot more instead of just lurking like I used to.
Instead of bots and trolls right? Yeah me too :)
I’m trying to upvote all that can, mostly because I’m not very good at commenting lol
I think you’re fine!
My people!!
E-introverts represent, it has been a change really. I found that in Reddit, the sheer number of participants led me to only contribute meaningfully in smaller subreddits. I think I’ve made more comments today than in the last year on Reddit.
Keep in mind that this being a much smaller site your voice and opinion does have an impact. Your posts and votes will influence the culture of this site. Put in the effort to shape it into how you’d like it to be.
Yeah, we just need a bit more of a push. I think some people may be a bit too fixated on reaching Reddit’s numbers; we really don’t need to. I don’t care if the top comment has 50 upvotes instead of 50,000, what I want is more comments, more posts, more experts in a field sharing their invaluable opinions.
Obviously it will take some time to reach the level of granularity some subreddits have. Like, we have a design sub, a good design sub, an ashole design sub, a crappy design sub (which is like asshole design, but unintentional), a design design sub (for awful designs that are also somehow aesthetic)… And all this without going into specific design subs (web design, brand design, structure design…). Yeah, we may not have all those for a while, we enthusiasts may all have to interact in a general Lemmy Design community, but guess what? That is how Reddit got where it is now.
Personally, I am enjoying the process. I’ve been lurking Reddit for years, reading awesome posts, and informing myself on all kinds of topics from people I won’t ever begin to compare to. But Lemmy, for the moment, feels more intimate to me, I am starting to recognize specific nametags, to interact with real human beings (not a sentient blob of like-minded thoughts). It feels like being at a bonfire enjoying the moment with a couple of people, and I think that by itself has it’s own charm.
Thanks for your thoughts. I hope this continues to develop and becomes a stable and positive community. It will never be reddit. The sooner people realize this as a positive, the better.
The first step to being a part of the community is participation. The smallest form of participation is a vote. With a tiny community, posting without social engagement lacks the positive feedback needed to be self sustainable. Getting past the point of critical mass where we are more than sustainable is absolutely critical right now. The best way to influence this, and lower the critical mass threshold is to encourage people to boost/bolster engagement, especially in niche areas of critical importance to those willing to post. Increasing the volume and categories encourages more specialization and adoption.
So the most important aspect right now is simply getting people to upvote, and as many as possible to post
It will never be reddit.
Thank god, it turned into a chaotic toxic mess.
I kinda like it. Reddit can feel disconnected, comment and move on kind of thing. I’m curious where this is in say a year. I will miss my smaller intimate communities, but this is one general intimate community so it works.
This feels like when you find a really good smaller streamer and can actually talk to people in the chat and make good friends with some and become part of a cool community where every voice is heard… before the streamer hits it big and the chat scroll is so fast you can’t even see your message among the omega luls and kappas and pogchamps and kkonas and the streamer can’t possibly respond to anything because there’s just too much garbage
The current growth rate over the last few hours, just on this server instance has been around 275 users per hour. If that was completely sustainable, in one year, there would be over 2.4 million users on this instance.
That’s pretty crazy numbers! Here for it.
This moment is beautiful. People are understandably looking forward and hoping that they can recreate all of their niche communities. But I’m just enjoying this moment in time where we have a group of people figuring everything out together and trying to build something better than what we had. Even if Lemmy does get hugely successful, it’ll never again feel like it does at this moment, when all of the users care so much about being positive contributors.
Yep, that’s exactly how I feel too and you said it beautifully! I’ve been through this with a handful of platforms at this point and somehow it never feels any less bittersweet, :').
I will ask, is this how being part of a forum back in the day felt? Because that’s the “feeling” I have right now.
Yes. It’s like a BBS forum right now. It’s the feeling of seeing usernames as human beings, instead of anonymous trolls. Feels good man.
Long time reddit lurker, coming out of my shell one uovote at a time.
One comment at a time, you mean :)
Maybe I’m the extreme lurker. I used to rarely even upvote. Felt like at a zoo. Don’t feed the animals. Watch from afar. Laugh at the jumping monkey.
Same for me, but I wouldn’t nessecarily call it extreme. Just lurking or better only consuming. Now is the time to change that. I’m upvoting like crazy (compared to just a week ago) and the few comments I wrote since being part of lemmy is more than what I commented on reddit in years.
hahah, me on the other hand, i have always been a very avid commenter to the point where i was thinking i might reach 100,000 karma on reddit this year or early next year. buuut, with this happening, i might start working on building up lemmy/kbin/other stuff, idk, i’m also a programmer and i make a lot of utilities for communities… we’ll see, but it seems my hyperactivity will be transferred to this side of the digital world.
but yes, do be active here, because otherwise ppl will think this shit’s dead and they’ll join something else :)
I’m right there with you!
Yeah. There’s a lot of us. I’m trying to break out of that habit. I also feel like I’ll get more out of it if I actively participate.
Thanks for the encouragement and normalization words. I’m maybe the lurkiest lurker ever, but I absolutely can and do upvote!
Lurkiest lurker… i like that and laughed ! Up arrow for you!!
Try sorting by new and boosting genuine efforts.
I have noticed that sorting by new is pretty much required here if you want to see something, eh, new.
Sad but true.
I think the basic functionality is working great, but it needs a critical mass of people. Next few weeks and the June 30 shutdown will make or break.
Ooh what’s June 30? I’ve only heard of the one starting tomorrow so far
deleted by creator
That’s when most of the 3rd party apps are shutting down, same as the start of big new API fees.
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I think the apps are also an important factor, lots of people are having issues using jerboa and lemur rn, but I feel support might get better soon
I tried that but sorting by new is almost unusable. After a few seconds it starts loading new posts at the top and then everything moves, and keeps moving. You can’t read something if it doesn’t stand still.
lemmy.world users have subbed too many places! Guess it’s a “good” problem and something that can be fixed.
Heck yeah. As soon as I figure out what all these buttons do I look forward to engaging with some of these communities. Thanks for the advice, hope many take to heart
On that note, does anyone know the difference between upvote and boost?
From what I can tell, a boost seems similar to a retweet, in the sense that items you’ve boosted then appear on your own account. An upvote is just an upvote.
Good to know, thanks!
In regards to kbin they seem to show up in the “boosts” category of your profile. I guess it’s a little more relevant on Mastodon with its Twitter like concept. Unless that also somehow pushes visibility in regards to the algorithm? Might be too easy to abuse though, thinking about T_D days on Reddit dominating /r/all due to vote manipulation, so maybe it’s just not as relevant here.
ytmnd flirted with buying attention and for a while every post was a Christian org post. That’s about the last time I went there. Hope you can’t just buy attention on lemmy
There is no almighty algorithm here!
It is not implemented in Lemmy.
Well said! Im gonna try doing my part to make this place better one comment and upvote at a time.
Its funny: in my case a few weeks before the current reddit enshittification drive I started feeling like /r/all was turning into facebook or twitter from a ‘create engagement by pissing people off’ perspective and started checking in on mastodon more regularly and reddit less. I do participate in a bunch of subreddits too, but it seems like the writing is on the wall with reddit.
I don’t love the twitter model where you’re searching for a hashtag of the day or following some entity yelling stuff. I grew up on usenet news, forums, and bbs’es before Facebook came along and really like threaded discussions, with self/auto moderation for interest and community ‘adults’ moderating for big stuff.
Today is my first day on a Lemmy instance and so far it seems to be exactly the right model for me: distributed, forum moderated and user moderated, and threaded discussion based. Its awesome the underlying protocols fit many models (this one and the Mastodon one) so you can choose your style.
I was noticing it too over on Reddit. Last couple months I found myself almost unconciously in the comments of threads where there was a misspelling in the title. It happened often enough that I was starting to think they were doing it intentionally.
Y’all, I’ve been on Reddit for 14 years. It has been lowest common denominator garbage aside from the niche communities for over 4 years now. If it wasn’t for RES, RiF, and Apollo I would’ve stopped using it years ago.
The average redditor has been lowering the quality of posts and comments for quite some time. Around a year ago, I noticed people I personally know, using Reddit, whom I assumed never would do so. These individuals spent most of their time on apps such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok. I believe this is Reddits intention, and they want to stabilize to compete with some of the larger social media communities, rather than remain as they were.
I’m glad to see it rot over time, and will recommend no one uses it going forward.
Look at me. I am the 1% now.
Would it be ethical to start saving useful reddit post on lemmy ?
I think if you credit the original poster, it’s a great idea to grab some of the bestof Reddit posts. There is a lot of really incredible content that could disappear. Combined with Imgur removing a lot of anonymous content from the past decade, sadly it seems like there could be a lot of valuable information that gets lost.
Also, this is my first comment after being on Reddit for 15 years! Where did the time go… I’m glad Reddit didn’t track our hours.
Hi, Lemmy!
Just deleted my 10+ years old account, I feel old.
Over 80% of them are reposts anyway, so take solace in that. Regardless, why not curate some content in one corner, it’ll help us all out in the long run.
I saw a bunch of that yesterday, like if you click through to Reddit you’re still boosting Reddit 😂
Right. If we had a way to view the content without accessing the website I’d support it but I won’t be opening any reddit links starting tomorrow. Screenshot and credit?
Exactly. Repost some content from reddit (or from somewhere else) that you liked the most and skip the boring/non interesting/spam etc.
In my opinion, a ripoff post is better than no posts…
I’m really glad I found this place. I’ll do my best to spread it and be active
Me too, @[email protected]
Never has a user name been more appropriate
That’s what she said!
Seriously Mark, seriously?
Unrelated. But I didn’t know this. You don’t have an account in lemmy.world yet you could comment here? I’ve read up about the whole decentralised model. But how do I comment without logging in?
Because of the sites being federated. I am not logged into lemmy.world, but feddit.dk instead. Try searching for something like “asklemmy” (or click the following link) and you will be able to interact with /c/[email protected] via lemmy.world in the same way that I am interacting with lemmy.world.
So am I supposed to be not making accounts in all the sites I like?
I’m trying to browse on a beta iOS app (called Mlem) and the landing page is a list of all the accounts I’ve created.
Excactly you are not supposed to use more than one account for lemmy. The only case is if one instance is not federated with other instances (like lemmygrad.ml often isn’t).
I’m on android myself, so I don’t know how Mlem works, but try asking over at /c/[email protected].
Thank you!
What’s difficult is finding this website in the first place, most people don’t understand terms like instances and all the server details, it would have been fine to just share this main link and tell people to recreate communities
There is a bit of a learning curve, but it is not terrible. Based on the growth numbers so far over the last few days a small competence filter may be a good thing IMO. Maybe it will be too much for the most negative potential users to overcome.
I know I should read about all this more, but I’m just gonna jump right in and figure out how to comment and post on my own. I still have no idea what an instance is, but atleast I’ve found communities and I even posted a few comments so I seem to be doing just fine lol
That’s fair, we don’t want to put too much on the website and bring it down. So far the only frustrating this is that to post on other existing communities I need to make an entirely new account for that website?
Not really, you may subscribe, read and comment on remote communities.
(Just like this message I am posting from my feddit.de instance)
Nah, just search for most of them. If you can’t subscribe initially, I think it means you need to make a post on on the sub.
Try not using apps. This is not trying to data mine you, so it works better in a browser. Your instance is like your app. Log into your instance (Lemmy.world), use the hamburger menu to find the magnifying glass to search. Be mindful of the context of the search. Local is searching only in .world. All searches all federated instances. Think of this like what it is; notice the version number is 0.17… This is a beta version and the developers are working on it as they can and as this grows. Donations help, but I’m sure they have real jobs just like almost everyone else here. Everyone involved is a volunteer. Like I think Ruud is hosting .world out of his own pocket, and the entire development budget is like $500 per month for Lemmy’s 2 primary contributing devs. There are going to be bugs and issues that take some time to resolve.
This was exactly why I decided to jump in and learn. I know why I dislike most platforms and I can see the potential for something much better, here.
Already it reminds me of the early days of reddit, before memebarf, trolls, and shitposters took over. I know it’s inevitable that it’ll end up here too, but the reprieve is nice.
So far, yes! Much of this takes me waaaaaay back to the early screechy interweb days. Maybe the nostalgia has me in its grip, I dunno. :D
We’ll get there, I suspect. The learning curve is good, because it provides a hurdle for trolls and bots and boomer shitposters, which means those of us wanting to actually put some thought in can get a head start before the black hats catch on.
In addition om to what OP said, we should give a thought to how we will handle bots when they inevitably start showing up.
I find it hard to see how this site can ever challenge the huge user base of Reddit and how they have a relatively active community for basically every topic in existence. But maybe things will snowball.
It won’t. And it doesn’t need to. It just needs to grow and become self sufficient. This will never kill reddit. Reddit will not be “killed”. The purpose is not to kill but to become a place where people come to as an competitive alternative or at the very least a place where they feel good and where they feel they’re getting something out of their participation.
You never know, Reddit was once small and digg was the shit, then digg killed itself. Honestly, I kinda doubt it’s gonna happen here as well, social media has been consolidating for years now and it’s extremely hard to break into the space, but I’ll hold onto hope, this looks like a very cool conecpt.
Yep. I guess we’ll see. I think with the rise of the bots the internet is going to become more and more unusable in general. But hey, maybe we should just all touch grass more anyway.
He’s out of line, but he’s right.
Ex Machina is coming and I love it
It doesn’t matter. Even if somehow this system fails as well there will always be something else. Go back to yahoo forums lol!
from a tech standpoint… when the core development community departs a project, that project dies - its almost always a given. reddit is such a giant that it may never die and I dont expect its core to be completely gutted. but quality content attracts more of the same and I feel that we are beginning to get quality core people here. the reddit husk can continue to shamble on, I don’t care.
In my mind, it only needs to be a fraction of the size of Reddit to be potentially successful. I’ve been using online forums since the 90s, back in the day there were some forums with great long-lasting communities that had only a couple of dozen regular members. Sometimes a smaller forum is better than a larger one. Granted it’s different since forums generally specialised in one topic, but don’t forget the days where you didn’t need to be a huge all-encompassing platform to be successful, especially when you’re not trying to make money from it.
Sometimes I miss the 90’s and early 2000’s forums. Smaller and positive communities with good moderation. Hope this inherites that spirit.
#MakeTheWebDecentralizedAgain
Oh definitely. Also if you didn’t like the moderation or site policies you could just make your own forum. I’m sure it’s a bit of a rose-tinted view but those were the good-old days for me.
I’m not old enough to remember forums, but recently I was lurking around archives of some old forum and, the community around it seemed so special that I hope we can achieve something similar. Obviously, back in the day internet wasn’t so massive like it is now, so perhaps that feeling of closeness would be difficult to achieve (?)
Totally agree. It’s called social loafing. From Wikipedia: “In social psychology, social loafing is the phenomenon of a person exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when working alone. It is seen as one of the main reasons groups are sometimes less productive than the combined performance of their members working as individuals.”
In large communities like Reddit, users are less likely to participate than in a small community
It was better that way. I in no way feel engaged in reddit comment sections. I don’t recognize anyone and don’t bother to follow or chat with anyone. I pretty much comment and move on if it’s something I care enough about. I don’t want to get obsessively invested like I used to back in high school street fighter online forums (some embarrassing discussions) but I’d like to actually be part of a community that sees each other as people and not arguments.
I agree, actually. The people upset about the 3rd party apps unfortunately don’t represent the majority of the users of Reddit. I have several friends on a friends discord I run that never used a 3rd party app at all. They just used the base reddit client like insane people; but they did/do it. For them nothing is changing, and that’s going to be most of the people.
Unless…all the blackouts some how affect enough of them. If their favorite subreddits die out, then maybe they’ll notice. But overall, I feel like it’ll either take a while for Reddit to die out. Or it’ll just continue chugging on, except a lot of the people putting in the work to moderate and post content will maybe have moved on (which may end up eroding the platform there, too).
But we’ll see for sure.
Using the Reddit app… like from Reddit? those animals.
RiF for life. :-)
But how many of them are very active?
It’s a common rule that the vast majority of content is created by only a few members. It doesn’t matter if 90% of reddit’s userbase are happy enough and won’t leave if the 10% (or even a sizeable chunk of that 10%) of redditors who are most active and create most of the content on the site leave.
