Since my favorite reddit app came to Lemmy I’m really keen on getting more people into the fediverse to pump up the volume of content around here. Are there any initiatives that we can assist to get folks onboard?
I had my wife join, and she likes it, but laments the slow pace of new material in the communities.
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Artificial engagement only gets you so far.
I only say something when I have something to say. If I don’t, then it becomes a chore.
I try to say it when I have something to say though. I didn’t always bother on Reddit.
Mostly this
On Reddit I usually didn’t comment anything, even if I had something to say. I do comment here, and a big part is that more people actually engage here.
Oh, right. The poison. The poison for Kuzco, the poison chosen especially to kill Kuzco, Kuzco’s poison.
Sudden, but appreciated reference to The Emperor’s New Groove.
To add to this, artificial engagement is disingenuous. It’s akin to corporate-owned comment sections inviting people to “speak their mind” which, of course, no one does.
It’s a balance that should be kept: being willing to contribute, but not feeling forced to contribute. Quality begets quality, and if we compromise on quality chasing quantity, we would end up copying the worst of Reddit.
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This is daunting. I don’t want to make one. I have a full-time job and a house to take care of. I haven’t had a day off in over a month. I’m not set up to moderate a community. I’m not even set up to vet moderators. People say this on Lemmy all the time like it’s the easiest thing in the world. It’s not for everyone.
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OC brings people. Adopt a community you wish was bigger and make a personal commitment to post to it daily.
For bonus points convince two other people to adopt their own community. We’ll pyramid scheme this sucker with content.
That’s what I did over on kbin. I’m responsible for posting 95+% of pro wrestling news on Lemmy/kbin, and another person sets up most of the discussions. The community wasn’t picking up speed back during the early redditpocalypse. Now we’re getting tons of activity.
Nice!
You’re our LemLM success story. We’ll put you on the cover of non-existent magazine.
A non-existent magazine suits my looks so that works out perfectly!
So I was wishing that r/korea woukd be a thing on lemmy, I found an instance hosted in Korea and subscribed. I started posting, now after like 3 month it’s full of only my own posts, each gets 3-7 upvotes and every 5th gets a comment from someone outside of Korea ^^.
I feel that if I’m the only one posting anyway I perhaps should bring it to my own instance which I have controll over and could moderate if it became necessary. I have no idea who is the admin of that one.
I had no idea that [email protected] existed until you posted about it.
I am in Korea regularly. I joined the community.
The instance is a little small and the community doesn’t have many users. It could help advertising it a little so interested people find out about it. Looks like someone even made a post after your comment.
This is a community I help with, but there are others like it: [email protected]
perhaps should bring it to my own instance which I have controll over and could moderate if it became necessary. I have no idea who is the admin of that one.
I agree. I’ve been shying away from some instances. Since that community is small anyway, you could make it on your own / find a different instance for it.
MLMEMMY LEMLMY MLEMMYM
I dunno which one works, but the only way we’ll get enough Huns to pull this off is with a solid tagline.
Maybe something like, “Upvote your down line, lest ye receive downvotes from your up line.”
LemLM?
Lurkers gonna lurk.
commenters gonna comment
posters gonna post
It took a serious change in attitude for me to not become a lurker anymore. I always figured that if I have nothing interesting to say, I should just be quiet.
Eventually I realized that people are often happy to just get some feedback and interaction, even if it isn’t the most interesting or original response. As long as it’s done in a positive and friendly manner, you’re creating a sense of community.Yes! One kind comment is worth 1000 snarky or rude ones.
Lurkers shouldn’t lurk
you’re not my real dad!
Very much this. Every time you see something interesting make a post about it please. It doesn’t need to be polished. You don’t need to worry about it.
Save hot takes and negativity for posts made by bots. Pay attention to who is posting what, because the poster has to see that negativity and it is not sustainable. You are making every comment to a person. When you bitch about a title or article, it is going to a person that gets a notification and has to see it. Everyone that has tried to do this regularly with the goal of just making regular posts has quit, myself included. It is straight up unhealthy from a mental health perspective to have to read or see what the bottom 5% sludge post. This is one reason why we have so many bots and memes.
The single biggest change that would make this place better would be a negativity filter to wreck the few mental health patients that are always on here down voting every new post. Simply filter for the 0.01% of users with abnormal negativity and sandbox them so they are the only ones that see their own negativity. Posting something here for the first time and seeing this kind of response right away is totally disenfranchising. People that troll the world like this belong in little sandboxes of their own sadistic self gratification. I think down votes are useful and important, but their abuse should be eliminated systematically.
Sometimes (probably most times) people don’t have anything to add to a conversation. In these moments it’s better not to comment at all. Just look at how shitty reddit is with dozens of people making the same stupid joke in the comments on any popular post. Quality is better than quantity.
I think giving the benefit of doubt is extremely important. Being welcoming to newcomers, slowly integrating them into the different culture here, will help a lot (FTR I’m new myself, only been here a few months).
That’s not to say we should give every jackass a soapbox to stand on, but at least learn if they’re willing to converse in good faith before shouting them down.
I agree, it’s all about participation.
The problem with that (from my own experience at least), is that this platform is even more politically homogenous than even reddit or Twitter ever were.
If participation is the goal, you’re (as a community), going to have to be a little more accepting of people who don’t think exactly like you do. (Not you specifically, I mean you in the community sense of the word).
This is a similar problem something like truth social will have as well, catering to only one extreme political view (truth social - far right and lemmy far-left) isn’t a recipe for growing participation.
Now, if lemmy users were more of an open minded community who were capable of nuanced conversation and tolerance without jumping immediately to the most extreme reaction imaginable this would be able to grow.
No one really wants to hang out with a bunch of teenaged extremists. Unfortunately, that’s kind of what lemmy is
Yes. I have this issue in a new subs that people want to lurk but not post. Really hard to keep posting.
Stay strong, it’s the hardest phase. After a while, other people will post too.
Also, take breaks if you need to.
I’m a lurker, but want to contribute. It took a lot to get an account (and then got a bunch of hate because I picked lemmy.world), but I can’t find any guidance on how to create a new sub. Is there any advice on that?
got a bunch of hate because I picked lemmy.world
That was rude of them. I usually recommend people start with lemmy.world, and then move to something else if they want to, once they get a feel for what they want.
Is there any advice on that?
I’ll see if I can find a guide, but it’s fairly simple. On desktop, you click on “Create Community” at the top. This will create a community (the equivalent of a subreddit) (for you it will be on lemmy.world). After that, you should pick a good
namesince you can’t change that (it’s the thing that goes in the url, like if you didcats:lemmy.ca/c/cats. Everything else you can change up later on. I found it easier to learn by doing.If you want to make a community on a different instance, you will need to create an account on that instance, make the community the same way, and then add your original account as a moderator. This is more annoying, so I’d recommend just making communities on your home instance for now.
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I actually think Lemmy needs more work before it grows much bigger. The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit.
It’s tough to sell some of the niche communities without proper spoiler tagging, too. Need something easier to use that works on all platforms.
Proper spoiler tagging is important
I Jerboa uses this format
: : : spoiler Title
Without the spaces between the colons, this is just to show what it looks like.
: : :
Title
This is with the spaces removed
Lemmy in general uses this but a lot of mobile UI’s don’t have proper implementations (or at least they didn’t for a while). I’m not sure if liftoff is still in development but the reason I switched back to Jerboa was because spoiler support was finally added
I completely agree. I’m personally holding off on heavy promotion of this platform until we hit 1.0. If people join too early and are turned off by the lack of polish, they may not come back after it’s fixed.
Yes. Besides, there isn’t any profit being made, is there? I mean, today, more users just means more cost.
Well in theory, more users do mean more donations.
They need to add paid awards with some split for Lemmy development and the instance. That was the reason people bought into Reddit gold. It was a good faith, fund the platform thing.
Awards would only work for people on your own instance though. Pushing them across instances is difficult. If they’re free, they become worthless and defeat the purpose. And passing money between instances is stupidly complicated. I guess you’d have to go to the instance in order to buy the award there. Which gives people an incentive to run their own instance. I’d hope that wouldn’t make servers too small. As much as people seem to like the idea of many, many small instances federated, I think the system works best with several large instances than a million small ones.
I guess it’s complicated.
today, more users just means more cost
Not if they’re setting up their own servers. This kind of horizontal growth is the healthiest way to grow a federated network, and something we can do that centralised platforms can’t.
All I want is the ability to block inbox replies when I say something controversial.
That would be nice, but for now you could just mark all as read without reading them.
I have actually found that people don’t respond to me at all when I say something they feel is controversial. I get a ton of downvotes and maybe once out of every 5 or so times I get one really persistent person who won’t let it go. But that’s it.
The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit
Fair point. The same was said of Mastodon many moons ago. A lot of people put a lot of time and energy into detailed feature requests, describing the problem to be solved, and exactly how their proposed solution would work.
Given that I’ve also seen the same complaint about apps in other federated networks like matrix, maybe what’s needed is a general solution? A website where experienced mods describe the problems they strike, and how social software developers could help them with mod features.
We need a better site to link to than join-lemmy.org. It should concisely pitch lemmy to everyday users and suggest an instance for them to sign up at. Don’t get into the weeds about federation or choosing instances or selecting apps. Just select a sane default and point people to it. Rotate defaults to avoid overloading a given instance or making it too powerful.
It’s not only the “base” instance IMO, most servers have wildly different communities.
There should IMO be some way to search for communitues from any server (and subscribe to them, which is a real hassle especially if your base server doesn’t yet know about them). I like the endless flow of memes as much as the next person, but what I really want is a bunch of communities I’m interested in so that I can lurk, ask questions and eventually create some hi quality content.
Well yes you can search for the name of a community but not for the type of content, IDK like from all the descriptions.
Maybe a sort of indexer could do that…
Sounds like you’re looking for a different client. Connect has a perfectly functional search bar.
When I search for a community in Connect it only shows me communities my home sever knows about.
But if your server doesn’t know about them then wouldn’t you be unable to connect to them anyway?
Yeah that’s like the problem I’m trying to point out :-)
An indexer or Lemmy-crawler that indexes all the descriptions and stuff (maybe messages?) and make it searchable could be a road to check out.
I think the joinlemmy is currently worked on
I like the design, but the categories are all wacky, if your in the know about fedi stuffs.
The instance finder is built to encourage the use of topic specific instances rather than general use ones so that communities are grouped together better in the same site. The site can then manage all the communities effectively and have the site customized to accomodate them better (and make it feel more like a home for what you like looking at and discussion with others rather than one of many reddit clones)
Categories are mainly so that people are sent to a topic instance that matches their interests. Science goes to mander, programming to p.d, sports to fanaticus, gaming to lemmy.zip, etc.
If youve got some suggestions on how to improve it though let me know, still in progress
Sure! Maybe move Lemmy.World to general? I know we’re kind of a catch all instance. Other then that, great stuff.
lemmy.world is in general. Just instances appear in more than one spot (and some general communities appear for a category if they have the largest community for that category and theres no topic specific instances for it). For example of multiple spots lemmy.db.zer0 is in A.I., anarchist, and a couple others since it has those topics in it
Ah neat!
Agreed.
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We need to cut back the bot traffic a touch. All new people coming and see are a million posts with no participation. It’s good to have the content but we’re kind of lacking in curation and a lot of what’s coming over is not stuff we’re interested in commenting on. As long as we just keep carbon copying Reddit and Twitter and the Verge and hundreds of other places, we’re going to have a lot of empty post sitting around.
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Actual discourse and discussion needs to happen. We’re fairly low on trolls currently, which is a fantastic thing. But we also don’t have a lot of spicy takes either.
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More moderation, administration tools, better filters, easier ways to shut out bad actors. Right now the best we can do is defederate when somebody can’t manage their clientele. And we’re still way too bot-able.
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More migration tools something I can to what mastodon does if you need to move instances.
#1: Absolutely.
#2: I’ve seen some spicy takes, at least in the politics communities. Others, people are generally just more chill. I consider that a feature.
#3: The upcoming 0.19.0 will let users block instances as well as users/communities. Filters are unfortunately a client-specific feature right now, but fortunately there are a lot of clients to choose from now.
#4: 0.19.0 has this. Users can export their profile settings data (including subscriptions and blocklists) and import those elsewhere.
The upcoming 0.19.0 will let users block instances as well as users/communities
Oh hell yeah! Finally!
I just block the bots, I want to see what real people care enough to post.
You can also turn off the Lemmy option to see bot posts, and then just manage bot-like humans.
That’s what I meant, but appreciate the clarification.
That’s what I’m doing too. But trying to bring people in and saying oh just block all the bots as the default is not optimal.
Welcome to the new web. Nothing is optimal, it’s a good intro for people. The setting is there and that’s what matters.
Where do you see bot traffic? From my observations, Lemmy has the opposite problem than what you describe in your point 1: all threads I see do get plenty of comments (not as many as reddit, but still plenty), but we get relatively few new threads. Or does that only happen in specific communities? I don’t look at communities I’m not subscribed to, maybe that is why.
Go hit up lemmyworld, hit all hit new.
Every sport, every team, every game as a post. Every verge article ends up on every copy of technology on every service.
wow ok I hadn’t realised. I only ever see the lemmit.online bot posts which kinda make me rage.
If there’s multiple bots posting this spam then it’s not really a single-bot problem.
‘New’ is a bot orgy, which is a real shame because quality posts get lost in it and it’s harder for them to gain visibility and traction in the wider instance. If you stick to subscribed communities you won’t notice, but for new users who haven’t curated their communities yet (or people like me who just like discovering stuff I wouldn’t think to seek out specifically), browsing the general aggregate can be a great way to discover content and communities to follow.
Or it would be, if it wasn’t bot bot bot bot bot bot thread, bot bot bot bot bot bot thread, bot bot thread, bot bot thread, bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot, wait a minute, thread!
I’d much rather see more discussion under the various posts then just an endless stream of what looks like just random links, mostly political, either supporting some democrat or trying to explain why some Republican is evil.
But also, when everyone agrees there isn’t really much to talk about, and if you disagree you wake up to an inbox full of the stupidest comments imaginable and a post with more downvotes that the original post even got upvotes for lol
If conversation is the goal, lemmy users who dominate the community right now don’t know how to have it
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I dig. I’ll make an effort to post in my hobby subs (woodworking and 3d printing) to get some good shit in there. 😉
Good comments in here about the need for better mod tools etc. Not something I normally think about myself.
Couldn’t agree more. A focus on new members is a terrible idea. Just focus on making Lemmy better.
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Totally agree this is the way, and I just subscribed to !malefashionadvice Found fashion subs on reddit pretty standoffish and not helpful, so going to give this a try.
Definitely. Saw another one of your posts on MFA, thanks for your work there
Make valuable original content here that’s not found elsewhere, post and comment thoughtfully as much as possible(No. Pun. Chains). Don’t try to turn this place into reddit, be better than reddit.
People who are on reddit that wanted to come here right now has already done so, so it’s important to drew in people who has never used reddit before here instead of always waiting for reddit to do something stupid.
Also less celeb gossip please, need a place where I can get away from that on the Internet.
the last point should be ignored, the whole point of lemmy is to have as many communties as possible and subscribe to the ones you like. you can defederate ones you dont like
I respectfully disagree. The goal should always be to foster high quality discussion over raw quantity of comment and artificial engagement and the devs have said as much in their documentation of Lemmy’s design.
Otherwise, this place would be no different from 9gag or imgur comment sections, much less reddit.
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From Margot Robbie. Got it.
Also less celeb gossip please, need a place where I can get away from that on the Internet.
You get celeb gossip? I believe I’m somehow connected to the sewage hose that’s Elon Musk posts. I’d love for some more varied content instead of “[rich idiot] said [something incredibly stupid]”
It would be pretty clever, right?
Also, that profile picture is AI generated. :)
Not-so-secret of Reddit success (vs other link aggregators) was that they allowed NSFW content. Set up a separate opt-in corner of Fediverse to post that stuff and a big chunk of reddit will migrate over.
That’s lemmynsfw.com
Fortinet at my corp just banned the whole thing.
That’s probably evidence of success.
You shouldn’t browse porn at your company anyway lmao
But then how do I assert my dominance at meetings? By having hentai on when plugging in the projector?
I was shooting the breeze with a fellow Team Lead (automotive manufacturing), when I noticed that he was browsing Indeed, on our workstation. He didn’t care if they noticed; he knows he is indispensable.
If they’re smart, they’re working to make him less indispensable asap. The dude has one foot out the door whether they like it or not.
Kind of fair enough really
While I think a majority of their success came from basically being the only usable search result from google, I would be lying if I didn’t say I was extremely disappointed and left for a bit after I found out why I couldn’t find any NSFW instances on here.
If we could stop pretending we’re superior to other social media that might be a start. The number of posts talking shit about the “average redditor” or suggesting that we need more “high quality content than reddit”, or that everything needs to have a meaningful discussion is exhausting. We as a group seem to want to dictate who can comment, who can post, what kind of post is acceptable, and are fairly mean to newer people. You won’t keep new people if you’re rude to them or they see post after post trashing them.
Engagement comes at the price of low effort sometimes. So does content. Not every post or comment will be a shining beacon of perfection. Sometimes people just want to talk. Some of them are starved for human interaction.
Stop trash talking the lurkers. They may be sharing what content there is here and driving people to Lemmy instances. They’re an important part of the ecosystem.
Ask what caliber of people you want here. Because it is very apparent to me that the loudest members only want a specific type of community member here. And they are very outspoken about that fact. But are they actively extending a hand to those people when they encounter them on any other platform? Word of mouth (or keyboard) works. It’s slow but it works.
Might’ve missed it but I haven’t seen anyone say “Make it not awful to use”
It’s helpful to say that we need better onboarding infographics to simplify explaining how to use Lemmy, but also, Lemmy needs to be easier to use. Finding and following communities is far too complicated.
I come here everyday out of sheer bloody mindedness because I want it to work, not because I enjoy it. Yet.
Lemmy needs to be easier to use. Finding and following communities is far too complicated.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071#issuecomment-1653885992
We need to get this proposal implemented. It would pretty much solve the issue.
I totally agree with this point that, Lemmy needs to be accessible easily, I started using it and find it useful because of boost app. Otherwise it’s very hard to understand and still is what is Lemmy.world what is lemmy.ml etc. And how to make them combined.
Let’s not forget to comment this on I needed account , I tried to sign-up with lublnfrom boost didn’t work. I had to Google sign-up for Lemmy.world which takes me to special form , which has disable login with disposable email id’s. All in all TOOOOOOOOOOOO difficult process for common users. Doing this process I am still not sure if I comment on Lemmy.whatever subs.
Finding community and joining it, I still have no idea. It’s all too complicated.
Overall
- What is a different Lemmy’s means
- Simplifying sign-up process and make it streamlined
- Make easier to use Lemmy
These would be my suggestion as Lemmy stands now.
I’m trying to wrap my head around this, the issue is a very long conversation. Basically two subs merge together if they agree, if a user wants to post, both mods need to see if it’s not a duplicate? This might add more complication with more merging like a 6 group merge or something, it could be chaotic with more mods and each other having conflict wars.
Yes this is the most critical. The apps that have been made are a good stride in the right direction but the fediverse is not intuitive to use
- Publish useful content on lemmy. Link to that content on other social media sites
- Anytime you see a negative article about reddit particularly on reddit, remind users this will continue to get worse, link them to lemmy and explain what it is/how to join.
- Donate to lemmy development to improve UX.
Community grouping. It would massively increase the available content, and make lemmy much easier to browse.
We’ve got a new sorting option that boosts smaller communities coming in v 0.19. That plus community grouping would be killer!
I don’t know if this can be adjusted at the platform level, but is it possible you could put in a filter for meme posts? That is 85% of my feed, and I’d really like to minimize them as much as possible.
I come to Reddit(and now Lemmy) for discussions rather than memes, and the content I’m looking for just doesn’t appear in my feed at all really. It would be great if there was a way to filter out or diminish the quantity of those types of posts. Reddit has flair, which makes it easy to filter that way. I’m not sure if Lemmy has something comparable that would allow easy filtration like that.
I think some short of tagging system might be in the works. Not sure though, not whether you could filter by them.
Maybe you could change what you’ve subscribed to?
I mean in the main feed, as opposed to the subs/community subscriptions tab. I’d like to use it for content exploration, similar to how I would use /r/all on Reddit, but with memes filtered out.
Right. Yes I’m the wrong person to talk to. I gave up on local and all a while ago. Sometimes local is cool I guess.
Community grouping is also so closely aligned with a federated mindset - one instance may disappear but the community survives.
That said it’s clear you’ve got anything from openly fascist to diehard tankie on Lemmy servers so would definitely have to be a two-way choice and there’s a risk it just won’t work in the way we hope - I can easily see common topics fragmenting into so many shards anyway as one group can’t stand another group.
More tits.
I have always loved these great tits.
Something about their body language. I imagine the one on the left is telling a funny joke, or maybe it’s laughing at something the one on the right has said.
I don’t know; the one on the right looks mildly disgusted by the raucous laughter of the left.
MORE TITS!
I like the way this guy thinks.
CW: Unpopular opinion?
I’ve looked back at a few reddit threads, and I’m thankful most of those users aren’t coming here. I’m alright with the current level of content and participation. What little there is here is still better than most of what’s on r/all, and it’s not like we want to attract advertisers and self-promoting accounts.
Yes. I already see too much semblance of Reddit and i read this post and facepalmed.
The discourse I’ve observed thus far has felt more honest, less pugnacious than on Reddit. Obviously I’ve seen a drop in the bucket, but anyway, it’s good so far.
For the most part, yeah. I feel like it’s much better overall.
I sort by all and new when I want fresh content, and there’s plenty, although it depends on how much your instance members are subbed to.
There’s also https://lemmyverse.net/
Well yes, but do you want to maintain that ambience or attract more users? IMO these objectives are in conflict.
You’re probably right, but ultimately I think the vast amount of niche content around so many different hobbies is the most valuable thing, even if it comes with a bit of… human toxicity.
Sadly, I just can’t imagine how you get the former while really effectively suppressing the latter.
In general, I agree with you, where the quality of posts and comments on Lenny appear to be of much higher quality than Reddit used to be. At the same time though, I miss even some of the not-so-niche big communities that were engaging and kept me addicted to Reddit - like r/formula1. The community is too small here too sustain that interest
Yeah, I understand why you feel that way. I’m finding that how I interact with Lemmy is much different than reddit. On reddit, I often felt compelled to browse and post. Here, it feels more like a conscious choice, something I do because I see it as a good use of my time.
I think Reddit is going to make some new even more moronic decision after they IPO and there will be another exodus. This time around it can handle it and it’s mature enough to not have the same issues as before.
Nah. New wave of incommers will lead to more defederating drama I’m guessing.
Probably true lol
Hopefully the coming lemmy update will alleviate that a bit, users being able to block instances will be good.
posting more content. sharing lemmy posts with friends
It’s not intuitive to do so.
