1y ago

It's time to take advantage of Reddit's decline

It's no secret that Lemmy is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Reddit. The issue it faces however is that it's still relatively niche and not many people know about it. I propose that we change this. By contacting the mods of large subreddits and asking them to make and promote relevant Lemmy communities we could substantially increase the amount of people who discover the fediverse. What's more, I don't think this is would be a hard sell considering many mods are already pissed off with Reddit due to their API changes. I believe that this is the time to act, so this is a call to arms, to help grow the fediverse into the future of social media!

292 comments

Have a look at this post, we had a similar discussion there: https://lemmy.world/post/3074361
Long story short, the platform still needs a bit of work before being able to really move communities. Some examples exist (lemdro.id, piracy, startrek) but those are tech savvy audiences, there would be a lot more friction with more generalist communities
- I fully agree with you. And I want to emphasize that the main issue is that if you start advertising Lemmy like OP suggest before it's "fully ready" to give the best experience to this people, they will decide now that lemmy is not for them and after that it's very difficult to make they try again and change their mind.
  
  Exactly the mistake threads just made, trying to capitalize on twitter's rate limiting fiasco. The "general public" is extremely fickle, and Reddit will give us more opportunities.
- Server issues and quits need to be addressed, and mobile apps Ned to be polished. If the UX isn’t at least on par with Reddit, then it will only hurt to advertise now to the general public.
- One thing that annoys me coming from Reddit is, that there isn’t just one group of each theme. You have for example gaming groups on several instances and you can either chose to subscribe to a number of those or chose the one you like.
  But in the end, one will be the go-to group, and wouldn’t that centralize the most popular groups?
  (Honest question, I’m new to Lemmy and the thoughts behind it)
  
  instances are like countries with their own constitution (rules) and police (mods). This means that two communities in different instances may seem the same, but they are not, because they have to follow the rules and culture of their instance.
  Just like a Technology club in Japan will not be the same as the Technology club in the US because they will be culturally different. I think it will take some time for the Fediverse to think this way.
  For me, this is better. Instead of having one giant technology community where your comments and posts are drowned out, we can have different technology communities with their own culture and norms, just like we visit different countries. Your comment and posts will be not drowned out.
  It is a different paradigm to the centralised one of Reddit.
- Mirror for that lemmy.world post since they're currently down...
  https://programming.dev/post/1625433
  
  The fact that large instances hit more downtime than something like reddit will always be a detriment.
  
  Thanks!
- I predict it will be the mobile apps that get us over that hump
  
  Definitely. Sync and Boost will bring the largest users influx
  
  Which is unfortunate imo. More mobile users means less effort and lower quality content
- I do agree, however I would argue that an increased user base would help accelerate progress on improving lemmy
  
  To be honest, people who are tech savvy and bug tolerant enough to be on Lemmy are probably already here. There were quite a few discussions about it (and still now on Reddit)
- Yeah, people say we should use small instances to keep things spread out but two of the ones I tried have major posting issues that stop comments working, We really need to stress test and big squish before we really push it to everyone, some of the issues I've seen have been fixed and on general it's very stable so I don't think it's got far to go
  
  Which were those, out of curiosity?
- It also needs about 1000% less hostility when it comes to anything beyond superficial discussion. Basically every news thread just gets brigaded by idiots trolling with pictures of pig shit. I get it, internet is not serious business, but in terms of actual discourse at the moment, this place is worse than Facebook.
  
  Wow, my experience is very opposite this. It sounds like you're describing reddit to me honestly. I've seen way less hostility here compared with Reddit
  
  Yeah, I've run into this here. I posted a question to one of the posts asking why it was such a big deal, and all the sudden I'm a corporate defender. I don't think this is a reddit, lemmy, or anything issue, it's just internet and echo chambers. If you don't reply with a "OMG YES SO TRUE OMG" then you are a dissident.
  
  Come visit !worldnews@sh.itjust.works if you want quality discussion!

How about we just forget about trying to beat anyone and just get on to using the platform.
Reddit won't die anytime soon.
Lemmy won't become popular anytime soon.
It took Reddit years before it became a major platform known by millions. It will take Lemmy years to gain notoriety among millions. Give it time, enjoy what it so now because in a year, two years or three or four years from now, we'll all be wishing for the good old days when Lemmy just started and we were able to enjoy the simple system it is now.
- Reddit really did benefit from the fall of Digg though - this was about just shy of 20 years ago? Digg was where Reddit is now, thoroughly upsetting its user base with wholesale changes to the content of the site that nobody liked, and Reddit capitalized on that, and stole Digg's thunder.
  I think Lemmy can potentially do the same. For a second, it looked like Squabbles/Squabblr was going to be the winner, but the last I checked, they imploded after some controversy.
  (I came here from Reddit, incidentally - the user interface is very intuitive.)
  
  Yeah lemmy can do the same, but begging redditors to switch won't help anything. I was part of the digg migration, nobody on reddit ever posted on digg to go switch. I just searched for something else, and reddit was there. I certainly didn't spend a second thinking about digg afterwards, and i wont think about reddit either.
  
  Doesn't seem like most Reddit users care. There is still way more activity on Reddit then here, and that probably isn't changing anytime soon. And right now Reddit still has better content since it seems mostly Lemmy is just posts about Reddit.
  
  Agreed, lots of naysayers here for some reason
- Critical mass has high inertia.

Not this again...
Lemmy isn't everyones' cup of tea. Reddit, despite the API shenanigans, still does what people want.
People are not moving here from Reddit if they haven't already. They'd sooner go to Discord. Less cognitive load, and their subs already have servers set up. Lemmy has a 5 communities different servers for each sub and most will be inactive, so it's already a losing battle.
Make Lemmy it's own thing, rather than aspiring to be the 2nd head of the Hydra. Organic growth is good, sustainable. Boom and bust wholesale migrations look like failed hostile takeovers.
- People are not moving here from Reddit if they haven't already.
  I think you're underestimating Reddit's ability to continue degrading the Reddit experience with their ham-fisted attempts to maximize revenue.
  
  I don't disagree with that. Reddit will keep burning bridges with it's oldest users. old.reddit will be the next on the chopping block and that will be the death knell for desktop Reddit for a sizable number of people.
  But I think you're underestimating the average modern Redditor's reluctance to jump ship. 3rd party apps were not even something they knew existed. Most never used reddit before the redesign. They already used the app. You cant miss what you never had.
- I think you're grossly overestimating the ability of FOSS to reach "regular" people. 99.9% of Redditors haven't even heard of Lemmy. There are assuredly very many people using Reddit who would be very happy to switch to something better.
  You're not wrong with any of your points, I'm just saying there's no reason to discourage a "get the word out" campaign. People can make their own choices, but only after they know what the options are.
  
  As someone who recently was wondering what my alternatives to Reddit were, then stumbling here recently, I think what we need is a good personality to do a 3 minute YouTube tutorial that gets out on Reddit.
  I still don't fully understand the difference between the two, but what I do know is encouraging. But it took effort to discover that difference. Reddit is apathetic. A three minute video may be short enough to get people to understand.
  Just needs to show what it looks like (similar to Reddit with sync and I'm sure others), then a brief description of how it differs under the hood, and then how to set up an account and subscribe to a community.
  
  Have a look at this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/1507unf/post_why_dont_reopen_here_completely/
  People were being told to move to Lemmy, but they fiercely refused, sometimes being utterly agressive.
  And this is a Unixporn community, which is supposed to be aware of FOSS.
- I think the problem was Lemmy didn't have the apps in place ready to take advantage of reddits API deadline. Loads of people come to Lemmy but it wasn't up to scratch yet. So they went back to what they already knew.
  Now big apps like sync are on board. If they give lemmy another go I reckon they will stay this time.
  
  They open Sync, they they see they can't post, they leave again.
  I know post is coming in the next hours, but it's the same for multireddits, instance blocking, account migration, etc.
  
  This was basically me. Looked around for an app I liked, couldn't find one for Lemmy but there was an okay-ish open source one for reddit. Used that for awhile but kept an eye on Lemmy.
  My only issue now is that i want to ignore an couple instances (lemmynsfw, and the like) but I can't.... Can I? There isn't enough content in "subscribed new" and find I'm going to "all new" but there's too much NSFW... Maybe I'm on here too much.
- I think a more appropriate approach is just to mention lemmy to your circles of friends and try to get any redditors you personally know to give lemmy a try, at least get the app installed so they can browse both reddit and lemmy. Lemmy won't be able to handle millions upon millions of new people, especially ones with no guidance, but communities aren't built overnight and we should do our best to get those who could use lemmy to use lemmy, one at a time. We shouldn't be trying to overthrow reddit, just give a viable alternative to those willing to try one. It's the more organic approach.
  
  Grass roots wins Vs marketing.
  Make that healthy root system grow!

Honestly, I would rather Lemmy attract its own community naturally rather than it be the place all redditors pipe into. I think most people who have already come from there can agree the culture is not really conductive to quality discussion, and we've started to see some of that leak into Lemmy as well.
Rather than just copy/paste reddit's users and culture, we should try to develop both on their own. Create an environment that users want to spend their time on. Then through word of mouth on other platforms they entice people here. I don't think just being the place redditors flood after every fuckup is healthy for the growth of the platform. As a Mastodon user, I'm kinda glad it isn't the primary platform Twitter refugees are flocking to.
- What is "naturally"? I heard about Lemmy through reddit during the exodus. Was that unnatural?
- I'm not sure the culture aspect is unique to Reddit though. The culture seems more or less platform independent IMO.
- Lemmy attract its own community naturally
  Do you want to see more content, or you don't?
  
  I personally want to see more good content. Quantity means nothing if the quality isn't up to par.
  
  I prefer 100 quality posters to 100,000 shitposters.

Much the popular posts in lemmy are memes, shitpostings, or politics/technology news which we can easily obtain from other media. The way I see it, lemmy lacks experts, scientists, doctors etc that that can bring interest and credibility to the posts or threads. They can help generate quality contents, what lemmy lacks till now.
- fr, the best part of reddit were the ultra talented people, storywriters, artists etc. Also don't forget the most popular post on reddit is "The senate" and a picture of palpatine
- You're right that lemmy primarily needs content, and it doesn't have to be just credentialed experts. It will grow in appeal the more there are real communities discussing whatever their subject of interest is.
- I moved to my own forum because the alternatives are:
  Trust that the lemmy instance I choose won't do the same thing reddit did.
  Host my own Lemmy instance.
  For #2, Lemmy isn't polished enough, so I went with a traditional forum option that's been around for a while.
- This is something lemdro.id focuses on as an instance but to technical content. Particularly the !android@lemdro.id community is ran by the same mod team as the r/android subreddit and what comes with that are the AMAs with industry experts, various authors of android content on XDA and more, and other various things. !android@lemdro.id is the premier source for Android news and technical content with the subreddit redirecting to there where reasonable

Agree with Blaze, they probably remember too when Reddit was in its infancy, it was unappealing to your average netizen, the same as Lemmy is now
Remember that 90% of Reddit is now ex-Tumblr and Facebook people; they would come to lemmy, see it's a bit clunky, and go tell a hundred others on Reddit how bad an experience it was for them
Next thing lemmy has a reputation like Tesla that isn't going to shake off any time soon
- From what I've seen on reddit, this is sort of already happening. Lemmy's name isn't mud yet, but it's being spoken of like most of the alternatives over there: not good enough or flawed in some way. Lack of content and users is the main one that gets said about all of them, but beyond that, the negative things I see said about Lemmy most often are: "scatter-brained", "unintuitive", "tanky", "messy", "not respecting user privacy", "admins defederating and shadow banning", "having to apply to instances", "federated content not appearing the same on each instance", "lack of mod tools", "need a third party site to help find communities", etc.
  And it should be said that many of the most common negative things I've seen said about Lemmy on Reddit are being addressed, but some are not. Privacy (public voting) and issues with admins erecting invisible walls in the federation through various means are not being seriously addressed as far as I've seen.
  I think the main issue that will ultimately hurt Lemmy versus any other platform that comes along is that Lemmy's selling point of defederation is only a selling point to some people. Most people on Reddit don't care about centralization, they just want a platform like reddit. They'll come here and put up with it if they have too, but they will scamper off for a centralized site the moment one starts gaining traction unless Lemmy finds some way to provide something equally as unified, simple, and easy to use.
  Maybe a frontend or app that just shows you everything and allows you to interact easily without worrying about logins or urls for instances, and pushes the federation aspect "behind the scenes".
  
  I think the main issue that will ultimately hurt Lemmy versus any other platform that comes along is that Lemmy’s selling point of defederation is only a selling point to some people.
  I agree, and that's why I think in a few weeks/months people here will realize we can only have so many active communities at the same time.
  We'll probably gather around a few core communities, and that would be it.
  Lemmy is the Linux of the link aggregators, and as we all know, Linux desktop year is next year
  
  It's unfortunate people want centralization and seem openly hostile when discussions are had about ways to encourage decentralization. When reddit goes down, you can't use reddit. When a lemmy instance goes down, you can simply go on other lemmy instances. That's a major issue with lemmy.world right now and it being seen as the "default" instance
  
  in fairness, most of the whining about defederated instances is coming from the same people who turned reddit into a cesspit.
  
  Maybe a frontend or app that just shows you everything and allows you to interact easily without worrying about logins or urls for instances, and pushes the federation aspect “behind the scenes”.
  Let's say I'm browsing Lemmy.world through this frontend and I stumbled upon !privacy@lemmy.ml. Would the following be clear?

Stop trying to turn this place into R. We left because it was shit. If you don't like this place, go somewhere else.
- Are we blaming the people and communities of Reddit or the actions of the IPO-minded business?
  Inb4 "yes".
  
  Are we blaming the people and communities of Reddit or the actions of the IPO-minded business?
  It depends on the person, I think. I left Reddit because I was outright disgusted with its idiotic userbase, but plenty people are here because they know that the vulture capital will wreck that place.
  And at the end of the day, we might as well ask if both aren't intrinsically tied - Reddit's userbase being so awful because of the business behind it. @z00s@lemmy.world mentioned the "shitlord mods", most of the time the admins behave in a rather similar fashion.
  
  No, we're blaming OP for trying to make lemmy more like an ipo-minded business.
  
  Inb4 failed
  It was the infamous groupthink, brigading, and shitlord mods that were responsible for the R enshittening.
  All that business stuff was icing on the cake which was used as a scapegoat by the very people who made R such a shit place to begin with.
  
  The IPO-minded business was unwilling to curtail and curate the userbase as every user was the equivalent to potential profit. There's many many many people from Reddit who should not find a place online to call home. They can stay with the capitalists until the capital runs dry.
- Sounds like you're blaming the users for the CEO being a cunt
  Also sounds like you don't understand the structural implications of Lemmy being a federated social network
  Also sounds like you're intolerant of other's opinions and think they should leave
  Sounds like you're a conservative
  
  You need your hearing checked, as well as your reading comprehension.

No. Most large Reddit communities are toxic, both on the user and mod end. Let Lemmy grow at its own pace without repeating the same mistakes Reddit made.
- This is the best take. I'd rather organic growth, here people come here for actual content, than just shove a bunch of redditors over and repost reddit content
  
  In some communities they’re already doing exactly that.
- Right now lemmy feels more toxic to me than reddit in many ways. I've never been on a reddit news thread where people were openly trolling and posting pictures of pig shit in response to comments they don't like.
  
  Those get autodeleted, or are on instances that are explicitly been defederated across most instances outside of lemmy.ml
  
  Trolls and other idiots are part of humanity and its perfectly natural for lemmy to have its share. Reddit does as well. But taking one sub as a basis to say that lemmy seems more toxic than reddit sounds very far fetched.

Oh boy, it looks like main character syndrome patients have migrated from Reddit...
- I just thought Lemmy could benefit from my plot armour. /s

In all honesty, as much as I want non-profit Reddit alternatives to succeed, I think Lemmy is a tough sell to Redditors. Here's roughly how I think that'd go.
Lemmy user: "You should try Lemmy"
Redditor: "Sure, what's its website?"
Lemmy user: "There are many"
Redditor: "Wait what"
Lemmy user: "You have to pick one"
Redditor: "Why?"
Lemmy user: "See, Lemmy is not a website, but a network of federated instan-"
Redditor: "That sounds complicated. I just want a website like Reddit"
Lemmy user: "But don't you care about how Reddit has treated its mods, app devs and the general community?"
Redditor: "Yeah but all this Lemmy and Kbin stuff is confusing. Can I just use a website without reading up on all this Fediverse stuff?"
Lemmy user: "Okay, just go to Lemmy.world"
Redditor: "It seems to be down"
Lemmy user: "Hmm, maybe try Lemmy.ml?"
Redditor: "This website looks a little... hard to wrap my head around"
Lemmy user: "There are alternative frontends"
Redditor: "What now?"
Lemmy user: "Do you know about Alexandrite?"
Redditor: "Nevermind, I'm out"
If we want to convince a wide range of users to use Lemmy, we have to make using Lemmy a no-brainer for everyone.
I'm trying to contribute by building a new opensource web UI that I hope will provide a better UX for the average Redditor. It's not ready to become a daily driver yet, but I'm hoping to get to a point where it's nice enough that instances will want to host it on their domain. Maybe I'm delusional in thinking this web UI will appeal to users that don't like the current ones. But there's only one way to find out, and that is to build it.
- Lemmy user: "You should try Lemmy"
  Redditor: "Sure, what's its website?"
  Lemmy user: "there are many, here's a list, just pick one, you can always use a different one later"
  Redditor: "ok cool I'm glad you explained it in a simple way that is easy for me to understand I will use lemmy exclusively now"
  
  If it was that easy to convince Redditors, we'd already have a very diverse userbase. But by all means, keep spreading the word. We all want Lemmy to succeed.
- Honestly that conversation is very, very bad. That's exactly how you not introduce new things to people.
  Like you don't start throwing unknown terms to them, or at least I very much hope so. It is a network of forum websites. Yes it's good to know that it's federated but for a starter that's just an unknown word that makes it complicated.
  lemmy.world, lemmy.ml: why the overloaded ones?
  And when they say that it starts to get complicated, why would you mention yet another complicated concept out of the blue? Yes, if you do it that way, that's disastrous, and does much more harm than good.
- Oh, we're promoting our open source web UI now? Well, ngl, mine's kinda lean; it's Leanish!
  
  Heck yeah, share your work with the world.
  We should probably compile a regularly updated list somewhere. It's great that people have so many options. Now we just need to make it easier for them to find a web UI that suits their needs.
- You're not wrong, but it's no reason to discourage other people from making the effort if they want to.
- Dude, you just paraphrased my experience perfectly. Well almost, wtf is Kbin... (And what is Discord for that matter, someone mentioned that above?)
- The website looks good!
- Nice strawman.
  Lemming: You should try Lemmy, it's a way to have reddit style content, but without a company controlling it.
  Redditor: Wow cool, Fuck Spez. Where do I join?
  Lemming: it doesn't matter, every domain that participates has the same content, here's a list of places to choose from.
  
  I agree with both posts.
  I put lemmy off because the way everyone was explaining it was confusing AF. Everyone comes at you like they are on the street handing out Bibles.
  People go through this whole fediverse diatribe. There should just be a universal Eli 5 infographic that each instance shows new users that briefly describe how it works.
  Once you remove the decentralized fedi talk it's actually pretty simple to understand.
  
  It's a just rhetorical device to explain a theory for why most Redditors haven't jumped ship yet. It may be correct, it may be incorrect.

I might have a controversial question: but why? Do we really want this mass exodus to the Lemmy community? I think we have a nice little thing here. People will keep coming anyway, slowly, if they really are interested in what this is about
- It’s a nice little thing, but there so much to miss compared to Reddit. Sure, we have memes, technology and news. But there is very little other discussion going on, even for big things like food, sports, finance and relationships (picked some on the top of my mind). Huge communities on Reddit. Barely anything here.
  Overall Lemmy is very much a disappointment when it comes to “niche” communities, if you can even call those large subjects that. But it’s even worse for smaller subjects.
  
  There is a super active niche subreddit that I miss terribly. There is a Lemmy alternative with 3 subscribers only and a post every 5 days or so. I would love to see it active but me posting there feels the same as just screaming into the void. I know that to grow it I need to be active on it but if I'm the only one there then what is the point? I also don't want to go to the subreddit and say "hey, check out Lemmy" cause it feels I'll be sending them to a graveyard for that particular topic.
- I agree with this. The fedi communities as they exist appear to be happy with the niche. We don’t need to be the replacement of a corporate owned social network. Nor should we be.
  Places like mastodon or lemmy should grow organically over time if we all want a healthier online culture.
- I don't want them here. I continue to promote Lemmy on a one-to-one basis. No mass-market appeal, no calls for the masses. Don't poison the well.
- You mean you don’t want communities infested with bots promoting thinly veiled advertisements and reposting crusty old content to farm upvotes to make their accounts look more legitimate?
- Exactly, I enjoy the high quality discussion currently found on Lemmy and I feel the masses would only bring the average IQ down.

I really don't think Lemmy is polished and issue-free enough for tons of people to move here. It might be in the future but I feel like pushing it would do no good.
- Yeah, let it grow organically. Like other open-source projects, it's unlikely to shrink, and it'll gain profile and draw users from Reddit etc over time--faster when Reddit drops the ball, which it'll do more often as it scrambles to extract more profit from a shrinking user base.
  There's no reason to rush it. That'll just cause growing pains and give Lemmy a bad reputation.
  
  There is always a risk of collapse for lemmy. When you are in decline there can be negative feedback loops furthering the decline.

IMO the biggest thing Lemmy needs is a better onboarding experience and an official page that recommends mobile apps/alternate front-ends. One of the Lemmy devs said they wanted to overhaul https://join-lemmy.org/ and it's on their list, which is a good first step. Until then I think it's best to wait before trying to capture the average audience and have them leave in confusion.
- Yes I never thought plastering it with screenshots of your rust codebase made a good first impression. I get it, open source is awesome, but come on guys. That shouldn't be the first description of your product that people see.

We aren't going to get mods to promote us. That is just silly.
We should buy advertising though, definitely.
- When the API thing happened, several of the subreddits I frequented had threads about finding an alternative to move to. Lemmy was mentioned, but but discounted early on.
  One problem was that people found out the main dev was a tankie and didn't want to be associated with the project because of that.
  They ended up going to discords, or self hosted forums, or just staying on reddit.
  
  If we're talking about the same discussion, I think I remember a thread on either the modcoord or redditalternatives sub.
  From what I remember, the disagreement was that the only communities that were shown in the splash page were extremely edgy commie stuff. Blatant propaganda communities. There was a pro-Russian invasion community in the top 5 communities and lots of "Death to America" type stuff. '
  Compounding things, the initial response to these complains was a dismissive "Redditors aren't smart enough to work out how instances work!" which really didn't make people want to persevere.
  I'll admit, I was in two minds because of this. But gave it a go out of curiosity for the tech.

"Hello we are from the Church of the Fediverse, have you a moment to talk about our Lord and Saviour Lemmy? No not the tankies one"
- Haha, that is a pretty hilarious visual. Do we get funny hats?
  
  Best I can do is magic underwear.

Reddit's decline is greatly exaggerated.
- It's also advantageous to keep low agency and low quality users on reddit.
  Lemmy has already started to decline in quality since average redditors started migrating here.
  
  Honestly, my problem with Lemmy is that there's mostly hardliners here, hardly any average opinions.

I think something we could do as a community is to make resources that help make understanding things happening here easier, like rapidly updated community guides to the available apps with screen shots showing features.
Really what we need is independent and community development of cool new things that you can't get anywhere else, a real reason to actually come here over all the other similar choices - ideally things that corporate sites would avoid because they're focusing on profit.
One tool I'm going to be working on is having an instance/community that makes it easy for people to work on collaborative design - ideally it'll be a pipeline where idea get refined into design briefs then fact finding tasks split from that and eventually it all boils up into a series of implementation tasks, testing and documentation then finally actually gets turned into an open source product or a piece of creative commons media.
- Is there somewhere you can point me to with more information on this idea? I'm intrigued and would like to participate in this type of community.
  
  I'm just researching and working things out so far, will let you know if I get anything properly written up.

Current redditors are a virus. They are nothing like the people who built the site a decade ago. We don't need them here
- I messaged r/comicbooks mods after they were briefly banned by reddit offering them a place on my instance if they ever wanted to shift their community away from reddit. They threatened to permanently ban me for spam LMAO
  
  I feel sorry for you :(
- Lmao elitism like this will just turn Lemmy into a radioactive, insular circlejerk cesspool
  
  If you want the reddit experience you can just stay there. It's still available and active. You sound like the kind of people that move across country because you want change then complain the new state isn't the same as your old home full of those problems that made you move.
- I almost agree with this. I think that the problem aren't the individuals themselves, but how that environment conditioned them to behave like morons. And I also think that, as long as they change their behaviour when arriving, they could be useful to bring more content quantity to Lemmy.

Do we actually care about "beating" Reddit? As long as a friendly & knowledgeable community exists on Lemmy, do we really care about also being the largest?
- It would be nice if lemmy had the same level of niche communities as Reddit. That requires large total numbers I think.

Lemmy and Mastodon require some extra thought processes that most people do not want or can't work through. They want instant, fast and as much of it as possible.
Somehow this has to become so easy to understand and use that even the dimmest bulbs in society will have no trouble using it.
Upside? This will bring more usage and adoption. Downside? This will bring in more trash.
- One nice (yet sometimes annoying) thing about Lemmy is that you can have multiple communities of the same thing.
  What I think will happen is that a few instances of Lemmy will become the big ones and their communities for memes, news and politics will dominate.
  I can even see something happening to remove duplicates. Perhaps lemmy.world and lemmy.ml agree that /politics is on lemmy.world and /news is on lemmy.ml
  App developers will make those default communities easy to find. Kind of like how reddit used to have 50 or so default sub reddits.
  Less popular instances will have shadow communities that will be more difficult to find, but where there will be a more hardcore group of contributors and members.
  
  I honestly think the combining of the same communities on different instances will happen more at the app layer. It wouldn't be hard to group them all in the same category for convenience and it allows for more granular control. Downside being that it makes an already complex platform more complicated but hey, that's kind of the point and reason people come here to lemmy in the first place. I want more people to join lemmy but I also know that it's going to be a niche platform for quite a while if not the rest of it's existence.

As far as I'm concerned Reddit=Facebook=Twitter...
Although, it would be nice to see more actual useful communities that don't just latch on to pop politics, news culture, and media trends.

Two of my reddit using friends have never heard of lemmy until I told them about it a few days ago. Although they are quite invested in the FOSS world.
I am here because I read something about Lemmy on reddit, two or three times. More exposure on reddit would show many people that there is an alternative. It wouldn't convince millions but maybe enough to let some niche communities grow.
- That's surprising, I saw Lemmy mentioned a lot during the 3rd party apps debacle.
  There is even a sub called LemmyMigration

I think stuff like this needs to happen organically, otherwise you'll have people who hate it, complain about it, and give it a bad rep, hindering its growth
- No matter what you do people will hate it, complain about it, and give it a bad rep.
  I think right now, any publicity good, bad, or upside down will help.

They all already know about Lemmy 🤷‍♀️
- People "all already know about Apple computers", but they keep reminding us anyways! It seems to work. I think there are a lot of people who have been meaning to check out Lemmy, and could use a reminder. Or people who came and left before it was as worth staying.
  
  This is a bad parallel to draw, and I think you're aware of that.

I would argue we should wait until the software we're on does not feel like an alpha release. This is not some window of opportunity that will close soon, we have no strong incentive to rush this process.

Let them find their way on their own. They'll figure it out. As with the migration of MySpace to Faceboobs to Reddit - so the migration will continue. Let's not spoil the countryside just yet, okay? Lemmy is what reddit used to be but ain't been in a long time.

Your best bet will probably be r/redditalternatives. That community already promotes Lemmy and Squabble, a few others that I'm not remembering.

I've been a reddit user for at least 15 years. I've been a Lemmy user for a few months. Lemmy has a long way to go before it's a "viable Reddit alternative". Right now it's barely usable.
- You find it unusable? How so?
  
  Any topics outside of memes, IT and politics are nearly non-existent.
  This place is heavily skewed towards a specific niche of mostly males that are chronically online
  
  For me, it needs features from RES, Toolbox, highlight new comments, etc.
  
  You cannot block an instance, there are no multireddits, Sync is still in beta, the main instance is down half of the time, searching for contents is difficult, the discovery of new content is drowned among duplicates of existing communities.
  I'm a heavy Lemmy poster, but all of these points should be addressed for Lemmy to become mainstream

When are Lemmy posts going to show up on Google searches??
- They do, the problem is 1: Google prioritize Reddit. And 2: free domains like. ml dont show up on Google, so Lemmy.ml is practically invisible.
  
  How did you find out that .ml isn't on Google? Sure, it might be buried below shitton of sites that paid to be on top, or sites with better SEO, but they are not inherently invisible.
  
  I didn't know that about free domains. What is Google's (at least publicly acknowledged) rationale for this?
  
  This isn't true, you can google "lemmy ml" and lemmy.ml will show up in the results

Hmmm. So I think I posted on Reddit maybe a half dozen times ever? I didn't get the appeal. It kinda felt like shouting into a thunderstorm... I'm not sure I "get" Lemmy either, though it feels more like talking in a crowded room than everyone shouting at a cloud. :p More seriously though, I've had a few interesting conversations here, but miss the feel of forums of the 2000's where people just talked about stuff that they were making. Lemmy feels like everyone is striking up a conversation, but still trying to be careful about talking about their own interests because that's "self promotion". :-\ I dunno, maybe I'm looking for something that just doesn't exist anymore.
- If you want to share what you're making, dip your toes into the water. Some communities will appreciate the self-promotion as long as you do it in a sensible way, and other won't. Right now, some degree of self promotion is great because it's new content, which the Fediverse needs.

So, for my two cents: REDDIT was my go to for very biased but usually non-corporate info. For example, Baldurs Gate 3. In the past, I would research 'BG3 builds reddit' and just check out different builds people tried. It was always much better than going to a crappy corporate owned 'gaming mag' type website, where most of them just copy/pasted info from reddit anyway. It was a pretty good repository for info like that, and reddthat (or lemmy I guess) has not reached that level yet. I tried doing some searching on here for bg3 builds, almost nada.
- Yeah, given the Fediverse's much smaller amount of active users and its shorter history, it barely has niche communities nor a wealth of specific knowledge. Anyone who wants the Fediverse to be able to support that role that Reddit currently fulfills of non-corporate information has to know that there's a very large road ahead and it needs active building.
- Hope you posted your bg3 build on Lemmy after that....
  
  I don't have one, that's why I'm trying to look for one! But when I find a good combo I will be posting it, yes.
- Yep, almost all useful info for BG3 is in reddit and it sucks. I haven't even seen a community for BG3 on Lemmy, but I'm sure it exists somewhere.
  
  !baldurs_gate_3@lemmy.world
  
  I dn't know how to link, but search baldur on lemmy.world

In my experience, reddit mods are completely hopeless

I did this with /r/Cardano mods back before Reddit was blocking all mention of the fediverse even in PM’s. I managed to get one of them to help mod my Cardano communities. I’d wager that it’s exceedingly hard to get in touch with mods over there now that Huffman is blocking fediverse recruitment.
- They are actually blocking links to fediverse based websites, especially lemmy. Some of the larger lemmy instances are having their links deleted and people posting them warned/banned
  
  Really?
  
  To your point, I know when I was last on reddit, 1 month ago, lemmy links did not work

I want to call out a few QoL things here that will help lemmy:
There are a lot of read-the-headline-not-the-article commenters which is natural in an aggregation feed of links; there are numerous posts a day where people rewrite the news' headlines to fit their agenda where the actual article and articles headline doesn't reflect ANY of what they're suggesting. if you run these sub lemmies for news on your server, I encourage you to use a bot or enforce rules for news that simply scrapes the title out of the link. Otherwise people will post news links that lead to a real source but have a false headline.
There is a staggering amount of people pushing for oddities like child porn acceptance and I keep seeing it. Unless an entire server is compromised, reach out to the mods and ask to get subs cleaned up. Give moderators the benefit of the doubt and a chance to act without breaking federation completely. Its important Lemmy moderates content but also communicates well amongst each other when something is going wrong.
- To your second point: possession of child porn is actually illegal in the US and many other countries.
  In fact, depending on the country the instance is hosted in, it's entirely possible that the people running an instance that hosts it could be arrested for not only possessing it (on their servers) but also distributing it (through their servers). (This is, in part, why YouTube has tried to crack down on videos that aren't for children: they may be held liable for it.)

On one hand I can't say that we shouldn't try. On the other hand, If we let nature take its course it gives us time to scale. Until they pull a full-on dig 2.0 which might be very close, It would be kind of nice just to have a gentle increasing onslaught coming into our breach.
- They did that Friday with the site redesign, well damn close to it. Not a complete sell out like Digg was.
  
  Those poor bastards. I'm kinda shocked the investors and employees haven't had a mutiny yet.
  
  Wait, what did they redesign this time?

You are asking a moderator of subreddit to destroy that subreddit. Why would they do that?
- Because Reddit sucks, and moderators know that better than the average user.
  Plus, if they’re the ones that can make their communities on Lemmy or Kbin, they wouldn’t lose their power, just the majority of their subscribers.
  That last reason is why most will say no. Still it’s worth an effort I think
  
  Those moderators that know, left already. I mean, just google Reddit alternative and leave. Those who stay want to continue.

I'm just happy that there is a non-mainstream alternative where I don't get to interact with your typical Redditor.
Do we even want Lemmy to become mainstream? Because Reddit progressively went further and further down the toilet as it became more popular.

The main reason I'm still posting and reading on Reddit is that I belong to a lot of small subreddits that haven't had any reason to migrate elsewhere. You can dislike what Reddit leadership is doing, but lots of people belonging to small subreddits haven't been impacted as much.

Here‘s a post about this on the reddit side: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/15o4uwz/why_no_coordinated_mirroring_in_the_fediverse/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
Feel free to comment so people might get first person encouragement to move.
- You can cut that link in half to remove that tracking info: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/15o4uwz/why_no_coordinated_mirroring_in_the_fediverse

I'm really not interested in this being a Reddit clone. Several of the subreddits I wanted to be rid of have already popped up, here, while the better side of Reddit isn't really showing up, especially since Reddit re-opened and purged pesky mods so they could all get back to their scrolling.
Oh, yes lawd, that's what I need. I need fucking antiwork to shit up the place with their misery vibe while 196 goes skipping back to Reddit and takes all the fun times with her. Sign me up.
I wanted to become involved with a completely different community, with different mores, a different feel, and its own vibe. Fuck Reddit. I left that place looong before the blackout thing, I got tired of its toxic culture that sucked the life out of me after a few minutes.
Now that's starting to leak into Lemmy and I'm frankly eyeing the door.
If you liked Reddit, you need to go back there. I didn't like Reddit. I don't want to go back there. I don't want there to come here, either.
The joy of the Fediverse is that growth is nice but we don't NEED growth. A lot of you can't understand that. You can't understand that the platform will NOT fail if it doesn't get the kind of exponential, runaway growth that you associate with social media success. We do not actually need to hit TikTok numbers, ever. We need steady, slow user growth from people wanting something different, that's what. If the Fediverse becomes the Linux of social media, fine.
So no. No to this idea. Let Reddit stay on Reddit, thank you.
- Tbh when I'm reading comments on Lemmy I'm seeing way more negativity than what was in Reddit discussions.. this comment is really an example of that too. It was a nightmare reading discussion here when Sync was released. I'm trying to like this place but I find the community here to be a bit exhausting, it seems if you don't conform to certain ideas/opinions you're just going to get torn apart in the discussion. Not to mention I'm seeing a lot more politically right leaning attitudes around here than I'm used to (which doesn't HAVE to be a bad thing but unfortunately usually ends up being so).
  Not saying all of Lemmy is like this, but from what I see get voted to the top of discussions more often than not, it seems to be the vibe here. Reddit had it's issues of course but at least it still seemed to carry a lighthearted attitude in the community. I hope more people come here still and the community vibe changes.
  
  Sorry for this. Atmosphere and vibes are greatly different from community to community.
  I noticed that everytime Reddit is mentioned there is indeed more negativity
- So we are gatekeeping lemmy now lmao?
- Disagree with this take in general (growth is worthwhile if only to shift communications platforms in general to open and federated protocols) but I don't think Lemmy is quite where we need it to be in order to sustain a migration. Finding a good instance is still tough, the idea of federation isn't easy to grasp for a new user yet, and the UX is still hammering out bugs. (Big thanks to all the devs that already work on Lemmy and all those that shifted over with the Reddit exodus for driving it to new heights so rapidly.)
  An ideal migration from my perspective would have them find instances that cater to their interests and views and would allow easy defederation if undesired. Also, more control for the end user in what communities they see on their feeds when going through discovery (new/hot/etc feeds).
  With better user controls for self moderation and better distribution of users across multiple instances I think we can have our cake and eat it too: growth towards a free world of communications without bogging us down by dealing with the folks/attitudes we find repugnant.
- I agree and disagree.
  If it's one or the other I'd also say we don't need growth. But truth is: We have to be of a certain size so that talking about niche topics works. Currently there are communities that just don't work because it's just one person or a very few active people and it's not enough for a conversation. It's just, we need to grow in a healthy way. In certain places and we need to attract just the right people.
  But altogether it's what i've been saying about free software and/or platforms for years now. We don't need to compare ourselves to something else, we don't need to clone something else... This is our little cozy place. If i wanted everything to be like on reddit, I'd just go there and not spend my time here and complain.
  One thing I disagree is that Lemmy is becoming like Reddit. I met a few nice people here. And it did and still does feel different. And maybe this place is big enough to be a home for all of us. From people who are 'toxic' in other people's eyes to people that just want to talk about 80s computers. I think we need a few things to change and a technical solution to the problem so that people can get along. We already have federation and some servers de-federating others because of fundamental disagreements. I think moderation has to be enhanced. And we need to stop showing the 'ALL' feed per default. That just contains silly memes or lots of low quality content. That'd be a good start.

I think lemmy will have an eternal September moment eventually when the platform improves. Mastodons will likely be soon. It's not a good thing nor is it a bad thing. There will be both benefits to it and negatives as well.

Reddit operates largely exactly as before
And frankly we dont need the larger populace of reddit here, we dont want an even steeper decline of content now do we

personally, i'd go for some stability and allow lemmy to create/develop it's own vibe. it doesn't need to grow and get big. those who seek alternatives will easily find it. let the people come to us.
- Honestly, I think the platform is pretty stable if you take out the outages caused by DDoS. Let's also be honest, would anyone be shocked if those DDoS's were actually sourced by a competitor who lost users to this platform?
  It takes a ton of time and effort to be able to build robust DDoS mitigation strategies, even for Fortune 500/100 companies. Sure, you can throw yourself behind a known mitigation company, but their out of the box rules don't always work for you. Most of the time you go behind them in a "transparent" mode and begin slowly deciding what is and isn't a real threat. Volumetric attacks are easy to deal with - "hey, that's fake traffic, block it.". Attacks like the admins of lemmy.world have talked about are application layer and require much finer tuned filters. You can't just immediately say "block this" because you may block legitimate traffic.
  I think it's more about getting the time to be able to develop the features mods want after dealing with how to protect the site, than it is about "stability of Lemmy"

A point I haven't seen mentioned yet is the lack of an accessible Automoderator equivalent on Lemmy. Moderators of larger subreddits use it to implement spam filters, remove commonly asked questions, handle multiple reports and sticky important information to the tops of comment sections. Not having a feature like that built into Lemmy can be a dealbreaker for those moderators.
- Is Lemmy even considered a stable platform yet? Some of those feel like nice-to-haves once the platform is stable software.

I put a Kbin and Lemmy community in the sidebar of /r/vexillology shortly after the beginning of the API protest.
- Is there a similar community here?
  
  !vexillology@lemmy.world

I don't even want more redditors to show up here anymore.
We've already got enough people doing and saying the same dumb shit they did there.
- If we aren't careful, the top comment chain on every post will be puns we've all seen too many times
  
  Exactly..
  reddit was once semi useful ... Before it devolved
- Agreed. The platforms are both very similar structurally but the zeitgeist is different.
  Fostering our own organic direction of thought is a lot better than trying to bring yet another shitposter.

Why would power hungry Reddit mods, who love being mods so much that they all crumbled the second Reddit admins threatened to remove their mod powers, advertise Lemmy where they’re not mods so don’t have that mod power to abuse?
- yea, I don't want to bring these idiots to lemmy

What can I do then?

OP has straight up mental illnesses

It’s no secret that Lemmy is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Reddit.
I will tell you why this is not true.
Any platform that becomes successful enough to grow and cater to a larger audience eventually gets sold to large corpos. This is inevitable, because the owner usually doesn't have the principles to say "no" to $100m+. This is a bad thing, why? Because you joined the platform due to its reliability and its culture. These things are no longer guaranteed to stay when the owner is replaced. So the previous owner essentially did a bait-and-switch by selling you (the user-base) to a corporation.
On one hand this leads to a more stable platform that can withstand legal trouble and has a steady inflow of money to maintain service. On the other hand, you get cencorship, woke ESG-score-friendly ideology and UX anti-patterns (like when Reddit constantly pushes their app to track you and show you ads). The ending of such a platform is hatred from most common people and aggressive monetization by the owners to compensate for a lower rate of growth. These owners, usually shareholders of publicly traded companies, do not care about maintaining quality as much as they care about generating wealth. This means that they will resort to several anti-user tactics to keep growing their wealth, like for example milking the platform dry with ads & micro-transactions.
Lemmy.world and other large instances are just like Condé Nast Reddit. Same censorship, same garbage. If you think that Lemmy is more free, then let me remind you that Reddit pre-2014 was more free than Lemmy.world. Yes, once upon a time Reddit was much more free and open than the so called "Lemmyverse". Why I say this is because of Lemmy's rules and policies. As an anecdote, I literally got banned from a community for saying that there are only two sexes (no foul language, nothing). For me, who was a Redditor during the pre-2014 era, this was unheard of. Lemmy is less like Old Reddit, and more like Raddle.me (Communist Old Reddit-clone). Lemmy is the LGBT/woke Old Reddit clone. It's not as fringe as Raddle.me, but it is still fringe, and it will therefore not be able to have the same reach as Old Reddit once had. The fact that Reddit is woke now is a bait-and-switch, as I explained earlier. Reddit would have never been successful had it been woke from Day 1. I predict that Lemmy will never grow as large as Reddit because of this reason.
To mods: Leave this post be. If not, you can have your echo-chamber, and I'm fucking out of here.
- Lemmy is the LGBT/woke Old Reddit clone
  checks comment history
  Children need a man as a father, not a spineless cuck.
  https://lemmy.world/comment/693917
  Cisgender is a slur:
  https://lemmy.world/comment/726144
  Where did the big bad woke touch you?
  
  Children need a man as a father, not a spineless cuck.
  It is harsh language, I will admit. But the guy needed some tough love.
  Cisgender is a slur
  It is a slur, since it is constantly being used in a negative context. It is how I, and others feel from experience.
  Where did the big bad woke touch you?
  Nowhere, thank God.
- Lemmy.world and other large instances are just like Condé Nast Reddit. Same censorship, same garbage. If you think that Lemmy is more free, then let me remind you that Reddit pre-2014 was more free than Lemmy.world. Yes, once upon a time Reddit was much more free and open than the so called "Lemmyverse". Why I say this is because of Lemmy's rules and policies. As an anecdote, I literally got banned from a community for saying that there are only two sexes (no foul language, nothing). For me, who was a Redditor during the pre-2014 era, this was unheard of. Lemmy is less like Old Reddit, and more like Raddle.me (Communist Old Reddit-clone). Lemmy is the LGBT/woke Old Reddit clone. It's not as fringe as Raddle.me, but it is still fringe, and it will therefore not be able to have the same reach as Old Reddit once had. The fact that Reddit is woke now is a bait-and-switch, as I explained earlier. Reddit would have never been successful had it been woke from Day 1. I predict that Lemmy will never grow as large as Reddit because of this reason.
  I think it's a huge shame it went this way, and I'm still hoping small instances will be able to grow so we get a truly distributed platform. Right now the entire lemmy conversations just stops when Lemmy.world is down which is ridiculous to me. It's like email would stop because Microsoft Outlook is down.
  I feel like people who don't agree with the centralization are in minority though. And this I see as a big risk to Lemmy.

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