It's time to take advantage of Reddit's decline
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In my experience, reddit mods are completely hopeless
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
