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Blaze (he/him) @feddit.org

Let's discuss how to efficiently promote Lemmy to potential new joiners

To follow-up on the Reddit thread yesterday, here are a few elements that can be interesting to discuss.

Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy

Just quoting "Lemmy" or pointing to join-lemmy.org can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance. Recent post by a new joiner 9 days ago, they had to change server 2 times to get a satisfying experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536.

Using something like

"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users

Feel free if you have any questions"

Can already point them in one direction, and avoid them getting lost in the too many options.

If people want to debate the choice of those two instances, I'll add my thought process in the comments.

The Lemmy feed looks as depressing as Reddit's All, and how to mitigate that

Some feedback I received when promoting Lemmy the way above

Just checked out lemmy to see if it’s different from reddit. Im very disappointed lmao.

First post I see is a comic about cultural appropriation with an ifunny watermark. Next are several posts about the proton vpn ceo “going full maga.” And finally a post I saw on Reddit days ago that is ragebait making fun of the cybertruck.

Yikes. It’s the same exact thing.

--

Lemmy still has a pretty obnoxious tankie problem. Even if you block the .ml instance, pretty much every thread about US politics or world news on any major instance gets hijacked by the same handful of trolls and their associated vote bots. Hopefully this will become less of a problem as more sane people join, but just as a word of caution, be aware that you will be called western imperialist scum by a bunch of 14 year olds.

--

Lemmy is utter rubbish, it's as if their entire userbase consists of the top layer of scum carefully siphoned off from the Reddit cesspool. It got the worst of the annoying political echo chamber and "very smart" argumentative users from Reddit.

I just clicked on half a dozen random Lemmy servers, and all of them had at least one link about Trump in the top 5 posts. Even ones that seem like they're supposed to be about tech.

Normal humans want the Reddit of 10+ years ago back. We don't want to use a different site colonized by the same modern day Redditors we loathe interacting with.

--

To be fair, you can't say they're wrong. Open https://discuss.online , by default you'll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.

What I try to do in such instances is to give something like

"While politics are important, you can still very much block them. Here are an example of some communities that can interest you:

I also wrote a long post about that issue that you can read here https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/

As a side note, I recently started a discussion on !fedigrow@lemm.ee about a potential political-free instance for new joiners, feel free to have a look: https://feddit.org/post/6819084

Lemmy is too small, 42k monthly active users is nothing

Discuit, the centralized alternative to Reddit, currently counts 181 weekly active commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/NlAdOWAp

You can also mention that NodeBB is now federating with Lemmy:

That's all for now, happy to discuss in the comments.

Note: if you're not interested in promoting Lemmy, feel free to hide this post, you are able to do this on specific posts if your instance is running 0.19.4 and newer

162 comments

  • To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong.

    Most of them are. Some of them are even plain old factually wrong, not just condescending or exaggerating.

    It's important to understand that many of these instances were raised by people who didn't like reddit's widespread US-defaultism (including people claiming reddit is left-of-center because it swings Democrat) and its tolerance of bigots and trolls. Now if someone wants to set up their own instances to clone reddit and keep all the bad parts, sure, all we can really do is ignore them or get ignored by them. But when those people complain that this is "a bunch of 14 year olds" with "vote bots" or a "political echo chamber", that's just plain old ignorant, or shocked that they're suddenly in a place with a different culture and struggling to believe it's mostly just normal nerdy people like reddit is.

  • The youngest couple generations don't really do writing (or reading) they watch videos to learn things. Pixelfed.org just pushed Lemmy onto fourth place.

    Promotion of Lemmy should be to millennials and older, say.

  • Some personal thoughts:

    about the content when you first open lemmy: I joined reddit some time around 2015 and it was not exactly the most welcoming experience with the type of content you see by default either. Still, I had seen smaller communities with cool content and I joined anyway and just learned to use it enough to tailor my feed. Lemmy becomes much nicer after awhile of hanging out and discovering new and cool communities!

    In my personal opinion the "Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy" part is the most important. Fediverse IS confusing when you check it out the first time. It took me awhile to make an account because people kept telling to choose an instance that fits you. I know it sounds stupid but it really kept me away from making an account for awhile.

    I instance-hopped a couple of times because I joined smaller instances (the recommendation everyone gives you) that then disappeared / were abandoned by the admin. That was not a very nice experience. I know lemmy.world is too big, but honestly it is a very easy and nice starting point to lemmyverse (so is sopuli!).

    Also: really appreciate the effort you are putting into growing lemmy, Blaze!

    • I instance-hopped a couple of times because I joined smaller instances (the recommendation everyone gives you) that then disappeared / were abandoned by the admin.

      I already had this problem on PeerTube years earlier, so I played it safe with a bigger instance, at least for a main account (I also had one on gtio.io which was gone before the reddit API exodus). This is absolutely a real issue with people recommending small instances, but at the same time, it's necessary to avoid recommending just one which gets overwhelmed and disables new accounts.

    • Hello,

      Thank you for your comment!

      I joined reddit some time around 2015 and it was not exactly the most welcoming experience with the type of content you see by default either.

      I think the main issue here is that Reddit in 2015 didn't have to compete with modern Reddit. Nowadays, you create a Reddit account, you get a few subs suggested depending on your interest and your geodefault, so that's enough to give you a first tailored experience without being first drown into All content.

      We can't really replicate that on Lemmy (hopefully one day we will), so the best we have is what I listed above: tell people they should focus on laid back communities.

      • That is interesting, I didn't know that about modern reddit.

        And I agree I hope that we do get something like that. I've been thinking for a while that merging https://lemmyverse.net/communities with instance specific account creation would be really cool, but it has just been a passing thought without much further thinking. I always recommend that link to new people on lemmy (also put it on my account description). But sadly it doesn't have recommendations based on interests / geolocation, Although it does let you filter accessible communities based on your instance, but it could possible also have a tool "choose an instance for me based on my location / interests".

  • To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong. Open https://discuss.online , by default you’ll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.

    The fact that they (or you) complain about the "All" timeline having the same stuff in all servers shows they have no idea what they're talking about: that's the entire point of an All feed! (plusminus stuff like defederation). It would make more sense to compare the Local feed of instances, IMO.

    Besides, the default sorts are active and popularity nowadays, so it only makes sense that stuff that we care about and have to have words with, takes the forefront. If you want to solve that the solution is not "let's ignore what's going on around the world", it's "post more cats" and "post more ich_iel". Or just use the Scaled sort, I don't understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.

    And that's right there with the complaint about the 42k users too. The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about. Complaining that for the next people to come in "I'm going to be called a westerner imperialist" is delicious hypocrisy on not noticing how indoctrinated they are.

    • The fact that they (or you) complain about the “All” timeline having the same stuff in all servers shows they have no idea what they’re talking about: that’s the entire point of an All feed! (plusminus stuff like defederation). It would make more sense to compare the Local feed of instances, IMO.

      The complaint is not about the All timeline being the same everywhere. The complaint is that most of the All feed is US politics, a topic which is already massively dominant on Reddit. Some people are looking at alternatives because they want to avoid that. If it's the same, why bother changing and not stay on Reddit?

      I don’t understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.

      Good point, could be something that could be change by admins.

      The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about.

      Well, that's not the case for everyone. A lot of people came here because they wanted third party apps on Reddit.

  • Content is King. You can have a good chunk of people that manage to go through the UX issues, they will still leave if they don't find what they want. The mirror bots (alien.top, lemmit.online) were meant to help with that, but the people here would rather complain about the post volume instead of learning how to follow only the subscribed communities.

    Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

    A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third. My proposal to separate user/local instances from topic-based instances has been rejected here, even after I offered to put them under the governance of a wider admin group.

    Now, I'm tired of this culture and small thinking. Fine if you want to be proselytizing and convincing people "at retail", but this will not be nearly as impactful if we had a dozen people who had the courage to setup a Lemmy instance with Fediverser.

    • no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

      PieFed solves all of that. It isn't quite ready for the non-technical masses from Reddit, but those particular issues at least it does solve.

      I kinda want to recommend people to simply visit https://piefed.social/ and see what will eventually become available as a standard Threadiverse software suite just like Lemmy and Mbin.

      • Sorry, what about PieFed specifically solves the issues?

        • Does it allow people to sign up to the instance directly from their Reddit credentials?
        • Does it provide a mapping between Fediverse communities and subreddits, so that when people sign up they are automatically subscribed to their groups of interest?
        • Does it provide a separation between topic instances and user instances?

        I sincerely don't see how piefed relates to Fediverser at all...

    • The issue with the mirroring, at least how it was done, is that it was too much content for not enough users, creating the feeling of a deserted mall. If my comment disappears in a flood of posts, it's no better than when my comment disappears in a flood of comments (like it does on reddit). (Lets forget about the part when one guy started copying entire threads including their users, which was not well thought out)

      A way of combining communities into "multilemmys" would be great. I can understand why there's pushback for separating topics from users. A Lemmy instance is not just a basket for specific topics, it's a expression of ideology, and as such ideological arguments about the moderation in your proposed structure are guaranteed. It also would reduce comments with minority viewpoints to a minimum.

      A slow and steady promotion of lemmy is the best that can happen - from what i learned in the last year a slow and steady influx of people is preferred by the majority, and not a flood of people that can't be handled by our culture.

      I like efficiency too, but some things do get lost when speeding things up too much.

      • A way of combining communities into “multilemmys” would be great.

        Don't mbin already have this?

      • (Lets forget about the part when one guy started copying entire threads including their users, which was not well thought out)

        That was me. ;)

        And sorry to disappoint you, I thought about it a lot. Mirroring the entire thread was less about the benefit the (few) users that are here and more about the potential to bring the masses of Reddit users who are stuck there because they (rightfully) claim that they do not have any other place to find their niche content. Mirroring the entire thread was also a way to ensure that we were (a) breaking the monopoly on the conversation and (b) creating an incentive for app developers to create a hybrid Lemmy/Reddit client, that could read from Lemmy and post to both, which would effectively make the transition away from the siloed network completely transparent.

        The one thing that I didn't get to execute properly was that I should've completed the two-way bridging before enabling the full mirrors.

        A Lemmy instance is not just a basket for specific topics, it’s a expression of ideology...

        1. This is booooooring. So boring. This is the kind of thing that keeps people away. To the absolute majority of people, social networks are about FFF: Friends, Family and Fucking.
        2. It's not an exclusive option. If you are part of 5% of people who want to be in the small, niche group are still free to do so. The other 95% of people who just care about gorging in from the content hose would be perfectly happy by following from the larger topic-based instances.

        A slow and steady promotion of lemmy is the best that can happen

        This is what the Mastodon crowd would also say. Now they are seeing constant churn and watching Bluesky grow, and have to bury their faces in the sand arguing stupid things like "Bluesky might be winning, but they are not really decentralized". Yeah, it is true. It's not "really" decentralized. 99.98% of the world will say "so what?" and continue to use it.

        I'm tired of consolation prizes and moral victories. I want the web to be free, and I want it to be free for more than just a tiny niche of ideologues. Slow and steady will not win against Big Tech.

  • Just my opinion: No need to focus on reddit. The world is not focused by that platform, and there are other people on the Internet.

    To attract an audience, you need exactly to attract an audience. Add indexing by search engines, Add SEO optimization for lemmy-ui, etc. People can find interesting instances exactly in google search after that without any provisioning. That's why web search engines be created.

    • Lemmy is a very similar platform to Reddit, it makes sense to target those people.

      web search engines

      The sad thing is that search engines aren't really at the best at the moment, and with Google and Reddit deal, it's not like they are going to promote alternatives forums that much.

      • Google and Reddit deal, it's not like they are going to promote alternatives forums that much

        There is more than one search engine in the sea.

        And that would be an argument if it weren't for a completely broken CEO headers in the web interface. I can't attach a screenshot because I changed the web in my copy to the Photon. In general, there are tons of SEO mistakes. At least according to Yandex Webmaster page.

        UPD: for example api don't have robots.txt method. As result I generate new pages lists for best search optimization with self written script...

  • Prevent opinion downvoting by disabling downvotes globally.

    50 upvotes, 90 downvotes, that's not problematic at all, but there is the huge total score of -40 in this case that could lead to the deletion of the post or comment.

    By the way: My instance is one of the few with downvotes disabled. So, if you want to give me feedback on this, I can only see comments...

    Opinion downvoting was the most toxic feature of Reddit and led to perfect echo chambers. We should have left it there.

    • Blahaj does it as well

    • I think downvote anonymity is the bigger part of the problem, not downvotes in general. Unless I'm misunderstanding, what you're proposing amounts to "if you want to downvote in a community you'll need to make an account on it's instance". This would be a nice option to have, but it should also remain an option.

      In your +50/-90 example, showing at least the instance provenance for votes allows more (sub)cases. If I can see that 55 of the downvotes come from the instance hosting the community, that's potentially a very different situation than if only 5 do. Or if 70 of the downvotes come from a pair of instances that aren't the community host. The current anonymity of these downvotes flattens these nuances into the same "-40", which I agree isn't great when it can lead to deletion - but I'd argue that's also an entirely separate problem that might be better addressed from a different angle. I find that disabling downvotes from other instances entirely flattens things just as much if not more, just not in the same manner. Instead of wondering how representative a big upvote or downvote count is, I'm now wondering how representative a big upvote count is, period. That might seem like 50% less wondering but with no downvotes at all it might also only be about 50% less votes.

      I'm not convinced silencing negative outside contributions won't just shift the echo-chamber-forming to one that's more based around a form of toxic positivity and/or reddit-style reposts and joke comments, either.

      Revealing from which instances downvotes come from doesn't prevent opinion downvotes but it allows dulling their bite. The same is true for opinion upvotes.

      From my understanding votes are more-or-less already somewhat public on lemmy between it's implementation and what federation needs to function properly. At the very least, each instance knows how many votes they're getting from the other instances. We should embrace the nuances federation brings to the problem instead of throwing them away entirely.

      So much thought has been put into "how do we convey the different instances' character and their relations to each other to new (potential) users in a way that doesn't a) overload them and/or b) scare them away with content that rubs them the wrong way" in communities and posts like these, when potentially we just need to render more visible the data that is already present on the instance servers.

      I'll acknowledge up-front that the "just" in the previous sentence is carrying a lot of weight; data viz is not easy on the best of days and votes have so little screen real-estate to work with. On top of that, any UI feature that can make what I'm suggesting palatable and accessible to non-power users would also need to be replicated across most popular clients. They're written in a motley assortment of programming languages and ecosystems, and range from targeting browsers to native smartphone OSes, so the development efforts would be difficult to share and carry over from one client to the next. Still, they're called votes: there's a lot of prior art in polling software and news coverage of elections from the past few years that should be publicly accessible (at least in terms of screenshots, stills, and videos of the UI, if not a working version of it to play around with).

      On top of this, I don't know how much effort this would require on backend devs for lemmy (and kbin/mbin I forget which is the survivor, and piefed, and any other threadiverse instance software I'm currently unaware of). I wouldn't expect keeping track of vote provenance to prove immensely difficult, but it could cause some sort of combinatorial explosion in the overhead required by the different sorting algorithms proposed (I'm ignorant on how much they cache vs how often they're run for lemmy, for example).

      I can't foretell if this would "solve" opinion downvotes on it's own, but I do think it would contribute to the necessary conditions for people to drift away from the more toxic forms of it. It could also become another option for viewing feeds on top of "subscribed"/"local"/"all" + the different vote rankings.

  • Oh, yeah. It's still ongoing. You can track the progress at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/api/alpha/routes.py if you like. At the bottom of that page, things with a 'Stage 1' are what's left to do.

    The remaining stuff is mostly to do with chat / notifications. Once done, a basic app could be released, and then improved to include stuff that's missing (things like uploading an image to post or a comment, and viewing reports)

    EDIT: sorry, this was meant to be a reply to another comment. Still getting the hang of NodeBB. Now will this edit work ...

  • Yep, lemmy definitely has a problem with too much politics.

    I propose that no post should include the head or face of any politician. Seeing a politician typically ruins your day. Best to either keep politics abstract (memes) or not do that at all.

  • Promote Mbin. The only bad thing it has going for it is that it cannot block entire instances, which is odd because one would think blocking domains would do this. It also has a number of pet peeves, but none I've found to be as bad.

    Or just link to this: https://jointhefediverse.net/

162 comments