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can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance.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.

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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.

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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.

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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 [email protected] 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

  • A Wild Mimic appears!@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    4 hours ago

    I know that you thought a lot about it, but you came to the wrong conclusions. But hey, since you seem still pretty grumpy about all of this and nearly a year has come and gone, maybe try again? This time users at least already have a working blocking feature, i think that wasn’t a thing yet last time. If a free alternative comes out of it i’m all for it.

    The one thing that I didn’t get to execute properly was that…

    … you didn’t ask anyone if they would be ok with it, neither on the fediverse nor on reddit, not thinking about possible legal trouble for all federated instances which automatically copied the “property” (ugh i hate IP laws, but it is what it is) of reddit from your instance, opening them up to possible lawsuits.

    … your actions would impact the existing structures, which flooded the “all” channel - which made you demand that everyone else change their usage patterns to filter out the spam you created.

    … the existing lemmy codebase was probably not performant enough for what you were planning anyway - damn, there are instances that can barely handle federating with lemmy.world; had all of this worked as you planned, i’m pretty sure that the fediverse, or at least most of lemmy would have come to a screeching halt.

    This is booooooring.

    To be honest, i am perfectly fine if the people who just want to flood their brain with content stay somewhere else. These people have a plethora of choices to get their dopamine flowing, and with pixelfed there is now one that grows pretty fast in the fediverse too.

    It’s not an exclusive option.

    But it creates a chilling effect, if the main community for a specific topic is under control of people who might not be as open or even just interested as needed. All discourse is ideological - a discussion about fascism will look very different depending on who has the last say regarding whats acceptable to say.

    Mastodon’s issues, in my opinion, stem from something else - the name. Mastodon is a really crappy name. I tend to keep an open mind about most things, but i bounced off that name hard. I would choose a service named Bluesky over one named Mastodon 9 times out of ten even if it’s not really decentralized. Maybe now with the transfer to a new non-profit someone thinks of a snappier name that’s marketable.

    • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
      1·
      46 minutes ago

      i hate IP laws, but it is what it is

      It is what it is because we are too afraid to challenge them.

      which made you demand that everyone else change their usage patterns to filter out the spam you created.

      I really don’t get this argument. Browsing by “all” is akin to drinking from the firehose, people are not using the affordances that the software provided from the very beginning and then the problem is with those who are bringing content to the network?

      Next you are going to tell me that the reason we should keep Lemmy small is to not break people’s workflows.

      the existing lemmy codebase was probably not performant enough for what you were planning anyway

      Au contraire!. One of the reasons that I was creating so many different instances was precisely to avoid concentration of communities in a single instance. In Lemmy’s currrent design, the communities are the chatty agents. Every comment and post becomes a message broadcast by the community. The reason that LW has become problematic in the overall network is less about the amount the user it has and more because of its communities.

      But it creates a chilling effect

      I just disagree, here. In fact, it feels like the opposite is the problem here. I feel like the Fediverse is so concerned about being a place for minorities and outcasts that it only accepts fringe opinions.

      Mastodon is a really crappy name.

      May as well be, but completely irrelevant. There are a dozen other projects providing microblogging and a Twitter-like experience. All of them failing to appeal to a more “normie” crowd.