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can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance.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
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
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:
- https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
- https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
- https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
- https://discuss.online/c/patientgamers
- https://discuss.online/post/15026558 for 20 non-political communities"
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:
- https://feddit.org/post/7035166?scrollToComments=true
- https://community.nodebb.org/topic/71fe3f89-361c-4716-a79e-de02f94b3113/test-from-lemmy-to-nodebb
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
And again blaze doing the hard work for shaping fedi in positive ways while lemmy.world mods are busy censoring speech!
Sounds like we’re filtering out the exact type of people I would never want to come from Reddit. Dunno why y’all want them.
I generally try to avoid political shit here myself, it’s too depressing and I’m not sure reddit-like forums is really a good format for that.
But for those who are out there posting cybertruck memes, thanks for scaring away the MAGAs for the rest of us. It is much appreciated.
Everyone else is already here or is not interested in text-based forums
Shoutout to lemmy.zip, y’all are a great instance!
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.
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?
Well then the key is to not show the All feed. That feed, by its very design, is about showing the overview of what is going about “the known fedi”, and we can’t control what other people talk about, fedi or otherwise. If he current news is Luigi, exploded Starlink launches and double Nazi salutes, that’s what’s going to be talked about - and the presence of generalist instances is going to amplify that effect. Unless you have enough cats, enough Linux, or enough ich_iel.
A lot of people came here because they wanted third party apps on Reddit.
Well then they were told wrong: here it’s not about developing for Reddit. In fact, when someone tried to act on trying to bring people from Reddit or emulating “third party app” by bringing in the threads from Reddit, it was the lemmings who complained (even if rightfully so).
This is the best platform for constant live updates about what the people you don’t like are up to. Then there’s articles about everything that’s wrong in the world and also some memes - mostly political.
You forgot about the Linux memes
The disrespect is palpable
selection of 20 non-political,tech,memes communities: https://feddit.uk/post/22376629
The best promotion is to be awesome.
>Lemmy, is awesome (y/n)?: _y
The thing I hate worst about Lemmy is that a lot of people are dickheads about their opinion, which often is barely different from the persons’ opinions you see them aggressively shitting on. In other cases the opinions are pretty different but start with the same basic premise, yet some users see no common ground at all. It’s become really disheartening honestly. There are probably more than 30 users like that which I had to block for my own sanity
This is the twitter and reddit ethos. Everyone is Super Smart and You Are Wrong Ha Ha.
On reddit you can find smaller communities where people are more normal and it’s closer to having a discussion at a bar than it is going on to /r/politics or something.
People DEFINITELY don’t like showing up at a new place and posting stuff and people piling on with snark and stuff.
It’s human nature. Mods can help with that, so it’s also community dependent.
I’m for the sink or swim mentality. Point them here and if they come up with an excuse to not be here then they probably weren’t going to be a good contributor anyway.
I’m fine with being selective. There is no reason we need 1M+ MAU for the sake of the network, we aren’t trying to turn a profit
There is no reason we need 1M+ MAU for the sake of the network, we aren’t trying to turn a profit
There’s also no reason a topic as popular as TV shows relies on 3 posters to keep the main community active: [email protected]
We don’t need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement
We don’t need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement
Definitely agreed with this. And less always (understandably) angry political posters, more escapists that want to chat about movies, games etc. It becomes like that snake eating itself because people that want a break from real life come here and see nothing but the same 24 news cycle as everywhere else. And then, speaking for myself, searching up certain niche communities and finding them either non-existent or with 3 posts from 1 and a half years ago.
I’ve been thinking of porting a couple of my old review posts over here from my banned but not yet closed Reddit account. Just so that, for example, the next time someone visits the Ghibli community there’ll be 4 posts instead of 3.
And the Sonic communities are pretty disappointing too, considering I’m always seeing it mentioned in the wild these days. Makes me think (or hope) that there’s a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.
Reddit is sadly still unbeaten in searching up a TV show that you enjoy and finding an entire community built around it. And those communities never took a lot of members. So it shouldn’t be impossible here.
Makes me think (or hope) that there’s a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.
If you have a topic you would like to talk about, feel free to post about it in [email protected]. Not sure we have enough people for Sonic, but we can try.
I get the frustration with not having a lot of active posters in a community despite diligence in posting and promotion on [email protected]. I’ve had the same frustration trying to operate [email protected] the last two seasons. I am not going to keep it up this offseason
Sorry to hear. How are the NFL communities doing on Lemmy in general? I’m a bit active on [email protected] (the other one), it’s moderately active but still niche.
I don’t know if @[email protected] has a bot that automatically posts news from a feed or is just a diligent poster but he is always posting relevant news to the NFL community.
For college football, @[email protected] and @[email protected] do a great job modding and make sure that community has content.
The CFB community has really active game threads and even a community poll, the NFL community is more for news but it’s very helpful for me to follow the news in the league and most posts get at least a few comments.
That’s nice. About fantasy football, did you promote in on the other NFL communities? I guess it’s too much of a niche topic. I had some success with fantasy football for the Euro 2024, but that was a continent-wide competition, not a regular season.
I’ve promoted it and it has plenty of subscribers, it just doesn’t have a lot of regular activity. It’s not my community anyway, I’ve just been trying to steward it the last two seasons. I think it’s more just become more of a place to chat about fantasy football than an active place ask for and give advice for fantasy football. I’m fine with that as well.
Honestly, there needs to be a setting for lemmy admins to specify the default comms displayed to not-logged and new users. Just the firehose of the /all or local is not particularly attractive to most people.
EDIT: Went ahead and opened a feature request
Agree. I’m of the opinion that the default view for guests should be Local, Scaled. Or alternatively, Local, Popular. But never All, and certainly not mixed with Active.
This is what I’ve been saying. I think it should go even further and give admins a default block list of users.
A lot of folks talk about how Lemmy became useable after they spent hours (or sometimes a month) blocking the right communities and users, but most social media users don’t want to work that hard, they just want to start doomscrolling.
give admins a default block list of users.
Usually obvious trolls are banned on their instance, so for everyone. There is also synchronization between admins to ban people on instances that admins can’t be contacted
Isn’t that what /api/v3/community/hide allows? https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35617930
Not really. That just hides it from /all. Just because not want new users to get dumped into /c/politics, or /c/slop, doesn’t mean I want to hide their existence from everyone.
The hard part is that for some people, News and Politics is actually what they are looking for. Others want only Memes and never not that, while still others want content types like Gaming or Arts and Crafts, etc.
So when Categories of Communities and/or Topic areas is implemented, this issue will be solved, but until then these are merely a best guess about what an “average” user desires to see, rather than allowing them to choose their own experience.
Sure. The suggestion I did for the devs is just to have another tab “suggested” which will be a feed of the preselected comms from the admins. Anyone can easily switch away from it
Ah, indeed. Thanks for the feature request
Single topic forums are still doing ok out there on the wider Internet. Create more well moderated, single-topic, federated forums, and then promote those specifically to users who care about those topics.
Don’t sell Lemmy to end users. Lemmy is a solution for admins. Sell the specific websites to end users.
Difficult to sell a forum to people where most mods on Reddit are going to remove posts mentioning it: https://lemmy.ca/post/37657096
People on specific forums are probably happy where they are and aren’t going to switch from their established forums. The strength of Reddit and Lemmy is to be able to have several forums accessible from the main site.
The last place that’s left is /r/RedditAlternatives, where you just have people who want, well, a Reddit alternatives, and they usually don’t mention their preferences.
But I agree with you to an extend, [email protected] is a good example of focused forum. It’s a bit unique on Lemmy unfortunately.
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!
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”.
have a tool “choose an instance for me based on my location / interests”.
https://join-lemmy.org/ kind of does that, but the results can be a bit off. I just tried “Technology”, and the first result was lemmy.today, which is fine, but doesn’t defederate anything, so maybe not the best choice for a new joiner.
“Gaming” gave https://sub.wetshaving.social/ as the first result, not sure it’s the best recommendation.
Edit: defederate, not federate
Yeah… I understand that we need to spread out more but honestly I think join-lemmy.org should not be the first stop for someone new to lemmy seeing the results you are getting. I agree with you Blaze, point them directly to an instance or an app.
Found this pretty cool that on the voyager for lemmy test web app you can specify the local feed of an instance: https://vger.app/posts/lemm.ee/local - although not sure if that is the best way to “market” lemmy, the local feed of lemm.ee actually looked nice.
Yes, that’s a cool features of Voyager
I signed up on lemmy.today and can see and interact with I’m pretty sure everything, I’m not sure what is meant by doesn’t federate anything?
Sorry, typo, I meant “defederate”. Lemmy.today indeed shows you everything.
“Reddit but you can block the part that annoys you”
And then only with deeper knowledge of how the Fediverse functions under the hood - like how “instances” relate to “communities” and specific moderator names, especially when working from a remote account on a different instance than the community structure… Hey, where are you going? 😯
let’s just rebrand instances to superleddits and communities to subleddits 🤣
Thought process about discuss.online and sopuli as recommendations
There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/)
- Lemmy.world is too big
- Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )
- sh.itjust.works names contains “shit”, which can deter users: https://feddit.org/post/4255611/2825351
- lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric
- feddit.org, is German-centric (sidebar in German first, Matrix chat is in German, meta community is in German)
- dbzer0 federates hexbear
- programming.dev is topic-centric
- blahaj is queer-focused
- discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
- lemmy.sdf.org does not defederate anyone
- lemmy.zip is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad
- beehaw is way outdated
- infosec.pub is topic-centric
- aussie.zone is country-centric
- midwest.social is region-centric
I ended up with discuss.online and sopuli.xyz as they have
- neutral names
- long running history
- good downtime
- active admins
- defederate hexbear and lemmygrad
If people have other suggestions, feel free
There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances
[proceeds to list pretty much all good instances, and complains about hexbear]
…I’m curious, what is your definition of “generalist”? Because I suspect it involves “not punching nazis”.
“generalist”
Something that is not linked to a country, a theme or a demographic
Non-generalist:
- lemmy.ca, feddit.org, programming.dev, blahaj, etc.
Generalist:
- lemm.ee
- sopuli.xyz
- discuss.online
Not sure what you meant with “not punching nazis”
What is with hexbear and lemmygrad…why are people calling these out
They support the USs enemies.
That seems fine, if distasteful? Like I’m in support of free expression
Propaganda focused instances, with deranged users that attack anyone who tries to fact check and they are protectes by their admins/mods.
I’ll mention my experience with a server from that list (that I won’t name)…
The server worked most of the time but federation kept breaking. The server was rather small. Since you use Lemmy from your home instance, this meant that only a few local communities showed any activity and this was a very low amount of activity. This would go on for days or even well over a week before things got better for a while and then everything started to break again.
It is one thing for a server to just go away. You then clearly know that something is wrong and you can migrate over to another server. It is another thing for the server to generally be online all the time with it just messing up in such a way as to make the whole Lemmy ecosystem seem rather dead.
Things would have been easier if most of the communities I want to interact with were on the same server as my account. The other server, with federation issues, was only home to 5 % of the communities I was following which left 95 % of the communities I wanted to follow as not updated due to federation issues.
There isn’t a clear indication of which servers are working great with a proven track record of working great as opposed to “zombie instances” not federating correctly or other instances which are moments away from randomly shutting down. The point is that I feel like my account anywhere will be able to receive and send information throughout the whole Lemmy network or sites. This reduces the concept of federation a bit down towards needing to have an account on a well known working server simply because account migration is such a headache. I can then interact with communities without issues (hosted on well working servers) but I can easily change my community subscriptions as I want to.
One thing that may help for someone is to try and see what communities they want to participate in. If the communities they primarily find interesting are in Lemmy.world then they likely should have an account there to ease any federation issues. The number of communities I follow here are 3 times larger than communities I follow with any other specific instance. This community subscription list is one I figured out when I was on “that other server” so it guided me here.
To give a counterpoint, the experience on LW in summer 2023 was horrible, due to the constant DDoS attacks on the infrastructure.
Discuss.online has a status page: https://status.discuss.online/
Sopuli.xyz is very stable, and transparent about how they operate: https://sopuli.xyz/post/13531
A few other instances have status pages:
Thanks for the information!
I’m not sure if the status pages accurately show federation issues though (not federating or well behind). I’m not sure if they can easily show that information either.
Lemm.ee definitely does:
If people want to have a better overview, they can use this dashboard: https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=programming.dev&var-remote_instance=lemmy.zip
join-lemmy needs to have a better interactive flow to select a server. What they have is difficult and slow to maintain and doesn’t take into account server stability or newness (new servers are more likely to stop working once the admin discovers they don’t like hosting, or they have a terrible mod experience). But the lemmy devs are not interested in either doing things like allowing servers to tag themselves, nor utilize sites like the fediseer which already does that. So we end up with a bad “join” frontpage which people like you end up just avoiding which goes to show how bad things are.
There used to be a very nice interactive lemmy server selection site at one point which guided you based on interest/subinterest as self-tagged in fediseer, but I can’t remember the domain anymore :(
There used to be a very nice interactive lemmy server selection site at one point which guided you based on interest/subinterest as self-tagged in , but I can’t remember the domain anymore :(
Yes, it rings a bell too but don’t remember it either :(
But the lemmy devs are not interested in either doing things like allowing servers to tag themselves
Indeed, that’s probably a whole topic altogether. If people want to try working on a better join-lemmy website, that would be great, but it seems like people are already spread too thin.
Yes, it rings a bell too but don’t remember it either :(
Ah found it: https://pangora.social/
Sadly it’s gone offline. sigh
@[email protected] how come you took it down?
Ah yes!
It probably depends on what audience you are talking to. Privacy advocates, Anarchists, AI-Imagegen-Fans and digital pirates are probably a good fit for dbzer0, even with hexbear federated, and a LGBT-positive audience would feel at home on blahaj. So while promoting generalist instances per default is a good move, if the subreddit has a well-defined audience, a recommendation for a “specialized” instance might work better.
Indeed, but usually I promote on /r/RedditAlternatives, and don’t have any way to know what the user’s interests are.
How’s Lemmy.cafe? I believe they defederate the Big 3 Tankie instances. Dunno what their downtime or admins are like.
I have my main alt there. It’s pretty good, but there was an issue with the thumbnails that got resolved a few days ago. Also, the instance is much smaller than the two others (64 users per month), so I sometimes have to subscribe to some medium-size communities before nobody did before. Federation can get a bit clunky at times too, and I have to pull myself some posts or comments to “unclog the pipes”.
Discuss.online has 140 users per month, sopuli 496
I am not entirely sure how appropriate my reply is since you name lemmy specifically, but since one can subscribe to particular topics in piefed, I am leaning towards it more than lemmy as an alternative to reddit.
Once Piefed will get Thunder as well as an iOS app, it will become an alternative. That’s the main blocker I have now recommending it. Besides that, it’s a quite good Lemmy alternative.
@[email protected] Thunder is written using Flutter / Dart - meaning that it’s cross-platform. I’ve compiled the version for PieFed for windows, linux and macos, so as long as I’m able to get it working for Android, it should also work for iOS. I’ll need to be someone else who does though, 'cos my mac is too old, and I don’t have an iphone.
Bonus screenshot:
Amazing! So what, the Piefed API is already there? I thought that was still ongoing
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 …
Great, thanks!
Just a thought I’m having, but rather than just spamming Reddit with Lemmy links maybe we should promote it more on Linux type areas, at least people coming from there will find their niche content here.
Isn’t every Linux user aware of Lemmy by now? I’ve seen a few posts about it on a few Linux forums during the API fiasco
