Fediverse

Unfortunately, everyone of your quoted feedback is spot on. Lemmy got the worst of reddit's political echo chamber combined with the "I am so smart" crowd. To make Lemmy barely tolerable, I've had to filter far too many words and block far too many communities. Most people aren't going to jump through hoops to make a platform usable.

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.

I’m very new to the fediverse but I am trying to learn what exactly I am doing. I joined lemmy through a link my relative sent me and somehow I did not get to select an instance, it seemingly auto-assigned me to lemmy.cafe. Which, tbh it’s working out I think, but what did I do for this to have happened? I’m also on pixelfed and am awaiting an email from loops. Meta is too frightening to stay, I deleted TikTok and Reddit. I just long for the community I felt in those places.

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.

A thought that just hit me in the shower.

I don't feel like lemmy is too small. It quite comfortably fills all my lazing on aggregator time without getting stale. The thing is, like many here, I'm a libertarian leftist politics nerd that's into linux and self hosting.

That description describes a sizeable chunk of this project's userbase so enough content is being posted enough to saturate the feed.

If you want the project to expand into other niches, you will have to post into the void about whatever you're into. Seed forums with TV shows or photography or hiking or warhammer or whatever you're into and encourage others to do the same.

All forums are dead at first but if you want people to come and talk about pottery, you're going to have to make that forum cozy before it gets enough interaction to become self sustaining.

I've noticed that people forgot how long ago the Reddit blackout was (about 19 months ago?), and Lemmy has improved a lot since then. Back then Lemmy was like pre-alpha, super buggy, and servers were very unstable. And we have way more 3rd party apps/frontends now.

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1i7gufa/hundreds_of_subreddits_are_considering_banning/m8ktmgh/?context=9

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

An official Android and iOS app called "Lemmy". If you wanna go big, you need the mobile platform.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

Shoutout to lemmy.zip, y'all are a great instance!

"Reddit but you can block the part that annoys you"

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.