This is not going to be a blogpost about “Why do people still use Reddit instead of everyone moving to Lemmy?”. I noticed that even with Mastodon users, who already understand and like the advantages of decentralized platforms, the usage of Lemmy is extremely small, and more people use Reddit. Most of them haven’t even heard of Lemmy. To be fair, the Reddit usage also seems to be fairly low.
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sue 2: Users could agree on one community. Or (a functionality Lemmy doesn’t have), similar communities could be grouped or linked together. Instead of choosing between [email protected] and [email protected], users could follow a combined “Linux” topic.
Doesn’t PieFed do exactly that?
Yes, and it consolidates comments from cross-posts. Very neat.
Personally I’m not a fan. Imagine if /r/games and /r/gaming on reddit shared comment sections. That’d be a complete mess.
Different communities should be allowed to nurture their own culture.
Well it doesn’t mix the comments, there’s a divider between
A divider, lol. It’s still the same page and everything. Hardly any separation. We shouldn’t encourage this mono-culture style.
Well you don’t have to use it if you don’t like it. Many people like it, it was a feature with high demand. Even without the feature I always check the crossposts for different comments, so it’s the same thing just more convenient, no difference in “mono-culture”
Let’s state plainly: the title is false. I use lemmy; you’re using lemmy; the other commentators are using lemmy.
There’s a concept I’ve been mulling over for a while–and economists probably have a term for it of which I’m ignorant of–that is that free software fails in capitalist market economies. I expect that statement to create a knee-jerk reaction. The truth is free-software is everywhere and as computers become ever more embedded into our economies free-software’s presence will only grow exponentially. It’s often the foundation for computerised economies.
Free-software enthusiasts understand that its become endemic to the economy. However businesses and consumers still ignore it even when it might be prudent to select or fund free-software. To ignore it seems contradictory to a lot of ideals. A capitalist business should use free-software as the monetary cost is zero: it’s a free product. Revolutionary organisations should adopt free-software is it aligns with their ideologies. Yet we know they don’t. These actors are acting irrationally.
Free-software lacks something that is a prerequisite to participate in an economy: capital. It has no money to propagandise itself. To phrase it another way: it has no money to buy ads. Without ads it doesn’t exist to entities who do have capital.
In Australia Reddit brought ad-space inside shopping-centers. Commercial software has revenues from which a portion can be spent on advertising and its through this advertising that growth can occur. The reason why lemmy has a small user-base is because it has no revenue streams. It’s an economic sink.
If we were to imagine that the user-pool was to dramatically increase what would actually occur? I imagine many instances would be overwhelmed with traffic, knocking them offline. For those that remain a lot of traffic would be perceived as spam. There is no revenue stream that’s attached to that user-base. If there was you would–absolutely!–see lemmy’s user-base increase as there would be a profit incentive: more users would equate to more profit. The current reality is that more users equates to more debts.
The market for ‘internet-forums’ has already consolidated into the big-players we know of. Maybe someone could take lemmy’s code and usurp the established vendors. That behaviour is already underway now; it’s why we have a multitude of lemmy instances. Maybe the next titan of ‘internet-communities’ will be running a lemmy stack. Not all operators are hosting lemmy with ideology/charity being at the fore. Some site operators are asking themselves, “how can I monetise this?”
From my perspective the issue isn’t why people don’t use lemmy, it’s why is hosting so expensive? The prerequisites to self-hosting (whether it be for personal use or for an established group or organisation) are costly. One has to pay rent on a DNS, static-IP, hardware and data connections. These prerequisites are commercial in nature and are priced as if every buyer has a revenue stream from which these rents are payed from.
If an individual/group wants independence and decides to self-host they’re taking on these rents that have been priced at commercial rates. Those are the monetary hurdles. There’s an intellectual hurdle too: a group needs to have members that know how to administer and maintain servers. The prerequisites are rather burdensome. It should then not come as a surprise that a group of young people who play video-games with each other elect to have their community on discord, or whatever commercial-entity takes on the economic and intellectual burdens. These commercial entities hide the complex nature of computer systems and the economic relationships that exist. In exchange they’re chasing speculative profits. They have revenue coming in from which they can apportion to advertising and paid programmers. They have the incentives to grow.
Lemmy is reactionary software. It pines for the day’s of webmaster superiority… Where a webmaster ruled a personal fiefdom and brought and sold other fiefdoms. Users should be able to host and maintain servers for themselves and their communities. Economic rents and knowledge-specialisation are high hurdles to overcome. If they are overcome they’ll find a wasteland where users have already been captured by existing market players—not only that! They’ll exist side-by-side commercial vendors that pay to have their software blasted from every ad outlet they can afford. The enthusiast or ideologue has sparse capital to attract new users away from their existing ‘digital-home’ whilst the current players have enormous war-chests and if non-economic forces somehow push new-users towards them (e.g. something ‘viral’) they have insufficient economic resources to accommodate them.
I would advocate for technology like GNUnet, i2p and hyphanet (GNUnet being my personal favorite). Software such as those abolish the major economic-rents that would otherwise be required for the ‘clearnet’. (DNS rents are unjustifiable and I would like to direct readers to the OpenNIC project.) However the intellectual burden is increased.
I would like to take a jab at the idea that Reddit (or whatever third-party is used) takes ownership of a community and their user-generated content. They certainly do, but the community leaders voluntarily gave it up. They also neglected their responsibilities. There’s no reason why users couldn’t have a local-mirror of their community even if it is hosted on a third-party platform. That would negate the reality of a third-party purge and therefore the ‘destruction’ of their community. These communities are irresponsible with irresponsible users. How does one make an irresponsible user responsible? I don’t think it can be done.
The autism is this comment is thicker than Earth’s mantle. Which is a layer of silicate rock between the crust and the outer core. It has a mass of 4.01×1024 kg (8.84×1024 lb) and makes up 86% of the mass of Earth. It has a thickness of 2,900 kilometers (1,800 mi) making up about 46% of Earth’s radius and 84% of Earth’s volume. It is predominantly solid but, on geologic time scales, it behaves as a viscous fluid, sometimes described as having the consistency of caramel. Partial melting of the mantle at mid-ocean ridges produces oceanic crust, and partial melting of the mantle at subduction zones produces continental crust.
The easier way to say what you said is that there’s no marketing and no money.
I use Lemmy. And you do. And 1000 other people do. So I’d say it’s big enough.
And Reddit was small for years and years when it started. I don’t even think I really started using it till around 2013-2014. Didn’t have a username or anything just came across it through Google searches. All websites take a while to build a userbase.
This I think is the main problem to adoption. It’s very hard to come across Lemmy results on a search engine even if I’m trying to specify Lemmy. (Not that search engines matter for most people these days what with the LLM executive summary pushing out real web pages, who needs resources when you have slop, am I right? \s)
Where do all those meme posts about “Lemmy is bad name / bad branding” come from? I’ve seen it recurrently enough every time someone launches a FOSS thing that I would normally suspect it’s part of a LLM farm or a scam attempt from some sort of naming / patents agency, but I’ve seen these reactions from long enough (2015-ish).
It’s named after a famous musician that was active for like 30+ years. Half the results when you search “Lemmy” are him, not the platform. Oh, and he had an unfortunate collection of Nazi memorabilia - he claimed it wasn’t because he liked the nazis just that he liked the look of their shit…
FOSS often ends up with bad names unfortunately. People never know what is going to become big when they start a project and they might get a giggle out of the name when it’s a small project. By the time the project becomes big enough that the name might actually start being a problem, it is also known by that name and changing it could significantly impact how many people keep using it. Unfortunately, a name change is often a touchy subject for any project.
Coca-Cola the drink is named after the drug and no one complains. Plus, words can have and acquire more than one meaning during their lifetime (see eg.: “fine” which means all of bad, regular and good).
I mean the sad explanation is that they simply don’t care. They’ll complain all the livelong day about the problems but they’ll never leave. That much was clear after they killed the API and everyone protested for a whopping 2 days.
It’s because everything that becomes popular starts with people in the 14-20 year range.
Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Tiktok…
The Fediverse will eventually grow once something triggers a snowball effect due the nature of connectivity and federation. Until then, the way to make it grow is to have young people make it popular.
Edit: There also needs to be more “fun” here. I think the Fediverse is a more “serious” place which isn’t what those other social media sites offered. “Serious 24/7” isn’t that enticing for young people.
The other day I was imagining a game or game service that has you make a Fediverse account of some kind. You get people to signup with a username that automatically creates a “@fedi.games” account. That account can have access to Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed etc.
what, you don’t think it’s fun endlessly memeing about doomerism and murder?
There’s not enough politics IMO. No fun at all.
People need to spend more time on lighthearted issues like Palestine and the evils of capitalism
Does anyone else find the font on this uncomfortable to read is that just me?
Nobody used reddit for a long time as well
Until people did
Lemmy feels like reddit around 2009
I’m a 31 yr old dude that just found out about this along with what the fediverse is. When I found out, I was researching this stuff so it took me some time to understand it all and I still don’t think I fully understand it all
Part of the problem is there’s a lot less to it than it feels like there is. The analogies we use to teach to non-tech people don’t quite match up.
It’s simply a structured way to log in and send messages back and forth.
You can use it to stitch together forums, link shares, social media, video sharing, or image sharing sites.
But we really don’t bind things together all that tightly. At best you can follow someone on pixelfed or mastodon. Since there’s truly no minimum wiring, a lot of services don’t even really fully communicate with each other. So we end up mostly with mastodon <-> mastodon links and lemmy->piefed<-lemmy links.
activitypub is a protocol. like email.
instances are just what provider you want to use, gmail, hotmail, outlook, etc.
and the ‘platform’ lemmy, piefed, mastroton, pixelfed, is just the aesthetics
Unlike like email the fediverse servers defederating / blocking each other more.
dogmail can send to birdmail but not to catmail.
A lot of people do use Lemmy. I dont get why so many people think something has to have literally everyone on earth using it or its dead. You see the same thing in games, too. Id rather there not be a singular monolirh even with lemmys fediverse design. The internet was better when it wasnt this way.
Exactly. Be grateful that all of reddit is not here.
Niche and local communities are non-existent here. It’s either politics, furry memes, or anime posts. It would be nice for the other communities to have engagement.
hey don’t forget all the mental health communities here…
And we have cats communities to deal with that one!
https://lemmy.world/post/51345527.
Basically this. Quadruple moderation on lemmy is stupid.
Reddit agents easily ban content and active contributorsThe UX still has a long way to go.
I’m very tolerant of shitty tech and like a struggle, and even I am often like wtf.
Signed up to piefed.zip the other day, and the default feed is just horrendous
Most users will just quit instead of trying to figure out how to fix it manually.
No proper onboarding
When you onboard onto Reddit it asks interests and points users to subreddits. I don’t think anything like that exists on Lemmy, but could be a good thing for the less tech inclined.
definitely, it would help setup default subscriptions, and even default blocks would be very nice
Default blocks are difficult, one of the things the dev of the Tesseract frontend got absolutely roasted for a few months ago was for how aggressive the block list was and blocking Blähaj just reeks of transphobia. (The primary issue was his lack of disclosure of the existence of the block list.) There is no low controversy way of making a default block list beyond what we already do with most instances defederating a couple of the most egregious instances.
Tesseract didn’t disclose it, if you make the messaging clear then it can work. A button like “Block political communities” with a full list of what’s being blocked and a link to the page to edit your block list.
In my view, people go to the areas where good content is happening, not different communications architecture.
In my opinion the following:
- Minority of very vocal users who get angry if you don’t share every point of their world view. Honestly you can just block most of them.
- Limited active subgroups - There are only a handful of active subs the rest are just dead. Which leads to…
- Limited content, posts stay in my feed for a week at a time before being replaced. I often block posts I like just because I’m sick of seeing it in my feed.
- Shitty moderation - mods here are way worse than Reddit.
I’ll be honest I miss old Reddit, Lemmy feels like an apocalyptic wasteland but it’s still better than most alternative. It’s kind of nice I don’t sit and consume content as much as I used to.
Minority of very vocal users who get angry if you don’t share every point of their world view. Honestly you can just block most of them.
THIS. I’m a progressive, egalitarian, socialist. I believe everyone deserves civil rights, but socially I don’t give a fuck about furries or whatever fucking kink you have. Do not equate the fight that gays/trans people have fought for their rights to your weird fetishes anime drawings. This opinion gets me in trouble here.
I’ll be honest I miss old Reddit
Everyone does. Just like we all miss og Myspace or geocities sites. Old Reddit at its prime was a different time period. Can’t recapture that just like you can’t recapture the geocities era of the internet.
We’re being enshittified. Lemmy is the least enshittified (thus far.)
The real answer, that we all know but dare not speak, is that it’s miserable here.
Once you’ve blocked the tankies, porn, and militant dweebs, it’s wall to wall politics and titty memes.
I’m here because I’m also a miserable asshole.
There was a glorious few months before Reddit enshittified even further, before the bigger migration of users. After that it turned into 90% American politics.
Edit: downvote me all you want Americans, but the rest of the world is kind of sick of your shit ngl.
My main reason for looking for alternatives. Wanted to stop my morning coffee doom scrolling to consist of only US politics… if you can call it politics that is… Lemmy fits the bill.
As someone has said before, I agree with a bit of lack on on-boarding, you need to be a little bit more insistent on setup to ensure you get the communities you want. Not hard, but can definitely imagine that would stop some from trying out lemmy any further.
Soapy Titty memes are a breath of fresh air compared to recurring bean memes TBH 🫘
Well, as the saying goes, be the change you want in the world - if you find a community that you’d like to see more posts on, and you can contribute, then by all means, please do so
Conservatives did this to you. I’m sending you some “cheer up” tiddies.
You can be in the left and know this place is filled with the most broken progressives we have 🤷
to block all the politics communities should be an option at sign-up, or better yet, even when you browse without being signed in.
