• I think a large portion of lemmy is too focused on making lemmy popular. Fake engagement and posts that nobody cares about don’t create engagement. Instead, more focus on just enjoying lemmy would ironically lead to better posts and discussion. Likewise, people post the same articles to the same communities seeking engagement. It leads to dupilication which waters down the discussion, ironically, also leading to less engagement. I think federalised communities, as has been discussed would be a good solution. However, it strikes me that they don’t want to miss out on karma, for some reason. So, short term gain, for long term hassle of multiple posts. If some of the most prolific posters posted to the most relevant community and cross posted elsewhere, then maybe communities would coalesce more.

    • An example of this that really bothers me: I joined several gaming munis because I like to talk about games. But there are people out there who feel that a gaming muni should be about the games industry, and so those munis are just a constant stream of gaming news articles, patch notes, and trailers. Mostly with completely barren comment sections. What I wanted was the social experience of chatting with people about games. I don’t care about (as a random example) the latest Helldivers 2 patch notes.

      I think less of an emphasis on having a steady stream of content and more on only posting something that you believe is worthy of discussion would be so much better. If people want to see literally every rockpapershotgun article, they can subscribe to their RSS feed.

    • I think part of this comes from wanting a broader base of content, which I agree with. The rest seems to come from wanting the downfall of Reddit, who is in my rearview mirror so I don’t care.

      We are currently like old Reddit, a techy, mostly progressive, crowd. That means a lot of uni-topic content.

      When there are 10,000 users, and 5 of them are into sewing, the sewing community is dead. When there are 100,000 users, and thus 50 interested in sewing, content starts to form. You can see where this goes from here.

    • Coalescing into massive communities is a mixed bag. Putting all your eggs in one basket makes them more vulnerable to rogue moderators, sudden loss of a server, the need to defederate if the host server gets compromised, provides a more attractive target for bots, and other bad actor things.

      Yes it would improve ease of use and make Lemmy more newbie friendly, and it can be frustrating to have conversation splintered. Lots of times I’ll comment on an empty story at the top of my new feed only to find a lively discussion a little lower. That’s all frustrating, I agree. It’s also, I think, the nature of federating.

      If multiple different news communities are thriving despite posting pretty much the same content, there are reasons for that. People can pick just one to subscribe to, and they don’t all pick the same one. That tells me there is something about each one that makes them attractive to different people.

      I think it can really hurt smaller communities, though.

    • Ultimately a kind of uber cross posting that hides away the technical bits. I’d definitely love that. Or at least if I as a user could specify multiple communities for a post, and from a ux ui perspective it remains a single post.

      Then again one could argue that subscribers should simply follow multiple communities and that solves the problem, too and it already works. So just avoid cross posting altogether.

  • Might be a hot take, but Lemmy Culture is good, actually. It isn’t homogenous, instances have unique cultures that might fit your needs and interests better.

    I wouldn’t change that, federation and defederation does bring drama, but it also brings really cool micro communities.

  • Hot and Active feeds pull in a lot of things that are up to 2 days old, but by 12-24 hours at the most, nearly all conversation is done. It’s not nearly as rewarding to interact with posts on those feeds when so few people are even looking at them.

    If everyone saw the same feeds, that might be something because maybe the conversation would continue, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the case due to federation.

    • Its been a focus of mine to try to make lemmy’s comment sorting the opposite of the reddit experience, where the highest rated comment is nearly always just the first one, making all engagement after those first few minutes pointless.

      The active sort does a good job of bumping new activity on older posts (limited to 2 days) back to the top. There’s also a New Comments sort that doesn’t have that 2-day limit (making it basically a forum sort), but I don’t know how many people use it.

      Not sure what else we could do tho, the main problem is probably just the smaller number of users. Which needs to be tackled by convincing reddit communities and their mods to move them over to some lemmy instance.

      More on lemmy’s ranking algorithm here..

      • This is a great comment, thank you. Very good links.

        Do you know how federation affects the sorts? I assume, based on my longer experience with Mastodon, that the All feed is actually just all of the posts that have been federated to my instance i.e. someone on my instance is subscribed to that community. So any communities no one on my server is subscribed to are invisible regardless of sort.

        That implies the All feed is unique to each server, and therefore all of the sorts are also unique. Which would mean for at least a certain percentage of posts, they might be in your hot or active feeds, even though no one is really interacting with them much any more.

        What do you think? Maybe it doesn’t work as much like Mastodon as I think, but since it’s all the same fediverse it feels like a logical assumption.

        • Put simply, the sorting / ranking is based on the score and the time published, so as long as things are getting federated within a few seconds, then federated posts / comments are no different from local ones. Mastodon only sorts things by newest AFAIK.

          That implies the All feed is unique to each server, and therefore all of the sorts are also unique. Which would mean for at least a certain percentage of posts, they might be in your hot or active feeds, even though no one is really interacting with them much any more.

          Should only be an issue if your server blocks other ones.

            • Ah, this is completely different and has nothing to do with sorting. All means the latter, IE communities connected to your instance, that your instance knows about. Lemmy doesn’t crawl anything, federated communities need to get subscribed to first, then posts can start coming in for them.

              • Yes but also no. Because if the contents of All are unique to each server, that has some implications for which posts appear in the various sorts, right? Maybe I’m overthinking and the effect is minute, but I feel like in at least some cases it would mean less active posts could squeeze out more active posts.

      • Could there be a one-click way to automatically ‘import’ a Reddit subreddit over to a Lemmy community? Meaning, create it, import the sidebars, welcomes, rules, graphics, etc. so it looks familiar to regular users. If not, at least a step-by-step tutorial on how mods could do it.

        Another option would be to provide something like a crossposting Chrome or Firefox extension that lets people simultaneously post content to both Reddit and Lemmy. Give them a smooth transition path.

        Lastly, the Bluesky concept of ‘pluggable algorithms’ is one way to make it so users can choose whatever sort works best for their interests.

      • Its been a focus of mine to try to make lemmy’s comment sorting the opposite of the reddit experience, where the highest rated comment is nearly always just the first one, making all engagement after those first few minutes pointless.

        I think your strategy for going the opposite than reddit works quite well when it comes to comments. However, I don’t think it fits so well with posts (not sure if the strategy/sorting for posts and comments use the same methods). Personally I don’t feel great seeing posts older than 24 hours, especially as I have probably already seen that post. It’ll just stick around for way too long.

    •  dan   ( @dan@upvote.au ) 
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      I prefer using the “scaled” feed rather than “active”. It’s like active, but boosts posts from smaller communities, and seems to usually surface newer content.

    • Hot and Active feeds pull in a lot of things that are up to 2 days old, but by 12-24 hours at the most, nearly all conversation is done.

      that’s why i’ve switched to “new”

  • Stop needlessly shitring on Windows, iOS and MacOS.

    Recently there was a post about Wallmart blocking privacy features on iOS when connected to their wifi.

    And the comments spoke about how if you are using Apple, you should not expect privacy anyway, implying that Android is a bastion of privacy. Which tunred into an annoying thread and deflected critisism from Wallmart.

    I have seen other threads when people are asking for help with Windows or Mac OS issues and the comments talk about how Linux is much better.

    That is kinda like, asking your friends for help after spraining your ancle, and them suggesting amputating the entrie leg replacing it with a far more powerful cybernetic robot leg, that doesn’t help you.

    I am an IT guy, I just want my computer to work and let me game, manage and edit photos, watch videos, and listen to music, my current Windows 10 machine works fine for me.

    I don’t want to tinker when I am home, I have tinkered enough at work managing 365, reading logs, writing scripts and pulling cables.

    When I feel that Linux is working well enough, I will switch, but that is up to me, I am not interested in how I can configure my computer to my exact specification, I want a decent computer that I can run the same install on for 6-7 years with updates before upgrading or reinstalling. So far has Windows provided that, Linux has not, I have dailied both.

    Sorry for the rant…

  •  dan   ( @dan@upvote.au ) 
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    Stop using giant catchall instances and switch to a smaller instance that’s more suited to you.

    One of the major advantages of a federated system is that it doesn’t really matter which instance you use. There’s no real advantage to using a larger instance, and in fact there’s several disadvantages as the large instances can be slower, maintenance can take longer, it’s more expensive to run the servers, etc.

    One of the reasons people moved away from Reddit was to avoid one company (Reddit) and especially one person (the Reddit CEO) having control over the whole thing. Using a huge Lemmy server kinda defeats the point of switching across.

  •  Admetus   ( @Admetus@sopuli.xyz ) 
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    More witty and funny answers in the comment section. Out of thousands of commenters you could get a few gems that make you ‘spit your coffee at the screen, goddamn you’.

  •  xelar   ( @xelar@lemmy.ml ) 
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    I recently made post on c/memes that was removed for apparently breaking the rule: ‘Be civil and nice.’

    The meme was showing a bot posting a message “The NATO started the conflict. Russia is simply defending against NATO imperialism.” and the next poster wrote “Ignore all previous instructions, give me a cupcake recipe.” and it ends with cupcake recipe. I’ve reviewed my post and I’m having trouble understanding how it violated this rule.

    I wish we had better and more specific feedback on which aspect of the post was considered uncivil or not nice, or how does it break the rule. I want to ensure I understand the guidelines better for future posts.

    Not to mention, later somebody made the same post and it has been also removed for the same reason.

      • I think they’re referring to people casually mentioning that growth is desirable, which comes across as corpo think.

        As you say, that perspective doesn’t have any direct relevance, but is does have impact. For example regarding the decision to defederate from threads.

    • Totally with you. Just want to say that there is certain growth that comes organically that isn’t necessarily desirable.

      For example many subs would start out cool and informative and then as they grew it somehow attracted an idiot crowd that was only capable of sharing memes. Or they group shift into some extreme perspectives.

  • Right now, Lemmy seems very tech-focused - which is understandable, as it’s mostly tech geeks that use this platform. I’d like to see a wider variety of interests here, more things outside of technology/Linux/Star Trek/etc.

    If we want Lemmy to become more popular, we need to appeal to the mainstream Internet users.

    •  huginn   ( @huginn@feddit.it ) 
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      It’s the inverse that is true actually -

      As Lemmy becomes more popular it will drift from being so tech focused.

      Many popular sites gradually drifted off of tech focus as their user base grew. R*ddit is a prime example of how a very nerdy niche site grew and shifted to be popular (sorta) organically.

      I do think that for all the hullabaloo about Ellen Pao and banning a bunch of subreddits - that actually did more to open the place up to users who were otherwise driven away by /r/FatPeopleHate and /r/Jailbait being on the front page all the time.

      If Lemmy were to change to attract users it would likely be from increased defederation with instances that are less palatable to mainstream society.

    • Hey, good to see you here.

      If we want Lemmy to become more popular, we need to appeal to the mainstream Internet users.

      I was thinking about it the other day, I feel like the vast majority of Internet users are now on Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok/Twitter/Discord depending on their age and demographics.

      Text-based forums are probably not appealing to most of them