Since my favorite reddit app came to Lemmy I’m really keen on getting more people into the fediverse to pump up the volume of content around here. Are there any initiatives that we can assist to get folks onboard?
I had my wife join, and she likes it, but laments the slow pace of new material in the communities.
I actually think Lemmy needs more work before it grows much bigger. The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit.
It’s tough to sell some of the niche communities without proper spoiler tagging, too. Need something easier to use that works on all platforms.
Proper spoiler tagging is important
I Jerboa uses this format
: : : spoiler Title
Without the spaces between the colons, this is just to show what it looks like.
: : :
Title
This is with the spaces removed
All I want is the ability to block inbox replies when I say something controversial.
That would be nice, but for now you could just mark all as read without reading them.
I completely agree. I’m personally holding off on heavy promotion of this platform until we hit 1.0. If people join too early and are turned off by the lack of polish, they may not come back after it’s fixed.
The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit
Fair point. The same was said of Mastodon many moons ago. A lot of people put a lot of time and energy into detailed feature requests, describing the problem to be solved, and exactly how their proposed solution would work.
Given that I’ve also seen the same complaint about apps in other federated networks like matrix, maybe what’s needed is a general solution? A website where experienced mods describe the problems they strike, and how social software developers could help them with mod features.
laments the slow pace of new material in the communities.
Participation. We need more of it. Like…a lot more of it.
Lurkers shouldn’t lurk, and people should give others the benefit of the doubt far more often than they ever did on Reddit, if they ever did at all. Make Lemmy a community where engagement is valuable and fun and actually useful.
OC brings people. Adopt a community you wish was bigger and make a personal commitment to post to it daily.
For bonus points convince two other people to adopt their own community. We’ll pyramid scheme this sucker with content.
So I was wishing that r/korea woukd be a thing on lemmy, I found an instance hosted in Korea and subscribed. I started posting, now after like 3 month it’s full of only my own posts, each gets 3-7 upvotes and every 5th gets a comment from someone outside of Korea ^^.
I feel that if I’m the only one posting anyway I perhaps should bring it to my own instance which I have controll over and could moderate if it became necessary. I have no idea who is the admin of that one.
I had no idea that !korea@lemmy.funami.tech existed until you posted about it.
I am in Korea regularly. I joined the community.
The instance is a little small and the community doesn’t have many users. It could help advertising it a little so interested people find out about it. Looks like someone even made a post after your comment.
This is a community I help with, but there are others like it: !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
perhaps should bring it to my own instance which I have controll over and could moderate if it became necessary. I have no idea who is the admin of that one.
I agree. I’ve been shying away from some instances. Since that community is small anyway, you could make it on your own / find a different instance for it.
MLMEMMY LEMLMY MLEMMYM
I dunno which one works, but the only way we’ll get enough Huns to pull this off is with a solid tagline.
Maybe something like, “Upvote your down line, lest ye receive downvotes from your up line.”
LemLM?
Lurkers gonna lurk.
Sometimes (probably most times) people don’t have anything to add to a conversation. In these moments it’s better not to comment at all. Just look at how shitty reddit is with dozens of people making the same stupid joke in the comments on any popular post. Quality is better than quantity.
We need a better site to link to than join-lemmy.org. It should concisely pitch lemmy to everyday users and suggest an instance for them to sign up at. Don’t get into the weeds about federation or choosing instances or selecting apps. Just select a sane default and point people to it. Rotate defaults to avoid overloading a given instance or making it too powerful.
Agreed.
Make valuable original content here that’s not found elsewhere, post and comment thoughtfully as much as possible(No. Pun. Chains). Don’t try to turn this place into reddit, be better than reddit.
People who are on reddit that wanted to come here right now has already done so, so it’s important to drew in people who has never used reddit before here instead of always waiting for reddit to do something stupid.
Also less celeb gossip please, need a place where I can get away from that on the Internet.
- jackpot ( @jackpot@lemmy.ml ) 13•1 year ago
the last point should be ignored, the whole point of lemmy is to have as many communties as possible and subscribe to the ones you like. you can defederate ones you dont like
I respectfully disagree. The goal should always be to foster high quality discussion over raw quantity of comment and artificial engagement and the devs have said as much in their documentation of Lemmy’s design.
Otherwise, this place would be no different from 9gag or imgur comment sections, much less reddit.
From Margot Robbie. Got it.
Don’t focus on looking for ways to find new members. Focus on ways to make people who find the fediverse want to stay. Accomplish that by putting something here that they like to see and want to see again.
When they join the Fediverse, or when they come to visit and consider joining, they’re going to search for the stuff they want to see. They might look for memes, but more likely, they’re going to look for their hobbies. If the only hobbies reflected here are gaming and programming and the fediverse itself, most people are not going to want to stay, the userbase is going to develop an even heavier bias towards certain types of people, it will become more alienating to other types of people, and it will stagnate.
Make an effort to post about and comment about other things. Cooking, movies, TV, sports, fashion, hair, plants, decor, architecture, history, religion, travel, a nearby city or town. Join those communities. Remember, when you see a cool article about nutrition, or a cool video guide to Copenhagen that you think people will enjoy, share it here. Post it, even if the community is small and you don’t think people will care, because we need to seed communities with something. This is what I’ve been doing in a few communities, but mostly in !malefashionadvice. It’s been frustrating, I haven’t really been able to build the community up yet, but it’s okay.
While we’re at it, don’t alienate people by posting, commenting about, or upvoting things that… suck. Keep all forms of bigotry at the door. If you’re a hardcore libertarian or tankie or militant atheist… I’m not going to tell you to stop believing what you believe, but try to cool it, like 10%? Please? Nobody wants you breathing down their throats with extremism.
And… I’ve done this too, but let’s make sure that we’re not focusing too much on meta posts. They can be worthwhile, but they also are not what new people want to see.
I dig. I’ll make an effort to post in my hobby subs (woodworking and 3d printing) to get some good shit in there. 😉
Good comments in here about the need for better mod tools etc. Not something I normally think about myself.
Couldn’t agree more. A focus on new members is a terrible idea. Just focus on making Lemmy better.
Eh. I do also want to see lemmy grow, but it has to grow through different communities, if the only active community is 196 then it’s going to grow in a very shitty direction. If it grows through hobby communities, it will slowly capture the charm and power of the Reddit network—as a place you can go to talk about anything and have any problem solved.
Definitely. Saw another one of your posts on MFA, thanks for your work there
Not-so-secret of Reddit success (vs other link aggregators) was that they allowed NSFW content. Set up a separate opt-in corner of Fediverse to post that stuff and a big chunk of reddit will migrate over.
- Omega_Haxors ( @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ) 1•1 year ago
While I think a majority of their success came from basically being the only usable search result from google, I would be lying if I didn’t say I was extremely disappointed and left for a bit after I found out why I couldn’t find any NSFW instances on here.
- Publish useful content on lemmy. Link to that content on other social media sites
- Anytime you see a negative article about reddit particularly on reddit, remind users this will continue to get worse, link them to lemmy and explain what it is/how to join.
- Donate to lemmy development to improve UX.
Community grouping. It would massively increase the available content, and make lemmy much easier to browse.
We’ve got a new sorting option that boosts smaller communities coming in v 0.19. That plus community grouping would be killer!
I don’t know if this can be adjusted at the platform level, but is it possible you could put in a filter for meme posts? That is 85% of my feed, and I’d really like to minimize them as much as possible.
I come to Reddit(and now Lemmy) for discussions rather than memes, and the content I’m looking for just doesn’t appear in my feed at all really. It would be great if there was a way to filter out or diminish the quantity of those types of posts. Reddit has flair, which makes it easy to filter that way. I’m not sure if Lemmy has something comparable that would allow easy filtration like that.
I think some short of tagging system might be in the works. Not sure though, not whether you could filter by them.
Maybe you could change what you’ve subscribed to?
I mean in the main feed, as opposed to the subs/community subscriptions tab. I’d like to use it for content exploration, similar to how I would use /r/all on Reddit, but with memes filtered out.
Right. Yes I’m the wrong person to talk to. I gave up on local and all a while ago. Sometimes local is cool I guess.
Community grouping is also so closely aligned with a federated mindset - one instance may disappear but the community survives.
That said it’s clear you’ve got anything from openly fascist to diehard tankie on Lemmy servers so would definitely have to be a two-way choice and there’s a risk it just won’t work in the way we hope - I can easily see common topics fragmenting into so many shards anyway as one group can’t stand another group.
CW: Unpopular opinion?
I’ve looked back at a few reddit threads, and I’m thankful most of those users aren’t coming here. I’m alright with the current level of content and participation. What little there is here is still better than most of what’s on r/all, and it’s not like we want to attract advertisers and self-promoting accounts.
The discourse I’ve observed thus far has felt more honest, less pugnacious than on Reddit. Obviously I’ve seen a drop in the bucket, but anyway, it’s good so far.
For the most part, yeah. I feel like it’s much better overall.
I sort by all and new when I want fresh content, and there’s plenty, although it depends on how much your instance members are subbed to.
There’s also https://lemmyverse.net/
Well yes, but do you want to maintain that ambience or attract more users? IMO these objectives are in conflict.
You’re probably right, but ultimately I think the vast amount of niche content around so many different hobbies is the most valuable thing, even if it comes with a bit of… human toxicity.
Sadly, I just can’t imagine how you get the former while really effectively suppressing the latter.
Yes. I already see too much semblance of Reddit and i read this post and facepalmed.
There should be an instance with an actual registered organization behind it - privacy policy & all to back up its legitimacy. Without this, Lemmy is a hard sell for a lot of people who don’t want to just hand off their information to a person who may or may not be doing certain things with it.
I think that’s fair, yeah. Explaining that some person I don’t know runs the server doesn’t quite sound the same as saying this instance is run by company XY
It also doesn’t require that this person you don’t know have any legal obligations regarding data handling.
Linking to Lemmy image posts is a bad experience. This use case needs to be much better because content is the main way that non-Lemmy users can be motivated to join Lemmy. I tried to share this with a friend yesterday, and had to explain that the image I actually wanted them to see is locked behind a tiny thumbnail, and that the full size Good Place Janet someone commented is not what I wanted them to see (at least not without the context of the posted image).
There’s no way to open a shared Lemmy link in your client of choice. You can manually add URLs on Android, but you have to do that for every Lemmy instance, so that’s not going to fly. I don’t know if there’s any solution at all on iOS.
There’s not a good way to control what content I see. It’s essentially either “everything” or “a single community”. On Reddit, you could already have multiple communities about the same topic on Reddit, but usually one was dominant, and you had multireddits to save you if there truly are a few good related subreddits. Now on Lemmy, you multiply that problem by N instances, and subtract the multireddit feature. This situation simply must be made better somehow.
This should solve that when it gets implemented.
There’s not a good way to control what content I see. It’s essentially either “everything” or “a single community”. On Reddit, you could already have multiple communities about the same topic on Reddit, but usually one was dominant, and you had multireddits to save you if there truly are a few good related subreddits. Now on Lemmy, you multiply that problem by N instances, and subtract the multireddit feature. This situation simply must be made better somehow.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071#issuecomment-1653885992
Nice, thanks for the link. That link is about the posting side, whereas I was talking only about the viewing side (apparently covered in issue 808), but the posting side is arguably even more important in reducing fragmentation. Just as it’s frustrating to group N communities for viewing, it’s equally frustrating to post to N communities, and then have to interact with them separately.
Unfortunately until it’s implemented I just can’t bring myself to use Lemmy full time. It’s too chaotic content wise, but once it’s implemented I may fully switch over.
Eh, if you’re mostly just consuming/lurking, it’s probably better to use Lemmy by viewing all posts on all communities on all instances, then filtering out the communities you don’t like. Gonna be like that until it gets more popular, and importantly, stops becoming less popular.
Currently on reddit if you attempt to link to a image directly outside of reddit and somebody clicks it, it’ll redirect them to a media viewer page that hides all the comments but provides a link to view them. As much as I hate that redirect, I don’t think it is a terrible idea for Lemmy to do as well because of the issue your friend had with the thumbnail that you wanted them to click.
I don’t like Reddit’s approach. It hides nearly all information about the post. You don’t get to see the number of upvotes or comments, and you can only see as much of the title as fits on a single line.
I’d rather the image post viewer default to an expanded state, and have a clearer delineation between the image and comments. Right now, there’s not even a header saying “Comments”. You’re expected to just know.
That would be great. I am not sure if it was RES doing it or it was a default reddit thing but I do remember images automatically expanding on there. Having it happen automatically on Lemmy would be great as long as the user is not on a slow or data-capped connection.
Even on a slow connection, if you’ve clicked the link, you’re there to view the post. The image simply must be visible by default. It would be more interesting to allow clients to choose what image quality to load, but I don’t know a good way to do that. Maybe default to low quality, then you can choose high quality after logging in?
It would be amazing to be able to easily and reliably link comments to places, like r/locationhere might have done in Reddit. I am finding it slow to work that out here.
posting more content. sharing lemmy posts with friends
Stop shitting all over people just because they don’t agree with you on everything
I think it’s generally a good idea to respond to folks as if they were a friend or family member. And, if you need to pull the ripcord and get out of a conversation that’s terribly frustrating, it means a lot to say something to the effect of “Thanks for the chat, but let’s agree to disagree before we devolve into pure name calling.”
Or something. I think it benefits the whole community to have a record of people disengaging when the conversation isn’t productive. Doesn’t matter why. Doesn’t matter if you think the other person is clearly, obviously being an asshole. Politely disengage and try to stop thinking about it (if thinking about it is unproductive and stressing you out.)
Relay for Reddit stopped working for me today. I won’t pay for content I partly create, so my shift will be final to Lemmy, unless my social media addiction finds another way.
Thing is, what Reddit still has, is the available history of content. If Lemmy has new topics and new content, it will at one point become second nature to also add “Lemmy” to a search query. And at some point hopefully without Reddit ever crossing the mind. For now it’s a slow and painful process as contribution is the only way to push Lemmy.
So whatever you do, contribute as much as possible. Then we can do it. I’d say push the bigger communities first, the smaller will follow, like how it was with early Reddit.
I also stopped using Reddit forever today, since Relay stopped working.
But I feel like there will never be a way like searching on Google for thing I’m interested in + Lemmy.
The problem is that content is duplicated on many instances, and those instances may even don’t have “Lemmy” in their websites
If you build it, they will come.
It’s the reason I’ve been motivated to post as much as I do, both in broader communities and a handful of niche ones that I want to see grow.
If you’ve thought about posting/commenting but just haven’t yet, take the plunge! I never used to post on reddit at all, and I’ve been pretty active since joining Lemmy.
Have you tried moderating yet? With your posting frequency you’d likely make a good mod. The tools kind of suck but its better if you’re on more like you are.
I created the XCOM community on lemmy.world, but I haven’t had to mod a single thing yet, because it’s slow (only 300-something subscribers, and mostly me posting).
I might look into it. The only catch is that I’m usually just checking lemmy on my phone, and I haven’t looked into how many apps have the ability to mod stuff.
