• It’s a war of attrition. Slow and steady will win this race.

    Lemmy, just like Mastodon has seen spikes followed by users leaving. But every spike leaves more users on Lemmy/Mastodon than previously.

    Truthfully, in the event another Reddit Exodus, which will happen, we need to try and be more of a content-oriented system during that era. Making more posts and focusing on adding to niches.

    Reddit is about Niche communities and Content Saturation. Lemmy isn’t really about that, but it can be for moments at a time to pull users in. At some point we’ll reach a critical mass of users that leads to easier justification for new users to join.

    We just need a group of extremely disorganized and disagreeable people to organize and and agree on this.

    oh no

    • Reddit also gets a little bit worse every spike, too. There are few mods remaining on Reddit who are doing anything more interesting for their communities than basic spam removal. Automod does all the work when all the largest subs just repost the same content and fake stories anyway.

      It’s not like going to implode or anything anytime soon but the quality (from my perspective at least) has totally flatlined since June because why would anyone in their right mind invest creative energy into cultivating a unique community? I think that eventually a Lemmy community will pop up that simply couldn’t exist on Reddit and will serve to illustrate why I believe this model is better.

    • I think Lemmy would either need to find a way to wean Redditors off of their dopamine machine or replace that dopamine machine long-term to sustain an exodus from Reddit. Either that, or Reddit will need to break their dopamine feedback loop. There are some cracks showing, and that might have already killed the platform in the long term, but it’ll keep going from pure momentum for a while. Maybe as long as months or years.

      Seems like there’s more sexists and racists than I used to see over there, which is definitely offputting. I’ve found communities that are supportive of thoughtful discussion are more appealing, and Reddit definitely lacks that lately, outside of some small, relatively niche communities.

    • Reddit also had the ability to just type in my address bar “/r/obscurefandom” and be taken directly to the subreddit for it. Lemmy doesn’t have those smaller subs yet and you have to hunt for the right instance if it does.

      • Bro, it’s so fucking frustrating that I need to be subbed to 5 different Android communities just to get my news.

        I can’t sub to just one because I miss news if I do.

        My only hope is that Boost brings multi-reddit support to Lemmy, so I can just click on “Android” and get the news from all 5 Android communities.

        • “multi Reddit” like feature do not fix the problem.

          First, like on Reddit, less than 5% of users will use it as a non default feature which needs to be configured.

          Second, even of those people who use the feature, they will have different sets of differently configured “multireddit”.

          The end result is a fragmented audience that has no shared experience and never aglomerates to critical mass.

          If you have 1725 /c/books communities, that does not make one cohesive books community. These people have nothing in common.

          Practical end result, one books community on one Lemmy instance, is “the one big community” and almost every other gets 1 post per year on average, which is never seen by anyone.

          For every big community, every once in a while, the moderation dictators sell out or otherwise piss off the community enough that it fragments. That works as well as the current transition from Reddit to Lemmy.

          Each schism doesn’t create a new, better community, it creates a smaller, less active community at the expense of the larger one.

          There needs to be a single point of agglomeration, which works by default for any community name.

          And moderation needs to be something dive by every user and moderation needs to be a filter that you subscribe to.

  •  Kedly   ( @Kedly@lemm.ee ) 
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    9 months ago

    Tbf, now that I’ve jumped over here and gotten comfortable, its nice that lemmee itself isnt abusive, but good god are the communists here fucking retarded. And I say this as someone who liked the ideals of communism. Its like how I liked the Idea of Telsas until I met Tesla owners

    Edit: Lmao the most controversial part of this statement is merely one of the words I used. One of the things I appreciate about Lemmy is that it shows both the up and downvotes

    Edit 2: Look at me! IM the controversy now!

  • A lot of subs never really got a foothold outside of Reddit. I tried to do what I could and I’m still trying my best but I’m only one guy and I’m not good at making content. Barely anyone from the BrandoSando subs came, the incremental games community gave up before it even started, no community that I know has had a successful offshoot in the fediverse.

  • It’s actually pretty funny how many discussions about Reddit, Twitter, and Threads happening in the Fediverse.

    I just deleted my Reddit account a few months ago (and my Twitter account years ago) and I don’t think I miss anything.

  • This is me. I still go there for two or three subs that don’t have critical mass here (thus no conversation). The upcoming weighted sort algo should help a little, drawing people to smaller community content.

    But I also moderate a reasonably large sub there, and have stopped attempting to grow anything there – just spam removal, manually.

    But I don’t post new content there. Sometimes I’ll reply on a comment chain. Here I post new content and interact a lot more.

    I’m using Lemmy Connect as my app (like 98% of it). What’s interesting is, when I use Reddit I refuse to use their app, so I’m using old Reddit, in a browser. But I catch myself attempting to swipe on comments using the Lemmy Connect gestures.

    So I’ve definitely flipped to Lemmy first.

  • As per usual, it’s a matter of content.

    I can’t (and shouldn’t have to) carry the entire weight of a fandom on my shoulders. Until there’s more activity here on those subjects, I have to at least keep an eye on Reddit.

    What I always do when I can however, is I try to do POSEO to raise awareness: by which I mean, I post my opinions or ideas or stories in my own site (or in my Masto main) first, and only crosslink on Reddit. I was thinking of doing the same with reply comments as well, but dunno how much would that promote interaction.

    • It’s also the toxic community.

      I was called a racist and holocaust denier because I asked someone how they expect YouTube servers to be paid for if you refuse to pay for premium, and don’t want to watch ads.

      My comments were downvoted like crazy, and the person who called me a racist holocaust denier was upvoted…

      Again, all because I asked a question about how servers should be paid for. What the actual fuck? Reddit is insanely toxic, but Lemmy takes the cake.

      • :note: I know this isn’t the point of your comment but I wanted you to be able to have a non-insulting conversation on the topic.

        Premium is more than it should be and ads on YouTube arent handled very well i.e. Obnoxious

        I watch adless on my phone, but still use the default app to stream to my TV and generally let the ads play through.

        23 dollars a month for 2 people on a family plan is just nuts, though. If they had a 2 person option that was like 17-18 then I’d probably get it.

        • I agree that the pricing doesn’t make sense unless you can split it, which is what I do.

          Premium is $25 in Canada. You can add 5 people to your plan. That makes it $5 per month for each of us.

          Personally I don’t buy cable or satellite TV, so I get most of my enjoyment from YouTube. So to me $5 per month is nothing, especially if you have something like Spotify which you can cancel and use YouTube Music, which is included in that $5.

          If you have no friends and you’re the only one footing the bill, I agree that the pricing is a lot. At that point you just have to deal with the annoying ads.

          I hate ads as much as anyone, but my question still remains for anyone who demands on blocking all ads and refusing to pay for premium, how do you expect servers and creators to be paid?

          I know Google can technically afford it, but that’s not how businesses are run. You can’t take profits from one department to make up for the losses in another department, and as we know bandwidth is extremely expensive, and Google hosts an unbelievable amount of data, and free, too.

          Like I’ve mentioned in the past, I have a bunch of videos uploaded to YouTube to share with family, and they are all private. Therefore Google is paying to store my videos, while making $0 from them, as they are not public and making any ad revenue.

          I also know that Google is bad. Corporations suck. All that jazz. I just don’t understand why most of Lemmy users think everything should be free, but when asked about how these things are supposed to get funded, they go silent.

          Lemmy itself won’t be around long if users refuse to donate to their instance, and refuse to view ads. Even if someone is hosting an instance in their basement, the cost of internet, replacement drives, maintenance, and electricity all add up.

          • As someone who rarely ever uses YouTube, $25 would be fucking bonkers to pay monthly for no ads. Imo a decent idea to explore would be x amount of minutes that are ad free per month, then after you hit that limit you get given ads. You’d have to be signed into an account, any instances with no account logged in get ads by default.

            Another idea is to add lower tiers to the available plans. 5 people can sign in on the current option? Is there a cheaper plan that only allows linking 1 account? This could even tie in with the previous idea and have certain plans that give you x minutes of watching adless per month.

            I’m sure there are plenty of other options out there. In fact I wouldn’t be bothered having to watch an ad before a video (or a midroll in a longer video) but the experiences I’ve had with using YouTube frequently involve me pulling up a certain scene within a movie or something and getting 2-3 ads that are a minute long each, unskippable, and potentially midrolls in there if the video is over 5 minutes. It just makes me close the video and think “yeah fuck that, I don’t need to watch that scene anymore”.

            Overall point: the ads would be fine if they weren’t so excessive and intrusive

            • There is a cheaper option for just a single account. 13.99 in the US. I think that’s a reasonable price and would pay it if it was just me. I just wish there was an option between 1 person and a whole family.

          •  Arcka   ( @Arcka@midwest.social ) 
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            19 months ago

            as we know bandwidth is extremely expensive

            No. You very obviously don’t know how bandwidth is handled for large providers. They don’t pay per gb, and instead have peering agreements with other networks. Google generally doesn’t have to pay these other networks, as Google has the web applications that the other networks’ customers expect to be able to use.

          • I hate ads as much as anyone, but my question still remains for anyone who demands on blocking all ads and refusing to pay for premium, how do you expect servers and creators to be paid?

            I’m pretty sure it’s 2023 and this has already been discussed and solved ad nauseam, so I’m also sure all I’m going to say here is just repeated from elsewhere, but:

            First of all, “creators” (not artists! There’s a semantic difference) are not going to get paid better just because you pay for YT Premium. Premium pays Youtube, not the creators pleading not to be demonetized. If you’re asking how are creators going to be paid, the answer is simple: directly. If you set up a service without intermediaries, for example a direct wire transfer, or at least something close to it like a Patreon, you get all of the coins and people who want to pay you-but-not-Youtube (or whatever platform) face a better incentive.

            Second, stuff like gift cards.

            Third, and this is something I’ve never seen any naysayer deal with properly: the same methods that have existed before can still work now. I don’t remember ever paying rent for Usenet, or IRC, or BBSes, yet those things were literally plentiful, if I so much as lifted a rock in a cropped 8-bit-color grayscale PNG, the tranparency layer had a link to a BBS. And part of the issue is that there’s a “attention deficit oooh shiny syndrome” going on where instead of using vintage-timer, battle-tested, lightweight, low dependency, cheap payment, low maintenance protocols and services for ensuring persistence and continuation of communities, we are for some weird reason insisting that whatever community launches next is a Perfect Imitation fo Youtube, or else. Such is the case of Matrix: for all its promises, IRC and XMPP are much better battle-tested and for the monthly price (and monthly annoyance) of 1 Matrix server you can run about 25 XMPP servers, or likely over 300 IRC servers.

            And the key here is that it’s the devs who have to take the turn return towards simpler, better tech. Devs gotta lead by example. Users (masses of) are obviously not going to be the ones to do it.

            • Creators can see how much they make from premium subscribers vs ad views. They do make more from people who pay for premium.

              Why do you say they don’t? Like I’m curious where you got that from, when it’s blatantly wrong?

  • I went back this week because I noticed narwhal 2 finally came out. I loved narwhal and we waited such a long time for the new app to come out. Outside of using Reddit in search engine results, I looked around with the new app. And people are so mean and rude on Reddit I forgot how toxic it can get there. Made me really appreciate lemmy.

    Narwhal 2 will eventually need to start charging. It was nice to finally get a glimpse of it because it goes paid.

    • I’ve been sort of bothered by the uptick of rudeness and combativeness on lemmy lately. When I first got here, it felt like everyone assumed positive intent from each other most of the time, but recently it feels like that shifted. I hope I just got unlucky and it isn’t a bigger trend overall.

  • Only time I think I’ve read it these days is when I have to look something up and the first result is a fucking Reddit page from 50 years ago discussing what I was looking up. Admittedly I probably still be using it if I hadn’t been banned from the whole site on a trumped-up charge.

    • Perma-bans are fucking crazy.
      The correct way to think about them is as a death sentence.
      Hatred speech in real life:
          what, like 2 years in prison?
          IDK actually...
      Hatred speech on reddit:
          death penalty.
      
  • I left reddit after a few weeks of getting any useful info off my saved list. Honesty I’ve been happier these last couple months. Now I only visit reddit( with an ad blocker, because they ain’t making a penny off me) to read help and old opinion threads when I need the info.