Did Reddit get massive because of Digg users making a beeline towards them or were they already big before that?
Counter point: lemmy doesn’t need to do anything to become a top website. Just stay decentralized and independently run. If that’s meant to be a “top website” so be it, but that’s not why I’m here.
I share similar thoughts. I care more about the quality of the content and most importantly the quality of the community than the popularity of the website. I do hope that we continue to grow and that the growth will be to the benefit of the community.
Reddit was big before the Digg migration and got bigger still. It didn’t happen overnight, it took many years. Reddit also benefited from celebrities and other influencers using it to become the default site for this type of content. Lemmy’s problem is there’s no void to fill, Reddit took a hit from the API fiasco but it’s still going strong because 99% of the users didn’t care, or returned soon after. Every subreddit I was in that chose to close down has returned to normal operation, and it’s not even 2 months later.
I like Lemmy, I’m going to keep coming here to see how it grows. Right now, it’s not even close to being a Reddit alternative. It’s barely hanging on, but I wish it the best.
My experience has been the communities are growing and getting more active. I’m seeing a lot of new communities with new posts in my feed as well.
How are people using Reddit, now that all available user interfaces with it are garbage?
There’s plenty of newer Reddit users that got in when the official mobile app and the new theme was default. They got used to it and never cared about the death of third party apps or the eventual downfall of old.reddit.
RES + old reddit on desktop.
Always was and remains the best Reddit UI.
I had no idea until I found this just minutes ago myself, but in case you or anyone isn’t aware… https://old.lemmy.world/
I LOVE it.
There’s a few third-party apps that have been granted exemptions from the API pricing changes, but other than that the majority of users are using the official reddit app or “new” reddit website because they don’t know any better.
Why is everyone in such a hurry to make lemmy into a Reddit clone?
For more interesting and easily discoverable content. Really that’s what people want at the end of the day.
Exactly. I hate Reddit more than most people here (I’m a mod on a sub that has more than a million subscribers and felt disrespected by spez), but the fact of the matter is they’re the gold standard of quality answers and discussions.
I would want Lemmy to get to that level, not immediately, but that’s the dream.
I want lemmy to become popular just so you can be quoted in news articles. User “fist eye mouth eye fist” wrote that…
Or just have 🤛👁️👄👁️🤜 appear in reputable news outlets.
By the way why are people able to do that? I see that person’s username is mojo by hovering over it but at a glance it’s just emojis.
Mojo is my account name but you can change your profile name at any time in the settings so I used dumb emojis lol
So that I can use site:lemmy.world instead of site:reddit.com when I’m googleing things
I would just love to see more users in the communities I care about! I loved Reddit for that reason alone. Here I can find the memes, news, and opinions that I care about, but none of my hobbies. I really miss it to be real with you.
Yeah, I get annoyed at the people acting like this place is perfectly fine as it is. It isn’t. It lacks content. It has repetitive posts. And as far as I’m concerned, growth will iron out those problems over time. It doesn’t need to be all at once, but I am looking forward to it. 60k active monthly users is nothing. Reddit has 450 million active users. It’s hard to overstate how much larger Reddit is. Even if you’re a hipster opposed to Lemmy growing to a Reddit size, it isn’t even remotely close to being that large yet. And as far as I’m concerned it still hasn’t reached the mass it needs to turn it into a super engaging community just yet. I’m rooting for it to become more engaging and I’m doing everything I can to increase that engagement, but we really don’t need the smug in denial “it’s perfect right now” attitude.
Reddit has 450 million active users.
Yes, but how many are bots? Trolls? Bigots? Spammers? Antivaxxers? There is some content that lemmy is better without.
I’m wondering if it’s possible to get the same level of broad esoteric discussion without also welcoming the same toxicity that made reddit the superfund site it is today. Is toxicity a function of size, or is it a function of an environment in which toxicity is encouraged?
Is toxicity a function of size, or is it a function of an environment in which toxicity is encouraged?
Both.
Exactly. One doesn’t happen without the other. If growth equals increase if trolls/bots- then grown equals strict moderation. Struck moderation equals power hungry mods.
Voila! You now have Reddit.
For me what made Reddit great was not the big wildly popular communities. It was the small niche communities that were (IMHO) only able to form in their shadow and you need a critical mass of people before you can have that.
I don’t want the r/funny people to invade this place, but quality middle sized to niche subreddits don’t yet have their active equivalent on Lemmy.
You’re not getting one without the other.
Let’s bet we can do it.
I wouldn’t take that bet.
Hope helps, try it!
Hope has no place in reality. I accept thing for what they are, not what I’d like them to be.
Lies, you have hope otherwise you would not be alive to live, you pretend otherwise to look tough.
I’d rather have dumb r/funny people in here than bitter mindless negativity
because reddit has all of the content and ease of use while lemmy has neither and we want to see lemmy succeed.
Lemmy is succeeding just fine right now.
Reddit’s “content” is way more rage-baiting, fake AITA stories, culture wars both-sideisms, publicfreakout schadenfreude, and basic-tier iFunny memes, re-posted by waves of bots. All reddit is “succeeding” at is being a firehose of diarrhea.
I prefer Lemmy’s slant towards technology-related news, and polite discussion in earnest without painfully unfunny “and my axe” responses.
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Idk, for people that left their ex, y’all are sure obsessed with your ex.
Was Lemmy not designed as a reddit clone? Community/post/comment system with upvotes and downvotes, volunteer moderators, generally the same sorting filters, crossposting - hell, they even display your date of join as a “cake day”. The influence is obvious.
That’s not a bad thing, take the good and leave the bad, but if anything I think Lemmy needs more unique features that Reddit never had.
If you want lemmy to be like Reddit, you’re not getting the bad without the good. When it grows in number, it grows in trolls, bots, fascists and pedophiles.
Take your pick.
Yes, it will have those things, and in fact already does. There are trolls, bots, fascists, and even pedophiles already. This is an extremely sad and disturbing reality of online spaces. The only thing we can do about it is ensure moderators and instance admins have the tools to deal with it.
Right. However the more popular it gets, the more moderation will be needed. See what heavy moderation did to Reddit?
You couldn’t even post on many subs without proper formatting and or your posts were removed if you didn’t put it in the megathread.
I’d rather lemmy remain small.
See what heavy moderation did to Reddit?
I was a moderator on Reddit off and on for like six years, so yes I did. Heavy moderation is the only thing that kept larger communities on topic - r/Askhistorians being the shining example. The amount of effort required to keep spaces from devolving into low effort hodpodges of memes and such was notable.
But it was worth it. Lemmy will grow, and moderation will probably have to grow as well, but I hope that the mod-user relationship here will be healthier and we can rely more on good faith interpretations of rules so we don’t need to resort to pages of detailing no one will read.
r/Askhistorians being the shining example.
You are so right about this! I will goto whatever service has that again
And how do you filter out the heavy handedness of mods like what was on WhitePeopleTwitter where if you didn’t fall in line with whatever agenda they followed, you were banned and reported to Reddit admin?
With growth, you can expect this to happen here.
Well I expect that the federation model that allows multiple communities to grab the same namespace combined with instance admins that will be more active in removing openly hostile users and mods will help.
The brand promise of Reddit was pretty simple—it was the “Front page of the Internet”.
It did not get popular because of the sub-communities or that there was a sub for everything ( at least not at first ).
Reddit became a thing because it was a single destination that aggregated and curated interesting content from the web that “interesting” people could comment on. If you were only going to make one stop on the Internet, it could be Reddit. Uses could share the main URL by word of mouth and new users would get the same experience. As content grew, Reddit became high ranking in search results.
Lemmy does not really offer the Reddit experience to a new user. New users do not want an offer to find an instance or create one, they want to experience the content, get addicted, and come back.
The closest Lemmy has right now to early Reddit is Lemmy World but how do new users know that? Actually, I guess old.lemmy.world is the closest. :)
Lemmy does not really offer the Reddit experience to a new user.
I agree with one caveat: yet.
If Lemmy can build up its userbase and content it could offer a similar experience to Reddit
The problem is the lack of a main page. People want to type “lemmy.com” and find what they are looking for.
I take it back!
I just type lemmy.com and got redirected to https://lemm.ee/?src=lemmy.com
I think that won’t be as big of an issue in time. As Lemmy grows, eventually people will be exposed to it and other services on the Fediverse and will be more likely to have an idea on how to get started, or at least find good guides.
Remember that pretty much everything on computers requires some instruction at the beginning. The advantage that Reddit and other software have is that people have (and continually are) already taught how to use them.
It’s a similar situation to Linux vs. Windows. A lot of distros on Linux are actually more user friendly and easier to learn than Windows - the issue with getting people to try Linux is that they already know how to use Windows and most people hate learning new things
Something like lemmy.world or lemm.ee will just become the “default” instance for new users.
I think people are forgetting that Reddit didn’t start off with communities (subs), they came later. Reddit got big the same way all sites that don’t have a built in audience (e.g. Threads users basically being Insta users) - time and commitment.
Lemmy is not going to be as big as Reddit for a long, long time. Everyone has fallen into this habit of thinking all Reddit mods are power crazy egomaniacs and some are, no doubt, but the good subs on Reddit required dedicated time and effort to build up. Curating, introducing and constantly readjusting rules and expectations and at some point a good sub reaches a tipping point and it’s popular.
All this will take time with Lemmy. Community mods will need to be as dedicated as Reddit mods were. And, as a side issue, this commitment to making and keeping a community great is what spez and his idiot gremlins have just thrown away. It’s not about user numbers for Reddit, it’s now a priority for them to get mods who are willing and able to put in the amount of work the mods they just alienated had. Subreddit engagement stats are mostly going down take a look at the number of posts and the number of comments for r/askreddit, it’s a steady decline.
Lemmy might not ever get as big as Reddit but it will grow if mods stay committed and users keep posting and commenting. If that happens, that same tipping point will come.
What is most interesting about that site you linked is further down the page - it shows the number of subs still growing - but that graph cuts off at 2022. The post and comments per day plunged in early July and have not recovered. And the top poster and commenter is the same user - u/deleted
And as you say, reddit has alienated a heap of good mods - and they are the true foundation of a site like this, not users
Also, there needs to be an established code of conduct in how to interact with users. For example, if i make a post on reddit that violates a subs rules, it get‘s either removed or put in quarantine and I get a message so I know what happened. In Lemmy, your posts may just vanish without you ever knowing how or why.
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Totally agree. For example, Madtodon was designed to be less addictive compared to Twitter. These platforms don’t share the same financial model, so they don’t share the same growth incentives either. Lemmy can grow as big as the users want it to be, but it shouldn’t aim to grow as big as possible. These are two very different worlds.
Absolutely. I mean, it would be nice to have more users in more communities, but with that I mean that maybe 10 or 20k is more than enough for a vibrant community. No need to aspire to multi-million users communities like any modestly large subreddit. Lemmy isn’t and shouldn’t aspire to be a reddit clone.
I think we should prioritize SEO.
If you get a link to a Lemmy post you can’t see the contents nor the comments of the post until you click a further link. Or at least I can’t.
And that means google can’t either.
We need to get to the point where people are adding “Lemmy” to their search posts like they do for Reddit today.
Doing a google search for “best budget backpack Lemmy” should bring up results like “best budget backpack Reddit” does today.
It doesn’t help that the thread URLs are some old school “post/4268567”.
I also noticed that the markdown format is included (e.g. the hashmarks for headings, asterisks for bold/italics) in search results while every other site doesn’t look like that.
Yea it’s a shame the URL isn’t
post/5784366/title_formatted_for_url
This isn’t the only answer but it’s a big one. Having both the communities where people can authoritatively answer niche questions and the ability for new people to find those communities/questions is absolutely critical.
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What do you mean you cant see the comments until you click a further link? What do you see when you click on this https://lemmy.world/post/2383782 i see the post and all the comments?
Real answer: ease of use
If I wanted to find a particular subreddit for whatever, it was as easy as typing in the name of the show or hobby. And it linked to other similar / related subreddits
Or someone would link to another subreddit in a comment.
Here I’m having to sit and learn what an instance is and if the community I was in transfered over, and if they did where did they go. It’s turning away alot of the less tech savvy people.
Does it need to be as popular as reddit? I don’t think so, anything that grows too big becomes a hassle and a problem. But to grow it would need easier interface or ability to find/interact with other communities.
I think we’re looking at this wrong. “Lemmy” as it is won’t get popular. It’s an underlying platform to create an internet forum. Individual instances are what may get popular
You’re not likely to read “cocksucker619 on lemmy said so and so” in a news article. Whereas “dickrider69 on an internet forum called dickriders.world said so and so” is a more likely proposition
Videos. We are missing Videos.
Reddit’s video player has always been shit and it’s actually a fairly recent addition to the website. Same with actual image hosting too.
That is true but it has had smooth integration with other video hosts since as far as I can remember, something I would love to see here
The software architect of lemmy is unfortunately doomed. The very concept of how it works means exponential storage and bandwidth needs as it grows in sublemmits and instances. A better design would have been instances being the sublemmits themselves, and leaving it up to the clients to subscribe and aggregate them into a feed. This way scaling is a lot more horizontal, and communities that get too big can scale up individually or purge old data without affecting the rest of the system.
I assume this is a larger theme across the Fediverse?
Could you expand on what causes the massive bandwidth needs? I’m have a vague idea but I’d be very curious to know.
If a user of an instance subscribes to content from another instance, their home instance is pulling, storing and sharing that content. With more and more instances, more time will be spent on sharing that content.
Almost every subreddit is fun until it grew then it goes downhill. I agree with people not wanting this to grow like Reddit.
As why Reddit grew, Digg is one and another is the format was perfect for the time.
Although growing too large not desired for Lemmy, but theoretically if you want to grow it:
First major issues and outages need to be dealt with.
Developing and deployment best practices should be followed.
Registration must be easy and open
SEO optimization
Securing funds
Getting noticed by the media often which may require some controversy.
Mod tools and supporting brands.
As you see many of these ,at end up be bad for users.
The goals of federated social media and corporate social media. Unlike siloed corporate social media, the fediverse platforms are not meant to compete with one another for being the ‘top dog’ so to speak. The idea is just diversity amongst the platforms and different options for people with different preferences. Since the fediverse is not concerned with revenue or appealing to a venture capitalist, competition is unimportant and I hope it stays that way.
The more users the more content there is though which is ultimately what I want as a user.
This is even more important for more niche communities a lot of which are still very quiet/dead/non-existent on Lemmy relative to reddit.
Nnnnoooooooo! Don’t make Lemmy a top website! The more popular something is, the more vapid and full of spewers it becomes.
Reddit got massive because it had very vibrant communities and lots of them that inspired a loyalty in its uses.
I was brought to Reddit by a previous user, and I brought several of my friends to Reddit.
For lemmy to get there, you need thousands of communities.
Want to know stuff about Rav4? There’s a sub for it.
Want to know about accounting? There’s a sub for it?
Want to know about what’s happening in Oklahoma city? There’s a sub.
Lemmy isn’t anywhere close to this point. In fact most subs are very dead.
Reddit didn’t start out like that either. If Lemmy is to grow, it will take years of dedicated active use from us.
Preach. So what, we multiply the amount of people those Sublemmies get by 100. It’s still going to be dead. That’s how dead it is.
We need to create Sublemmies for certain groups out of thin air. There’s no chance we can convince people to move when the amount of engagement is orders of magnitude less.
Look at League of Legends. You know, the most played videogame in the world. One post per day in here. It’s over.
The entire LCS regular season I made post match threads at !league@lemmy.ml . I always enjoy those discussions. Six weeks, 2-3 days a week, so maybe 15 posts. I probably got a dozen comments combined. I went into a few team discords asking for engagement.
On Reddit that’s more like 78 posts. Each of those posts on Reddit will get hundreds of comments. 12 comments on Lemmy versus way more than 1600 comments on Reddit.
The league communities here aren’t anywhere close to 0.1% of the league community there.
It’s hard to build from absolutely nothing.
A lot of those are bots though, fr.
