Lemmy is booming
I have never before received so many reactions and comments on my Lemmy posts before, so it’s obvious to see, that there are many new members here.
Welcome to all the new! And I’m looking forward to see more of you here.
Cheers!
The Reddit exodus has begun! My only regret is not learning about lemmy and the fediverse before things blew up over there.
As one of the emigredditors, hell yeah! Personally though, I’m still testing the waters and making myself more comfortable here; it’s eerily quiet here as compared to reddit, but I hope it’s just a matter of time :)
I’m calling it the Reddit APIocolypse.
I prefer Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification.”
Problem is, reddit has been undergoing an enshittification for nearly a decade. This is just the culmination.
Yes it’s been declining for quite some time. There’s new good things in smaller subs too, but the “all” feed and most popular ones have become unbearable.
The problem with reddit comes from the top. The APIocolypse is just the latest symptom of core degradation. There’s also the rampant abuse of power by mods on some of the most popular subs, the far right/fascists and homophobic/transphobic rhetoric going unpunished by a lot of mods but then coming down on the people who push back against it, the massive influx of bot activity etc etc etc.
Reddit, while being more popular than ever, is now a rotten husk of the beautiful dream it used to be…
Yes there’s definitely a need for more users to really make things take off, but I believe that’s a matter of time, assuming reddit doesn’t take a fairly large change of course in the near future. Got to say, it feels a lot more friendly than reddit has lately.
Definitely, especially as someone who always felt a little reserved while writing comments in large subs, talking in a smaller community feels a little more welcoming (・ω<) I’m not too hopeful about reddit’s decision making either, even though I see a lot of subs planning a strike in protest to their latest policy
I’ve been using redfugees but I think emigredditors is better
Man I knew there had to be a more witty word for this. I’d happily trade the word with redfugees XD
I kinda like the idea of a mass lemmygration.
Emigredditors is great lol, I’m stealing that as a fellow emigredditor :)
Have people been clearing out their reddit comment and post history on the way out the door?
I used power delete suite on my 10 year old account. Figuring that when API access gets shut off old.reddit and the ability to edit and delete old comments will go too.
I haven’t gotten rid of my content and don’t plan to. I had a good six years signed up with Reddit. Some of my comments include tech support and advice. Sure, I’ve had heated arguments and swore at times but I’m happy to keep what I have so that people don’t get confused looking at old historical threads.
a few years ago it was literally a handful of ppl posting 90% of links and talking to each other, witnessing firsthand how complicated it is to get over that initial user retention bump, but i’m convinced we’re over it now :)
I come back after a couple of weeks and we’ve quadrupled at least. It comes in waves, and now I’m thinking it may not stop (until some reddit staff make their own BlueSky equivalent, of course)
Welcome to Lemmy’s Eternal September!
Though, as I am also a Redfugee, I apologise for the disruption we’re about to cause. Hopefully the Fediverse can withstand the “Reddit Hug of Death.”
Hah, this is the second “September” I’ve been through, and it’s huge, but I think the eternal one will be the next one. At least a lot of people are learning that lemmy.ml isn’t a neutral flagship instance; the hug of death may have been a blessing in disguise, encouraging people to spread to the other instances a little bit more.
Most people who have come over have been pretty good about the thing and tried to learn about the local culture instead of just inventing “reddit, but here” again, honestly, but it’s just that the few troublemakers tend to be louder and argumentative.
So I’m part of both Septembers for you then!
My deepest apologies…
I’m really liking lemmy/fediverse, and I feel like I’m being quite respectful, trying to be part of the community that’s already here not force it to be Reddit 2.0. I have, sadly, seen a few people being, for lack of a better word, dickheads. They seem to be new, and carrying on with the Reddit toxicity.
Part of why I didn’t just buckle down and use the Reddit app when the APIocolypse hits is because I was sick of the toxic nature of so much of the interaction on Reddit. I know there’ll be trolls coming, just hope the fediverse can avoid what Reddit became.
Not sure if this is the right place to ask sorry, but how do I tell which comments are new on a thread I’ve already visited? Like on the frontpage it says “x new comments”, but when I go into the thread I can’t tell which ones are new. I’m accessing Lemmy using a browser.
iiuc easiest way to tell is to just sort comments by new, also very new comments are temporarily highlighted by a lighter grey background, but that’s about it i think 🤷♀️
So there’s no way to easily see which child comments are new since you’ve last visited the thread?
Even if not, it should be fairly simple to make an extension or userscript that does it. All the necessary data is already on the page. If Lemmy really does blow up I’m sure we’ll get something like RES that gives us more frontend customization options.
Wondering the same. Some comments are highlighted for me and some aren’t.
Might be a bug or might be grounds for a feature request.
I did not even know lemmy was a thing till people on reddit started talking about it
Same here. r/Privacy was where I first heard of it.
For me, I first heard of it in r/piracy a few months ago, but I actually started understanding what Lemmy is all about all throughout Reddit during the APIpocalypse a few days ago.
i tried lemmy a few months ago but i didn’t find enough content. I’m happy to see popularity is going up, and the new android app is a real game changer
What’s the new Android app if you don’t mind me asking?
Jerboa
i use jerboa ( available on fdroid)
i use jerboa too (from fdroid) and it’s my first post ever with it :)
boom !
👍👍👍👍
it’s absolutely awesome here! :-D
I feel like being part of the internet of my youth again.Random bullshit posts, random memes, it’s like when Reddit started! Content made by people, not companies pushing whatever agenda they have
Eh, I’m fine with neutral and minimal moderation of sorts. Anyone that was around to see Voat.co and Ruqqus.com saw it disintegrate pretty quickly, due to the lawlessness and lack of content moderation.
I still have no idea what I’m doing :)
I’m still learning too, it’s a bit of a struggle at first. My advice to Lemmy developers is make onboarding easier and the number one development priority - especially before Reddit drops the hammer July 1.
Stick with it, it makes more sense as you go
Nobody does and that’s the fun part!
Excuse my ignorance, but can Lemmy and the others handle a Reddit exodus?
Beehaw is already having troubles, guess instances have to ramp up their capacity in their near future
They should really have on the join lemmy server a guided wizard, like what are you interested in, and then it should basically give them server to join and a “Or I’ll choose my own”. But then you still have the "Wait I thought I was signing up for lemmy, not lemmy.foo.bar.baz issue. Decentralized is great, but we need a bit of centralization to help onboarding.
Definitely! There needs to be some improvements to user onboarding, it’s always one of the biggest painpoints with decentralized platforms.
Based on their funding post a few days ago, they’re on a digital ocean droplet that costs $18/month or something, so there’s plenty of room to scale that up. Whether or not they can afford it or get enough donations to keep it up is debatable. Point is the hosting requirements are fairly low.
I run my own Fediverse Instances.
Friendica, Lemmy, Pixelfed, Peertube…
I’m another reddit refugee and came just yesterday. I’m worried about happening the same that happened with koo when a lot of people migrated from twitter. They had to spend a lot into new resources, and expected a huge growth, but it turned out to be more of a temporary spike than anything. The majority of people already went back to twitter.
But at least for me, I’m here to stay.
Yeah, I’m done with Reddit. Been using it since near when it started, and I’ve gotten to watch it slowly rot… I’m either here to stay, or I’m just done with it all. Either way, I’m not going back to Reddit.
Over the years I’ve unsubscribed from more and more of Reddit’s default subs. I think I’m only still subbed to aww and til, and I rarely comment on those. Almost all my engagement is with niche subreddits for my topics of interest via a third party app, so until now I’ve avoided all the rot. If I lose the app, I lose interest in Reddit.
All we need is for Christian the Apollo app developer to port over his app to lemmy
Reddit Boost developer for me. Jerboa app is terrible lol.
Any reason not to just improve Jerboa? I don’t see anything fundamentally bad with it, and usually it’s not great to have a large number of apps for a (currently) narrow use.
People in the Lemmy matrix chat are working on a new Android app (not sure if it’s a redsign of Jerboa or a new app though).
Why is it bad to have multiple apps? Just like the dozen of Reddit apps on Android, competition is a good thing.
Plus not everyone wants the same UI, and trying to make a UI that fits everyone is impossible. For example, I cannot stand Sync for Reddit, but I love Boost for Reddit.
There’s only a finite amount of resources to work on apps for a given platform. It works fine for Reddit because Reddit is one of the top websites in the world. If all of Lemmy was a subreddit, it wouldn’t make it into the top 1000 subreddits. Spreading the amount of effort you can derive from that number of users over a large number of apps is a recipe for low quality apps. I’m not saying just have one app, but think carefully about whether it’s better for the ecosystem to simply improve the existing offerings.
It’s not bad at all. It just needs to be refined
Sync for Reddit on Android is my fav 🤤
Christian might want to talk to Paul Haddad @paul@tapbots.social (Tweetbot dev who switched over and now makes Ivory for Mastodon)
Lemmy and the fediverse are such unique and cool concepts. I hope to see Lemmy grow even more in the future!
I hope Lemmy does well whether reddit implodes or not. Great concept!
Yep, fediverse observer reports monthly active users count has doubled in four days, no real change in revenue (money donated) it seems which is a shame. The conversion rate needs to improve IMO and it seems that the option to donate is not attracting the attention it deserves. I think lemmy needs more improvements so it will be able to retain a bigger chunk of the users that is exploring the platform, look at what happened to mastodon and the fediverse after the migration after elon musk buyout , According to the statistics almost half the users are gone.
no real change in revenue (money donated) it seems which is a shame.
I mean, I’m only here since yesterday? Of course I will wait a month and see how things turn out before I invest money. And the problem with Mastodon was that the official app in the appstore was a absolute poorly designed lackluster that didn’t even support lists. Most people don’t look for third party apps.
Lemmy seems fine so far as alternative. You get enough recognition and responses, compared to a newly created Mastodon account.
Yeah, the statement was poorly made. The point of Lemmy isn’t to make money either way. Any financial contribution should be immediately put back into the community, i.e investing in infrastructure, in my opinion.
I mean, I’m only here since yesterday? Of course I will wait a month and see how things turn out before I invest money
I am not judging , but in for profit social media companies don’t wait to start making money off you, twitter makes about 20$ a year from a active user, for meta (facebook, instagram, whatsup) it’s almost 40 dollars.
its sort of depressing that they will rely on donations though. would be nice if there was some way for them to make money without gambling on random ppl
Fundraising when done well can be good, wikipedia (wikimedia foundation) made about 150M in 2021.
Having an instance that shows ads (even duckduckgo style ads that are privacy respecting) could be good (with funds going to development), maybe rysolv (or some other bounty site) could also provide revenue or getting paid for custom development or just paying a retainer so when need development a developer will be available.
Sponsorship (where you show the logo in the front page given a company clicks) like vue.js does it is also an option.
One problem with FOSS is that there isn’t anything like a endowment , with enough money invested you theoretically could use the 4 percent rule and fund lemmy forever.
We only have 2-3 full time devs at the moment, it wouldn’t take much to fund us at all. Youtube streamers make more than most open source devs :(
We might try to do yearly funding drives after this year when our NLnet grant runs out.
Here’s ou, donation page if anyone would like to support our time: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
when our NLnet grant runs out.
That’s unfortunate to hear…
Any possibility of renewing it/reapplying somehow?
We’ve renewed it for several years now, but most of the important activitypub work is done. Now we’re focused on code maintainence, performance, ancillary features, and front-end work.
Yeah it works but Wikipedia is constantly threatening to close up because of lack of donations right? That’s a huge fault that persists no matter how well done their fundraising campaign. I wonder are there examples of fundraising where they gather more than enough to foot the bills? Do they expand then like a business would or do they save that excess for next year? I have to assume they’d invest and grow it. Is Wikipedia or lemmy an example of FOSS though? It’s not as simple as open sourced software once you put it on the web and build a business behind it. Maybe the bones of it was FOSS but we’re passed that point now yeah? Obviously I have more questions than answers, just an interested layman. Cheers.
Yeah it works but Wikipedia is constantly threatening to close up because of lack of donations right? That’s a huge fault that persists no matter how well done their fundraising campaign.
I don’t think i saw that wording in years, and they probably exaggerated , There are other examples of open source projects that fund multiple develoepers , thunderbird, krita, blender , iirc for some of them people say they are competitive with closed source alternatives.
Is Wikipedia or lemmy an example of FOSS though?
Yeah for lemmy the code is open source and for wikipedia the code and content are open source.
I guess I just don’t get how being open sourced code is really relevant to Wikipedia? The code is not special is it? They don’t need donations to pay for elite programmers, it’s servers and IT people. The code being open source means that someone else can copy their own Wikipedia if they felt like competing and thought for some reason that they could. The fact that Wikipedia Foundation is non-profit basically precludes this but I think you answered my question basically anyway, they don’t rely on only donations.
I guess I just don’t get how being open sourced code is really relevant to Wikipedia? The code is not special is it? They don’t need donations to pay for elite programmers, it’s servers and IT people. The code being open source means that someone else can copy their own Wikipedia if they felt like competing and thought for some reason that they could. The fact that Wikipedia Foundation is non-profit basically precludes this but I think you answered my question basically anyway, they don’t rely on only donations.
It’s relevant that it’s open source because you don’t have to pay for it and a competitor could arise (iirc there is a startup that does that, provide a “better” user interface to wikipedia), and the software is pretty complex so you should pay full time programmers and UX researchers and designers.
I guess so. I would really love to see the paid competitor that successfully displaces Wikipedia. It would have to be extremely impressive wouldn’t it? Like paradigm shift level impressive. Any startup that currently claims to do it “better” will also need to make it available for free, or instantly fail because of no users ever bothering to sign up.
The Wikipedia software is used by many institutions. When i still worked in uni, we tried it for our group internal documenting. In the end went for a less complex wiki software, though. :-)
I mean it’s a different topic, aside from how a business (for profit or not) takes software (foss or not) and makes money from it. Wikipedia software is used a lot I’m just saying it’s not relevant to what I was talking about. Like if companies didn’t use this free software for internal documenting they would use something else, no biggie. In the same way that if the worlds largest online encyclopedia no longer had Wikipedia software, they would use something else, no biggie. The word wiki is like the word kleenex and that’s great for the founder of wikipedia, maybe? But it’s still just tissue paper.
I’ve thought about this. It’s likely that ads could happen but possibly only on specific instances so that some instances could remain relying on donations.
I see donations as mostly a problem for the app itself. The instances could begin charging a fee for hosting or whatever. So long as it’s reasonable, I see no issue
What’s the best way to contribute? I used the Patreon link at the bottom of the join lemmy page.
Looking at it now https://www.patreon.com/dessalines is pretty lite on details.
Liberapay, I think, iirc it is the only platform that does not take a ten percent cut (you can see the link to it if you click on the little heart next to “create community”).
It’s kind of awesome :) A question to others here. I mostly see stuff from beehaw and lemmy.ml on All. Are these the most active servers?
It’s not terribly active, but my instance midwest.social has people on it. There are dozens of us! Dozens!
I just submitted an application to join, so soon there will be baker’s dozens!
Found it. Still not able to figure out how to follow communities there from Jebora. The technology community seems like my speed on your server :)
Yes, by quite a margin as well, I believe. It’s unfortunate, and the only solution is to make diverse instances and advertise them well :) The fediverse is better if the load is more evenly distributed across instances instead of having most users sit on a couple of instances.
For what it’s worth, having a few “bigger” instances means less confusion for users who don’t completely understand federation yet but still want to make the switch. I wouldn’t call it a bad thing, they can always turn to another smaller instance later on.
Sure, that is a valid concern, but maybe that could also be mitigated by making it pretty clear that you can interact with content on other servers just fine, even if you’re not from there. Perhaps a little note banner on the “Join Lemmy” page itself.
Regarding moving to another instance, that is not quite possible right now. There’s no way to properly move an account to another server, you’d just have to start from scratch with a new identity. In the future, it would be nice to have proper account migration, or at the very least a way to import/export account data.
You’re right, a few additions / changes to the Join Lemmy page would indeed go a long way.
Regarding account migration, I’m fairly certain it’ll be implemented in the future if the project lives on long enough.
It will happen over time. Lemmy and Beehaw are still infinitesimally small compared to reddit. Trying to push people onto other servers right now is extreme premature optimization.
The issue is that the “first move” advantage is quite real and the momentum gained by lemmy.ml and beehaw.org can easily dwarf diversity on the network. Of course you don’t have to aggressively spread people out, but maybe the spotlight should be fairer, so to speak.
Can you explain what the issue is? I think it’s all but inevitable that one server will become the “default” server that most people will create an account on first. As they learn more about how everything works, they may choose to create another account on a server with different rules that suite them better. That flow seems much easier to me than putting pressure on new users to pick the “right” server from them off the bat.
It happened with mastodon.social, and it’ll probably happen here too.
I have a small, new instance, and I’m not really sure how to advertise it to the lemmy-verse. Do we have a good place to put our instances and what communities we’re hosting?
Hey, welcome! Thank you for your contribution to the network :D
As for discoverability, it is a problem yet to be properly solved. For now, I’d suggest making a launch post and share your communities in the many posts that have recently popped around (e.g https://lemmy.pt/post/36126)
Yeah that’s what I’ve been doing so far, for new users it’s pretty clear why they’re mostly just hanging out in lemmy.ml. Getting the word out about outside communities is a bit difficult, but hopeful. I’m viewing all of this as a perfect “Reddit gave Lemmy a window to view painpoints and minimize them before a larger exodus”. I don’t think we’ll see anything like the migration from Digg, but I see a lot of people who will be open to alternatives if Reddit goes through with this end of month. Right now it’s “How do we funnel them” when they drop the hammer.
The time you see a system’s weakness most clearly is definitely when stressing it in a real scenario. The goal is to improve further each time we get an influx of users :)
True. Maybe there can be something like rotating registrations.
Except for lemmygrad, yes.
That seemed like a very strange place :|
Strange is a rather euphemistic word for it.
Well I knew many people who were in a similar place in real life. Most of them were unhappy and struggling in real life and got sucked into an ideology that seemed attractive. Eventually after understanding how it doesn’t actually solve the problems they struggle with, most of them end up with non-extreme political learnings.
Many of the people I knew struggled a lot during this period and were exploited by others wanting to take advantage of their lack of exposure and experience.
Tldr; I try to be sympathetic to the people there as I’ve seen many people suffer a lot in real life going through the same. YMMV.
They are not cultists. There are more people from outside the anglosphere there so you might find them strange but try talking to them, they are normal people.
It feels like you’ve basically not read anything I’ve written. You’d be glad to know that I’m not in anglosphere and I don’t think people who believe in communism are cultists either.
I’ve lived in one of the few places in the world where a communist leaning government has been elected on and off for many years and they haven’t gone down the authoritarian route but participated in democracy.
None of that make the points I made invalid though.
I’m new around here. Why was it strange?
Basically extreme left. Not in the US politics sense but in the I want armed revolution and China is great sense.
@Parsnip8904
I think so. There was also jeremmy.ml but it doesn’t seem to be reachable right now.Thank you :) I remember seeing a solarpunk and another science server in the list but haven’t seen anything from those in my all feed either.
@Parsnip8904
It can be because no one on your instance is following communities from over there. There needs to be at least one follower of a topic/community before posts are pulled to the instance you’re on.@Parsnip8904
So if you want to follow a community on another instance which your own instance doesn’t know about, take the URL of the community from the remote instance and put it in the search field on your own instance and then you can follow it. After that new posts from there will show upThanks a lot! I’m going to try this out now. I wish there was a sidebar or something that explained some gotchas like this.
@Parsnip8904
Yeah that would indeed be helpful.
Well, it got me to try installing an instance of my own. We’ll see if I manage to keep it running 😂
@lmorchard
Cool! I have my own Friendica instance 👍 which I’m also using for posting on Lemmy. I prefer to have one account for everything whenever possible 😃deleted by creator
I’ve not quite been running mine for a day, so far. So, I’m not a great authority. But, so far, all the docker containers together are taking less than 500MB RAM and barely any CPU. And this is on a repurposed old gaming PC in my basement that’s also hosting Mastodon, Calckey, and a bunch of other ill-advised crap. I’ve been using tailscale and a super cheap linux cloud host with some reverse proxies to expose the services to the internet
I have been running a (unfortunately still low local volume) instance with a big federation pool for a while now, and resources are really manageable. CPU usage is almost non-existent (save for a few short spikes), pretty much always below 5% of my ~2GHz vCPU. RAM has never gone above 500MB, and typically sits around 250MB (mostly from postgres). Network I/O has never surpassed 50MB combined daily. Disk I/O is slightly higher, averaging at 40MB combined daily.
Overall, it’s really cheap to get a Lemmy instance up and running for you and some friends, and with the officially provided Ansible setup (and I believe there’s a Yunohost package as well), getting one operational is pretty easy.
The yunohost package is broken and outdated unfortunately. It’s a version behind and it doesnt support image uploading (for users submitting content OR for admins adding a server logo).
I have never used Ansible before yesterday, and I figured it out in about 15 minutes using the official Lemmy documentation. I’d encourage anyone reading this who is considering administering an instance to skip the Yunohost package for Lemmy at this time.
Oh, that’s a pity :(
Someone should take the lead there then. But yeah, Ansible is pretty great! I rock my own setup because I feel more comfortable this way, but it was originally based on the first Ansible setup heheI don’t want it to seem like I am talking down on the “Lemmy for Yunohost” package maintainers. They are doing a job I could not do, and for zero compensation. It’s just unfortunately not receiving the attention it needs for production purposes, IMO
I did not read it like that either! Perhaps I misworded. I meant that, since last update seems to have been on September 25th 2022, the maintainer probably is too busy right now, and if someone else feels they could help out, they should :)
For Mastodon, it depends how popular you get. The more followers on other instances you have, the more instances your instance has to send your post to whenever you make a post.
For Lemmy, I think the equivalent would be if you were hosting a community and you/others are posting in it, it then has to send to everyone who’s subbed. If you’re only hosting an instance to have an account, then it’s probably pretty lightweight.
And this is only the second day since the API changes were announced. I expect there will be lots of people coming over in the month of June, and probably another big influx on July first when Reddit apps shut down for real
I’m taking the opportunity of learning Lemmy, standing up my own instance, and creating a couple of niche communities that I care about. That way when the hammer drops I have links ready to go to post everywhere. I also have created “how-to” posts to help people if they choose to migrate.
I see some people telling people they need to migrate though, and that’s not working. People resist that sort of talk. I’m trying to keep it “Hey, letting you know this exists if you want to try it out, you don’t have to but we’re here if you get curious”
Messaging from the Jerboa app I just downloaded from the play store.
A few nights ago I discovered Lemmy as I needed to find a Reddit alternative fast knowing I will longer be able to use Reddit is Fun.
I’ve been a Redditor for almost 12 years now, I remember when it was a wild community where there was freedom of speech, few bots, it was the best source of memes next to cheezeburger, which was how I discovered Reddit.
I used it nearly everyday, and watched it’s decline, I remember when Elena Pao or whatever the fuck her name bought into the company, since then it’s become snipped more and more to the point I don’t recognize it anymore.
It transformed into some sort of money hungry beast, that is destroying its self from the inside out, trying to get people to use their shitty ad riddled app with a shitty interface.
I am so happy I found you guys, I really want to see Reddit’s blackouts go on indefinitely, infact I just wanna watch it burn. It’s dead to me, the owners suck, it’s just as bad as Facebook and the other main social media platforms now.
Any person I know who uses Reddit, I will point them here.
