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.
If we could stop pretending we’re superior to other social media that might be a start. The number of posts talking shit about the “average redditor” or suggesting that we need more “high quality content than reddit”, or that everything needs to have a meaningful discussion is exhausting. We as a group seem to want to dictate who can comment, who can post, what kind of post is acceptable, and are fairly mean to newer people. You won’t keep new people if you’re rude to them or they see post after post trashing them.
Engagement comes at the price of low effort sometimes. So does content. Not every post or comment will be a shining beacon of perfection. Sometimes people just want to talk. Some of them are starved for human interaction.
Stop trash talking the lurkers. They may be sharing what content there is here and driving people to Lemmy instances. They’re an important part of the ecosystem.
Ask what caliber of people you want here. Because it is very apparent to me that the loudest members only want a specific type of community member here. And they are very outspoken about that fact. But are they actively extending a hand to those people when they encounter them on any other platform? Word of mouth (or keyboard) works. It’s slow but it works.
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.)
You just made an enemy for life!
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.
It took a serious change in attitude for me to not become a lurker anymore. I always figured that if I have nothing interesting to say, I should just be quiet.
Eventually I realized that people are often happy to just get some feedback and interaction, even if it isn’t the most interesting or original response. As long as it’s done in a positive and friendly manner, you’re creating a sense of community.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.
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 [email protected] existed until you posted about it.
I am in Korea regularly. I joined the community.
Lurkers gonna lurk.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All I want is the ability to block inbox replies when I say something controversial.
I have actually found that people don’t respond to me at all when I say something they feel is controversial. I get a ton of downvotes and maybe once out of every 5 or so times I get one really persistent person who won’t let it go. But that’s it.
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
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.
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.
Do we have to have more people though?
Pretty much none of the communities that I used to browse on Reddit are active here, so I wouldn’t mind more people here.
I agree. Some communities are missing. But I fear to see the toxicity of reddit replicated here. I wish we can avoid this.
I agree, but in my experience the focused communities that I liked to browse on Reddit were almost never toxic. The difference may be that I deliberately went to the specific communities that I was interested in; I generally never just browsed Popular, where I’m sure the bulk of the toxicity was.
Unfortunately the communities that I’m interested in have next to no activity here, so I would definitely like to see more users.
Content rate needs to go up, I agree, but the biggest source of content in comparable social media came from something I’d like to avoid: power users.
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.
It’s not only the “base” instance IMO, most servers have wildly different communities.
There should IMO be some way to search for communitues from any server (and subscribe to them, which is a real hassle especially if your base server doesn’t yet know about them). I like the endless flow of memes as much as the next person, but what I really want is a bunch of communities I’m interested in so that I can lurk, ask questions and eventually create some hi quality content.
Well yes you can search for the name of a community but not for the type of content, IDK like from all the descriptions.
Maybe a sort of indexer could do that…
Sounds like you’re looking for a different client. Connect has a perfectly functional search bar.
When I search for a community in Connect it only shows me communities my home sever knows about.
But if your server doesn’t know about them then wouldn’t you be unable to connect to them anyway?
Yeah that’s like the problem I’m trying to point out :-)
An indexer or Lemmy-crawler that indexes all the descriptions and stuff (maybe messages?) and make it searchable could be a road to check out.
I’m still confused how it works. I subscribe to a channel, but all it is is updates about the channel, no content. Looks like I need to go to their website to see the content (which doesn’t seem right)
Have you taken a look at your instance’s FAQ here? Other than that, there are numerous guides to getting set up with Lemmy and how to subscribe to communities on other instances. It’s slightly different than Reddit, but apart from some technical details, everything works like Reddit once you’re set up.
Because of the decentralized structure, there can be communities on the same topic on different instances (with different subscribers, moderation guidelines, etc.). Use the search to find communities you’re interested in and post questions e.g. on the FAQ thread of your instance. Or right here of course.
This sounds like you have subscribed to a community where a bot just reposts Reddit content. Does that sound right? All the posts are by a bot that take you to Reddit?
I say we should dress up in nice suits, and go door to door asking if people have heard of our great community haven, thanks to the Great Lemming who we keep forgetting the name of. Ramen.
- 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.
Be careful who you invite.
Describe it as “openly leftist, there’s tankies on there” and if it turns them off, bullet dodged.
The tankie trolls will just seduce the right wing trolls. We need fewer trolls.
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
