To follow-up on the Reddit thread yesterday, here are a few elements that can be interesting to discuss.
Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy
Just quoting "Lemmy" or pointing to join-lemmy.org can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance. Recent post by a new joiner 9 days ago, they had to change server 2 times to get a satisfying experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536.
Using something like
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions"
Can already point them in one direction, and avoid them getting lost in the too many options.
If people want to debate the choice of those two instances, I'll add my thought process in the comments.
The Lemmy feed looks as depressing as Reddit's All, and how to mitigate that
Some feedback I received when promoting Lemmy the way above
Just checked out lemmy to see if it’s different from reddit. Im very disappointed lmao.
First post I see is a comic about cultural appropriation with an ifunny watermark. Next are several posts about the proton vpn ceo “going full maga.” And finally a post I saw on Reddit days ago that is ragebait making fun of the cybertruck.
Yikes. It’s the same exact thing.
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Lemmy still has a pretty obnoxious tankie problem. Even if you block the .ml instance, pretty much every thread about US politics or world news on any major instance gets hijacked by the same handful of trolls and their associated vote bots. Hopefully this will become less of a problem as more sane people join, but just as a word of caution, be aware that you will be called western imperialist scum by a bunch of 14 year olds.
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Lemmy is utter rubbish, it's as if their entire userbase consists of the top layer of scum carefully siphoned off from the Reddit cesspool. It got the worst of the annoying political echo chamber and "very smart" argumentative users from Reddit.
I just clicked on half a dozen random Lemmy servers, and all of them had at least one link about Trump in the top 5 posts. Even ones that seem like they're supposed to be about tech.
Normal humans want the Reddit of 10+ years ago back. We don't want to use a different site colonized by the same modern day Redditors we loathe interacting with.
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To be fair, you can't say they're wrong. Open https://discuss.online , by default you'll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.
What I try to do in such instances is to give something like
"While politics are important, you can still very much block them. Here are an example of some communities that can interest you:
- https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
- https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
- https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
- https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]
- https://discuss.online/post/15026558 for 20 non-political communities"
I also wrote a long post about that issue that you can read here https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/
As a side note, I recently started a discussion on [email protected] about a potential political-free instance for new joiners, feel free to have a look: https://feddit.org/post/6819084
Lemmy is too small, 42k monthly active users is nothing
Discuit, the centralized alternative to Reddit, currently counts 181 weekly active commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/NlAdOWAp
You can also mention that NodeBB is now federating with Lemmy:
- https://feddit.org/post/7035166?scrollToComments=true
- https://community.nodebb.org/topic/71fe3f89-361c-4716-a79e-de02f94b3113/test-from-lemmy-to-nodebb
That's all for now, happy to discuss in the comments.
Note: if you're not interested in promoting Lemmy, feel free to hide this post, you are able to do this on specific posts if your instance is running 0.19.4 and newer
because the only reason I still use Reddit is to interact with adults in my profession from around the world with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints and with good hearts but limited tolerance for spending time learning obscure tech
so anything to reduce the barrier of entry for those people is one less reason to ever use Reddit again. that's a win in my book. if you want to stick to your ML communities y, that's your right. but are you really going to change the world by shutting everyone out?
No one is going to change the world by posting. Very few people have the time or energy to discuss or debate every day. I'd rather just not deal with an entire host of opinions and takes that I already deal with every day in real life.
What I've learned over my time using sites like Digg and Reddit is that allowing conservative views to fester and form their communities on a platform allows them to organize and grow and seep into other "non political" spaces. The Donald, gamergate, transphobia, general reaction, whatever.
And the "anti-politics" enlightened centrist types are enablers that allow this.
If people come here and go "wow they sure are critical of Israel, America, Trump, and billionaires. I hate this", then they're self selecting themselves from joining and I just don't think that's a loss.
The measurement of a platform to me is the quality of the users, not the quantity.
Was it really considered non-political? Not that familiar with that sub history
No. My point was that as Reddit became more mainstream, it became more conservative. As it became more conservative, more conservative spaces were created like the Donald and gamergate subs. And people and ideas from those spaces ended up seeping into other "non political" subs, like technology, gaming, movies, etc.
The amount of xenophobia, transphobia, anti-feminism, etc. I saw in general purpose subs grew post Digg migration, especially in gamer subs as gamergate happened in 2014.
Conservatism and centrist liberalism are the dominant political beliefs in the US, UK, and seemingly most of Europe too. Those voices will outnumber and browbeat leftist voices over time if they join an online platform en masse, in my experience.
I see where you come from, but I would say that this would happen when Lemmy gets really mainstream, like let's say 500k or 1 million users.
I would just like to reach 100k or 200k so that it feels less like if 25 people stop posting the whole platform dies.