this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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It's no secret that Lemmy is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Reddit. The issue it faces however is that it's still relatively niche and not many people know about it. I propose that we change this. By contacting the mods of large subreddits and asking them to make and promote relevant Lemmy communities we could substantially increase the amount of people who discover the fediverse. What's more, I don't think this is would be a hard sell considering many mods are already pissed off with Reddit due to their API changes. I believe that this is the time to act, so this is a call to arms, to help grow the fediverse into the future of social media!

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[–] [email protected] 122 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How about we just forget about trying to beat anyone and just get on to using the platform.

Reddit won't die anytime soon.

Lemmy won't become popular anytime soon.

It took Reddit years before it became a major platform known by millions. It will take Lemmy years to gain notoriety among millions. Give it time, enjoy what it so now because in a year, two years or three or four years from now, we'll all be wishing for the good old days when Lemmy just started and we were able to enjoy the simple system it is now.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Reddit really did benefit from the fall of Digg though - this was about just shy of 20 years ago? Digg was where Reddit is now, thoroughly upsetting its user base with wholesale changes to the content of the site that nobody liked, and Reddit capitalized on that, and stole Digg's thunder.

I think Lemmy can potentially do the same. For a second, it looked like Squabbles/Squabblr was going to be the winner, but the last I checked, they imploded after some controversy.

(I came here from Reddit, incidentally - the user interface is very intuitive.)

[–] Bluescluestoothpaste 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah lemmy can do the same, but begging redditors to switch won't help anything. I was part of the digg migration, nobody on reddit ever posted on digg to go switch. I just searched for something else, and reddit was there. I certainly didn't spend a second thinking about digg afterwards, and i wont think about reddit either.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Doesn't seem like most Reddit users care. There is still way more activity on Reddit then here, and that probably isn't changing anytime soon. And right now Reddit still has better content since it seems mostly Lemmy is just posts about Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Look at the comments per day of any major subs such as

https://subredditstats.com/r/AskReddit

The 3rd party apps shutdown made a huge impact on the number of comments. Activity is still there, but much less

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agreed, lots of naysayers here for some reason

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I know right? People think that Lemmy will grow "naturally", but Lemmy is not a plant, there is nothing natural about this process. If people want it to grow, actions must be taken just like the OP proposed.

[–] Bluescluestoothpaste 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Naturally meaning make lemmy a good experience and people will come. Begging redditors to come won't help anything. Hell, OP and anyone else is free to just set up an instance where a bot reposts whatever gets posted to reddit front page, or a specific sub. That's a fine idea i think to help lemmy grow, as is any idea that will improve the Lemmy experience. But there's no need to spam reddit mods and ask them to help grow lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

free to just set up an instance where a bot reposts whatever gets posted to reddit front page, or a specific sub.

https://lemmit.online/ is that instance

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Naturally meaning make lemmy a good experience and people will come.

They can't come if they don't know about Lemmy. I came here, because I'd seen many posts about it on Reddit. You probably heard about it from someone too. We're on the internet in 2023: people don't go beyond first few links on Google, they rarely leave big platforms and aggregators like Facebook and Reddit. While I agree that this particular strategy raises questions (I don't see why Reddit mods would care), I support the cause.

[–] Bluescluestoothpaste 3 points 1 year ago

They'll know about it when it's a good product. And , they do know about it, every fuck spez thread had lemmy memtioned as an alternative. At this point, any redditors who cared about the api changes know about lemmy. And that's fine if you want to go on reddit and spam lemmy links.

But it makes no sense to go to current reddit mods who are committed to volunteering for reddit six weeks after all this shit went down. They like reddit and dont plan on leaving, if they did they would have six weeks ago.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People know about it already, they find it confusing, hard to use, you cannot block an instance, there are no multireddits, Sync is still in beta, the main instance is down half of the time.

All of these points should be addressed for Lemmy to become mainstream

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You make it sound like one blocks another, but we already have a lot of people and there's no reason why we can't attract more. You're here despite these issues.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I am, but I'm very tolerant for bugs and this kind of issues.

Early adopters are probably all here. To convince more picky users to join, those issues have to be fixed.