Memes about the Fediverse
Other relevant communities:
I mean have they seen how good Ice Cubes and Mlem look? How can they choose the default Twitter and Reddit apps over those masterpieces.
Yeah, a lot of people have quit Twitter over Musk being a huge douche and migrated to... Blusky. And they think they've done something really great. It's sad.
Mastodon is not a twitter clone.
Bluesky is a twitter clone, without musk. That's all these people want. They've never heard about the fediverse. They're not protesting corporate centralism.
They just don't like twitter being a right wing agenda. They want a twitter experience circa before musk bought it, simply because it was left wing before.
That's bluesky. That's not mastodon.
Bluesky is...fine. Currently, it operates the way that I wish Twitter did. It lets you curate your feed, it shows the feed in chronological order, and finally and most importantly it has a critical mass of users so there is actual content there, rather than every 5th post complaining about how everyone is on another platform or not using Linux.
Really, the only issue I have with it is that it is owned by a corporation. But like Twitter and Reddit, I am willing to abandon it for something else when it gets shittier.
Lemmy doesn't have much to offer compared to the "billionaire run" social media.
This is the real answer. I forget the exact numbers, but the vast majority of people on reddit are just lurkers. When you have an enormous user base, that still translates to lots of content to consume. Lemmy has way less content and very small communities (if any) for most niches.
Of course you can point to bots on reddit inflating those numbers and that Lemmy has more meaningful interaction, but that's not what most are looking for that are on reddit.
Also, as others mentioned, there's no negative engagement algorithm drivers on mastodon like there is on Twitter. Fact is, a lot of people just like to be angry and combative.
As a non tech expert, in my view, the biggest concern for the fediverse to grow, presently, is how difficult it can be to sign up.
Go to a instance listing, try and choose one, signup... all of this should be acessible but mostly invisible for the average user. The user should only be questioned what sort of content they mostly intend to browse, have a NSFW explicit option, perhaps a server location preference, and that should be it.
Beneath the hood, this process should trigger a call to the network requesting a user slot for any server that could cater to that generic profile the prospect user filled. Even bans should be handled differently, in my opinion.
Imagine to go over all that... To end up on .ml
You're 100% on point. From first attempt to getting my final account it took me a few weeks. Had an instance close down days after joining, another blocking communities I was interested, sign up denied...
In fucking reddit you don't even need a real email
It's unfortunate, but there's a real chicken-and-egg problem here. Those of us who are on here are here because of how strongly we believe in the ideal of it, but for the average person who just cares about talking about their favourite interests, there's a serious lack.
I'll use two examples, one that you clearly care about, and one that I do. /r/stopkillinggames is hardly super active, but in the last 3 weeks it's had 11 posts with a cumulative 68 comments. [email protected], by contrast, has had just 8 posts, all by a mod, with just 6 total comments. /r/AgeofMythology is very active with artistic appreciation posts, balance discussion, and advice just within the last 24 hours. [email protected] has failed to attract a single post from anyone other than myself, and it's been over 3 months since anyone other than myself has left a comment. It's disheartening, not being able to have conversations about the stuff you love, when you know that just over there it would be so easy.
Lemmy's excellent if you want to talk about politics, or open source, but there's not a huge amount outside of that. The Star Trek communities are pretty good, but they pale in comparison to a great sub like /r/daystrominstitute, and the amount and depth of discussion on ttrpg.network is slim compared to /r/pathfinder2e, /r/dndgreentext, /r/dndnext, etc. And these are some of the best-supported hobbies on Lemmy.
So as much as I'm staying here and trying to do my part to make it better, and frequently encourage others to join...I also can't really blame people who don't.
(I feel less charitably towards people on Twitter. Because that place is a total shithole, and Mastodon is surprisingly good, if you like microblogging platforms. Plus even Bluesky is better than staying on Twitter, and it has most of the celebrities and micro-celebrities some people might want to follow.)
To add to Blaze's point: as lemmy's still small, there's not much point to super specialized communities when the more general ones are "slow" enough that pretty much any post you make can remain "newest" for 2 days straight.
It’s disheartening, not being able to have conversations about the stuff you love, when you know that just over there it would be so easy.
Have you tried more generic gaming communities? [email protected] is quite active, I'm sure a regular thread about AoM there would definitely get some traction (or even just a one-time promotion thread)
The problem with more generic communities is that you might be sharing it with more people, but they're not people who are engaged with the topic. And that's what I really miss. The deep conversations on theorising, community drama, etc. that can only come from a large number of people who are really interested in the subject. Posting to a generic community limits the type of discussions you can have to those that are more accessible to a generic audience.
As another example, just now I've been playing Kerbal Space Program for the first real time (I toyed around with it briefly many years ago, but didn't try career mode and completing contracts). Right now, I'm struggling to understand why something I'm doing isn't working. I would love to be able to go to !kerbalspaceprogram and ask an audience of people who know what they're talking about. Sure, I could try my luck in [email protected] or something even more generic like [email protected]. But neither of those are really the appropriate venue for something that's so specifically only of interest to people who know about KSP. Posting "I've been playing KSP lately and really enjoying it" makes sense on patientgamers. Posting a detailed scenario of what I've been doing and what I've done in the past, and asking why it doesn't work for me right now even though it seemed to work before...probably doesn't.
Another example: I've been posting every useful or interesting guide or analysis of Age of Mythology I've come across to !aom. It wouldn't really feel right to post that kind of thing to patientgamers. But I probably will post when the upcoming expansion comes out to more generic communities
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe posting niche game-specific content to generic communities is a good way to bring attention to them for more people who would be interested in it, while also bringing attention to an audience that didn't know they might be interested in it. I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this. Maybe I should put a post in [email protected] for this discussion?
It's always a question of balance. How many people will see your niche community? How actively do you promote it? Is the userbase even large enough to have enough people interested in your community?
You mentioned Age of Mythology, I actually posted a while ago about it on [email protected] : https://sopuli.xyz/post/14540736. I got a few comments there, so probably people you can try reaching out or pinging in your community.
I just had a look, you have 74 subscribers on [email protected]. The userbase might be there, but if they are, they don't know about it. You can try promoting it on
The last three communities aren't that active, but they have between 200 and 300 subscribers, so that could help building your userbase.
As a side note, I don't know how popular AoM is. Games like [email protected] and [email protected] are doing fine, but they are quite popular and active.
For Kerbal, have you tried [email protected]? There is also
Might be worth it to choose one of them as "the one", and promote it to the other one, as well as the gaming communities above.
As you can see, it takes quite some work to get a niche community going, and that's why personally nowadays I stick to very generic communities: shows, pokemon, leagueoflegends (niche if you want, but still one of the most popular games worldwide), patientgamers.
I wish most people were more interested in learning. But ive settled for people being entertaining at best due to that disinterest.
Another contributing factor is that Lemmy & Mastodon "care about privacy". Odd, in my opinion, for a public social network.
Their interpretation of that is that they don't send referer headers. So to any site receiving Lemmy traffic, we're invisible.
The alternatives are annoying to sign up on and letting the community be in charge just leads to hate speech being allowed. Which tbh also is an issue with traditional social media but there at least they are reliant on advertisers so they have an interest in controlling it.
The fediverse is like a cafe with an unusual menu and interesting conversations. Most social media is like a McDonald's in Altoona PA.