I was wondering what the point of lemmy was, if we can’t get a certain number of people, we won’t be able to thrive as a community and I don’t see lots of people joining even though it is an open-source and decentralised forum unlike reddit.
There are many obvious things lemmy could do better, should I make a report about it? I think we are lagging behind and not doing things which are obvious. A better GUI for mobile website would be one of the top suggestions I have. thoughs?
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I don’t think there’s a need to replace Reddit, Lemmy just needs to serve as an alternative for those that want it. And I think there’s plenty of people here for a thriving community. I also think it functions perfectly fine for the most part. The mobile website looks great, and we even have a great mobile app. I’m not sure how reports work with Lemmy, but if you do have any gripes then by all means report them. The one major thing I think is wrong with Lemmy (and honestly the Fediverse in general) is how bad federation is. Communication across instances should be straight-forward and seamless, but it’s often just broken.
there aren’t plenty of people here. we need more. we need to be a better alternative.
Looks like there are about 500 monthly users across the main instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances
Reddit has about 430 million monthly users as of October last year.
If it needs a network effect of about 1% for people to ditch Reddit for Lemmy (like it did for Myspace → Facebook), that means we need about 4.3 million… so about 4,299,500 more. Better get working on some outreach 😉
Just a note that active monthly on lemmy, means you’ve posted or commented. Reddit might be using that more loosely, as in someone who just views the site. In that case their numbers might be highly inflated, include webcrawlers, etc.
Oh good point, Reddit are almost definitely including people who just vote, and probably people who just view 🤦 Is it easy to get “unique ‘people’ who looked at it” numbers off Lemmy instances, to make a fairer comparison? (Not optimistic that Viacom will be releasing numbers of how many humans they think are actually using Reddit any time soon…)
For logged in users, there is a table that checks if you’ve read a post, so it’d be possible yes. But IMO just viewing something shouldn’t count as “activity”.
You’re saying you don’t want to add metrics just to have a dick-swinging contest with Reddit’s fake numbers? Confusing 😂
I don’t see anything wrong with the GUI. In fact, I like it.
same
ok not the GUI but the people without dp it shows a broken pic on their screen, we need something better. maybe like what Reddit does, some default character until you get something else
“without dp” whats dp?
It’ll never replace reddit, but the hope is that it’d have a big enough community that it would be a viable alternative.
Will Mastodon ever replace Twitter? Maybe… But probably not. But the Internet is a huge place and there is space for plenty of alternatives.
I love this community but hearing your words I feel like we have collectively given up
You just have the wrong goals. It isn’t always about “winning”.
What was great in the early days of Mastodon is that, for those who could remember, it recaptured the feel of the “early” internet. You could feel distinct and interesting voices, patience and willingness to get into deepdives, where the payoff was from one to one interactions with personalities deeply interested in interaction itself and passion projects.
That made it have a value in and of itself that didn’t depend on competing platforms.
That said, you can feel echoes of typical internet culture all throughout the fediverse now. I don’ think you should measure success or failure on replacing reddit, but its great to have a place ready and waiting to absorb communities that become (say) disenchanted with bad mods.
So the model for replacements I think would be looking at how facebook replaced myspace, and how reddit replaced digg. In both cases, there was widespread user disenchantment at substandard designs and redesigns that disregarded interests of users. I think that kind of catastrophic incompetence and disregard for users was unique to a particular era, and there probably have emerged some industry standards and best practices to stop that from happening in our current internet, for better or for worse.
I think with reddits redesign, it has become increasingly frustrating to the user base, and there is a prospect that user disenchantment with reddit could lead to something, but I think its a long shot. The important thing to remember about reddit is that they caught a wave of exponential growth by not fucking things up, and staying more or less consistent with their product.
I think the best thing Lemmy can do is be consistent and keep doing what it is doing, and not try and reinvent itself. I actually think the website’s functionality on mobile is truly fantastic, the best I’ve experienced from using a website in place of a dedicated app, so I wouldn’t worry about it. I think so much of Lemmy is right in its current for, and 99% of the issue with fediverse products is that the ui/design is being terrible, and it took Mastodon to kind of teach people that it mattered. So yeah, I think the main thing is to not mess with success.
IMO, what is good for open-source web solutions, is that, if someone doesn’t like the vanilla frontend, one can write a new community-based frontend as a web, desktop or mobile solution, like Whalebird. It greatly expands user’s choice and it is a good selling point but goes unnoticed.
Regarding new features, it is a matter of the communitations’ protocols (ActivityPub, etc.) New features should comply with the specification and not introduce platform-specific ‘spin-offs’ as they would threaten the maintainability of the protocol and interoperability between platforms and in the long way ruin the whole fediverse. However, I have not read the specification of ActivityPub and what it can do. Maybe I have to try it first because it looks very promising.
with due respect to everything you said I don’t think this is a major success, even “our own” people (GNU Linux and FOSS enthusiasts) are in a greater number in Reddit. I think Open-source projects like Lemmy lack the aggressiveness required to make it big.
You seem to see a lot of problems. Do you have solutions and where is your place in those solutions?
I think I explained why I think you can call this successful without having similar numbers to reddit.
Widespread user adoption is important, but that is being achieved. I don’t think I agree that the specific criteria of “being more used than Reddit by FOSS enthusiasts” is a make or break criteria that decides whether this is a success.
I think Lemmy is functional, usable on its own terms, and aside from not quite doing enough to ban trolls it’s valuable in its present form.
I would distinguish it from, say, diaspora, which I don’t believe has reached a critical mass of users and frankly just isn’t designed well enough to really get off the ground.
There are android apps for lemmy called Lemmur and Jerboa
tq will try them
Good answers. It seems to me that there is no need to replace Reddit, copy it and try to be like it. A copy is always a weak resemblance. As Steve Jobs once said: I don’t want to do better, I want to do it differently. Lemmy have strengths, they need to be developed.
Can you make a quick list of its strengths besides those that derive directly from federation?
I apologize for not answering for a long time. Spring, construction, constant moving.
It’s so hard for me to immediately write about strengths, I got a little distracted, but I can only give advice. This applies to those who create this platform, developers. Make it stand out from the competition. You know for yourself what the strengths and weaknesses are. Make it so that anyone who puts another script (and there are plenty of them on the net) knows that his version is not very good and there is a better one - Lemmy. People are such that they will prefer to use the best, especially since installation and support is not very complicated here. Just don’t give anyone a chance. )
You can improve endlessly, any product can be made better and better, and you yourself know this.
It’s already better than Reddit. If someone doesn’t want to use it, that’s their problem, not mine…
We’re not even at feature parity. Wikis are something that communities use extensively and I do think growth requires Lemmy to provide an alternative to that. Improving on Reddit isn’t as straightforward as improving Twitter, but sharing the burden of hosting costs and maintenance via proper decentralization, we could for example bring Reddit’s paywalled features over to Lemmy without any ads or payments.
Reddit also now has a lot of “features” I don’t want and hope Lemmy never gets. As for the wiki system though, that might be an interesting addition.
A federated wiki would be a major project on its own. Doing that as part of Lemmy seems unrealistic (unless its very limited). Better to let another project implement that functionality, and make sure that it federates with Lemmy.
Unfortunately I think it will have to be made to foster communities, especially hobbyist communities the way Reddit does.
I dont care as long as reddit dies
It’ll take time and commitment from its early userbase, but eventually it should pull in enough people to become a self sustaining counterculture community to the swamp that is reddit. People don’t come here for the content, but rather the community itself.
Reddit is really good for hobby/niche content. Reddit communities have become the largest online communities for quiet a few different interests where previously the largest communities would be independent forums.
It would be great if some forums decided to use Lemmy. I guess there are barriers to this, e.g. user interface changes might not be wanted and it might be difficult to export/import the forum history.
I dont know if it was even possible to do that. Atleast us gnu Linux users should be here in a larger number I guess
What have you done for lemmy? Did you post content, spread it?
You make a good point. I will start doing that now.
Honestly I don’t really see a need to replace Reddit. This conversation always comes up and open source alternatives. Mastodon was never designed to replace Twitter. It was simply to be an alternative. Linux was never designed to replace windows, etc…
No, because its just a copy. Lemmy just takes reddit and slaps decentralization on top of it. Therefore it has the baggage of walled garden philosophy.
Something that would replace reddit is a platform that is willing to embrace the strengths of decentralization and truely design around its strengths. Design around human connectedness, community building, community collaboration, accessability (even for technically illiterate), detoxing.
What kinds of things would you want to be different in a system “embracing the strengths of decentralization”?
Having an underlying design philosophy that emphasize the humane.
“We build software for humans”
excuse my ignorance, but how is Lemmy not doing this already?
Because you cant just copy paste a centralized platform and expect that the design reflects the humane.
There isn’t really a walled garden philosophy here given that you can choose open instances to join and interact with other instances at ease too.
I agree, lemmy is not a walled garden. What I’m saying is, lemmy is lacking an underlying design philosophy. Design should be guided by principles, rather than replicating the feel of reddit. Functionality should be created to serve human needs rather than from trying to replicate reddit functionality.
We shouldn’t look to the people of cyberspace to understand how to develop platforms, especially not the centralized parts of cyberspace. Instead we should look to the people of earthspace. The offline people. People and communities. What do they want? Or what do they say they want?
To be clear this is a criticism not targeted specifically at Lemmy, but the fediverse as a whole.
reddit isn’t a platform, its a people!