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?
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
!fedivangelism@lemmy.ml - a community to grow the fediverse
You can’t and don’t need to replace Reddit. The way Lemmy is built will make it a much more viable and trusted platform for the long term.
No
No
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…
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH no
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
What have you done for lemmy? Did you post content, spread it?
You make a good point. I will start doing that now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
reddit isn’t a platform, its a people!
I don’t see anything wrong with the GUI. In fact, I like it.
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?
same
I dont care as long as reddit dies