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can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance.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/casualconversation@lemm.ee
- https://discuss.online/c/foodporn@lemmy.world
- https://discuss.online/c/superbowl@lemmy.world
- https://discuss.online/c/patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
- 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 !fedigrow@lemm.ee 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
Content is King. You can have a good chunk of people that manage to go through the UX issues, they will still leave if they don't find what they want. The mirror bots (alien.top, lemmit.online) were meant to help with that, but the people here would rather complain about the post volume instead of learning how to follow only the subscribed communities.
Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.
A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third. My proposal to separate user/local instances from topic-based instances has been rejected here, even after I offered to put them under the governance of a wider admin group.
Now, I'm tired of this culture and small thinking. Fine if you want to be proselytizing and convincing people "at retail", but this will not be nearly as impactful if we had a dozen people who had the courage to setup a Lemmy instance with Fediverser.
PieFed solves all of that. It isn't quite ready for the non-technical masses from Reddit, but those particular issues at least it does solve.
I kinda want to recommend people to simply visit https://piefed.social/ and see what will eventually become available as a standard Threadiverse software suite just like Lemmy and Mbin.
Sorry, what about PieFed specifically solves the issues?
I sincerely don't see how piefed relates to Fediverser at all...
@rglullis@communick.news No, I don't there's any overlap between PieFed and Fediverser either. The potential of Fediverser seems like it got cut off at the knees by how widely defederated alien.top is.