Ask Lemmy
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The niche communities are missing. It's a bit of a wasteland. What is holding people from migrating over I wonder?
Lemmy has way, way too much dross. Any user that pops in to check it out finds a billion foreign language posts, a billion weirdo anime shitposts and a billion Linux posts. It's a massive turnoff. I spent 6 months blocking communities that had zero interest to me and I'm left with news and Star Trek posts. I don't even like Star Trek but it's the only OC in this place.
I love star trek but 10 forward generates so much content that it becomes noise on the main feed. I'm also guilty of not contributing much though.
You could just follow the communities you are actually interested in.
"All" was shit on reddit so it's going to be shit on any reddit replacement.
My subscribed list has, like, 4 posts a day. I browse all in a hope to see new communities I might like.
I've found more communities that I like by browsing "Hot" and near the end of "top 6 hours" for what it's worth.
That's precisely their point: once you filter out all of the noise, you are left with very, very, little substance. And the communities with any substance are active at a ratio that makes them flood your feed with ONLY those one or two topics.
IIRC: Devs added the new filter, "Scaled" for this exact reason. Gives newer and smaller communities a chance in the sun.
Nice tip! I didn't know about that. Thanks.
It would be interesting to compare Lemmy to the community on Tildes. What do you think of Tildes?
I don't know Tildes. Never been there.
Setup was a pain in the ass for me, but I was determined not to return to reddit after the API changes. I'm tech-savvy enough to build a PC, format/partition disks, and provide tech support for my extremely confused mother, but Mastadon was so off-putting that I jumped ship during setup, and Lemmy had a learning curve that the average person may not be willing to figure out.
Even my brother who is familiar with using Tor and such couldn't quite figure out Lemmy. He wound up joining (what I assume was) one of the shitty instances right after the first large migration, and it must have been defederated for one reason or other because he denounced the rampant censorship and went back to reddit. If he were right wing or a Nazi I could probably connect the dots there, but my brother is even further left than I am. He actually got me into politics while he was campaigning for Bernie Sanders. So I'm not exactly sure what soured his experience more-so than the initial setup (which he also struggled to wrap his head around).
I suspect he didn't understand why his instance was defederated, and just saw the people around him complaining that it had happened. Kind of a bummer because he introduced me to Sync and would fit in really well here, but something went awry.
I found set up to be a little involved as well. Was there any particular aspect about it that you recall being unnecessarily complicated?
I don't know if it's still this way, but at the time I felt as though I had joined an empty cell on reddit and had to go through pages upon pages of potential subs/interests, many of which were vastly under-populated or duplicates from various other instances. It felt a bit like using a radio dial to find stations out in the static, and most of them weren't interesting. I was using Jerboa and didn't care much for it, but after Sync arrived my experience became nearly indistinguishable from reddit.. except I'm not always stressed out and constantly dealing with inflammatory assholes and social confrontation.
Lemmy has definitely grown a lot since I arrived, though. I do miss niche communities, especially for old PC games that are no longer mainstream.. But I haven't been back to reddit since before the blackouts. It wasn't good for my mental health.
Defederation is the biggest issue holding lemmy back IMO. If we could honestly say you can join any instance and it doesn't matter it would make onboarding a lot easier.
I think it's a combination of several factors. First of all there is the network effect. A social media platform gets interesting once there are enough people and we're just about 50.000 active users. Which isn't much compared to other forums, discord servers and fanbases of single individuals (streamers, ...)
Next there needs to be some motivation to join or some attention. We had that for a moment when the Reddit API thing happened. But I don't see that as of now. We need interesting content. And a nice and welcoming community. Or something that motivates people to come here.
And there is the technical issues. We've had lots of them. Federation broke for some time. There are still some bugs and user interface issues. Moderation tools still are an issue. Onboarding (choosing an instance, finding a good app) is a bit complicated. And I don't see big leaps in software development, things that are visible/obvious to the user.