this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

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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can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance.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

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.

--

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.

--

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.

--

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:

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 [email protected] 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:

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

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Prevent opinion downvoting by disabling downvotes globally.

50 upvotes, 90 downvotes, that's not problematic at all, but there is the huge total score of -40 in this case that could lead to the deletion of the post or comment.

By the way: My instance is one of the few with downvotes disabled. So, if you want to give me feedback on this, I can only see comments...

Opinion downvoting was the most toxic feature of Reddit and led to perfect echo chambers. We should have left it there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The thing I hate worst about Lemmy is that a lot of people are dickheads about their opinion, which often is barely different from the persons' opinions you see them aggressively shitting on. In other cases the opinions are pretty different but start with the same basic premise, yet some users see no common ground at all. It's become really disheartening honestly. There are probably more than 30 users like that which I had to block for my own sanity

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

This is the twitter and reddit ethos. Everyone is Super Smart and You Are Wrong Ha Ha.

On reddit you can find smaller communities where people are more normal and it's closer to having a discussion at a bar than it is going on to /r/politics or something.

People DEFINITELY don't like showing up at a new place and posting stuff and people piling on with snark and stuff.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (13 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This is the best platform for constant live updates about what the people you don't like are up to. Then there's articles about everything that's wrong in the world and also some memes - mostly political.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

selection of 20 non-political,tech,memes communities: https://feddit.uk/post/22376629

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Just my opinion: No need to focus on reddit. The world is not focused by that platform, and there are other people on the Internet.

To attract an audience, you need exactly to attract an audience. Add indexing by search engines, Add SEO optimization for lemmy-ui, etc. People can find interesting instances exactly in google search after that without any provisioning. That's why web search engines be created.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Just a thought I’m having, but rather than just spamming Reddit with Lemmy links maybe we should promote it more on Linux type areas, at least people coming from there will find their niche content here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

Sounds like we're filtering out the exact type of people I would never want to come from Reddit. Dunno why y'all want them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Everyone else is already here or is not interested in text-based forums

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

I generally try to avoid political shit here myself, it's too depressing and I'm not sure it's really a good format.

But for those who are out there posting cybertruck memes, thanks for scaring away the MAGAs for the rest of us. It is much appreciated.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

"Reddit but you can block the part that annoys you"

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Two thoughts:

  • I'm subscribed to 160 communities, most very small, but see interesting stuff due to the Scaled option - also deliberately avoid the big news communities. Evidently, it takes time to join 160 small cs, so to get started it could be handy to have an all/local except list, and remove the biggest news /memes unless people tick a box saying they like such. Or make an algorithm that prioritises stuff related to what I upvote (which is how other social sites seem to get people started - e.g. i just tried rednote and it quickly learned i like mountains and trains) - but i guess that's hard to implement as each instance would need to work out 'related to'.
  • 2nd point - there are other user-interfaces - I'm using Alexandrite which has a better layout than lemmy default, but how to make this easier (instructions suggest docker, how many casual users will do that ...)?
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

The fact that they (or you) complain about the "All" timeline having the same stuff in all servers shows they have no idea what they're talking about: that's the entire point of an All feed! (plusminus stuff like defederation). It would make more sense to compare the Local feed of instances, IMO.

Besides, the default sorts are active and popularity nowadays, so it only makes sense that stuff that we care about and have to have words with, takes the forefront. If you want to solve that the solution is not "let's ignore what's going on around the world", it's "post more cats" and "post more ich_iel". Or just use the Scaled sort, I don't understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.

And that's right there with the complaint about the 42k users too. The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about. Complaining that for the next people to come in "I'm going to be called a westerner imperialist" is delicious hypocrisy on not noticing how indoctrinated they are.

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