I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
The only way non tech users who comprises of 90% of the world will join Lemmy only if they have one instance which is baked in the app.
People don’t understand and don’t want to learn what instances are, how it works etc. Non tech users don’t give a shit. All they need is an app with username and password which hopefully the remember.
Once you get an app like that and the UI is reddit like , then 100% will move.
People over-react because it’s new to them, but it’s not really that complicated. It’s not like email never caught on because it’s federated.
90% dont care or want to learn tech but need fancy gadgets. Basically they need a screen and apps on a device which has been marketed successfully.
I think it’s really overstated how tech savvy you have to be. I don’t do anything highly technical here. I signed up to a server, searched for things I was interested in, and subscribed to communities with the stuff I liked. I vote, comment, and post. There are great apps on the mainstream app stores. Yes, more than one thing is inherently a bit more complicated than one thing. But, lest we forget, one is also the loneliest number.
We should really be telling people how easy this shit is.
There’s a reason nobody uses it because people like you are in every corner of Lemmy. Put it this way, if everybodys brain worked the same way then you’ll be a billionaire like Donald J trump or elon musk.
There’s a reason you’re slaving a 9-5 and trying to push Lemmy to get a purpose in life.
No doubt, if the goal was to be some rich, worthless scumfuck I’d be doing different things. I’d probably have to spend my days trying to suck Trump Coins out of some grifter’s dick. Or maybe I’d build a time machine to go back and make sure I popped out of a lady with a connection to an emerald mine. But… we all have our paths to walk. Mine is to toil endlessly in pursuit of purpose…
This conversation is actually a great example of complexity not mattering. You’re on an Australian server, I’m on a Canadian server. We’re replying to a post from a user on a third server to a community on a fourth server that people mistakenly think is American but is actually hosted in Germany. None of that matters because it just works. It’s indistinguishable from posts and comments – including you trying blame the whole thing on me – at the same place. You can make it seem very complicated but all anyone has to do is type words in the little box and press the button to post it.
The way too many people think about the Fediverse right now is like thinking that you need to know every minor detail about how a call could make it from a cell phone in Australia to a cell phone in Canada. You don’t need to know that to make a call. You don’t need to know all the minutia about ActivityPub or federation to use the fediverse.
How do you know what they do?
Is there anything wrong with trying to promote Lemmy to begin with?
Mate prolly all 9-5 slaves here. I have studied 9-5 aka middle and poor class behaviour for 15-20 years and I know when they start pushing something because they need a purpose in life like they have achieved something. Nothing wrong with that , every poor and middle class should have a purpose to exist.
If you want to play Minecraft with friends, you need to find a server. Still the most popular game in the world.
Gamers are a bit more tech savvy than average people tho
Stfu nerd
The other option is that anybody who recommends Lemmy, actually just recommends an instance. Make an account on examplelemmyserver.org and download the app XYZ should be the go-to recommendation. Not ”there are so many cool options”.
I don’t have the data to refute this but it just seems nuts to me.
Surely there are apps that allow signups from the app itself and suggest a default instance.
Voyager does, it uses Lemmy.zip by default
I agree completely, and I think this was shown definitively shown by Mastodon/Bluesky during the Twitter exodus.
While there is definitely something to be said for gradually assimilating new users into the customs of the network (I really like that Mastodon on the whole is a very respectful and inclusive space, with care paid to content warnings, alt text etc), on balance I would much rather have everyone on the fediverse - even if they brought all their Twitter-isms and Reddit-isms with them - but with strong moderation tools and protective spaces for those who want it. Then, we can win people over to those customs separately.
Many of the same apps that used to work on Reddit now work here on Lemmy, and some of the Lemmy apps now also work with PieFed.
Agreed on the sign-up but I think that too was mainly taken care of, back when lemmy.world was the default and over on Reddit people were sent direct links to the likes of e.g. feddit.org and discuss.online.
But there’s barely any content here, especially outside of leftist politics and GNU/Linux, and the people are quite toxic. The issues may be insurmountable though I am placing my hopes into PieFed, getting away from the tankie issue and also offering significantly better moderation tools.
We used to have a thriving Star Trek instance before that one guy made that one post
Which post?
A cisgender repost farmer made a post accusing the admins of being transphobic with absolutely zero evidence, and got the other repost farmers to move with him to a community on lemmy.world. He and his friends are now some of Lemmy’s biggest power mods, with influence across dozens of popular communities. The Star Trek instance had discussion forums, lore, news, and casual conversation about Trek in addition to memes. Now people only use the .world and dbzero meme communities.
Tbf, that’s not why the only or even I would guess primarily the reason why the startrek.website instance is used less. That was my first instance hop after Kbin.Earth died off (with that whole Ernst fiasco), and I abandonded it due to the very MANY technical glitches - like I remember making a post a couple times that did not make its way over to Lemmy.World for like a week, by which time of course nobody saw it, since even though it was “new” (to them) the time had gotten back-dated to its original, so it looked and acted like it had simply been passed over and ignored by the community previously, at which point it simply continued to be so forever.
Also seveal times I would write a comment but if I spent >1 minute doing so, then it would not let me post - though neither would it deny my post either, instead simply spinning forever trying but never succeeded, my only recourse being to copy and paste it into another window to try again, and hope to avoid duplicates. Sometimes even voting was problematic, requiring MANY presses and also waiting between each to see if it “took” because of the network issues.
Please note that most non-Lemmy.World instances were having those kinds of problems at the time, one of the multiple reasons being due to how Lemmy would send each individual item on its own (a vote, a comment, a post) rather than bundled together in packets of information, causing especially instances that are geographically far from Lemmy.World to struggle severely and be behind for weeks to MONTHS (aussie.zone was hit particularly hard). So I do not blame the instance admins for that, although the problem was more severe on STW, so I created what at first was an alt to use during the the times that STW was most problematic, but since Discuss.Online had such fantastic uptime, just started using it permanently.
Also I don’t know if you are talking about Stamets or FlyingSquid or whoever, but I will note that the Tenforward community is now even more fragmented before, with a version now on Piefed.world (it is the #2 community located there), where ironically they decided NOT to put a link back to tenforward@lemmy.world (e.g. as a Sister community), plus they still call the new one by the same name, making it at least LOOK like they want it to become the new default?
Anyway PieFed has the ability to fight against such fragmentation effects by joining together all related communities into a single conjoined multi-community (“Topics” are made by admins and the “Feed” versions are user-customizeable and shareable!), see e.g. https://piefed.social/topic/tv-movies/star-trek that puts Risa, Tenforward, Daystrom Institute, and Star Trek all together.
Startrek.website was never primarily local traffic. It used to be mostly lemmy.world users posting Star Trek content to the Star Trek communities, a lot like dullsters.net, but less extreme.
The off-instance users mostly stopped posting there and moved to Ten Forward, because of that clique’s post.
Maybe. I did not even know about that post at the time - and I still am not sure that I do even now - and to similar posts people seemed to have mostly responded that they too were not aware of things. People might be a lot lazier than you are giving them credit for!:-P e.g. people coming over from Reddit simply hop onto lemmy.world without giving a single moment’s thought to any considerations like spreading things out across the Threadiverse - which for someone’s first instance choice I do not criticize (at least, back then it was more understandable), since they can best learn about the Threadiverse by having joined it, and then make a different decision later on.
Nowadays, lemmy.world makes up roughly a third of the Threadiverse (14.2k / (35.2k + 2K PieFed + 0.7k Mbin). Over on r/RedditAlternatives, people like Blaze primarily direct new users towards feddit.org (iirc) or discuss.online (for people in the USA), or more recently PieFed (both are generalist instances and avoid issues with having the name “Lemmy” as part of it). Setting aside any issues with Lemmy.World’s moderation practices (which personally I think are mostly overblown… though perhaps not entirely), it is just good practice to help spread people out a bit.
Though back then, Lemmy.World made up a whopping ~80% of the Threadiverse. So having “mostly lemmy.world users” posting was the experience shared by pretty much every community across the entire Threadiverse (back then, mainly just called Lemmy, as first Kbin and then Mbin were always barely noticeable blips with <1k active users except the very first month it started).
I do not doubt that there was additional specific drama there - several of those mods are kinda known for being drama lamas:-P - just adding this background context to it all.
Piefed.zip is my goto nowadays
Yes, I agree that most users were unaware, but most users also follow the leader-y types who have the strong opinions. Those three repost farmers worked together to move all the content over, and anyone who investigated was given the post with the transphobia claim as a reason. This locked in the network effect that made most people move over to Ten Forward, with little outcry.
ST.W did have legitimate moderation problems, but the problems with the Ten Forward clique are much worse.
Sounds like Section 31 to me.
Is that the original instance? https://startrek.website/
I think we have to think more about network effects and be willing to move away further from copying Reddit. Otherwise we end up with the same powermod problems. Reddit has used Subreddits to split a massive crowd. We don’t have such a big crowd so there could be better ways to organise our posts.
This. Normal people can barely remember a domain name unless it’s also the name of the brand. So this platform is filtering for tech enthusiasts which leaves us with the same two-dimensional profile as every other platform.