this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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Fedigrow
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A comment saying
Currently has 15 votes, while my comment suggesting people to try Lemmy as it's bigger is down to 2.
I'm not sure if Lemmy just has a very bad reputation over there in general, or if Discuit people are brigading the comments
People find the "which 'Gaming' community is the real one?" issue very frustrating, because they currently have the illusion that they have access to everything all in one place. The idea that you can't have a discussion with a million other people is meaningless to them, totally crushed under the weight of FOMO.
They look at Reddit, and they look at Lemmy, and they see that they're different, but don't really care why. They see that different (not more, just different) effort is required to navigate the space. They don't care that they just need a different mental model to understand the space -- they don't want one. And the design language of the space communicates to them that they don't need one.
I'm not going to get up on my soapbox and rant and rave about this today -- I'm too tired, and it's too busy of a week -- but this is what I mean when I keep saying we can't win against centralized social media by aping the UI. "Lemmy" just isn't a Reddit replacement in the same way that another centralized service is. A Lemmy-based website, sure. But not the network of them.
Wouldn't they have FOMO by not following /r/Gaming, /r/Games, /r/Videogames, etc. as well?
They don't really need one. They can just open https://vger.app/ , see that it's quite similar to what Apollo used to be, then have a look around and see if they like it. They don't need to understand federation to lurk. They don't need to understand federation to install an app.
If they click on the vote or comment buttons, Voyager suggests them to register an account on Lemm.ee. Again, no need to understand what federation is to get it running.
Reddit could be manipulating votes that mention Lemmy, or otherwise shadowbanning mentions of it.
It could be that a first glance at lemmy is total shit. The "front page" is a hot mess, half in German with piles of pervy anime and Linux posts. It might be hard to believe, but not everyone likes that stuff. It takes heavy curating to get a moderately personally interesting feed and very few people are going to do that.
But that's just it, "Lemmy's" front page isn't like that. There's no "Lemmy" front page. There's a thousand different ones.
Reddit is a website. Lemmy is a potentially unlimited, constantly changing, number of websites. They're not directly comparable.
I just opened the following instances without being logged on
The same posts are there. You would only get a very different All feed on something like https://beehaw.org, but they are quite unique in that regard.
So, what we mean by "Lemmy", then, is the circle of 5 - 10 largest, unfocused "general interest" Lemmy-based sites?
Because front page of startrek.website and ttrpg.network look quite a bit different. The All page of ttrpg.network is meaningfully, though not radically, different from the All pages on those sites. And you've already mentioned beehaw, which probably should be seen as a better model for how to operate a Lemmy-based website. leminal.space also has a fairly long block list, and its All page is also meaningfully different and less grating than seen on the Big 5.
It looks different depending on which site you're using. Unless you restrict yourself to the sites that do everything the same as one another.
Looks similar to the other instances except if I missed something
They have indeed hidden the LW communities somehow, interesting. However, they only have 131 monthly active users.
If that's just the theme, users of that instance using Voyager or any other alternative frontend wouldn't see any difference. Or am I missing something else?
I would rather say it's the other way around. On top of the 5 instances I picked, my statement is true for the All feed of most of the instances except the few ones you picked. So on top of the 5, there is at least
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy provides a list you can filter by monthly active users.
Most of the instances offer the same All feed, and the ones who do not are the exception rather than the rule.
How is defederating the 2 largest instances, and not updating beyond 0.18.4 a better model?
You get an ENORMOUSLY different feed checking out lemmy.ml though.
Also extremely relevant: the top instance hit by a Google search of "Lemmy" is that instance (even though DuckDuckGo pushes Lemmy.World higher).
Therefore, to a non-tech enthusiast, "Lemmy" = that instance. We can argue that it should not be, but it is what it is.
As always, that's why people should always give one of the instances above when they mention Lemmy, to avoid people having to look up themselves
Exactly this. Lemmy isnt that great if you're not into few specific topics. My ban/blacklist is HUGE. It took a ton of work to make it so every other post isn't anime porn/fantasy fulfillment and suggestions to switch to Linux. If I'm being honest I still browse reddit in an app because otherwise I've run out of things to see on Lemmy in about 20 minutes each day.
It is interesting how people get different results. My process has been to simply block a user or instance when it's obvious nothing from there will ever be interesting to me. I haven't had to do that a lot though, and I don't see any of what you suggest. Then again, while I see mostly Lemmy content, I use Mbin, so perhaps that's part of it as well. Some instances might preblock better than others.
I do think the learning curve is higher than traditional social media. Not that it's hard, but the average person wants a plug and play without having to do anything. The caveat of having a preset curation of "safe" feed is that most people don't explore past that, and it's the random stuff that wanders in that makes things more interesting.
I think a difference between us is you block instances. I agree with the idea, but I'm hesitant to block whole instances for fear of weeding out some actually good people. I will block communities that I have zero interest in tho.
An instance block in your user settings just filters out all of the communities from thst instance. So, if you're worried about not seeing comments from users on those sites, don't be.
You are on an instance running Mbin, which iirc sorts things entirely differently, using Mbin (& Kbin)-only "Boosts" that ignore the external upvotes that Lemmy uses.
But more importantly, it looks like a lot of the most extremist content is being removed from your instance even before you have to make that call on your own. e.g. without an account I can see that the last post from https://fedia.io/u/@yogthos@lemmy.ml was a month ago, wheres if you follow the link you'll see that they made two posts and two more comments within the last hour. They are extremely prolific!!!
So e.g. you can read posts about those posts - like this one: https://fedia.io/m/meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works/t/1454997/Tankie-believes-women-s-rights-in-Afghanistan-are-the-same-as - but if you search for the title you won't see the actual post, as your instance seems to have banned it. The rest of the community is there (https://fedia.io/m/worldnews@lemmy.ml), minus this account. I don't see anything about this in a Lemmy modlog, but I don't know how to check that for Mbin (especially without an account?).
This is one of those times where how the Fediverse works is not just like email:-) - unless like Google would refuse to send or receive emails to/from Tim Cook of Apple 🍏🍎:-).
That's a valid point. We should probably get a Chill feed, and as much as some people would hate to not see news, politics and tech in there, that could help.
A small list I just curated that could be in there
There is https://piefed.social/topic/chilling:-). It is too early to be recommending PieFed for a mainstream non-technical person to make an account on, but perhaps you could use that as an example to represent what such a feed could look like?
Though I for one am loving PieFed so far:-). I do have to fall back onto Lemmy quite often for tasks such as searching or performing mod duties or previewing how content will look prior to posting, but there are so many things that PieFed can do that Lemmy cannot. Like resolve 50 notifications with one button press, and either enable or disable notifications on a per-item basis (a comment or post or even an entire community, whatever), and block all users from an instance, and it embeds YouTube to show a preview and watch without leaving the site (in fairness, Tesseract likewise can do the latter for Lemmy, and also uniquely adds doing that for Loops videos as well - see it in action here).
For people who like to fine-tune the control of their environment, regardless of whether they use Arch Linux btw, PieFed is really awesome... so long as you know how to fall back onto a Lemmy (Mbin?) when you need it. i.e. for the early adopter mindset it's a great (almost) daily driver already. And this even without knowing how to code, but for someone wanting to run their own instance it's even more amazing since it uses Python rather than Rust for the back-end. (There's also Sublinks that uses Java, but no developments have been announced for a long time due to family issues by the main developer).
Lemmy has a "mark all read" button, I might be missing something here?
Hrm, I don't see it - does it only show up when there are (multiple) notifications? If so then it is me who is missing something here.
Oh, Voyager has such a button I see. Above, I meant the base Lemmy web UI.
Interesting. Yeah perhaps it hides when there are no notifications to be read. Edit: yes, this is the case! If even one notification is present then this row gets added.
PieFed always shows it. I'm not saying that's better, just helping to explain the source of confusion.
Happy this is now clarified!
And we (re-)learned something in the process:-).
I think it could be the "Tankie Devs" FUD coming into play. People don't understand the devs don't control anything other than lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml, if they start injecting BS code, we could always fork it.
But one "Devs are Tankies" comment would just scare the neolibs and centrists away. (conservatives are never joining, that's not just a dev PR issue, its the userbase being too "left wing" for them, also, I doubt conservatives care about corporations controlling everything)
I tried to mitigate that with a post a few months ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/
I use it as a reference every time someone brings it up
I thought your parent comment to it was very well stated and succinct.
e.g. you don't have to know how it works anymore than someone needs to know how email or a combustion engine works - you simply click to go there and start reading stuff, if you like it then make an account and start participating as well.:-)
Lemmy requires heavy curation to block extremist content if one is so inclined (as I am), but wasn't Reddit becoming that way too when we left it? And on X I think it simply can't be done at all. It would be neat if we could add a "political" tag to filter by (like NSFW/NSFL), but meh, it is what it is.
Unlike some other instances, the default there is All, so they'll see the entirety of the Fediverse (minus Lemmygrad + Hexbear) even without an account or having to click anything at all. It's the perfect instance to recommend to the Reddit audience that is so heavily American (according to similarweb, 51%:-).
You are doing great work making sure that people are aware of what choices they have available to them - what they do with that is ofc up to them.:-)