Since my favorite reddit app came to Lemmy I’m really keen on getting more people into the fediverse to pump up the volume of content around here. Are there any initiatives that we can assist to get folks onboard?
I had my wife join, and she likes it, but laments the slow pace of new material in the communities.
I actually think Lemmy needs more work before it grows much bigger. The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit.
I completely agree. I'm personally holding off on heavy promotion of this platform until we hit 1.0. If people join too early and are turned off by the lack of polish, they may not come back after it's fixed.
Yes. Besides, there isn’t any profit being made, is there? I mean, today, more users just means more cost.
today, more users just means more cost
Not if they’re setting up their own servers. This kind of horizontal growth is the healthiest way to grow a federated network, and something we can do that centralised platforms can’t.
Well in theory, more users do mean more donations.
They need to add paid awards with some split for Lemmy development and the instance. That was the reason people bought into Reddit gold. It was a good faith, fund the platform thing.
Awards would only work for people on your own instance though. Pushing them across instances is difficult. If they’re free, they become worthless and defeat the purpose. And passing money between instances is stupidly complicated. I guess you’d have to go to the instance in order to buy the award there. Which gives people an incentive to run their own instance. I’d hope that wouldn’t make servers too small. As much as people seem to like the idea of many, many small instances federated, I think the system works best with several large instances than a million small ones.
I guess it’s complicated.
It’s tough to sell some of the niche communities without proper spoiler tagging, too. Need something easier to use that works on all platforms.
Lemmy in general uses this but a lot of mobile UI’s don’t have proper implementations (or at least they didn’t for a while). I’m not sure if liftoff is still in development but the reason I switched back to Jerboa was because spoiler support was finally added
The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit
Fair point. The same was said of Mastodon many moons ago. A lot of people put a lot of time and energy into detailed feature requests, describing the problem to be solved, and exactly how their proposed solution would work.
Given that I’ve also seen the same complaint about apps in other federated networks like matrix, maybe what’s needed is a general solution? A website where experienced mods describe the problems they strike, and how social software developers could help them with mod features.
All I want is the ability to block inbox replies when I say something controversial.
That would be nice, but for now you could just mark all as read without reading them.
I have actually found that people don’t respond to me at all when I say something they feel is controversial. I get a ton of downvotes and maybe once out of every 5 or so times I get one really persistent person who won’t let it go. But that’s it.
Don’t focus on looking for ways to find new members. Focus on ways to make people who find the fediverse want to stay. Accomplish that by putting something here that they like to see and want to see again.
When they join the Fediverse, or when they come to visit and consider joining, they’re going to search for the stuff they want to see. They might look for memes, but more likely, they’re going to look for their hobbies. If the only hobbies reflected here are gaming and programming and the fediverse itself, most people are not going to want to stay, the userbase is going to develop an even heavier bias towards certain types of people, it will become more alienating to other types of people, and it will stagnate.
Make an effort to post about and comment about other things. Cooking, movies, TV, sports, fashion, hair, plants, decor, architecture, history, religion, travel, a nearby city or town. Join those communities. Remember, when you see a cool article about nutrition, or a cool video guide to Copenhagen that you think people will enjoy, share it here. Post it, even if the community is small and you don’t think people will care, because we need to seed communities with something. This is what I’ve been doing in a few communities, but mostly in !malefashionadvice. It’s been frustrating, I haven’t really been able to build the community up yet, but it’s okay.
While we’re at it, don’t alienate people by posting, commenting about, or upvoting things that… suck. Keep all forms of bigotry at the door. If you’re a hardcore libertarian or tankie or militant atheist… I’m not going to tell you to stop believing what you believe, but try to cool it, like 10%? Please? Nobody wants you breathing down their throats with extremism.
And… I’ve done this too, but let’s make sure that we’re not focusing too much on meta posts. They can be worthwhile, but they also are not what new people want to see.
Couldn’t agree more. A focus on new members is a terrible idea. Just focus on making Lemmy better.
Eh. I do also want to see lemmy grow, but it has to grow through different communities, if the only active community is 196 then it’s going to grow in a very shitty direction. If it grows through hobby communities, it will slowly capture the charm and power of the Reddit network—as a place you can go to talk about anything and have any problem solved.
Totally agree this is the way, and I just subscribed to !malefashionadvice Found fashion subs on reddit pretty standoffish and not helpful, so going to give this a try.
Definitely. Saw another one of your posts on MFA, thanks for your work there
I dig. I’ll make an effort to post in my hobby subs (woodworking and 3d printing) to get some good shit in there. 😉
Good comments in here about the need for better mod tools etc. Not something I normally think about myself.
It’s a difficult issue to overcome. You need an active user base so people have content to view, but people won’t use the platform if there’s no content.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day” - it’s going to take time to build the user base.
The first steps here would be to be active, post and reply to content. Try to get friends or coworkers to join, but you gotta give them the caveat that it’s early, it’s not going to be like reddit now but it could be!
Need to find a new gallowboob. Better if it’s an actual group of users sharing the same id and pumping out quality content
I’ve got good news for you
This guy right here, officer
Which reddit app came to Lemmy?
Sync
I hope the developer of Relay makes a Lemmy app. I’m trying Boost and it’s just OK. I might try a web based one (Photon or Alexandrite) next since I don’t think a native app really adds any value over a PWA.
I use the default PWA for my instance and whenever I go back to my home page it acts like I am logged out until I reload the page. It gets old fast because it switches me from subscribed to local posts. I may finally cave and seek out a dedicated app in the hopes it works more smoothly.
Photon looks like it’ll work better than the standard Lemmy web UI. I just need to get around to seeing if it works as a PWA, and installing it on my Lemmy server.
Sync for Lemmy is pretty good. Closest thing to Relay atm.
I’ve tried Jerboa, Sync, Boost, Connect, and Liftoff. They’re all good, but IMO none of them are quite as good as Relay.
I’m over here now thanks to Boost.
Ok. Never heard of it. I am an Apollo refugee.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Post noodz
We’ve got those condensed over at lemmynsfw.com, and I believe they are actively looking for more mods
But please pump up good content. not just low effort re-posts.
Linking to Lemmy image posts is a bad experience. This use case needs to be much better because content is the main way that non-Lemmy users can be motivated to join Lemmy. I tried to share this with a friend yesterday, and had to explain that the image I actually wanted them to see is locked behind a tiny thumbnail, and that the full size Good Place Janet someone commented is not what I wanted them to see (at least not without the context of the posted image).
There’s no way to open a shared Lemmy link in your client of choice. You can manually add URLs on Android, but you have to do that for every Lemmy instance, so that’s not going to fly. I don’t know if there’s any solution at all on iOS.
There’s not a good way to control what content I see. It’s essentially either “everything” or “a single community”. On Reddit, you could already have multiple communities about the same topic on Reddit, but usually one was dominant, and you had multireddits to save you if there truly are a few good related subreddits. Now on Lemmy, you multiply that problem by N instances, and subtract the multireddit feature. This situation simply must be made better somehow.
This should solve that when it gets implemented.
There’s not a good way to control what content I see. It’s essentially either “everything” or “a single community”. On Reddit, you could already have multiple communities about the same topic on Reddit, but usually one was dominant, and you had multireddits to save you if there truly are a few good related subreddits. Now on Lemmy, you multiply that problem by N instances, and subtract the multireddit feature. This situation simply must be made better somehow.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071#issuecomment-1653885992
Nice, thanks for the link. That link is about the posting side, whereas I was talking only about the viewing side (apparently covered in issue 808), but the posting side is arguably even more important in reducing fragmentation. Just as it’s frustrating to group N communities for viewing, it’s equally frustrating to post to N communities, and then have to interact with them separately.
Unfortunately until it’s implemented I just can’t bring myself to use Lemmy full time. It’s too chaotic content wise, but once it’s implemented I may fully switch over.
Eh, if you’re mostly just consuming/lurking, it’s probably better to use Lemmy by viewing all posts on all communities on all instances, then filtering out the communities you don’t like. Gonna be like that until it gets more popular, and importantly, stops becoming less popular.
Currently on reddit if you attempt to link to a image directly outside of reddit and somebody clicks it, it’ll redirect them to a media viewer page that hides all the comments but provides a link to view them. As much as I hate that redirect, I don’t think it is a terrible idea for Lemmy to do as well because of the issue your friend had with the thumbnail that you wanted them to click.
I don’t like Reddit’s approach. It hides nearly all information about the post. You don’t get to see the number of upvotes or comments, and you can only see as much of the title as fits on a single line.
I’d rather the image post viewer default to an expanded state, and have a clearer delineation between the image and comments. Right now, there’s not even a header saying “Comments”. You’re expected to just know.
Even on a slow connection, if you’ve clicked the link, you’re there to view the post. The image simply must be visible by default. It would be more interesting to allow clients to choose what image quality to load, but I don’t know a good way to do that. Maybe default to low quality, then you can choose high quality after logging in?
It would be amazing to be able to easily and reliably link comments to places, like r/locationhere might have done in Reddit. I am finding it slow to work that out here.
As a lurker who doesn’t post much:
Improve the quality of the platform. Fix the moderation issues. Find a solution to communities being fragmented across multiple servers. Keep improving reliability. And so on.
It’s not intuitive to do so.
Doing the lord’s work right there. Hah!
Content rate needs to go up, I agree, but the biggest source of content in comparable social media came from something I’d like to avoid: power users.
we could offer every new member a free pony and maybe a soft drink of their choice
Since my favorite reddit app came to Lemmy
What app is this?
Boost for Lemmy. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenmayayo.lemmy
Will check it out, thank you!
Sync, probably
Boost, apparently
