I hate big tech controlling social media. I desperately want social media to be federated.
I really love community-driven social media like Reddit. Lemmy feels… too small. I really loved that Reddit let me jump into any niche hobby, and instantly I had a community. Lemmy, you’ll be lucky if that community even exists, and if it does, chances are nobody has posted in ages.
On the other hand, Lemmy is full of political content lately. I’ve basically been doom scrolling everything US election-related, and it’s really starting to take a toll on my mental health.
I know I can filter content. I know I can post and be the change I seek. Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.
Not sure what the point of this is, or if it’s even the right community to vent about this. I just really want to replace Reddit, but I find myself going back more and more (e.g. r/homekit is very active compared to Lemmy version).
removed by mod
I like it as a platform but the userbase just isn’t there.
They said, in a thread that has literally tens of thousands of words in replies.
Compared to Reddit the userbase here is miniscule.
Feel free to block communities with political content.
You can also use an app or alternative frontend to filter keywords. !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca has a post about that.
For communities, !newcommunities@lemmy.world can help
For home kit, the Apple communities are probably more active, and you should be able to post about it there too
How do I do this? Because honestly, yeah, I’ve come to a point where I’m realizing that, while it’s my responsibility to do what I can in the world, it is not my responsibility to just bear witness to suffering when I can do nothing to prevent it. All it’s doing it hurting me for no gains to anyone.
One of the front ends that have keyword filtering is voyager.
definitely agree. this has helped save my sanity in recent times.
Lemmy is amazing. I am so glad I found my way here. I was doom scrolling as well. I had to unsubscribe from all my political communities I had joined and just keep one of my news committees. I then expanded the groups for my other interests. This really helped. You are in control of your time line here.
Yes Lemmy is smaller and doesn’t have instantly fully formed communities. Reddit has been around for almost 2 decades. Lemmy is newer, smaller, and actively fights the sorts of shenanigans that Reddit initially used to get big.
If you want more niche activity, make posts and interact with posts. Lemmy is user driven- that means you. It isn’t a giant megasite where you can just expect to be a passive receiver of endless content.
I was their in reddit beginning. There were no initial shenanigans. It was a good place and existed at just the right time, when people wanted to leave Digg because it was turning into a dumpster fire, similar to what reddit has done.
When reddit started turning to shit there just wasn’t anything for the masses to migrate to that was available other than here. Problem is that here isn’t as simple to get into. In lemmy, the learning curve is slightly higher than “bare minimum”.
Sort of, but it didn’t really work. Reddit existed in 2005, but wasn’t popular. It only became popular in 2010 after all of Digg went to it, because it was pretty much a Digg clone, but with owners who weren’t Digg.
I’ve presented you with the proof that early Reddit was populated with large numbers of sockpuppet accounts by the owners, creating whole cloth communities to draw in users, which is not something that is happening on Lemmy.
The entire reason the Digg mass exodus was viable was people leaving Digg found these “preexisting” Reddit communities and felt more comfortable joining in.
Lemmy doesn’t have that socketpuppet population to springboard with, so growth is slower and unpopulated communities are not falsely full of fake users.
I hung out on reddit long enough over the previous couple of years when people were up in arms to leave. It wasn’t the lack of subs or community size that kept people away. It was simply that it was harder to figure out how to get up and going. You can’t just go to lemmy.com, create a name and password, and start doing stuff. Further still is that now people want an apk for phone browsing and particularly when the masses wanted to leave reddit, there was also no “use this apk and its easy”. Plus, creating an instance is much more work than creating a subreddit.
It was never about the size of the website already appearing to be in place. Lemmy just has a harder entry fee. It keeps lemmy at a lower user base in the same way every subscription service in existence knows it wants to make things super easy to sign up, but time intens8ve and difficult to cancel. Because it takes a bit of effort, lots of people don’t get around to doing it.
You can’t just go to lemmy.com, create a name and password, and start doing stuff.
Go to https://lemm.ee/
Have a look around, see if the content and the formatting is appealing to you, register an account if you want to be able to curate your feed further
Go to https://lemm.ee/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world to see communities (equivalent of subs) that might be interesting to you.
Use Voyager as a mobile app: https://www.lemmyapps.com/Voyager. When they ask for your “instance”, use “lemm.ee”
If you want more choices for apps, have a look at https://www.lemmyapps.com/
I think the Lemmy devs political stance and instances such as hexbear are more detrimental to the success of the platform than the entry bar.
Edit: Discuit is a centralized site, and now has 209 weekly active users: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/OiU8YjZ_
This is great for people looking now, but the info, the apks, and the knowledge to get there was less known or not very good a year or so ago.
Also, I’m personally a big fan of “thunder” for my phones lemmy apk. It’s awesome.
The difference was that Digg used to be the site. Then Digg ticked off all their users and 90% of them migrated to reddit, which was already available.
Reddit had its dumpster fire moment over the last couple years, but there was no available place for everyone to quickly migrate over to other than Lemmy, and it didn’t really happen. Lemmy is a bit harder to get used to and figure out, so we missed out on a huge migration.
So its doubtful that lemmy will ever expand out like reddit did. Not for a long time, anyhow. It will be great if we make it to a couple million active users. At that point, I’d be totally content. Things get too sloppy once you go over 10 million users, it seems.
Funny cause I reduced my recent reddit usage cause I got tired of the toxic post election political liberal cope
One suggestion I saw a while ago was to use more general communities for things you’re interested in and as it grows then the more niche communities can be made. Ex: post about a specific game you like in gaming up until enough people like it to make a sub for that game. Or post about a song you don’t know in asklemmy until enough people do that to make whatsthissong
I totally get wanting the niche communities and, personally, I just lurk reddit completely not voting, posting, or commenting unless as a last resort if I really need to find info that Lemmy isn’t able to provide.
It’s a slow process and I don’t think there’ll be another boost of users in Lemmy until reddit does another thing that enshittifies it to annoy people to leave.
And some times, having the initiative to create such more specific communities could be a change factor for the growth of a social media. Also, with federation, not just the person can choose where to create the community on while not making it a walled garden as other sites would still have access to it, but also if a community for the given subject already exists but the user thinks he can do better, he/she can more easily do it with how expansive the “fediverse” is.
Our community !homebrewing@sopuli.xyz has for now everything beer, wine, cider… it didn’t reach the point of creating another specific, niche community. So I totally get the niche interests aren’t represented here yet and the number of homebrewers is big.
Still we get good engagement for lemmy and there are active people from industry, so I wouldn’t call it exactly small.
you gotta realize reddit didn’t just “appear” one day with those obscure niche topics built out. There is a network effect large communities have. We need hundreds of thousands more members before that is possible.
I think you probably weren’t there for early reddit, but most of the active posters here on Lemmy were. It was tiny. Like Lemmy.
You can’t force those niche communities to exist here. It doesn’t work. But what you can do is post and create valuable content. and eventually we may get there.
It’s so weird to me that people are so spoiled today that they feel inconvenienced when there isn’t limitless content in their niche fields of interest being served to them on a platter every single day.
Those of us who remember the before times can tell you that the absolute best of a platform comes before that point. I’m sure it’s lovely getting your full every single second, but the best conversation, the best education, the best introspection comes when you’re allowed a few minutes between stimuli to think.
I feel like “Old woman yells at cloud” but I really feel like our younger folks who crave endless, mindless interaction, don’t know what they miss out on.
I can’t blame them, because they’ve been conditioned to be consumers of content. While they idealize creators, they also put up barriers in their minds as the the level of quality a given comment, piece of content, whatever, needs to achieve before getting involved.
I try and think of Lemmy as the equivalent of the Linux. We’re just going to have lower adoption because there isn’t a corporate juggernaut behind us promoting this thing.
But if people really want to know why reddit was able to become reddit, it happened here yesterday with cats. It’s bean memes. Its Stör. Its us developing culture of our own as a community.
So its fine. I’m not too worried. We’re doing great.
I didn’t get a wall of voids and honestly, I feel a little left out lol.
Maybe that’s part of it, but it’s not just that.
For example, I preordered a Nanoleaf Sense+ switch, which just shipped for everyone on the preorder. I’m excited to hear other people’s experiences with the product as it uses direct communication with lights via the Thread network.
If I go to Reddit’s r/nanoleaf, there are enough members that I see people posting about Sense+ within a few days of the product shipping.
And it’s not just consuming. I want to help people set up the switch too. For example, Nanoleaf has a very confusing menu in the app that took me a while to figure out. I saw someone else with the exact same issue and left a helpful comment.
Seems to be a good topic for a thread on !homeimprovement@lemmy.world ?
This is usually how it goes. The larger communities keep growing until they can branch off into the more niche ones.
Doesn’t seem that obvious, some people in the comments here point out that they prefer to have a dedicated community for their niche topic rather than posting on a generic community
And a lot of those people arrived when those communities were already built up on reddit.
This seems to be a type of post that keeps popping up more and more. Some people are venting and mourning their loss of reddit, which I get… but others have a sense of entitlement, of wanting to have things without needing to work for it. They want someone else to put in the blood, sweat and tears and be the ones to reap the benefits.
Imagine pilgrims coming to early North America and no one wanting to participate once they arrived, because no pre-built cities exited? We wouldn’t have a country in the US (though I’m sure that must have been the attitude of some)
I’ve tried, believe me I’ve tried. Posting a bunch of threads out into the void doesn’t suddenly manifest a like-minded community to reply to and engage with those threads. It won’t truly be viable until there’s a much larger userbase to begin with.
And honestly, it just comes across as patronizing to say the only reason my hobbies don’t have traction here must be because I didn’t try hard enough.
And how do you think that larger userbase is going to come into existence?
What I’m trying to get at is that people need to stay for a critical mass to be reached instead of going “there’s nobody here” and leaving.
Fighting games and Riichi Mahjong. !fgc@lemmy.world and !mahjong@lemmy.nerdcore.social exist, but are pretty barren. I’d also previously tried to start communities for them on kbin.social, but that’s gone now.
Also arcade-style versus puzzle games, but those are so dead these days that even on Reddit they didn’t have an active sub.
are pretty barren.
Have you tried promoting the fighting games community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and generic games communities? That could help you find at least a few other people who would like to discuss that topic in the fgc community
Also, !fedigrow@lemm.ee is a community dedicated to community growing, we have regular threads to discuss “shouting into the void”
because I didn’t try hard enough.
That would be pretty patronizing if I said that, I agree.
What I did say was, you need to start the conversation.
However, now that I’ve looked at your account… unless you have a secondary account to the one I’m replying to now, the whole 21 posts you’ve made over multiple communities, and that being your whole history for a year’s worth of account… maybe I am saying “try harder.” If you want to feel like that’s patronizing, that’s fine.
All the bigger communities on lemmy (like tenforward) happened because first one person posted a lot, every day. And then they were joined by others. And then the community they were in had drama so they moved to tenforward, but my point is, if you want people to talk to you about something, a single post once in a while doesn’t do it. You gotta pump out content, post memes, attract people who want to be part of the conversation. Reply to like, everyone. Be friendly. Be engaging.
Okay, now you literally are saying I didn’t try hard enough.
This is not my first account (it’s also not anywhere close to a year old, not sure where you got that idea). I’d tried to start a few communities over on kbin.social, but that’s gone now.
I don’t have the energy to spend several hours a day flooding threads nobody will engage with, just in the hopes that if I keep it up forever eventually one of them might get a reply or two. It’s not that easy, and it’s patronizing to act like that’s such a simple solution I should’ve thought of.
This is what I was getting at: communities don’t come from nothing. You’re welcome to stay where they’re pre-built for you but posting endless content is how communities get started.
When I was younger, I was someone who ran a few of those communities myself. If it’s patronizing to say you didn’t try hard enough (while you’re also declaring you, yourself, don’t have the energy to do it) then it should be less patronizing, but still fair, to say… if you don’t want to do it, don’t complain that someone else isn’t doing it for you.
If you don’t want to be on Lemmy, then don’t. Come check back in periodically to see if someone else had the energy to do what you didn’t. It’s fair to say you don’t want to do the work. Whining someone else isn’t doing it doesn’t get it done faster.
it just comes across as patronizing to say the only reason my hobbies don’t have traction here must be because I didn’t try hard enough.
It is absolutely patronizing for people to say that. And you are right to feel that way.
Maybe think about it like this. I collect and propagate one species of orchid as a hobby. Its an obscure species among orchids, which are relatively obscure plants among plant collectors, and plant collecting is a relatively obscure thing among people growing with and interacting with plants, which is a relatively obscure thing in the grand scheme of all things.
So lets assume a 5% conversion rate at every step: There are maybe 40k active users on lemmy?
So of 40k users about 2k are into plants.
Of the 2k users into plants in some manner, about 100 are into plant collecting.
Of the 100 users into plant collecting, maybe 5 are into collecting orchids.
And of the five users collecting orchids, I’m the quarter of one user who collects Vanilla planifolia and Vanilla planifolia var. tahitensis.
So if I acknowledge this, I’ve got a couple options. First, I could just start a vanilla community. But I really shouldn’t expect other people to participate, because I recognize that I’m probably the only vanilla grower on all of lemmy. If I do that, I should probably think about it as a place more like a personal blog or place for me to record my story. And maybe over time, it can grow in popularity and get a following.
Alternatively, I can share my exploits on larger subs, like c/plants, where I’ll probably do well because there are more users, and the content I’m sharing is interesting and unique because so few people are into/ do what I do.
So if you can adjust your exceptions, there absolutely is a place for you here. But we’re the flea market to Reddit’s mall of America approach. But remember, Reddit too started as a flea market. It was a place for internet weirdos with weird hobbies and senses of humor. But appreciate you’ll be a lone diamond here, but that gives you a chance to stand out.
Could vanilla orchids do well as a houseplant? I’m zone 7b/8a so I’ve had success playing around with semi tropical plants, but I don’t have greenhouse space to overwinter frost intolerant plants.
I grew them in green houses for years. If you can keep the humidity high (60%+), they’ll grow, but you’ll won’t get flowers.The leaves will be very diminished, and the plant less robust. Two things very different about vanilla compared to other orchids: they aren’t an epiphyte; and they grow as a vine.
Typically, in the wild (and many of my cuttings are from ‘adventures’ to abandoned plantations) Vanilla has a “grow and fall over” vegetative habit. It grows tendrils down to the soil (which turn to accessory roots) following a support plant or structure. Its also extremely apically dominant. It barely branches, and it really, really wants to grow ‘straight up’. It takes a substantial amount of training to get them to grow sideways. That was many words to say they do best in high humidity, regular potting soil, and need lots of space (especially vertically).
If you are still interested let me know or DM me. I’d be happy to send some cuttings.
A lot of people want that, it’s not that easy to find and it never was.
We just got spoiled by the good days of the internet.
Yeah, the reason I like Lemmy is because it reminds me of old reddit. Like old old reddit, before the Digg migration.
Growth is a process, not an immediate switch. Every social media started small and then grew. If immediatism, or however it is called, was the predominant factor for any struggle to become an achievement, nothing would be achieved.
And on lack of contents, I, for one, block everything that is not of my interest, quite a lot to be honest, specially with certain niches spamming the federated platforms, but even then, I get a feeling I should trim even some of the communities/magazines I follow/subscribe to as I can barely catch up to those already.
Build Lemmy and they will come!
Someone has to be the first on the dance floor, and you don’t want to be it.
Most people are obviously more lurkers than contributors. I don’t think one should expect that to change, given the vastly different mindsets behind it.
I’m happy to create posts, but it’s hard if you’re the only person. If I could get a few active people, just all it feels collaborative, I would.
Admittedly, I haven’t tried that hard, but I’m going to make more posts in communities I want to grow.
Unfortunately, community building is work, and it’s work that users actually do on the bigger, corporate sites. Those community builders helped get those spaces going, helped make them appealing, and help trap users there. In smaller spaces like this, we need to be the community builders, not just the content consumers.
One thing I find really helps is to use something that doesn’t look like the space you left. Lemmy looks an awful lot like Reddit, but it has themes, and even alternative web clients that can change the experience and make it feel like something new.
Lemmy also isn’t the content and communities, it’s just the website’s server software. You can access… ugh… the “threadiverse”… from websites using other ActivityPub enabled servers. There’s an ActivityPub Discourse plugin. nodeBB is adding ActivityPub support in its next version. Friendica and Hubzilla have group support, and work with Lemmy-hosted communities.
Find a new window on social media, and it might help you engage with it differently.
The other thing you can do is just niche down a bit here. Find a few active communities that you’re interested in, and focus your attention on them. Lemmy is actually much, much more like classic forums, where communities or spheres of interest have their own website. The difference here is that you can actually look outside of those communities to interact with other forums, too. It works a a lot better if you treat it that way. Find your home, as it were, and branch out from there.
Unfortunately, the modern mental model of social media is the fire hose, not the node-and-spoke that is actually best supported by the technology.
I have really been enjoying Comic Strips. There can be some political content, but there’s plenty of other interesting and funny stuff too.
Rather than trying to replace something else, it’s a good idea to look for what’s new to you.
I don’t want to simply repeat what others have said, but on a personal level, I’m actually enjoying the smaller overall community - it makes it a bit more personal, I feel. I enjoy that. Yeah, fair enough, it’s not great for niches, but you don’t have to be tethered down to one place for your content.
Back in my day, you had to go to completely different websites for your niche content! Forums were the mainstream!
I agree that, asking with the bad things OP mentions, there are good things about a smaller site. I remember a lot of times on Reddit when I had something to say, but when I went into the thread there were thousands of comments and I’d feel like there just wasn’t a point in adding mine.
On Lemmy, when I make a comment, it’s very likely to be seen (for better or worse), and I have much more of a feeling of adding to the conversation. It’s more like joining a conversation at a party.
I guess maybe the reason I fell into niche communities on Reddit was that I liked the smaller feel. So I do appreciate how many people actually see my comments. But I also appreciate communities that are focused on specific topics. Maybe I need to consider broader categories on Lemmy.
I think you’d be surprised how many people here share your interests. You may not be able to scroll through an album of other people’s projects relevant to your hobby right now, but I bet you can post to a more general community with a very specific question (or show off your own project) and get a good amount of engagement and feedback, maybe even with broader perspective than you might get in a subreddit with an established “meta” for your hobby.
Ya I don’t mind and I think it’s because this place reminds me a lot of old forums or old reddit. I really miss some of my old forums and the community that would be built there.
. The smaller feel also encourages contributing over lurking, because every individual’s comment can actually get read, unlike the huge megathreads of reddit.
Thing is, it can be great for niches! The Star Trek instance is very Star Trek. The TTRPG instance has a lot of potential. If we try to build the fediverse out from these niche nodes first, instead of starting from the general and trying to branch out, it could work a lot better than what we currently have.
One time I complained about a response I got in a separate post and then that person found me and responded again.
I wasn’t even mad, that’s good dedication.
Hmm maybe I should post to niche communities then repost to broader categories.
Or just assess whether your niche is sustainable at all, if not then just use the broader category
The problem, as already stated, is that there are not many communities in the first place. And if there are, they’re likely more or less dead, with weeks or even months old posts.
Huh? There are a looot of communities. Of course, a good number of them are dead. To get a good idea of which smaller communities are active, I’d recommend following the !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl posts. @Blaze@feddit.org did “active communities” overview threads a while ago at !newcommunities@lemmy.world too.
I’m not here to post stuff, that’s the opposite of what I want. And the things I’m subscribed to I can scroll through within a couple minutes before they’re dry. It’s just too empty here with only a few threads and comments here and there.
Well then I can tell you you’re in the wrong place. There aren’t algorithms. There aren’t bots. Just people like me posting. It is run by and for individuals, and all posts are made by individuals. If you don’t want to post then you are the one to be mad at for not enough content
The fuck are you talking about? It’s not about algorithms (which there are some, just not content based), it’s about the lack of people. Maybe work on your reading comprehension. It’s simply a matter of the fediverse lacking critical mass.
I don’t know why you people keep suggesting people do something that’s not within their interest & use case.
A lot of the small communities are not dead, they simply have a low post rate. If you actually post something of interest to them, they get engagement.
Social media suffers from the curse of the Pareto principle: The overwhelming majority of users do not generate content. They also suffer from the network effect: Most people will be where the content is, and most content creators will stay where the audience is. What we have on Lemmy is a group of people that skews more heavily toward consumption or commenting than posting new content, and the ever present thief of joy.
