I haven’t gone back since Apollo shut down, and not planning to, but I am curious.
I read a post somewhere that really vibed with me. It said that they use Apollo and Reddit was just a backend. When Apollo died, Reddit did too for them.
Boost just died for me a hour ago, and Reddit with it. So now I’m here.
I’m jumping between Reddit and Lemmy. Some subreddits have all of their mods booted out (r/GoCommitDie and r/OpenAI are two I can think of). Some subreddits have decided to flag their subreddit as NSFW but are being threatened by Reddit to reverse that move, and many have returned to business as usual.
Let’s face it. We’ve lost the API protest. All we can do now is make Lemmy popular and make it attractive to other users. Give people an incentive to actually join here. Our job here is not to make Lemmy a copy of Reddit. We need to make Lemmy different (in a good way!).
And here’s an unpopular opinion: we need to make Lemmy easy to use and understand. If normies find Lemmy difficult to use or understand, then we’re fucked.
My personal opinion is that normies might get confused by the fediverse and might be turned away by thinking they need to make an account on every single instance in order to participate in them. I am not proposing that we get rid of federation. What I am proposing is that we somehow make it clearer to everyone that all you really need is one account and you can get access to everywhere. I don’t know how we can do this, but I’m sure there is someone who knows.
For the normies, I just saw someone recommend the wefwef app on reddit and now here I am.
It’s 2023, people don’t need to know how the fediverse works, they just need to know which app to install.
Content is nice. It feels like reddit of old.
This is going to be great.
Right now, you DO need multiple accounts. Instances are down all the time, federation either breaks or is intentionally broken through defederation even between relatively large instances, … it gets tedious.
This isn’t my experience.
I usually hate this response… But I haven’t had any issues, this is bizarre to hear for me.
That’s just growing pains from a sudden mass migration, the hug of death if you would.
User base growing organically over time will make this happen less and less.
Lemmy as a software will get more sophisticated, the people running the software will get more used to how things operate and be able to buy more/better hardware, etc…
Right now things are just a bit chaotic from thousands of people jumping ship at the same time.
People don’t care about it being growing pains or what will happen, they’re trying it now.
And people will try it in the future when it is a better experience, too. Both things can happen, I promise you.
I feel like I haven’t seen enough of that happening in the past though. Can you share some examples of where you’d seen it? Maybe Steam? No Man’s Sky?
What other apps debuted early to a poor public reception that got people to come back and try it again and successfully change their minds?
Lemmy now has over an average of a million posts a day up from 300k a month ago. It’s experiencing massive massive growth NOW despite no venture capital being thrown at it. I don’t know why you are asking about sleeper hits when you are literally posting on one. EDIT: I’m an idiot. Misinterpreted the “1 million posts” post from yesterday as a daily total not a cumulative lifetime total.
I’m not really a normy, but the simple act of making an account is not obvious. With that barrier of entry, most people will simply never be able to join here.
Good. Its an intelligence gate.
Lack of technical expertise does not equate to a lack of intelligence.
It does though. Its not the technology… Its the critical thinking and problem solving. It could be a stone puzzle.
Please help, I can’t for the life of me work out how to Sign Up!!!
GTFO!
Please, anyone that dumb - force them to stay on Reddit. Don’t let them in!!!
Most people start by ending up on the join Lemmy website and are bombarded with info about the fediverse, and the description of each server makes it sound like you can only interact with local commities. If you link someone straight to lemmy.world I imagine they will have no problem signing up.
Oh, ok - I missed something.
I started by looking at BeeHaw from a link - but couldn’t get in.
Then Lemmy.ml, which promptly failed to do much of anything, I actually made 5 accounts with the same username in Bitwarden (just join, then search up my BendyLemmy and ‘auto-fill and save’…).
When Lemmy.world stopped responding (last week I also got tons of errors with Lemmy.ml) I just took a back seat, did something else, then spotted several ‘upgraded!!!’ posts in my feeds.
maybe drop the word federated. That word makes little sense here.
We didn’t lose. Reddit lost us and will continue to lose.
Reddit offers nothing without its (human) users. They can chatGPT all the posts they want to try and look busy, but people are gonna notice the lack of original thoughts and leave. It will be slow and it won’t be complete, but it is happening.
Fediverse services need to lead with the “all” feed. People don’t want to be pressured to pick a server without knowing what’s on it or where everyone else is. When you go to reddit, the first thing you see is the r/all feed. The posts and content is what gets people to join.
“People are gonna notice the lack of original thoughts”
My gamer in christ we go to reddit and redditlike sites to avoid original thoughts
I mean just having someone that has good real world UX skills (as in, good UX for normies) to redesign join.lemmy would probably already solve 90% of it.
I think account transfers is another thing what would help alleviate the pressure from choosing an instance.
I have good (I hope) UI skills, as in, I am good at designing good looking frontends. How do I apply to design the join.lemmy page?
Probably through the GitHub would be my guess.
I’m all for improving the user experience here on Lemmy.
But what I find not so appealing, is targeting mass adoption in a way that dumbs down the community we’re building here.
As long as we just make Lemmy a great place to be, the right kind of people will keep joining.
Meta knows exactly what to do to bring a billion new users to a new social media site, and all you have to do is look at Threads to see the kind of community they are cultivating.
Lemmy does not, and never will, have the moderation power to contend with that many bad actors. I’m perfectly fine with Lemmy having a tiny learning curve to keep out the dregs.
Making cute little infographics could help. Even Reddit had them way back when people didn’t really “get” what all the voting was about or why people were so into bacon.
This is the oldest one I could find with a quick Google search, but I am sure there were older ones as well.
What is the confusing part?
Honestly I feel like the barrier of entry for normies is a good thing. What’s the confusing part about Lemmy and the fediverse? Maybe I’m missing something
You’re just being obtuse if you think that there’s no confusion for the majority.
The absolute vast majority aren’t techies, they aren’t open to learning and they have been used to centralised simplicity.
Just trying to explain home instances, federation and defederation is more than enough to lose the interest and understanding of a vast majority.
Now the barriers do lend themselves to an entirely different feeling and community base. Whether that’s good or bad is down to personal taste. But Lemmy isn’t going to compete with reddit until the process is streamlined and the thinking required is mostly removed.
People outside the sphere of knowledge about the fediverse who I’ve tried to introduce to Lemmy have been quite confused for sure. They’re used to centralized platforms like reddit, so even the concept of having to choose which instance they sign up on and comprehending that they can interact with content on other instances from their instance is super foreign to them. It also isn’t very clear how to subscribe to communities that aren’t on their instance (once they’ve got their head around the fact they can), although sites like Lemmyverse help a ton with discovery. But even visiting a 3rd party site to find communities is confusing.
People who don’t think Lemmy is confusing are only seeing it from their position of knowledge and assuming concepts they already understand are “easy” or “common sense” when to most they’re anything but.
While it’s true that the majority of people may not be tech-savvy or open to learning complex new software, it doesn’t necessarily mean that normal people don’t adopt new software at all. Throughout history, we have seen numerous instances where new technologies and software have gained widespread adoption, even among non-technical users.
Consider the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. These platforms started with relatively niche user bases but eventually expanded to reach millions, if not billions, of users worldwide. The key to their success was not only their technical features but also their ability to simplify the user experience and cater to the needs and preferences of a wide range of individuals.
In the case of home instances, federation, and defederation, while they may sound complicated and unfamiliar to the average user, it’s important to note that successful software platforms often find ways to abstract complex concepts and provide intuitive interfaces. If the process is streamlined and the thinking required is minimized, it becomes more accessible to a larger audience.
Moreover, it’s worth considering that as technology becomes more pervasive in our daily lives, people are becoming increasingly comfortable with exploring new software and digital experiences. The rise of smartphones, mobile apps, and the increasing reliance on digital tools for various tasks indicate a growing acceptance and adoption of new software by the general population.
Therefore, while it’s true that there may be initial barriers and confusion, it is possible for new software like Lemmy to compete with established platforms like Reddit by focusing on simplifying the user experience, addressing the needs of non-technical users, and gradually building a community base that fosters familiarity and engagement. It’s important not to underestimate the potential for normal people to embrace new software when it offers compelling features and a user-friendly interface.
I tried to explain Lemmy to my gf since she was on reddit a lot, but quit for other reasons. Her eyes glazed over, and she gave me a “wow that sounds cool” , like i was our toddler, excitedly telling her about a leaf i saw.
Ah, yes, typical reddit addict having withdrawal syndrome.
Don’t look back…
Lemmy is my new Reddit addiction. With Lemmy becoming more vibrant I’m missing Reddit less and less, though Lemmy still has a ways to go.
Getting better daily though.
Is it withdrawal symptoms if I’m only curious out of spite?
Tbh this is filling that void. Think I checked reddit once since Apollo died
Removed by mod
I love the sound and view of a good trashfire, so I sometimes go look and see how hard it’s burning.
So /r/madlads Mods did what madlads do: They made everyone a moderator just like /r/politicalhumor did from the beginning of the protest. I brought the idea up to the /r/pics mod just to let them know. Would be funny as hell.
Postwise, Bots started reposting content from 2-3 years ago, ChatGPT was spotted multiple times as a replying user and smaller subs returned to normal, but are slowly drowning in spambot posts or switched to approval-only due to the failing tools.
EDIT: A major antispambot on reddit closes down today by unbanning EVERY SINGLE SPAMBOT on reddit. Did I mention that I love watching things burn down?
To me it feels like the whole ordeal shook reddit quite a bit and made maybe the top 10% of the users drop out of the bucket this way, going to the Fediverse (flavors: lemmy, kbin, mastodon) as far as I can tell right now. Tildes and squabbles got some users, too, but IMHO those seem to be not doing well so far.
They didn’t unban all spam bots, they just aren’t adding any more to the ban list.
Jesus that’s hilarious! Make everyone a mod, I’d love to see that spread.
Turning everyone into mods is a horrible idea, because reddit will hand over ownership of any sub doing any kind of protests to the first mod that contacts them and asks for it. At least one sub was taken over because of that by a person who had basically no clue about what they were doing.
It’s dangerous and just asking for Reddit to take over.
You’re not wrong, but that’s also the point. Let Spaz try to run the site with sycophants and no real content creators.
I suspect that mod teams who were serious about protests from the beginning knew that they would eventually be replaced. They’re just doing as much damage as possible and dragging it out now. Spaz will win, but they can make it a Pyrrhic victory.
/r/all has top posts from very obscure subreddits now
My Frontpage has much much less churn.
As long as we keep making this place good and active, it will be attractive. With the increased spam bots and degraded moderation, people will start looking elsewhere
It was going back to normal, but now they’ve made an even bigger fuckup (removing the ENTIRE AWARDS SYSTEM) so it won’t last.
deleted by creator
Do they seriously have 2k employees? I’d kill to know what all of their jobs are and what each of them does day to day. From what I’ve heard from mods and from what we’ve seen I can’t imagine they were all doing much.
You’re gonna have Devs, Support, QA testing, HR, Accounting, IT, Facilities, cleaners etc etc.
Lots of stuff behind the scenes that doesn’t interact with the public.
Reddit is like a museum, except they don’t pay for the art, and the staff (docents, security, etc) are all volunteers. Further, they don’t sell tickets, rather they charge people to run concessions and gift shops on the premises.
Without the art, nobody comes and the vendors all quit. Without the staff the art will get vandalized and stolen, visitors leave, and the vendors all quit.
Reddit owns a warehouse where volunteers built something valuable for them. Fighting with the volunteers is next level dumb.
What’s more disgusting is the army of bots they used to slander their volunteers. Every subreddit I was actually active in was painfully obvious to see hundreds of accounts that never posted there suddenly showing up and being violently anti-moderator.
The porn is still decent, but it does feel like a lower quality overall than I’m used to.
What infuriates me are subs that act like nothing is happening. I can understand not wanting to get involved with drama but actively supporting the devs by pretending everything is fine is vile to me.
Theres on going drama with subs going nsfw. For what I know NCD was forced to go into sfw mode, along with serveral other subs.
Good luck explaining to your advertisers why their ads are shown along side fighter jet hentai, mobnik cubes, and nuclear and dam schizoposting.
NCD is nsfw again and they are meming about it.
People should screenshot this stuff and send it to the advertisers asking if they support whatever exactly it’s displayed next to.
Do it yourself then
Lmao this is how to cause some serious damage right here
My favorite thing over there right now is r/videos, which only allows text descriptions of the video you were going to post. It’s way more entertaining than it has any right to be.
Dammit.
Business as usual for the subs I frequent. I wish they’d move over to Lemmy but the infertility/IVF group is a super tight knit community and likely won’t move over. I’ve known most of the users for 5 years. If it weren’t for them I’d have deleted my Reddit account but all I did was delete the official app (I had the Reddit app and RIF).
Hmm, i checked out the FP and a few of the subs I used to frequent. Front page seems to have more TikTok style crap than ever, like “guy gets punched!” or “someone makes annoying food!”. Relationship advice: “get divorced!!”.
City subs seem about the same as before. Medical subs I used to read seem about the same and holy shit, am I glad I’m not reading those every day. Same questions and memes that have been rotating through for like 5 years, and the confounding pattern where the community consensus on issues changes from week to week or post to post. One week it’s “this term is offensive and I hate it” and 50 people are “YEAH! That’s right!” and then the next, “don’t you know about this term, it’s perfectly valid” and 30 people are “YEAH! Use your brain if you have one broo!!”. And the questions like “does anyone else with this condition suffer from these extremely common effects that are listed in every medical article about it?” So anyway whether reddit has gotten worse or not, seems like I was ready for something different.One of my most frequentes subs (/r/soccer) is seemingly working as normal. No changes or differences, before and after the protest. No real replacement for it on Lemmy yet
Look up lemmy.world/c/football basically r/soccer and it’s growing
Write it like this:
!football@lemmy.mland it will turn into a link that fits whatever instance you are on: !football@lemmy.mlThe client should be able to do this tho. Users would usually want to copy paste a link instead of converting it.
