I think most of us agree that the main problem which Lemmy has today is its lack of users. This is not for technical reasons, as we know it is quite stable and usable. The main cause is that the project is not widely known yet. In this post I will propose what we can do to change that.
First, lets clarify why we should promote Lemmy. Clearly there are many different reasons, and every person prioritizes them differently. So I will just give some common examples:
- Promote open source (and all the benefits that entails)
- No advertising or tracking
- Allow communities to manage themselves, instead of being controlled by corporations
- Making Lemmy more active, particularly if you would like to see more discussions on certain topics
So how can we promote Lemmy?
I think one of the most effective thing we can do at this point is to post about Lemmy in other communities where we are active. This has the benefit that other people already trust us to some degree. Open source projects looking to setup a forum might also be a good target. When doing this, we should consider which aspects of the project would be most important to the target audience, and emphasize those.
Another option is to contact bloggers, video creators, podcasters or others, and suggest that they report about Lemmy. As above, it is important to adjust the message to the target audience. Because Lemmy is quite small, it is unlikely that major tech magazines or professional content creators would care about it. Instead we should focus on smaller creators. This will also lead to more sustainable growth, and give us some legitimacy in the eyes of bigger creators.
In both cases, we should avoid doing anything that might be perceived as spam. It is better to create one or two high-quality messages, which will give a good impression of the project, rather than a dozen generic ones that tarnish the reputation.
It is worth noting that some important features are still missing in Lemmy, particularly mod tools (we are going to implement them in the next ~12 months). There also aren’t many different instances yet.
When promoting Lemmy like this, please avoid linking to lemmy.ml directly. This instance is already too big relative to other instances, and it is not meant to be a “flagship instance” (What is lemmy.ml?). Instead you should try to find an appropriate instance on join-lemmy.org and link to it, or link to the joinlemmy site directly. You can also explicitly encourage the creation of new instances.
On a side note, it might be worth mentioning the many ways that people can contribute to Lemmy (again depending on the audience). There are the obvious ones, like writing code for lemmy and lemmy-ui, writing documentation or translating. There are also multiple interesting options to create new projects, such as:
- Create an alternative frontend: nojs frontend like lemmy-lite, a traditional forum frontend or something like stackoverflow
- Create a new client, be it for mobile, desktop or terminal.
- Gather instance statistics using lemmy-stats-crawler, and build some nice graphs.
By the way, Lemmy is not just a Reddit alternative, so there is no reason to limit the promotion to Reddit.
To help with these promotion efforts, @dessalines and I would be happy to give interviews via email (in English, German or Spanish). For that, they can get in touch by mailing contact@lemmy.ml.
I disagree that Lemmy isn’t known as an alternative; it’s mentioned everywhere where Reddit’s current trouble is.
I actually think the issue is just as much about community discovery and fragmentation; combined each community+rest of the fediverse is large. On an individual server there can often be few users and few posts. Being able to subscribe to a batch of fediverse communities in one go would really help. Then the entry point could be these discovery systems and the home of the account a secondary concern.
I did do a video about Lemmy at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5axSUJj0bBY intended as a “what is it about if I’m considering it”
Thx for making this post, and you’re right that we could definitely focus on doing interviews: that was one of the things that made mastodon blow up in its early stages.
Besides the things you mentioned, the only other thing I can think of that would help adoption, is more / better mobile apps. Lemmur and Remmel need more development, but I’m convinced that one of the reasons for the popularity of a lot of social media platforms, is having a good mobile app ecosystem.
Yeah, mobile apps are definitely something that should be invested on. Lemmur uses Flutter and so it runs really badly on my devices (I haven’t had a single Flutter app run well) and the UI is a bit meh. I’d love to have a Slide-like application for Lemmy :)
Same. My dream would be to have a lemmy android app using jetpack and kotlin. I’d like to do this myself but I have too many other priorities, and I’d have to learn jetpack.
Yup yup, that would be great! I’ve used Kotlin quite a lot but never in Android, but there’s always a time to learn stuff. If someone were to kickstart it and maintain it I’d probably contribute :P
I am very new to lemmy (joined lemmy.ml only yesterday) so my knowledge about the software and its community is very limited. I am member of a cooperative that runs a Mastodon instance. Some of our members are clubs which might need a discussion forum for their hobby horse. Installing a forum like discourse or flarum is quite easy – running Lemmy needs a lot more. I would think that it requires as much maintenance like Mastodon or Matrix. So we need good arguments to promote Lemmy.
I think a good way to promote Lemmy would be to outline the benefit of running an instance for the maintaining entity – be it a club, a political party or group, a company, a town or region, a school or any other institution. I think a small list of usecases and benefits for a couple of organisations could be a good start. Maybe we can start here?
I have never hosted any of the software you mention, so I cant compare the administration effort. But if you are using Docker, I would say its very little effort to install and run an instance, moreso if you use our Ansible playbook. What exactly makes you think that Lemmy is hard to run? Maybe you could setup a test instance and see for yourself?
Listing the benefits of Lemmy sounds very useful, I just dont really know what they are (and what to compare it to).
I always look at the instructions to install software from scratch. ;-)
Many organisations want to create a discussion forum for their members. This can be done with Lemmy as it is a forum with federation as add on. They can use local communites for their internal discussions and federated for for discussing things with the whole world. This is much better than having a forum only for members and only for internal use. The Glasgow instances shows what I mean.
Is it possible to restrict account on an instance to members of an organization eg. by using LDAP or invite only registration?
The instructions for installing from scratch are overly complicated, I plan to rewrite them soon. We are also doing some things which will reduce the number of steps needed for installing from scratch (distribution via crates.io, removing iframely).
At the moment you can enable/disable federation only for the whole instance, not per community. But we have an issue for that: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1576
Invite only instances are not supported yet, but are on our roadmap.
I would appreciate a straight forward installation documentation for non docker installs as I am eager to install Lemmy on a managed server.
It would be great if you could do an interview or contact Henry from Techlore. The Techlore audience is focused more towards privacy and open source software.
I think most of us agree that the main problem which Lemmy has today is its lack of users. This is not for technical reasons, as we know it is quite stable and usable. The main cause is that the project is not widely known yet
No offence intended, but i am not sure that hypothesis is correct, even if it’s working kind of well there are other open source reddit alternatives, it needs to be better then them to really get a lot of users.
On a side note, it might be worth mentioning the many ways that people can contribute to Lemmy (again depending on the audience). There are the obvious ones, like writing code for lemmy and lemmy-ui, writing documentation or translating. There are also multiple interesting options to create new projects, such as:
Do you have any thoughts on addons? something like friendica addons? I think a big part of what made firefox get so much users were the extensions (that allowed hobbyist developers unleash their creativity).
On a more practical note, People can always vote and try to write great persuasive content on alternativeto and slant.co
No offence intended, but i am not sure that hypothesis is correct, even if it’s working kind of well there are other open source reddit alternatives, it needs to be better then them to really get a lot of users.
I disagree, Lemmy is not simply another foss Reddit alternative, it can be many more things with different frontends. Plus federation really sets us apart from any similar projects. And no worries, there is nothing offensive about having disagreements in a discussion.
Lemmy addons would be interesting, but i have no idea how that could be implemented.
We can crowdfund actual advertisements/partnerships. I’d much rather see a Lemmy commercial than a NørdVPN or RAIÐ $hadovv Legendş commercial.
It is worth noting that some important features are still missing in Lemmy, particularly mod tools (we are going to implement them in the next ~12 months). There also aren’t many different instances yet.
Do that first, though. We don’t want a flood of spammers and disappointed users because the mods/admins can’t do jack shit about it.
I am really against paid ads for Lemmy. If we receive that amount of donations, there are much better things to spend it on than giving it to youtube or other corporations. For example we could give the money to pay people who are contributing to Lemmy in different ways.
It won’t grow so much, since it’s only for leftist media and has hard coded regexp filters
That’s only one instance, lemmy.ml. As per the post, this is not what they are trying to promote.
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