Conversations like this are why I want more people, especially "normies", in the Fediverse : fediverse

[–] Fizz@lemmy.nz 105 points 1 month ago (4 children)

The thing is that "normies"(I hate the term) weren't on reddit when it was the size of lemmy. The only experience they have is joining it after it had 10 years of development reached critical mass of users.

So we are stuck being compared to an impossible standard. When I compare Lemmy to old reddit lemmy hands down blows it out of the water. Old reddit had cp and racism on the front page every single day for years.It was hard to use and hostile to new users.

I've seen lemmy pop up in search engine posts already which was cool to see. Ive also seen lots of high quality intelligent posts granted they are only tech related but we will grow.

[–] nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 25 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I tried to use Reddit for years and absolutely hated it. Finally after virtually every internet search for any question i had lead need too Reddit I decided to aquire a taste for it.

[–] Jake_Farm@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Was it the format or the user base that drove you off?

[–] nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 month ago

Format at first, then user base. I then found you could subscribe to subs and see only that stuff. That made it tolerable.

[–] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I guess that's a fair point, but I'd rather shoot for what's good instead of settle for "better than terrible".

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 month ago

Incremental improvement is bad?

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[–] Anon518@sh.itjust.works 44 points 1 month ago (2 children)

we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics in an organic way

In my experience, many of the people claiming to be experts on reddit are spreading misinformation. This goes for Twitter too, and probably most other large social media sites. People love to be seen as an authority on a topic.
Reddit is anything but organic, and is getting worse and worse in this regard.

[–] Keegen@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The eye opening moment is when one of these threads touches on a subject you know a lot about and the top upvoted comment is spouting complete bullshit. See it once and you start to doubt the credibility of every other highly upvoted comment that looks legit but could be just as wrong, you simply don't know enough to immediately disprove it.

[–] actually@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

I have a conspiracy theory that most users who are an expert don’t post much about that.

For example I am an expert on two things most people find obscure; and for all my comments I just avoid talking about them. It’s too hard to wrap up an idea without lots of background information, there are no short posts or comments I can make about it.

Almost all the highly upvoted stuff are short. Were I to try to make an expert post it would be totally ignored. So why bother for me when I can snarky about things I know nothing about ? More fun !

I think experts who write short terse pithy comments that hit the mark, at a timely fashion, are rarer than hens teeth

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[–] awwwyissss@lemm.ee 5 points 1 month ago

Yeah, reddit is corporate plastic these days. Fake, cheap, unhealthy.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 21 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

an organic way.

Not sure if that defines current reddit if you have a look at /r/TheoryOfReddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1gdpeyp/this_bot_thing_is_dystopian_bot_copied_my_post/

On the other hand, I found this interesting thread on !houseplants@mander.xyz today: https://lemmy.world/post/21385568?scrollToComments=true

Feel free to have a look at !newcommunities@lemmy.world for niche communities

[–] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 28 points 1 month ago (11 children)

It's not just about the communities. We push communities a lot, and we do need more communities. But fundamentally we need a lot more PEOPLE.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Exactly! Yes!

I get downvoted everytime I point out that a healthy network comes with users. Lots of users. Users of all kinds. Users you don't agree with. Users you do agree with. I said that the userbase of threads being on Lemmy would be a culture clash, but it would be a sign of a growing fediverse concept.

Everyone else says if the threads users federated with Lemmy, they would personally block the instance. Which just shows how much of a bubble the people here want to live in.

I work at an airport. You will never see a more diverse group of people from a bigger selection of places than at an international airport. I don't agree with all of them. I don't agree with the majority of them. But I can converse with them. I can make small talk for 10 minutes.

I treat the fediverse as I treat the real world. I wouldn't look at these people and say "You're banished from my existence for having conflicting politic or religious beliefs! Begone from my presence! You do not deserve to exist in my world!"

But thats how people here treat "outsiders" or "normies".

I want the fediverse concept to grow. I want the idea of a concept that's immune to corporate ownership by design to BE normalized.

Because right now, it's a niche interest that 98% of people have never heard of. Corporations want to keep it that way.....if they've even heard of the Fediverse. They might to be too busy exploiting labor, and polluting the planet with their private jets and resource sucking plants located in places that already have water shortages.

Yes I'm talking to you Nestle, and you Starbucks CEO. I don't know how this comment turned into a rant against them specifically, but fuck Nestle, and fuck Starbucks.

[–] Flamekebab@piefed.social 8 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Perhaps it's just me having different priorities, but I have no interest in making small talk with lots of people. There's plenty of spaces for that already whilst the spaces for enthusiasts have been sacrificed to the general public.

I'm not arguing this specifically about Lemmy, or trying to suggest policy, I'm just chipping in that there's at least something to be said for not trying to make all social spaces for all people.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 5 points 1 month ago

The idea is not to have to talk with everyone in the circle, but to have enough people to create a long tail of niche interests.

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 7 points 1 month ago

But please remember that in order to enjoy such diversity of opinions as you mentioned... we must become intolerant.

To the intolerant. There is no faster way to shut down conversations than to allow bullies to dominate everything within their reach.

So long as conversations can be kept "fun", there will naturally be many more to follow, but when they cross the line, then fun-time is over and the people go home. Unfortunately, modding efforts are in short supply here - not as limiting as content creation, but still a constraining factor.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Feel free to join us on https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ to promote Lemmy (most of the other subs ban it)

I was just pointing that with 44k monthly active users, interesting conversations are already happening. A few of them are reposted on !bestoflemmy@lemmy.world , we could probably do a better job to repost them there more

[–] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

I got shadowbanned from reddit before even making a single post.

I've said it before, I like reddit users but I hate reddit the company.

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[–] andrew_s@piefed.social 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That comment chain demonstrates a real appeal of Reddit. Even for something like a post-episode TV discussion, a critical mass of people means that not only can you have the discussion in the first place, but there might be some extra info from someone who worked on the set, or attended an audience taping.

You can click to see the rest of the comments to see plenty wrong with Reddit too, but it's not like there's any particular drive to prevent the elements of Reddit culture that I find annoying from coming to Lemmy too.

I'd be surprised if there's ever a critical mass of people on a federated app though. If there is, it's more likely to be on something with the proper funding, that hides the details from regular users (e.g
it'll be BlueSky, not Mastodon). On Reddit, Lemmy has a reputation for being too complicated, for the mundane reason that is. Too much stuff that should happen doesn't, and the answer to why are the stuff that 'normies' don't want to hear (LW and PD instances are both a bit unstable atm), or they're so unintuitive that that they'll need answering forever (e.g everything around discussion languages, instance blocks, newly-discovered communities , etc etc).

I've just seen a user accidentally submit the same post to the same community multiple times (the worst I've seen is 4 times). Preventing that is some real 'web dev 101' shit. Federated apps can be an interesting hobby for inexperienced devs (like me), and mildly diverting for anyone who wants to use them as a user, but a critical mass of users?! Forget about it.

[–] jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

All the others will get bought out and enshittified. The future is not there.

The Fediverse has the potential to be the future. It's gated behind open sourceheads not being all...open-sourcey about. Making it clunky to use and badly designed and then pulling the establishment economist "you poor schlub you're just too dumb to get it" card, thereby shooting their own efforts in the foot.

If they can make it open source AND easy to use/intuitive/well designed, then we have a solid future. If not, the future still won't be those other places.

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[–] MimicJar@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago

we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics

Lol we have that now... just be sure to phrase your question in the form of a Linux distro.

But to be serious I do think we're heading that way, but it's going to take a long time, likely as long as it took Reddit (if not longer).

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 15 points 1 month ago (3 children)

We are far too unwelcoming to normies currently. Many people on Reddit reporting coming here to check it out only to not enjoy it and remain there.

100% of every single person that I've ever told about Lemmy irl gives me grief about how politically extremist it is. Like not just "no thank you, if you don't mind" but "FUCK NO, WHY WOULD YOU SHOW ME THIS!?". I mean, I'm no lover of capitalism but... if we want normies, we have to make this place more palatable. The likes of Facebook, X, and Reddit are grandfathered into the public consciousness - like it or not, convincing someone to come here is basically meaning to leave there, if only for part of each day (which Mbin is strongly helping with, by also conjoining Mastodon with Lemmy).

As an experiment, go to Lemmy.ml and sort by Local. The very top post is currently this one: https://lemmy.ml/post/21925926. This does not make me feel welcomed, being a citizen of the USA. Mind you, I get that there is a certain degree of "Truthiness" to it - especially if you ignore all of the thousands of years of history that predated the very "discovery" of this Western-most continent (even by Leif Erickson) - but true or not, it turns people away. An admin account even specifically decries people not liking it:

Judging by the downvotes, a lot of Lemmitors have no idea how the world works. Just living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—must be nice.

So, this post isn't going to be removed anytime soon, although beware of downvoting it - you might be kicked out of all communities that exist on that instance, including those you've never so much as heard of existing (yes that's a real thing, see MANY cases described in MANY communities across the Fediverse, e.g. !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com).

Note I did not cherry pick that example. That is literally the first post that I saw. Every time I do this, I can always find such an example in <10 seconds and half of that is going to Lemmy.ml in the first place.

I mentioned Mbin as being one potential solution. Sublinks is another (but in the meantime there's Tesseract on dubvee.org if you like that). I switched to PieFed myself, though there are quite a large number of issues with it (e.g. zero new posts from all the super cool Star Trek memes made in the last 3 days from https://piefed.social/c/tenforward@lemmy.world are showing up here - tho tbf this is far from the only instance that is struggling to catch up to updates with Lemmy.World). If you want to remain tied to the actual Lemmy codebase there's lemmy.cafe and quokk.au that defederates from hexbear.net and lemmy.ml (the former also defederated from Lemmygrad.ml). But so long as people keep joining e.g. lemmy.world or lemm.ee, they are going to have to discover how those instances are by themselves. Except they won't, and based on my experience, instead they leave - and then blame me for even having mentioned Lemmy to them in the first place.

We are fooling ourselves, to think that we can have our cake and eat it too. If you make fun of someone - e.g. people in the West including in USA, UK, Germany or other EU nation, etc. - then why would those very same people want to join in despite the "joke"? It's really not that hard to understand: we either make the Fediverse more welcoming to normies, or we give up hoping that they will come in spite of everything. And based on the MAU (monthly active users) stats, this is basically peak Lemmy right now without much chance to grow further - and if anything we're declining. I mean, I'm writing this to you from a non-Lemmy sourcecode-based instance right now.

[–] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago (8 children)

We should all defederate from .ml. That would be a huge step. We need to excise these extremists in order for the community to grow.

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[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

go to Lemmy.ml

I'm gonna stop you right there, I've already found your problem. Try introducing them to instances that aren't militant.

But, since all of Lemmy is run by those guys, maybe just skip Lemmy altogether. I honestly don't see a future for it with them in charge.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I just said "Lemmy" and they went forward from there.

Helping people pick an instance is not as straight-forward task as many people claim. e.g. if you love programming, then perhaps programm.dev is right for you, except right now they are having enormous federation difficulties - e.g. https://programming.dev/post/20692281. They are far from the only ones doing so though - https://feddit.org/post/3524876 - and yet they do have more difficulties than most.

Any instance that is not Lemmy.World itself is going to suffer right now, until the deployment of 0.19.6 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623. And yet people piling on top of the already too-large pile of Lemmy.World will only make the future problems worse. This whole "federation" concept is still experimental, compared to a single-server model like Reddit had.

Blaze often tells people to go by default to lemm.ee. Which is one of the rare instances that defederates from none of hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, or even lemmygrad.ml. So if someone comes across this advice and follows it... BTW, Lemmy.cafe likewise defederates from almost nothing, except it DOES defederate from those big 3 (caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time - though there are so many other things about that instance that are so welcoming and friendly, and btw it is one of the very select few that are already running 0.19.6-beta! so a single admin yes, but one who seems VERY on the ball!).

But ultimately you are correct: they control the sourcecode, so it is YOU who are using THEIR platform - and they WILL do it THEIR way, regardless.

Until and unless more people switch to Mbin, PieFed, or eventually Sublinks. Admiral Patrick who developed Tesseract for dubvee.org and who has blocked lemmy.ml users has pledged to switch to Sublinks whenever it will come out. In the meantime you can view a demo, but I haven't heard of any developments for it for like half a year. So I switched to PieFed, and am posting several bug reports to help make it better. I advise people to check all of these options out just to see what's out there, though definitely more is yet to come due to the hard work from these very helpful developers!

And credit where it's due: Dessalines is helping in his own way, to reduce people's dependency upon Reddit, and offering that codebase completely free of charge - that's not nothing. Though administering a server instance is an entirely different skillset... and if we want to see the Fediverse grow rather than shrink with time, I think that better fences are going to be necessary (or mere labels would be even better, except they seem to militantly refuse to do such - but could you imagine if "politically extremist" content had a label just like all the NSFW posts do? then we could all get along side-by-side in the same space).

Nobody enjoys being punched in the face, or to see their (or why not ANY?) nation mocked - especially normies who may have DEEP knowledge of their subject matter, yet happen to not use Arch Linux btw, or may not be actual full-on communists (yet?).

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time

You pointed out the biggest issue with that instance.

If you have a better alternative (so blocking hexbear and lemmygrad, with a large userbase and managed by a group of admins), feel free to suggest it.

Also, do not underestimate the importance some users give to low defederation.
Lemm.ee is still the second largest instance for a reason.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (18 children)

Right, and for people who want that low defederation, lemm.ee is not just a good but a great option. Though for normies, it may be turning people away.

But as you said, what other options are there? Lemmy.cafe seems so perfect in so many ways. Like their welcome messages are actually helpful, e.g. pointing people to !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, as opposed to e.g. "What is Lemmy.ml" that is just a broken link to nowhere, or Lemmy.World's Getting started guide that doesn't mention things such as cross-posting. But then again, normies especially wouldn't like it when/if the instance suddenly has to shut down for whatever reason... I get you there.

So who else defederates from the entirety of the big 3? (Btw lemmy.cafe defederates from almost nothing but these, and threads ofc, so still has e.g. NSFW and anime instances linked. And quokk.au likewise has only a single admin.) Or better yet allows custom user blocking? PieFed does, Tesseract on dubvee.org, and perhaps some apps (not sure which ones - and the trick is that some appear to at first glance, but it's merely the same Lemmy back-end blocking that doesn't block users, only communities). And I'm not clear about Mbin - I think not.

Moreover, nearly every instance other than Lemmy.world is having federation issues with lemmy.world right now. But we can't just keep sending people to lemmy.world bc it's the only one that always works for >80% of the content on the Fediverse? That would somewhat work, but be a purely short-term solution. Yet nothing else would work... e.g. I made a post from StarTrek.website to tenforward on lemmy.world and couldn't see the comments (or votes) that people made to it for at least 2-3 days. Eventually I responded from a third instance involved - discuss.online - but federation issues such as this tend to have a cooling effect in terms of shutting down conversations. This stuff is going to turn normies away as well, on top of the toxicity issues.

So there are problems with every instance. At least you get your choice of which issues you want to deal with:-). The toxicity issue though is particularly what has driven away 100% of the people that I've mentioned Lemmy to irl, so it seems to be the major one. Perhaps if not for it they might have joined Lemmy and then left it later, but as it is they refuse to even consider it bc they can't get past that. So THAT is the one that I think we need to focus on to get more people. At which point yeah, perhaps add Lemmy.cafe to the recommendation list? Alongside PieFed that allows custom user blocking of whatever instance you want - and I mean the good kind, blocking not just communities but all comments as well.

Perhaps the reason that people are mentioning the defederation issues is due to Mastodon's heavy fragmention and inability to really search for content outside of someone's initial chosen instance? (Though that feature seems to be coming "soon(TM)".) If so that would make a LOT of sense?! However, the difficulties faced by Lemmy are of a different sort. Not being able to search for content from any other instance is nowhere near the same as e.g. the Western world defederating from an instance that constantly mocks and disrespects everything that it does - and kinda vice versa btw bc there is much that the Western world does not respect about how the Eastern world (specifically Russia and China) does things as well, e.g. the extremely heavy-handed banning from all communities, and how the East is "not" doing genocide, fully and literally directly, even while the USA "is" (I mean it low-key is, but how does that justify the Ukrainian invasion or the Uyghur situation?!) - the whole "one rule for thee, an entirely different set of rules for me" thing is a real turn-off for people to remain in the Fediverse. So while I don't doubt that people are asking for instances that aren't defederated from anything, I do question whether that's truly what they want, especially "they" meaning the majority of normies. It's complicated bc some truly do want something like lemm.ee, while on the other hand I see some people leaving Lemm.ee wanting to go somewhere that defederates from at the very least Hexbear. It's one thing to foster and encourage STRONG diversity of opinions, but it's another to open the door to people who consistently argue in bad faith (and rarely if ever do not do such). The former makes dull conversations better, while the latter ends conversations entirely.

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[–] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (4 children)

You've convinced me to try mbin. I had a kbin account and I really liked it, but federation with lemmy was soooo slow.

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[–] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

One problem is we get people from ml posting on .world and other sane instances.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yes, but rarely. And you won't get banned from .world for a slight criticism of China.

[–] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I see em alllll the time. But I don't block anyone, ever.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Sigh... I used to be that way. But it does get exhausting, and I now prefer to spend my time in other ways.

[–] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Yeah, but it's important to refute their bullshit if we want the fediverse to get better.

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[–] Blaze@feddit.org 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

(e.g. zero new posts from all the super cool Star Trek memes made in the last 3 days from https://piefed.social/c/tenforward@lemmy.world are showing up here - tho tbf this is far from the only instance that is struggling to catch up to updates with Lemmy.World)

For people reading this, that got fixed in the meantime

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[–] 4shtonButcher@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I see people in that thread recommending to avoid lemmy.ml - what’s up with that?!?

[–] Mjpasta710@midwest.social 33 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

If you're asking in good faith.... Most of lemmy.ml is a tankie echo chamber that silences or outright bans any dissenting discussion.

Try bringing up the facts surrounding Russia, China, Cuba, or North Korea...

Only lies and good vibes for tankies are permitted.

[–] cowpattycrusader@thelemmy.club 11 points 1 month ago

I did not know this and posted a serious question on a thread dismissing starvation under Stalin as fake news. Ban was swift and responses were brutal. I thought it was just isolated trolling at the time.

[–] 4shtonButcher@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 month ago

Thanks, I honestly didn’t know! I’ve only really adopted Lemmy for almost daily use a few weeks back and mostly read tech related stuff and it’s been blissfully apolitical for the most part. Some of it is on .ml - I now understand the issue and will look out for it/support communities on other instances where possible.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 15 points 1 month ago (9 children)

!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca has a dedicated thread

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