Let's discuss how to efficiently promote Lemmy to potential new joiners

Blaze (he/him)

sites that permit it

So Bluesky nowadays, based on Meta and Facebook recent removal of Pixel fed and Lemmy mentions

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I don't disagree

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A thought that just hit me in the shower.

I don't feel like lemmy is too small. It quite comfortably fills all my lazing on aggregator time without getting stale. The thing is, like many here, I'm a libertarian leftist politics nerd that's into linux and self hosting.

That description describes a sizeable chunk of this project's userbase so enough content is being posted enough to saturate the feed.

If you want the project to expand into other niches, you will have to be post into the void about whatever you're into. Seed forums with TV shows or photography or hiking or warhammer or whatever you're into and encourage others to do the same.

All forums are dead at first but if you want people to come and talk about pottery, you're going to have to make that forum cozy before it gets enough interaction to become self sustaining.

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I think downvote anonymity is the bigger part of the problem, not downvotes in general. Unless I'm misunderstanding, what you're proposing amounts to "if you want to downvote in a community you'll need to make an account on it's instance". This would be a nice option to have, but it should also remain an option.

In your +50/-90 example, showing at least the instance provenance for votes allows more (sub)cases. If I can see that 55 of the downvotes come from the instance hosting the community, that's potentially a very different situation than if only 5 do. Or if 70 of the downvotes come from a pair of instances that aren't the community host. Disabling downvotes flattens these nuances into the same "-40", which I agree isn't great when it can lead to deletion - but I'd argue that's also an entirely separate problem that might be better addressed from a different angle.

Revealing from which instances downvotes come from doesn't prevent opinion downvotes but it allows dulling their bite. The same is true for opinion upvotes.

From my understanding votes are more-or-less already somewhat public on lemmy between it's implementation and what federation needs to function properly. We should embrace the nuances federation brings to the problem instead of throwing it away entirely.

So much thought has been put into "how do we convey the different instances' character and their relations to each other to new (potential) users in a way that doesn't a) overload them and/or b) scare them away with content that rubs them the wrong way" in communities and posts like these, when potentially we just need to render more visible the data that is already there.

I'll acknowledge up-front that the "just" in the previous sentence is carrying a lot of weight; data viz is not easy on the best of days and votes have so little screen real-estate to work with. On top of that, any UI feature that can make what I'm suggesting palatable and accessible to non-power users would also need to be replicated across most popular clients. They're written in a motley assortment of programming languages and ecosystems, and range from targeting browsers to native smartphone OSes, so the development efforts would be difficult to share and carry over from one client to the next. Still, they're called votes: there's a lot of prior art in polling software and news coverage of elections from the past few years that should be publicly accessible (at least in terms of screenshots, stills, and videos of the UI, if not a working version of it to play around with).

On top of this, I don't know how much effort this would require on backend devs for lemmy (and kbin/mbin I forget which is the survivor, and piefed, and any other threadiverse instance software I'm currently unaware of). I wouldn't expect keeping track of vote provenance to prove immensely difficult, but it could cause some sort of combinatorial explosion in the overhead required by the different sorting algorithms proposed (I'm ignorant on how much they cache vs how often they're run for lemmy, for example).

I can't foretell if this would "solve" opinion downvotes on it's own, but I do think it would contribute to the necessary conditions for people to drift away from the more toxic forms of it. It could also become another option for viewing feeds on top of "subscribed"/"local"/"all" + the different vote rankings.

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Well, also maybe Reddit, unless they're also removing/burying other social sites. Besides that, any messaging services one may use to chat with friends or others.

deadcatbounce

The youngest couple generations don't really do writing (or reading) they watch videos. Pixelfed.org just pushed Lemmy onto fourth place.

Promotion of Lemmy should be to millennials and older, say.

Ategon

Nobody reported it as down, I can bring it back up

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"Curated" would be a better term I think. Suggested feels like it's personalised while it isn't.

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because the only reason I still use Reddit is to interact with adults in my profession from around the world with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints and with good hearts but limited tolerance for spending time learning obscure tech

so anything to reduce the barrier of entry for those people is one less reason to ever use Reddit again. that's a win in my book. if you want to stick to your ML communities y, that's your right. but are you really going to change the world by shutting everyone out?

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I’m very new to the fediverse but I am trying to learn what exactly I am doing. I joined lemmy through a link my relative sent me and somehow I did not get to select an instance, it seemingly auto-assigned me to lemmy.cafe. Which, tbh it’s working out I think, but what did I do for this to have happened? I’m also on pixelfed and am awaiting an email from loops. Meta is too frightening to stay, I deleted TikTok and Reddit. I just long for the community I felt in those places.

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hi! i also am on the lemmy.cafe instance there’s not many of us but it’s very chill

as for what you did to have happened, your relative may have just sent you a link to lemmy.cafe?

that’s the cool part of fediverse: you technically don’t “join the fediverse” in the same way you don’t “join email.” Rather, you signed up for an account on a single server that can communicate with all the communities hosted between all the different servers. It’s kind of like how you might choose to make an account on outlook.com versus gmail.com—and you visit the site to go there.

ZeroOne

We can flood the appstores then

comfy

To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong.

Most of them are. Some of them are even plain old factually wrong, not just condescending or exaggerating.

It's important to understand that many of these instances were raised by people who didn't like reddit's widespread US-defaultism (including people claiming reddit is left-of-center because it swings Democrat) and its tolerance of bigots and trolls. Now if someone wants to set up their own instances to clone reddit and keep all the bad parts, sure, all we can really do is ignore them or get ignored by them. But when those people complain that this is "a bunch of 14 year olds" with "vote bots" or a "political echo chamber", that's just plain old ignorant, or shocked that they're suddenly in a place with a different culture and struggling to believe it's mostly just normal nerdy people like reddit is.

comfy

I joined lemmy through a link my relative sent me and somehow I did not get to select an instance, it seemingly auto-assigned me to lemmy.cafe.

Like spujb said, my guess is the link was directly to lemmy.cafe.

If you want to quickly browse around different instances, there's https://join-lemmy.org/, which some people have said they avoided because they don't want people joining the politically-stricter instances as a first impression. So I'd recommend settling in for a week on .cafe to get an idea of how this works, before considering if you're having no problems with .cafe or if you'd like to explore other options. For example, if they have blocked any communities on other instances which you're interested in (I don't know if this is the case).

comfy

I instance-hopped a couple of times because I joined smaller instances (the recommendation everyone gives you) that then disappeared / were abandoned by the admin.

I already had this problem on PeerTube years earlier, so I played it safe with a bigger instance, at least for a main account (I also had one on gtio.io which was gone before the reddit API exodus). This is absolutely a real issue with people recommending small instances, but at the same time, it's necessary to avoid recommending just one which gets overwhelmed and disables new accounts.

Aurelius

I created Quiblr which acts as a client for all Lemmy servers. I've tried to remove some of the friction that comes with the Fediverse (including the sign up).

Check it out and let me know what you think. It sounds like you're exactly the kind of user I built Quiblr for (i.e. folks who are familiar with big tech social media and are not familiar with the fediverse)

db0

Ah, well it's down maybe it could be useful in onboarding users.

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Hello,

A few pointers for you :

https://lemmy.cafe/post/11539890 a list of 20 general interest communities
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https://www.lemmyapps.com/

db0

@[email protected] its's up again. What do you think about using that to advertise lemmy?

db0

Do you need to make it refresh or something? it still reports lemmy.dbzer0.com as being on 0.19.5