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

db0

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

[email protected]

Hello,

A few pointers for you :

https://lemmy.cafe/post/11539890 a list of 20 general interest communities
[email protected]
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

[email protected]

As you stated in the other comment, let's refresh data before using it, and check if all the recommended instances are still around

[email protected]

Unfortunately, everyone of your quoted feedback is spot on. Lemmy got the worst of reddit's political echo chamber combined with the "I am so smart" crowd. To make Lemmy barely tolerable, I've had to filter far too many words and block far too many communities. Most people aren't going to jump through hoops to make a platform usable.

[email protected]

Indeed, hence the proposition for a "politics-free instance" https://lemmings.world/post/19715687

[email protected]

No one is going to change the world by posting. Very few people have the time or energy to discuss or debate every day. I'd rather just not deal with an entire host of opinions and takes that I already deal with every day in real life.

What I've learned over my time using sites like Digg and Reddit is that allowing conservative views to fester and form their communities on a platform allows them to organize and grow and seep into other "non political" spaces. The Donald, gamergate, transphobia, general reaction, whatever.

And the "anti-politics" enlightened centrist types are enablers that allow this.

If people come here and go "wow they sure are critical of Israel, America, Trump, and billionaires. I hate this", then they're self selecting themselves from joining and I just don't think that's a loss.

The measurement of a platform to me is the quality of the users, not the quantity.

[email protected]

“non political” spaces.

The Donald

Was it really considered non-political? Not that familiar with that sub history

Ategon

Ah yeah I need to refresh the data, ill do that later

[email protected]

There is just an absolute ton of nuances involved.

SOME types of Federation issues is due not to the local instance but rather Lemmy.World and overall lack of distribution of users and communities across the Fediverse (some of which is better now than the past, but not nearly enough).

Other types involve the instance, and in turn its hardware and even more so its number and skill of admin support. Like if you have to wait several days for a manual sign-up procedure (people say quokk.au was this way, at least sometimes) then you may have already moved on elsewhere.

Some of the issues have greatly improved - like I switched from Kbin.social to Star Trek.Website and for super frustrated with how often I would try to do something - like vote or comment - and so switched to discuss.online, which I have been exceedingly happy with. The thing is, Star Trek.Website's technical issues got WAY better (still not perfect) in the past year, and also I still have had issues with discuss.online - again, most often I would guess that Lemmy.World's lack of updates to the latest Lemmy software was to blame for that (even though I understand that there are a whole bunch of reasons for the delay).

Yet people also report that Lemmy.World itself can be quite slow to access from some parts in the world like Australia and the USA. I don't know how much that has to do with method of access like an app vs. the web UI, and even then, would an alternate front end app like https://photon.lemmy.world/ further affect the speed?

A simple score isn't going to come close to describing any of this. But if it would, uptime % might come the closest? Especially in conjunction with other factors like avoiding recommendation of an instance that has only a single admin.

Discuss.online is tried and true, and I unreservedly recommend it. Anyone who likes can make an alt or two and see tor themselves how good the experience is in comparison between them. Also the admin is quite responsive, both in reacting to requests and remaining on the ball proactively before even being asked - see e.g. the pinned post on that instance.

[email protected]

No. My point was that as Reddit became more mainstream, it became more conservative. As it became more conservative, more conservative spaces were created like the Donald and gamergate subs. And people and ideas from those spaces ended up seeping into other "non political" subs, like technology, gaming, movies, etc.

The amount of xenophobia, transphobia, anti-feminism, etc. I saw in general purpose subs grew post Digg migration, especially in gamer subs as gamergate happened in 2014.

Conservatism and centrist liberalism are the dominant political beliefs in the US, UK, and seemingly most of Europe too. Those voices will outnumber and browbeat leftist voices over time if they join an online platform en masse, in my experience.

[email protected]

As the developer himself states, and me as someone who uses it as my primary daily driver concurs, it is not quite ready yet. e.g. a good fraction of the Notifications I receive end up being dead links to posts that don't exist anymore, or to users that I have blocked, etc. Also user tagging is not implemented yet and searching often does not retrieve things that you can find much more easily using Lemmy, plus tools for moderation of remote communities remain very primitive.

Soon now, it will be user-friendly enough to recommend to people, but for now it's primarily for beta testing the software and those of us prepared to use an early adopter mindset when using it - e.g. switch to a Lemmy alt to do things that PieFed cannot yet.

Though more features get added seemingly weekly or at least monthly, it's so exciting to see! I love the new inline comment feature, though inconsistently applied e.g. not yet available for edits. But it's coming!

[email protected]

I see where you come from, but I would say that this would happen when Lemmy gets really mainstream, like let's say 500k or 1 million users.

I would just like to reach 100k or 200k so that it feels less like if 25 people stop posting the whole platform dies.

[email protected]

no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

PieFed solves all of that. It isn't quite ready for the non-technical masses from Reddit, but those particular issues at least it does solve.

I kinda want to recommend people to simply visit https://piefed.social/ and see what will eventually become available as a standard Threadiverse software suite just like Lemmy and Mbin.

[email protected]

Sorry, what about PieFed specifically solves the issues?

Does it allow people to sign up to the instance directly from their Reddit credentials?
Does it provide a mapping between Fediverse communities and subreddits, so that when people sign up they are automatically subscribed to their groups of interest?
Does it provide a separation between topic instances and user instances?

I sincerely don't see how piefed relates to Fediverser at all...

freamon

@[email protected] No, I don't there's any overlap between PieFed and Fediverser either. The potential of Fediverser seems like it got cut off at the knees by how widely defederated alien.top is.

[email protected]

Not Fediverser per se but the underlying concepts. In detail:

Content is King

Here, PieFed is no better nor worse than Lemmy. It uses ActivityPub to connect with Lemmy, as well as having its own communities, like Mbin (except unlike the latter it doesn't have its own separate voting system, nor does it federate with Mastodon).

One thing PieFed does have though is the ability for a user to block all users from a particular instance of their choice, without requiring admin approval. This helps SO MUCH for certain instances that nobody wants to defederate from... yet I don't want to read content from either.

Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

There is a wizard where you choose what content you want to see - News, Politics, Arts & Craft, Technology, Movies & TV, Science, etc. - which then signs you up to communities in those Topic areas. You can later unsubscribe or subscribe to any individual communities that you wish, but the wizard helps the onboarding process so that you don't have to simply stare at All bc your Subscribed feed is initially empty, as Lemmy does, bc on PieFed it would not be empty. It thus makes it much easier to find less prominent content, such as poetry, that would otherwise get swamped out by all the memes and politics and such.

A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third.

There are Categories of Communities that combine posts from all of the topic areas, whether you joined those communities or not. So if you don't want any politics filling your feed, yet you occasionally do want to look up something related to politics, it is just one click away. So not quite mapping specifically to Reddit subs, but yes mapping to content areas. You don't need an account to see this - just visit https://piefed.social/ and look at the top.

Or here is an example post showing the Categories above the post, hashtags below it, YouTube embedding of the link, a link to watch that rather on Piped, and if you scroll down note how the sidebar text appears below every single post (some apps make that exceedingly difficult to find on Lemmy, but it's very often helpful to see not just when on the community page, and rather when in an individual post, e.g. to read the rules).

Does it provide a separation between topic instances and user instances?

No, there are extremely few instances so far and the whole project is still in late alpha as it adds features to catch up to Lemmy, although as detailed above it already has many features that Lemmy lacks. And I didn't even begin to get into some of the best thoughts for how to democratize moderation practices to rely less on authoritarian control of "remove" vs. "allow" content, by expanding upon those binary choices to include user options to control their own experience - e.g. automatically collapse any comment with >20 downvotes (though it can easily be uncollapsed with one click), and labels next to usernames (e.g. "account <2 weeks old", "may be an unregistered bot account that posts but never comments", "controversial user receiving >50x downvotes than upvotes", etc. - except these are icons not words as I relate here, plus you can add your own icons whenever and to whoever you wish, that only you will see, on top of these conditional-based ones), and even more than this besides.

When it catches up to feature parity with Lemmy, damn it's going to be so exciting! Right now it's more of a future thought, except I (who know how to fall back to Lemmy when the occasion demands, e.g. when searching for a post) already use it as my primary daily driver - not that I would recommend that mind you, just saying that it's possible, if that gives you any indication as to how close it is to being ready for the masses. It's very close, I do believe!:-)

[email protected]

The onboarding by topics is good, okay. For someone that is coming from Reddit, it would be even better if the the subscription was automatic and without having to think about it.

The other two, I think they improve the tooling a bit compared to Lemmy but they do not solve the problem of the Fediverse: content is still limited outside of the news/politics and that Federation makes it confusing to give a reference point when looking for content.

But overall, I think we keep making the mistake of building decentralized social media software focused on the server, replicating the corporate sites. We should be thinking about "switching instances", but simply of switching/improving clients.

[email protected]

It's been too long, but there might be a way to click all at once or some such. But those are details, compared to Lemmy that has All or None (and empty Subscribed), with nothing whatsoever in-between. It's a step in the right direction I am saying.

Nothing will ever entirely "solve" anything at all - people even on Reddit complain about "lack of content". There's tons of content here though, it just gets really difficult to find it. However, check out this link for Arts & Crafts. There are lots and lots of posts there - PieFed shows like 5x more in a listing than Lemmy - virtually none of which would make their way to All bc of being swamped out, and yet if that is the content that people are TRULY looking for... this brings them straight to it, with one click! Why isn't that a "solve", at least for the issue of content discovery?

Then they can subscribe to the communities they want to see in their Subscribed feed, which is less relevant due to being able to use those Categories. Also you can trigger a Notification for anything at all on PieFed - a user account, a community, a post, and I especially love seeing that you can turn OFF notifications for a particular comment, if abusive trolls decide to spam you for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, which is a real story that has happened to me at least twice on Lemmy, once on hexbear.net and another on lemmygrad.ml - in either case, my consent ceased long before they eventually got tired of harassing me (in fairness, that is supposedly what communities such as [email protected] are for, so it's not that I want the community to cease to exist so much as to not have its content promoted as if it were adopting the same standards of behavior as every other space that I was used to across the Fediverse, without at least a warning of some kind delivered, which is yet another beneficial capability that PieFed offers).

So in addition to Categories and Subscriptions, I also have Notifications sent to me for lesser-trafficked but highly desirable content for me to see like [email protected]. And sometime this year there will be yet another method of handling all of this, in user-defined topic areas like a Favorites or other category of content that the user asks to be separated from all the rest.

And respectfully I disagree, bc depending on implementation, Categories of Communities has the advantage that it could make discovery of new communities obsolete - e.g. if there's a [email protected] and a [email protected], it could put both of those into the same Category, and isn't that what you are essentially asking: that wherever the content ends up moving, that the software go and find it and bring it to you, wherever you happen to be at?

Granted, the solution that PieFed offers needs to be improved upon:-), but at least it exists now.