this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
1825 points (98.4% liked)

Reddit

17698 readers
427 users here now

News and Discussions about Reddit

Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules


Rule 1- No brigading.

**You may not encourage brigading any communities or subreddits in any way. **

YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things.



Rule 2- No illegal or NSFW or gore content.

**No illegal or NSFW or gore content. **



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-Reddit posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



:::spoiler Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 133 points 10 months ago (8 children)

Lemmy is like 1/2 of what reddit was able to do for me. I haven't gone back to reddit since the exodus, I deleted all my posts and my account and never went back. But even now when I need information on anything from a community it's always reddit that pops up with the information that I need. I understand this is because of userbase and interacting with it but lemmy has not been able to do that effectively yet.

Granted I did post about a fish for my fishtank here and it was answered actually pretty quickly.

I think I'm just not understanding what instances and the feddiverse is. Most posts I'm interested in have like 1 or 2 comments, and half the time they're not useful interactions. It just feels kind of dead here. And again I understand it's because of the lack of interaction and userbase. But to say it's better than reddit or the best alternative is being a little frivolous.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Feels kind of dead

The frustrating aspect is that it isn’t dead here. I’ve been on dead forums where you make a post and nothing happens. On Lemmy I’ve posted on seemingly dead or near dead communities, and received a flurry of response in the form of votes and comments. There are definitely people subscribed, and willing to comment, but very few people posting threads. It is a bottleneck to have users all waiting for somebody else to post something.

I hope anybody reading this comment understands that in a smaller ecosystem they can’t just passively wait for content to fill the feed. There needs to be more contribution in the form of posts, and hopefully posts that go beyond just memes (memes are great and fun, but Lemmy desperately needs posts that go beyond just that) or arguing about politics (politics are important, but exhausting). More activity on interest, and hobby communities, especially with original content adds uniqueness here.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The one thing I've noticed, at least on the lemmy.world instance, is that posts I make in whatever dinkum communities I'm in show up on the front page right there as bold as brass, which never happened on reddit. I think that's where some of these comments and upvotes are coming from. After I started noticing this I looked to see what communities the other random stuff I'm seeing on the front page is coming from and in quite a few cases they're also from tiny communities.

So that's pretty cool. Making a post in your niche subcommunity of choice is not necessarily just shouting into the void, and some people might actually see it even if they weren't looking for it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Some of it absolutely is from the frontpage, but I consider that a reason communities need more posts. Posts from a niche community actually have a chance at wider visibility. People who interact with the posts are more likely to be the kind of people who would like the community I figure.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

My new year's resolution is to post more threads in "dead" communities I care about. Thanks for the perspective.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I've taken one and tried to post something into it daily. Its kind of a fun project.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Yeah same, what lemmy needs is more of the niche stuff because that was what made reddit "reddit"

[–] [email protected] 40 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Rather than trying to find a specific community to ask a question. Ask it in a general community. Specific subreddits were only born when generic ones became too big. But as the generic ones are much smaller it makes more sense to ask your questions and make posts there.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

That's helpful thank you. If I had a question for example for a specific video game you'd recommend going to the gaming community over the game specific one?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

As of January 2024 that is still the recommended way of doing it (mostly because of the overall network size).

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

Yes absolutely. Ask in the general game community.

For example I wanted to know about HaikuOS. It's an open source OS. There's no community for it but I know Linux users are the most likely to know about it and the Linux community is huge.

So I asked in c/Linux and found users of the OS.

If I didn't get a response I'd ask in c/AskLemmy

I've done the same with anime and games.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That would work for asking, but it wouldn't help if you wanted to discuss community specific things. For instance if I wanted to discuss the new Heroic lineup after Stabby imploded the previous core I can't just post this into gaming. People are going to look at it, think "what the fuck did I just read?" and ignore it. That post requires a CS2 community and that community doesn't exist yet. There have been attempts but it's never taken off.

I think such communities are important for growth because those are the communities of you stick around for. I probably wouldn't be on Lemmy if the Formula 1 community wasn't active here. General communities are great for a general news feed, but the "niche" communities are the glue that keep people together.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

You think the gaming community doesn't have CS gamers?

See my other comment where I do just what you say you can't:

For example I wanted to know about HaikuOS. It’s an open source OS. There’s no community for it but I know Linux users are the most likely to know about it and the Linux community is huge.

So I asked in c/Linux and found users of the OS.

If I didn’t get a response I’d ask in c/AskLemmy

I’ve done the same with anime and games.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

This is insightful. Also some of the niche communities that came over have probably found it hard to recreate the experience with less participants - whereas when they were historically established on Reddit only when was enough traffic to justify splitting off from a more general topic.

Perhaps over time the members of smaller niche Lemmy communities will drift into more general topics. For example if there's not enough participants to maintain a vibrant 'wearing feathers in your hair' community, those members would probably be welcome, and valuable participants, in the larger 'head ornaments' community. Since I'm slightly invested in the success of Lemmy, I certainly hope that's what happens rather than people going back to '/r/featherhairwearing'.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (1 children)

My Reddit account is 16 years old but I have abandoned it. Lemmy is what Reddit was like 10 - 12 years ago. People were nicer for the most part and there was light discussion on random topics.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah my account was about 15 years old. Reddit definitely decayed into worse and worse and I have no regrets leaving. But it did leave a little bit of a hole that's yet to be properly filled. And lemmy is definitely doing a good job, just hasn't filled it yet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Yep. Need a bit more engagement, but not as much as Reddit/FB/etc.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

But even now when I need information on anything from a community it's always reddit that pops up with the information that I need.

Lemmy devs should prioritize SEO optimizations to make the platform more visible on search engines. This will boost traffic and leads to a positive userbase growth.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

punching you punching you punching you

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Half of what reddit was able to do for me is being overly generous, but my experience is the same.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Yeah, I think it’s just the critical mass that makes a space feel lively. The discussions I participated in felt great (actually felt like pre-digg reddit). It’s a trade-off. I similarly minimized my own reddit usage, but I still browse it on my desktop (much less than before). And that’s fine. I also stopped using Twitter, and Mastodon is a similar story: fewer, but better interactions. I don’t mind it, and it also might be by design. It’s not a for profit service and it does not need to make the engagement line go up all the time. I have more time to do what I actually want.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Did you try to use alternative search engines like tailsx or searx?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

Encourage more niche reddit subs to move to Lemmy.