this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Hi all! I used to be a daily r/selfhosted lurker and a bit active user. Since the Reddit saga I thought that r/selfhosted would be one of the first and bigger community to move to Lemmy due to the IT knowledge of all of their users and the sensitivity about self host/privacy/open source, but I see that not only the community is still all there, but it's rising. :( That really makes me sad. How can we convince the mods there to move people here? Is it allowed to talk about Lemmy on Reddit or do we risk of being banned?

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[–] [email protected] 308 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Stop obsessing about Reddit and create a content on Lemmy instead. People will come once they see there's enough activity here.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

Exactly. Chill out. It's not a competition.

Just hang out and enjoy the community.

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[–] [email protected] 273 points 1 year ago (3 children)

My favorite r/selfhosted comment.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Same with r/antiwork they closed briefly and when Reddit sneezed their way, they opened the sub instantly. Talking about hypocrisy.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There's a lot of subs like these which I don't want to name. Basically, subs with anti-corpo principles but refuses to leave corpo Reddit. I'm happy for the subs who are still dark even until now (and even more reason to be now that Reddit is deleting older DMs and removing awards/coins).

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why not name them? Personally, I'm most disappointed in r/cyberpunk. They kind of proved they are all about neon lights.

[–] RadDevon 16 points 1 year ago

Every movement, subculture, whatever is just about fashion for 98% of the people involved. Fashion is easy. Values are hard.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Basically, subs with anti-corpo principles but refuses to leave corpo Reddit.

See also: Discord

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

Well, imho, at least half of r/antiwork posts were escapist fiction of how one should have replied to their manager.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

I guess moving to lemmy was too much work.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Ahahaha, top message!!!

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[–] [email protected] 92 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

If you look at the charts you linked, you can see the users activity (post per day and comments per day) is falling sharply since last month. Subscribers count mean nothing if a big proportion of the active posters leave.

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

Makes sense, the people who have both the tech knowledge and conviction on the advantages of selfhosting, were probably the most active posters.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The new subscribers are probably bots.

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

100% how spez started out initially and made it appear that reddit had a lot of activity. So this definitely smells like spez-tricks

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

Post per day seams steady at about 30/40, comment per day seams to have dropped from 3/400 to 250/300, I would have expected a great fall.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If you compare post per days from before the strike, it definitely falls. It's no longer an upward trajectory despite subscribers growth.

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[–] [email protected] 91 points 1 year ago (5 children)

The change will come once people start searching for stuff on Google and they get results which link back to lemmy. For that to happen we need people asking for help/feedback and getting their answers here.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The most useful comment in this entire thread, the search results are a bit of a mess currently and that's a huge stumbling block.

I tried a simple search query with lemmy and the way results come back is not good

it's going to take a long time for that to change but just as a casual user I doubt I'd click anything past the first few reddit links.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The fact we're on the first screen of results is progress! 🎉

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I'm happy to help provide answers on my fields of interests but they are pretty much dead on Lemmy for now, it's a chicken and egg thing.

It doesn't help that because we don't really have good algorithms, my feed is dominated by generalist topics, memes, news and tech stuff. So even if I subscribe to smaller communities, if I don't intentionally go visit them they're never in my feed.

We need to better surface posts from smaller communities by having a weighted algorithm so that your feed is a mix of big and small communities.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This was actually mentioned in an issue on the github. I can't quite remember whether it was turned down or just inactive. I totally agree. If we're going to compete with big social medias then we also need some kind of algorithms. Opt-in/out of course.

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

Google's algorithm might actively down-rank Lemmy sites though, as the messages appear duplicated on multiple sites, which is usually a sign of SEO blog spam.

Probably needs a change on Google's side to better recognize federated websites. Not impossible that they will do this, lets see.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

As of v0.18.2, Lemmy marks the "original URL" as the canonical URL so search engines know which page is the "real" one. Shouldn't that help?

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well firstly, why do you care about being banned if you're leaving Reddit?

Come to terms with Reddit not dying overnight. Lemmy isn't going to vanish if people don't move over straight away. Reddit will eventually succumb to the 1000s of tiny self-inflicted cuts. Post content that isn't on Reddit and people will have a motivation to stay here.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

Make Lemmy the place to be when reddit kills the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. Yeah we're small, but we're something crazy like almost 10x the size we were before the 3rd party app shitshow.

We aim to be the place where people can migrate to next time reddit causes a freakout, like killing old reddit

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (4 children)

If you link to Lemmy on Reddit, the admins sometimes delete the comment.

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

Lol I used a script to overwrite my 13 years of fairly active redditing with a join-lemmy.org link

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I've read that Reddit was recovering them all. Are yours still gone?

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You would think, of all the communities that would be comfortable with migration, it would be the folks from /r/selfhosted!

Fellow user from there, btw, nice to see we've got a decent pool of people on this board instead.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Subscriber numbers mean little. Take a look at the trend for the posts per day and comments per day graphs. They're far more accurate indicators of the level of engagement actual users are having with reddit.

I've just checked for 10 of the subs I used to subscribe to, 2 of which have over 30m subscribers - all of them have the same downward trend in terms of posts and comments. I'm not saying reddit is in trouble but less new content is being created and that which is is being talked about less, eventually that will take a toll.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Neat, where are you pulling these graphs?

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

allowed to talk about Lemmy on Reddit

if /r/lemmy is any proof; A) its ok to talk about lemmy on reddit and B) /u/spez has some validity in his point about users would be back not just because of the '48hr' thing.

That said, yes a loud enough minority can create change and that discussion does need to happen where the users are for the network effect to kick off.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ever since the api shit happend, and mods left their subs unmoderated, I feel like there are more bot accounts/posts on Reddit than ever.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree with all the comments so far but would like to add my own thoughts. Users are not important. Personally I moved to lemmy because the quality of discussion on reddit dropped so much.

This has been my trajectory:

  • avid reddit user and content creator there (not sure if the right term) 2016 - 2018
  • lurker from 2018 to 2023
  • completely dropped reddit and moved to lemmy

My hope is that we can have the same kind of content and discussion in pre 2020 reddit

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm one of them! I didn't even know about r/selfhosted when I was on Reddit but I found this place when I joined kbin. I've been thinking on-and-off over the last year about self hosting so subscribed. I still occasionally look at Reddit in view-only mode though (largely for legacy content) so I also subscribed to r/selfhosted over there too last time I checked it.

It's not subscriber numbers that matter though, it's active users and quality new posts - people who go to the sub regularly, upvote, comment, and create content that causes other people in turn to look at the sub. I'm still a subscriber to a tonne of Reddit subs that I used to post and comment regularly on, and now don't. If every active Reddit user became a passive user then Reddit would grind to a halt overnight, regardless of how many users they notionally have.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

I like it here on Lemmy as there are quality talks from people and not too much circlejerking same concepts around. I actually like going trough here.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

So....I own a .com domain that's really, really good as far as being lemmy-related (it has lemmy in the name).

Not exactly a s self-hosted question, and I'm an old geek so I can arrange hosting and set things up myself when I have time, but anyone have a guess as to my traffic costs if I decide to turn it into a federated lemmy instance and open it up to the public? Just looking for thoughts and opinions.

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

The fediverse keeps sabotaging itself with instances defederating left and right, that way it'll never become an alternative regular user would want to join.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Defederation isn't sabotage. It's a feature for healthy communities. Anyone that is interested in discussions on either defederated community, will create an account for both.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Anyone that is interested in discussions on either defederated community, will create an account for both.

And that is the reason why reddit is still growing. If you are required to make multiple accounts just to engage with the communities you want to engage with, Lemmy is no better than separate forums. And those all got overshadowed by reddit for a reason.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Do what you can to make this the place you want to be.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

More subscribers.. check More comment.. maybe check Quality content.. nah

I use RSS to get r/selfhosted post and I can guarantee that most posts are amateurs asking questions.

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