Ask Lemmy

What I think lemmy needs 1 it needs to feel like a website to the user 2 single login you join and automatically get put on a server that isn't overloaded 3 search you need to be able to search for any sub you want right on the app 4 this is something that a user wont see but is important for them a unified system of raising money for instances

I’d rather not have Lemmy become a top website. I don’t need to see anime porn and onlyfans thots.

It doesn't need to. Pray that it doesn't.

I think better integration with peertube would help. Videos are very popular on reddit and they require a lot of resources for an instances to host its own.

Ultimately I think it's sort of like Python and C#. Python got big by being easy to use, with great community management, and it took decades to reach its peak of popularity. C# got big because Microsoft threw a ton of money at people to use it. Of the two, Python's popularity seems to be lasting longer.

I suspect this will be the case for all the new sites and protocols popping up in The Web 2.0 Crash, or whatever the history books call it. We'll see a few sites like TikTok and Threads that "buy their friends", get a ton of overnight popularity and then fade away, and we'll get a few "institutions" that take their time building healthy communities over tens of years. ActivityPub didn't wow me with Mastodon but I'm pleasantly surprised by Lemmy, so maybe the Fediverse will be one of those institutions... but personally I still think there's room in the market for RSS to make a comeback.

I think social media designed like "Reddit" is just THE logical way to structure social media. That's why I think there is just an inherent demand for a platform like Reddit. Because of the network effect, social media platforms strongly tend to centralize. More users > more content > more users > more content > ... it is a self-reinforcing cycle favoring centralization. So that is the reason why reddit is popular, it was "the first", it is big. The only reason why people would ever leave is if Reddit themselves screw themselves over. Luckily for us, they do all the time.

Where Reddit really fails is how powerful admins and mods are, and regularly abusing that power. To fix this, you need to change the incentive structure so that power goes to the users themselves. Lemmy is already better at this because of its federated structure.

But I would go a step further and make communities work more like git. Anyone can fork any communities, meaning they create a new copy of a community but under their management. If enough people switch over to that fork, they get to keep the name of the sub.

That way mods and admins are incentivized to act in the best interest of users at all time, because if they don't, they are easily deposed.

As a bonus it would also result in making new communities from two groups who shouldn't have been together in the first place. Essentially creating more and more specialized communities more closely matching the wants of the users.

This is different to Lemmy or Reddit where you would have to create a new sub, with zero content to depose a mod/split the community.

You essentially make the process to switch out mods as low cost as possible for users. Thereby massively increasing competition, increasing quality and user satisfaction.

Ideally this would all be built on top of some base data storage layer like IPFS or something, so you don't have to literally copy over all the content any time you fork a community, but you just copy the references to where the content is stored.

Also hosting should be as simple as possible, ideally on some decentralized hosting service, like some of these crypto solutions.

This would basically remove all barriers to creating and maintining your own communities, except for hosting cost and moderation.

If you had to design the perfect social media platform, I think that would be it.

We need to have something that they cant have or is lower quality like communities like c/techsupport