This is not going to be a blogpost about "Why do people still use Reddit instead of everyone moving to Lemmy?". I noticed that even with Mastodon users, who already understand and like the advantages of decentralized platforms, the usage of Lemmy is extremely small, and more people use Reddit. Most of them haven't even heard of Lemmy. To be fair, the Reddit usage also seems to be fairly low.

I don't like the title cause there's a decently sized userbase here, but the article is good. If the article was something like "Why don't more people use Lemmy?" then I would share this on Reddit, but as-is most people will just read the headline and skip it.

I mean the sad explanation is that they simply don't care. They'll complain all the livelong day about the problems but they'll never leave. That much was clear after they killed the API and everyone protested for a whopping 2 days.

everytime an instance, or a community goes down or recieves too much drama(like how some users dint like the "political stance of a specific instance owners(not tankies)), they scatter to other platforms thats why. some went to piefed, and others. the last instance that went down, there was much more people lemmy, especially in some categories(not much but more than now)

And yet here we are 3 years later, still protesting.

I don't use Mastodon or Twitter either. I never understood following specific people and prefer following topics instead.

I think its okay the way it is. Too much attention leads to many reposts, karma farmers, bots, now AI bullshit etc.

Does anyone else find the font on this uncomfortable to read is that just me?

nobody

I'm somebody!

Your browser likely has a "reader view". In Firefox, by default, this can be toggled via clicking the little page icon in the URL bar. Remote styles won't be applied in that.

Just you wait. Growth will happen in shocks. Basically people probably haven’t heard about Lemmy yet.

I have to be that guy and point out that the Threadiverse isn't just Lemmy, and microblog-Fedi isn't just Mastodon.

I don't generally like the Twitter model and rarely use it, but I will say that one thing that it does do well, better than the Reddit/Threadiverse model, is very rapidly assembling information about a specific, temporary topic.

Like, the Reddit model is about letting a community assemble over time and letting people find their way there and moderators be chosen and all that. That works quite well for a lot of things, and lets people with expertise in the field arise and all that.

But let's say that there's a huge natural disaster and people are putting up video clips from their cell phones and stuff like that. They can coalesce around a hashtag or a couple of hashtags pretty quickly. Relevant material from people who have had no contact with each other and maybe no time to assemble a community or anything gets drawn together. Other users retweeting content help highlight it. The topic probably won't be active for long. It can be really useful for a rapid setup and teardown scenario.

Of course, that's really mostly following a hashtag, rather than a particular user...

I also dislike the "short comment" model that Twitter uses (though over the years, the comment length has been increased and workarounds added), but one thing that it does help with is to help deal with inexperienced users unfamiliar with quoting etiquette. In email or in traditional forum systems, it's conventional to quote a bit of relevant text before responding to it. This requires knowing syntax for doing so and when it's appropriate. Twitter deals with that by forcing everything to be broken up into bite-size chunks as a property of the system, so someone responding to something is forced to respond to only the relevant bit. I think that that probably helps make Twitter more-approachable.

I’m nobody.

Also: Happy Cake Day!

Reddit started out small too, you know when it was actually good.

Thanks!

People that do actual geolocations for the war in Ukraine are basically the primary sources. They figure out where and when videos were taken and do the actual work. Following the topic gets you to some big account that aggregates them

I use Lemmy every day!

Lemmy ist for talking about topics, mastodon is for following brands and entering parasocial relationships.

If everyone used lemmy, lemmy would be reddit

It is not just you

No you're thinking of Threads

I'd say we have too many reposts and not enough original content here. I mean you probably need to think about the value proposition. What does the Lemmyverse offer to someone from Mastodon? A lot of what we do is post the news and memes. And we got some Linux computer support. Now they already got all of that over on Mastodon. Oftentimes it won't even be a repost by some third party, but they get more original content because bloggers and comic artists post themselves over there. Along with some computer magazines and news outlets.

sue 2: Users could agree on one community. Or (a functionality Lemmy doesn't have), similar communities could be grouped or linked together. Instead of choosing between Linux@lemmy.ml and Linux@lemmy.world, users could follow a combined “Linux” topic.

Doesn't PieFed do exactly that?

This is the thing right here. Enjoy Lemmy as it is. There's plenty of people here. The more people there are, the more it's going to suck. Be glad Lemmy isn't Reddit. I sure as fuck am. Lemmy is exactly the right size. Well, maybe it could double or triple and there would be more content and that would be a net positive, but anything more than that and it's going to start devolving into the same cesspool that Reddit has become.

Yes, and it consolidates comments from cross-posts. Very neat.

I think it's too empty a lot of times. Mainstream topics are nicely populated but a vast amount of specific communities are just one person posting links over and over with a handful of upvotes and zero comments. Sometimes I see posts here and have to go to Reddit to see what the community thinks about it, because on Lemmy the post is completely dead.

I'm not!

No, the issue with reddit is the lack of openness and chokehold spez has on it. Lemmy is free.

Mastodon is a source for links to post to Lemmy. :P

I say this in all of these threads: more users does not mean a better experience.

Instead, focus on making our communities the best they can be.

I think that’s only true after a certain amount of users.

I don't know if more people make lemmy automatically more shitty.
After all this community started with a few hand fulls of reddits banned political extremists which tended to be the most annoying part at reddit (at least for me).
New users at lemmy learn pretty quickly to ignore/ban pricks.
I'd hope we get more content (and again advise anyone alread here to share their interests by posting in the dedicated communities).

The real answer, that we all know but dare not speak, is that it's miserable here.

Once you've blocked the tankies, porn, and militant dweebs, it's wall to wall politics and titty memes.

I'm here because I'm also a miserable asshole.

The UX still has a long way to go.

I'm very tolerant of shitty tech and like a struggle, and even I am often like wtf.

Signed up to piefed.zip the other day, and the default feed is just horrendous

Most users will just quit instead of trying to figure out how to fix it manually.

No proper onboarding

33 people participated

Mastodon allows you to follow hashtags, which would be like following a topic.

Exactly! I'd be curious to see the reverse poll, asking Lemmy users "Why does nobody use Mastodon?" (and include Bluesky and Twitter in the poll.)

I use Lemmy (and in the past Reddit) because topic based conversation is what makes sense to me. Anytime I try to use Mastodon or Bluesky I lurk for a bit and then just come back here.

Lemmy and Reddit usage are relatively low compared to their respective social media siblings. I've always believed the reason is in the difference in how they're structured. Most other social media is wired around people as the primary structural unit. "Who's saying what?" Reddit and Lemmy are instead wired around topics. "What are people saying about this?" And I assume the difference in popularity is evidence for how most people themselves are wired.

That's also true. It has a wider audience, so there is more stuff to discuss. But I feel like it converges mostly to mainstream topics, and more niche things are harder to discuss.

Social networks live and die by network effects. People don't use Instagram because it's the best. They use Instagram because that is where their friends are. Either everybody uses a site, or nobody does.

Conservatives did this to you. I'm sending you some "cheer up" tiddies.

Finding communities can be confusing: There can be multiple communities about the same topic on different servers: For example: Linux@lemmy.ml and Linux@lemmy.world

I agree that finding communities can be confusing, but I don't think the problem is the naming.

For example on Reddit if you wanted to talk about video games you'd look at /r/gaming. However over time, since that was a "default sub", it became a bit of a mess and instead /r/Games was the community to have real discussion about video games. But of course over time that too became a bit of a mess and /r/TrueGaming was the best place to talk about video games. In fact for a long time /r/True was a common way to find the better community.

Of course the name of a community might be confusing to an outsider. On Reddit if I'm a fan of Game of Thrones there is /r/GameOfThrones, but what if I'm looking for something a bit more meme worthy, well that's /r/freefolk.

And that's true even on Lemmy. What if I want Star Trek memes? Well that's !tenforward@lemmy.world

I think discoverability is something that can be improved. Of course at the moment so many communities are so small, so looking at all of them isn't really much of a problem. You can usually find what you're looking for.

There was a glorious few months before Reddit enshittified even further, before the bigger migration of users. After that it turned into 90% American politics.

Edit: downvote me all you want Americans, but the rest of the world is kind of sick of your shit ngl.

Alexandrite is pretty great

You can be in the left and know this place is filled with the most broken progressives we have 🤷

There was beans before there were titty memes, also there's a lot of owl and cat pictures, and random comics

Conservatives did this to us. We're gonna need some more "cheer up" tiddies.

The grouping is something that should have been solved long ago. Also removing/merging duplicate posts in the feed, it's crazy it doesn't do this yet.