You put too much faith in the general public.

Free as in beans

F*ck spez.

to block all the politics communities should be an option at sign-up, or better yet, even when you browse without being signed in.

Exactly. And with the advanced web interface on Mastodon or an app like Moshidon or Manfred, you can create custom timelines that show just a collection of hashtags.

I use that a lot—exclusively, really.

following people is nice if you know these people personally, like from real life.

That's terrible! Outrageous! Where can I find these titty memes so I can block them?

we also have science memes, showerthoughts and comic strips though!

Since a few weeks I actively post lots of news in several mostly already existing communities. But it is frustrating. I do not see much user growth. If it just would be 1-2 new users per week I'd be happy...

I wonder if the comic strips community isn't just frequented by way too many high drama people to be appealing to a general audience. 😂 It is one of the very popular communities, though.

I tried to post regularly in a few existing community. View were up, engagement null. I didn't knew what to do either.

Because it's a carbon copy of reddit and it replicates all of its problems in miniature. Also because everyone in here is extremely exclusionary and hateful of anyone who isn't wholesome 100. Also because it's decentralized but not peer to peer, which means that it's basically feudalism.

"nobody", nearly 50k people.

Asking people on mastodon if they use lemmy also doesn't make much sense to me. I don't use mastodon because it's not threaded, people on mastodon probably don't use lemmy for a similar reason. I'm not sure how many people use both threaded and unthreaded platforms, but it feels to me like the two layouts attract different people.

yeah, having tags for each community would be great.

Maybe because they’re spread out over a bunch of different instances?

The people love algorithms, even if they don't admit that. Reddit and the other platforms invest a lot of money to make people more addicted, and it works. Lemmy on the other hand... well people quickly engage with lemmy.ml and think what the fuck is this place

Its very cool.

I joined Lemmy a couple of years ago and I already notice more user engagement. I would like a little bit more, such that more niche communities can have an ecosystem of posters instead of a single one doing most posts. But not much more indeed

I would say Lemmy has bern growing more rhan pifed. Lemmy is still "new" compared to Reddit. A lot of users like the Reddit UI compared to Lemmy's barebones (like on Voyager).

In my view, people go to the areas where good content is happening, not different communications architecture.

Soapy Titty memes are a breath of fresh air compared to recurring bean memes TBH 🫘

2/3 of polled Mastodon & co. users use no link aggregator, neither Threadiverse not siloed ones.

Maybe microblogging is good enough for them?

Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with beans. Who’s gonna do it? You? 🫘

Moths, off and on.

My main reason for looking for alternatives. Wanted to stop my morning coffee doom scrolling to consist of only US politics… if you can call it politics that is… Lemmy fits the bill.

As someone has said before, I agree with a bit of lack on on-boarding, you need to be a little bit more insistent on setup to ensure you get the communities you want. Not hard, but can definitely imagine that would stop some from trying out lemmy any further.

Personally I'm not a fan. Imagine if /r/games and /r/gaming on reddit shared comment sections. That'd be a complete mess.

Different communities should be allowed to nurture their own culture.

Just gonna throw this out there: Lemmy is a bad and dumb name.

1. It's a joke about users being lemmings
   • this subtly denegrates the user on every usage
   • this implies the app/product itself isn't that serious and sounds kinda childish
2. It's not a satisfying word from a pronunciation standpoint. How many other company or product names can you think of that end with that ee sound? Reddit, Twitter, Threads, they all end with these conclusive consonant sounds. Lemmy sounds like it's trailing off while whining.
3. At best it conjures up images of rat like rodents.

Well it doesn't mix the comments, there's a divider between

Lemmy, reddit, and other forum type websites are primarily text based. Microblogging and social media are short form and have plenty of pictures and videos, which catches and retains the attention of users more. Their algorithms are also more intense and curated compared to say reddit’s front page which is more generalized to all its users. Forums mean you have to spend time reading and typing while you can doomscroll and press a reaction button on social media and microblogging.

A divider, lol. It's still the same page and everything. Hardly any separation. We shouldn't encourage this mono-culture style.

I don't think you're wrong but I question how much the name really matters. As a name, Reddit is also kind of confusing until someone explains the pun and has historically been seen as weird. Only reason it's not weird now is cause it's popular. The name "lemmy" could just as well see the same happen.

PieFed helps with this

Yeah that was a big part of why I swapped, but it's getting flooded again.

Reddit has like 8 different Dragon Ball communities lol, and 3 for the show "From"

but still something that could be improved in Lemmy, to have an advantage over Reddit

It’s been a thing on !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world for the past days or two..

… but it’s more meme than titty.

Plenty of people heard about Lemmy and bounced off. PieFed is the one people haven't heard about yet, there's some hope that they get a big growth spurt

Also removing/merging duplicate posts in the feed, it's crazy it doesn't do this yet.

This does exist in the default Lemmy UI, it's just a bit inconsistent. Also it's hard to notice when it is working, for obvious reasons lol.

I agree with you here, if people have no problems using Tiktok or Bilibili or Zalando, Lemmy shouldn't be much worse.

Damn dude, who hurt you?

I was on Reddit a long time, it wasn't always huge. Usenet forums before that. I like following topics, not people, and like hosting communities built around topics but would hate to have "followers" of myself personally, that sounds hellish. So never used Facebook, etc, and don't even love Mastodon, really.

But apparently this is a minority view?

I use Lemmy

I didn't downvote your comment but I'm American and most of us are sick of it too. We're trying. I vote in every election.

Well you don't have to use it if you don't like it. Many people like it, it was a feature with high demand. Even without the feature I always check the crossposts for different comments, so it's the same thing just more convenient, no difference in "mono-culture"

When you onboard onto Reddit it asks interests and points users to subreddits. I don't think anything like that exists on Lemmy, but could be a good thing for the less tech inclined.

Reddit seems to be highly algorithmic now, so I think it has more of the “doomscrolling effect” that does accrue a lot of engagement.

Nobody used reddit for a long time as well

Until people did

Lemmy feels like reddit around 2009

Then there are psychos like me who use both, and Bluesky, and other social media and have a personal blog.