This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.

That's so much extra work

YOU HAVE MADE A BLOOD PACT WITH WORLD.

ML HATES YOU NOW

I’m a 31 yr old dude that just found out about this along with what the fediverse is. When I found out, I was researching this stuff so it took me some time to understand it all and I still don’t think I fully understand it all

There's not enough politics IMO. No fun at all.

I think you guys have a great chance to capture Reddit's exodus. I used it for about 16 years and me and all of my friends have realized how awful it's become. People are looking for a new platform. I'm going to try and help by opening PRs against the repos.

Part of the problem is there's a lot less to it than it feels like there is. The analogies we use to teach to non-tech people don't quite match up.

It's simply a structured way to log in and send messages back and forth.

You can use it to stitch together forums, link shares, social media, video sharing, or image sharing sites.

But we really don't bind things together all that tightly. At best you can follow someone on pixelfed or mastodon. Since there's truly no minimum wiring, a lot of services don't even really fully communicate with each other. So we end up mostly with mastodon <-> mastodon links and lemmy->piefed<-lemmy links.

activitypub is a protocol. like email.

instances are just what provider you want to use, gmail, hotmail, outlook, etc.

and the 'platform' lemmy, piefed, mastroton, pixelfed, is just the aesthetics

I think it's pretty good. Two syllables, easy to say, no similar sounding competing platforms. What do you think's wrong with it?

and which instance you start out on... is going to heavily influence your experience/content and get you branded/blocked by a lot of the userbase

hey don't forget all the mental health communities here...

Disagree. This is a case of the brand actually not meaning much. "Reddit" isn't great either, but people think it does because it's well known.

I'm reminded of the person who said Mario was a character designed from the ground up to be marketable, when it was literally created to make a graphic of a person readable in a 16x16 sprite with three colors.

Reddit has been exodusing for multiple years now. At some point, people are going to have to stop caring about the gorilla down the road and just be good, and I think Lemmy is good. Posts that make it to the front page often have over 1K reputation! It's far from Reddit big, but it's still big!

Well, as the saying goes, be the change you want in the world - if you find a community that you'd like to see more posts on, and you can contribute, then by all means, please do so

In other words, you're saying I use Lemmy because I have no friends. If that's what you mean, you'd be right.

i feel like it's usually the opposite. some people just really insist on getting upset about anyone on .ml

Where do all those meme posts about "Lemmy is bad name / bad branding" come from? I've seen it recurrently enough every time someone launches a FOSS thing that I would normally suspect it's part of a LLM farm or a scam attempt from some sort of naming / patents agency, but I've seen these reactions from long enough (2015-ish).

Perfect. I'm in the right place.

217 comments on this in 24 hours says to me that there must at least a few people using lemmy

I feel like this is an issue of (either accidentally or incidentally) putting focus on something that doesn't really need it. Picking instances should not matter; not in the sense of "it's federated blah blah" but more in the sense of "it's 2026, there's password managers, noone uses their real identities for everything; having multiple accounts wherever it's convenient should be normal".

And we have cats communities to deal with that one!

Naming something after a famous person means you're starting off on the back foot in terms of SEO and brand clarity.

Digg worked well because it came out of an era where adding a second G was enough to sound techy, but it also played into the dig/bury aspect of voting. Reddit works because the name is "read it" while also being a unique string you couldn't mistake for anything else. Both have a lot going for them that Lemmy just doesn't.

...until found by another means.

It's named after a famous musician that was active for like 30+ years. Half the results when you search "Lemmy" are him, not the platform. Oh, and he had an unfortunate collection of Nazi memorabilia - he claimed it wasn't because he liked the nazis just that he liked the look of their shit...

FOSS often ends up with bad names unfortunately. People never know what is going to become big when they start a project and they might get a giggle out of the name when it's a small project. By the time the project becomes big enough that the name might actually start being a problem, it is also known by that name and changing it could significantly impact how many people keep using it. Unfortunately, a name change is often a touchy subject for any project.

I was recruited from reddit where search results about Lemmy can be found through google. Though see a lot of people have arrived here through the catgorl culture and linux

on reddit it would be 6000.

30K users is small potatoes. even niche subreddits have userbases larger than that.

I love everyone!

I just suggest that people join .world (unless I know the person I'm talking to will best fit a different instance) and not worry about it. Once they understand how it works, they can make an account on a different instance if they want. There's no need to overthink it.

That is what we want people to believe. It's nice and cosy without the 'mainstream' users. ;)

Yea, once a post is up on reddit for even 3 hours its not worth interacting with because no-one will see what you have to say anyways. Honestly its what makes Lemmy better to me.

Best question here. Also, if Lemmy had a ton of users would it really be the place we want to hang out? I personally felt Reddit got worse after it blew up and a lot of people joined.

I used to sit around and talk about silly things like Linux just fine then I noticed I started getting constantly brigaded by Winblows Fanbois. Reddit turned into a shit hole of sub-par generic groupthink and I would rather that did not happen on Lemmy.

I use Lemmy. And you do. And 1000 other people do. So I'd say it's big enough.

Eh not that famous, I bet most people dont have any name associations with Lemmy except that it sounds kinda like "lemming". Which is sort of unfortunate though because lemmings (the de facto name for lemmy users) generally means crowd-following idiots. But as far as factors that inhibit the growth of lemmy go Id put the name way down the list.

People need to spend more time on lighthearted issues like Palestine and the evils of capitalism

Haha there are in fact 8 different NFL shitposting subreddits, one for each of the 8 different divisions. And each one is as active as just about any Lemmy community.

I agree on the other 2 points as well. Not only is it weird to have to pick an instance, the names and descriptions are off putting as well. You scroll through and several of the top ones are openly Marxist/leninist/leftist. 95% of people see that and are immediately put off. It sends a message that Lemmy is fundamentally for leftist agenda-posting, and a lot of users treat it that way. Click on any completely non-political-sounding community (like Movies or something), sort top all time and you will usually be greeted immediately by posts about Israel/Palestine or Donald Trump. Its exhausting honestly.

Edit: also, why does join-lemmy.org not show .world (one of the largest coms if not the largest) anywhere on the popular instances page? What kind of drama is going on there? This is exactly the kind of shit Im talking about.

I was about to respond 'I've never been banned from an instance' but then realized that I don't know how I could verify it. 🤔

It's finicky. You kind of have to check the mod log from that instance. I went to respond to a comment there and couldn't and the mod log showed me as banned.

It's not good to be the king...

I guarantee there are many bad people here, because... humans.
It's all about percentages though I guess, at this point a lot of lemmy users wanted something different, something 'better', but at some point most lemmy users will just be here because everyone else is here, at which point the decent people will have found the next lemmy (this has already happened no doubt).

It's partially the platform, partially the moderators, partially the people using it

Being able to migrate an account between instances would help a huge amount. I am almost wishing we could agree on a default instance for all newcomers, but this would work to just centralize the user base so it's not a good solution. However, if account migration were implemented, there could be a sort of "first steps" or "training ground" instance that accepts all new users by default and only allows accounts to remain there for a set period of time before asking them to find a new instance to call home. This would let users who aren't interested in the technical details of federation get their feet wet and figure out which instance aligns with them before needing to make the choice.

This scheme would definitely require that new users have the option of signing up to a particular instance right away; no need for the default instance to be the only sign up option.

Yeah but thats better than most niche message boards back in their heyday. Probably better than y incubators message board to.

A big chunk of reddit traffic and users are bots. Another large segment are more recent arrivals from India (check out how many Indian topics make the front pages on the weekends when USA/UK traffic is low.) While I can't prove it I have a hunch that Spez hired a bunch of Indian clickfarms to pump the numbers before the IPO. Maybe he just promoted in India more to get an influx of users for the IPO or maybe they are mostly "social media marketers" hired to sell health/peptide supplements (seriously there are services that do that on Reddit so be careful ever taking any such advice from them.)

But my point is that the quality of users is pretty weak and I'm certain American advertisers have noticed by now. 300ish real, quality users is a better engagement metric than 6000 bots.

I’ll be honest I miss old Reddit

Everyone does. Just like we all miss og Myspace or geocities sites. Old Reddit at its prime was a different time period. Can't recapture that just like you can't recapture the geocities era of the internet.

We're being enshittified. Lemmy is the least enshittified (thus far.)

And Reddit was small for years and years when it started. I don't even think I really started using it till around 2013-2014. Didn't have a username or anything just came across it through Google searches. All websites take a while to build a userbase.

It took me a long time before I signed up. I think I lucked for at least a year. I didn't want to join an instance and then regret it. And all instances have their own small novel of rules, that I need to read through to know if I agree with. And even if you do, you have to send an application and get approved as well.

It almost scared me away - I'd imagine the same goes for a lot of people.

This I think is the main problem to adoption. It's very hard to come across Lemmy results on a search engine even if I'm trying to specify Lemmy. (Not that search engines matter for most people these days what with the LLM executive summary pushing out real web pages, who needs resources when you have slop, am I right? \s)

1. Few people like to be the first(ish) one on the dance floor.

2. It's slightly harder to sign up for than Reddit, so people interested in this kind of thing usually just sign up for Reddit (or stay there).

3. Most people don't care about the advantages Lemmy affords us; they care about what's on TV tonight or which celebrity is dating which celebrity.

This is exactly one of the reasons I like this more. Writing anything of reddit is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean. This comment here might only be read by 10 people, but 10 good, real people will actually read it.

Oh ok

I think because people are the same no matter what platform they're using and you'll end up with the same kinds of arguments, trolling, or derailing everywhere. But they already have platforms they're on for those, so why switch?

Lemmy would have to be pretty different and because humans are the same everywhere, I'm not really seeing that difference.

I see it somewhat when browsing contents in other languages because the culture is different enough to lend itself to different contents, or at least different arguments that are less tiresome than what I see on English platforms...

Because you get banned from communities by mods too extreme for reddit or the USSR