I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but threads or comments about Lemmy or the Fediverse get downvoted a lot on Reddit and trolls who claim that it’s “dogshit” and “not going anywhere” get systematically upvoted.
Some of those trolls get then exposed when you ask them what Lemmy instance they tried and one of them with whom I had a surreal exchange answered with something like “yeah ofc I used Lemmy, this is the instance: join-lemmy.org” 🤦♂️
It’s frustrating that these trolls keep contributing to the big lie that “Lemmy is not ready yet” and that there’s “no viable alternative to Reddit”.
This and the overwhelming number of comments being “against the mod protests” just prompts me to question whether there isn’t some brigading being organized straight from the Reddit HQ.
Probably bots. Reddit has been using them for some time, but recently got caught using chat gpt or something similar to argue against the blackouts.
Do you have a source for this claim? I’m very interested in reading about it
That’s pathetic lmao.
The majority aren‘t bots. Most of them are legit no lifers to whom Reddit going down the drain would be a huge blow. I mean you work full time as a cashier for taco bell and you are not really happy with that situation. Some people go to school again, learn a skill… others spend all their time one Reddit stockpiling karma. Those are the people who really hate lemmy and anything that could remotely make Reddit worse, because they are heavily invested in the platform for the wrong reasons.
deleted by creator
It really feels like that is happening in /r/lotrmemes – https://www.reddit.com/r/lotrmemes/comments/14cekxa/shall_we_continue_the_blackout_poll_round_2/
Which is fking insane since one of Steve’s excuses for upping API pricing so high is to fight LLM from training on “their” dataset! Fucking LOL
Unfortunately there’s probably a large amount of users who simply don’t care.
But that’s okay. What matters is content creators, not content consumers. Anyone with half a gram of decency and self integrity will have realized that they need to take steps to move away from Reddit.
When the content creators leave and go to Lemmy/Kbin, eventually those content consumers will leave and go with them too. Will be a bonus for the Fediverse
We need to ask Louis Rossmann to join the fediverse. He’s been super critical with Reddit on YouTube.
I’m sure he’s already aware and will make an account if he wants to.
There’s no point in shoving the Fediverse in someone’s face.
Some slight reassurance never hurt anyone, that’s worlds from advertising or pushing though.
I care and I’m here. I count as do all of us! Fuck ‘em!
Exactly. Let the milquetoast mouth-breathers stay behind. With sufficient brain-drain, Reddit will eventually look like Quora.
Once - unfortunately - Apollo app will be down, in less than 2 weeks, I’m pretty sure Lemmy will surge and they will come complaining here 😅
Maybe. It’s not like there’s a Lemmy app that’s as good as Apollo.
Have you tried Jerboa for Lemmy? It is not Apollo but it is comfortable and ads free
Jerboa is for Android. Apollo is for iOS.
Memmy is in TestFlight if you fancied being a tester.
Same with mlem. It’s a little ahead of memmy in development right now.
Beta full unfortunately at the moment it seems
Mlem has become really good since they updated the app two days ago.
They really need to fix some of their accessibility issues. Comment text cannot be resized which makes it impossible for me to use the app. Memmy respects the dynamic text sizing in iOS, so I’m using it for now. It’s not up to feature parity with Mlem but the developer is doing a great job with adding features.
Memmy also works natively on iPad. Mlem has just a zoomed iPhone version.
I’m already seeing an increase in trolling and spam across the Lemmy and Kbin instances. Hopefully the mods can handle the influx.
I miss Apollo everyday. I haven’t used it since the blackout in solidarity.
Yep, they will definitely come complaining here.
Some subreddits are also using automod to remove comments linking to Lemmy.
I hope some journalists put a spotlight on the deceptive tactics Reddit is using.
The people who like it are here. The people that don’t are still there. Not that complicated.
Also, people have a natural tendency to form “teams.” Even if they don’t particularly like what Reddit’s admins have been doing they may identify as part of “team Reddit” and so see other teams as the enemy.
Besides, the way to convert isn’t by arguing. You do it by providing a good platform (not there yet), good content (not there yet) and good community (kinda there?).
I’d say we’re at “okay platform” level, and “okay content if you’re into the specific things we’ve got okay content for at this point.”
It’s a gradual process. The Fediverse is slowly getting better, and Reddit is slowly getting worse, and eventually someday they’ll pass each other in the wilderness.
There was a legendary episode in social psychology called the Robbers Cave experiment. It had been set up in the bewildered aftermath of World War II, with the intent of investigating the causes and remedies of conflicts between groups. The scientists had set up a summer camp for 22 boys from 22 different schools, selecting them to all be from stable middle-class families. The first phase of the experiment had been intended to investigate what it took to start a conflict between groups. The 22 boys had been divided into two groups of 11 -
- and this had been quite sufficient.
I’ve just read up on that experiment on Wikipedia and the conclusion you present seems to be shortcoming to tell nicely. Reassuring to me was that the two groups occasionally ganged up on the experimenters, being aware they’re being manipulated. Thanks for mentioning this, yet for me it seems to be way more to it than '2 groups will fight inevitably ’
Sorry, it was a pithy quote. It’s not meant to fully encapsulate the results of the study, it just seemed relevant and likely to bring some pleasure to people.
Obviously, people are more complicated than can be fully captured in a single statement, but there is some truth there; look at how hostile people can get over sports teams, which are never going to affect people’s access to food, shelter, medical care, etc, and which are still treated with life of death seriousness by their adherents, who largely differ in which location they happen to originate.
Amen, if Reddit ever died it would probably survive living rent free in Lemmy users’ heads.
Lmao, who cares what they think?
My biggest issue with Lemmy is lack of userbase… which is fixable by signing up for Lemmy.
Figured best case scenario other people make the switch, worst case I’ll forget this service even exists.
Also does anyone know how to enable dark mode, or if there is a dark mode?
I use jerboa for Android and it has TWO dark modes 😱
In case you happen to need sunglasses at night?
Once there are good mobile apps in the app stores, I think we’ll start seeing a surge in adoption. The other big piece is moderation tools. If Lemmy can manage to build better mod tools than Reddit, it would be a big draw for power mods
yeah that’s what I’m struggling with too, like it’d be great if we could encourage people to try these, but at the same time I don’t want to give them a bad first impression to turn them off forever if they can not stand it’s still a baby project (understandable). I honestly don’t think it’s that hard to start using these fediverse products though, and I feel like the posts saying “lemmy will never take off”, “kbin is too hard to use” only gave me barriers to start using it. And then when I did start, I was like oh this is great, everyone’s talking, it’s a close community
The biggest issue is how easily people are taken “off-site” when linking to another instance, leaving them essentially logged out and unable to subscribe or otherwise participate. Users should be presented an option to be redirected to the relative view within their instance or go external. With the “external” link in much smaller font below the preferred option. Kind of like how Steam or Discord has a pop-up asking if you “trust this site” whenever you leave their spaces.
As a tech savy person, I can confidently say lemmy is not a viable reddit alternative at this stage for an arbitrary reddit user. The UI and clients are just terrible and full of small bugs, annoyances and inconsistencies. Sure, it will eventually get there, but negative opinions about lemmy are not completely unmerrited. Just as I’m typing this, I get screen tears and flickering elements. It’s just very, very bleeding edge and I can absolutely see how someone trying it for 5 minutes would be turned off. If you want to capture the masses, the user experience has to impeccable.
PS: my first try at submitting this response timed out. This is my second try.
It doesn’t have to be impeccable. It doesn’t need corporations to buy ads. It just has to keep getting better and not die. Look at Linux. It never did overtake MacOS & Windows on desktops. But it keeps getting better and it didn’t die and it took over server rooms. Look at Mastodon. It’s nowhere near as popular as Twitter and maybe never will be, but it’s 5 years old and is steadily growing. I like hanging out there. Oak trees start as acorns.
That’s the thing though, criticism of lemmy does not necessarily mean hate. We can acknowledge and be honest about the problems without shitting on the platform. My experience over the last week with kbin would have been way beyond the technical know-how of say, my sister. It’s not ready for the average user. It will be, devs are kicking ass, but we’re not there yet and that’s okay. I would rather people know what they’re in for here than to show up expecting a polished, bug-free interface.
Is this the year of the Lemmy desktop?
Thing is; I don’t want the “arbitrary reddit user”. I want the low-effort user to get irritated and leave.
you only need to move the more techie knowledgeable user base here. The ones that mod and post content.
The average user provides nothing to the site but dead traffic. They’ll come when the content is here.
The content creators want their content to be seen by as many people as possible. It’s not “dead” traffic, they are valuable consumers even if all they do is lurk. A content creator is obviously more valuable than a lurker, but we should not ignore the other side. It’s a chicken-egg problem.
lurkers follow the content.
Here’s an example: how can I subscribe to the topics I want to follow? I don’t want to see the 198 or whatever it is posts. Nor programmer humour. Lemmy has a great community of fans and users but if I can’t see only what I want I’m not going to use it.
I don’t know about lemmy but I’m using kbin and it’s pretty easy to subscribe to magazines (aka communities) and block the ones I don’t want to see
Neoliberals and saying “there is no alternative”, name a more iconic duo
Spam-bots and strange links.
The wheel of history will succumb redditors who refuse to accept that their system will pass just as all other before it have.
Removed by mod
what does that have to with neoliberals lol
Probably a lot. They love bootlicking
I haven’t noticed that because I no longer look at reddit. I suggest you do the same.
Yeah, OP is getting hate-baited hard.
Yeah, I don’t care what happens on there.
Reddit is known for it’s use of bots. Bots helped Reddit grow in its early days. I’m not surprised that bots are being used now. As more people leave, I’m sure more bots will get used to give the impression of an active community. Just lie they did in those early days.
I think there’s truth to some of the “not ready” claims… and this is coming from someone who really tried to get into Lemmy, ended up creating their own instance (as demonstrated by my user handle).
A few issues I think Lemmy dev team really need to address ASAP, from least technical (thus affecting most users) to more technical (this affecting less users) are:
1. UX/Discoverability – Finding communities are a huge pain in the backend right now, and with multiple communities on different instances serving same purpose (i.e.: [email protected] and [email protected]). Sure, Reddit had same issues (the example I’ve heard is /r/meirl and /r/me_irl), but Reddit offered solution (multi on old reddit, community+community on new reddit). There must be a way to streamline it with meta-communities or lists on Lemmy such that the contents can be viewed in a unified fashion. I recommended
!community@(note the lack of domain) to streamline all of user’s subscriptions with same name on different instances as an example; and perhaps we can use#list$user@lemmy.domainfor users’s maintained lists to unify!homelab@lemmy.ml,!datahoarder@lemmy.ml,!homelab@lemmy.world, etc.).2. Trigger happy defederation hubs – a certain instance has unceremoniously de-federated a couple of other larger instances. This is not the way, but here we are, with users on those instances not able to access the broader Fediverse, and vice versa. Until discoverability gets taken care of, it will be challenging for users to find a good home – this leads to next point:
3. Authentication – The Fediverse at large needs to separate authentication out from instances. Instances may provide their own authentication, fine, but there needs to be better way to authenticate against something else other than an entire new instance of Lemmy. The ActivityPub protocol has clear definitions on what is an actor, and users shouldn’t need to deploy a Lemmy instance to identify themselves, separately from a Mastadon instance to identify themselves, separately from a… etc. This is because frankly…
4. Deployment of Lemmy is utter garbage. The official documentation’s getting started guide gets users setup with an instance where the UI container cannot talk to public, but the lemmy backend can? Why bother shipping an nginx container if the backend will just expose itself to the whole wide net? Also, let’s just pretend postgres container isn’t open to the whole world with a basic password… Trying to get it up and running with Traefik was a pain, just do a quick Google and see how many people have asked and gave up, as well as how many different ways people have tried to go at it (something something xkcd 927; I’ve contributed to a new one of my own per linked post on top!), and the dev basically just straight up going ‘we don’t support traefik’… also, each approach is not without problems…
5. Federation is a bitch. I am pretty proud of the way I’ve used override to not edit original docker compose, and locked my setup down a little. But, I’m not ready to have the instance open to the whole wide web without CloudFlare in front… but allegedly, Federation doesn’t work with CloudFlare… why? Good luck trying to get to even a popular sub’s scale without getting hit with DDOS when someone disagrees with something someone else posted.
There’s many more problems, and I genuinely want Lemmy to work. But, Lemmy is, lack of better words, “not yet ready” for prime time. It is thrown into the spotlight with Mastadon (which feels a bit more mature, at least from reading the docs) because of bad leadership at mega techs… It will take a lot of work for Lemmy to evolve and mature, before it can be “ready” to really absorb the mass of Redditors leaving Reddit.
- That certain community is beehaw.org by any chance? They also ask you to write pretty much an essay to join, and didn’t accept mine.
Regarding #2, I think not defederating might be an easier sell if users had the ability to block instances. Right not it’s just users and communities. Hate lemmygrad? You can block its communities one by one, but it’s kind of a pain. So instances only have the option of a full block.
Removed by mod
Lemmygrad is thoroughly obnoxious. Full stop. Also, you clearly have no idea what western chauvinism is if you’re calling me one.
Removed by mod
First, they ignore me…
Then they laugh at me…
Then they try to fight me…
And then I win.Of course there’s no viable alternatives to Reddit. Why would someone create another dumpster fire?
So what are the odds those are spez-trained bots?
Spez-naz lol
Idk, maybe two?
Yes
It’s sort of an asshole problem. All the cool people are walking away from Reddit, or at the very least trying to support the blackout/boycott. So all that’s left are the chronically online people, apathetic lurkers, and assholes who purposefully don’t care. The assholes are now seeming more vocal because all the logical voices are burned out or gone. Provided the good contributors/commenters stay away. Eventually lurkers won’t enjoy a ton of pissy comments on everything and look for more interesting discussion to peruse. Then the assholes will just be being assholes to each other, then be like man this place is full of assholes, and go look for a healthier community to be an asshole too because they don’t want people who fight back like they do lol.
Hey hey hey. I’m chronically online. That’s why I care enough to be here instead of Reddit!
Honestly it’s pretty great this way, lemmy is most of what reddit was to me without all of those problematic groups you mentioned.
