Don’t be a vote connoisseur here please. Redefine how you think about voting and participating.
Do you miss your communities from elsewhere. Well guess what, you are that core community now. If you want it back, the only thing holding you back is you. Don’t wait on someone else to start posting. You don’t need to worry about the perfect polished quality of your content or if it has been done before elsewhere. The current bar is, umm, poorly defined. No one is judging you. Call it practice. EVERY time you see something interesting, get in the habit of posting it please. Maybe go out of your way to grab a reference or two and post them.
Along these lines, think of how unsure and uncomfortable this may seem to most of us former lurker connoisseurs. You can play hard and thick skinned all you want, but you know exactly what post or comment you posted elsewhere that got the most votes or interaction. Why? Because it matters to you. So upvote everything you can. It matters to someone else too. Don’t upvote just for the value or interest you have in the content. Do it just to say “hey, thanks for making the effort to participate and make this place a few lines longer.” Please rethink how you handle voting, at least for now, think of a down vote as FU for participating, no votes as I wish you weren’t here. We are all likely accustomed to a lot more interaction and validation in our own little niches. This is really an underpinning value of social media, we are here to engage with people, so tell people who are new and unsure about a new and different place, “hey, thanks for participating.” You may not know or really appreciate their interests, but you can help us grow a core that can evolve into your favorite niches as the community grows. You are the core community. We can all make it grow if we make it a place people want to be.
While I can appreciate wanting to help others feel good about posting, here are my concerns (and some solutions at the end to consider):
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If most posts were upvoted blindly, it would make post ratings meaningless as well as the Hot feature. I prefer “good” posts to rise to the top.
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If we upvote low quality/low effort posts, then that is what we are encouraging users to produce.
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Low quality posts especially from Help Vampires can be a huge drain on the community and moderators. E.g., No one wants to see the same question asked every few posts.
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New users may at first be drawn to seeing the number of posts…but if the first x number of posts are all garbage, we may lose potential users.
Personally, I will not upvote posts just to make new people more confident. However, here are some alternative solutions:
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People can learn to feel comfortable posting in certain communities that are either smaller or where quality is less expected. E.g., if the future Arch Linux community is like their forum, they are very strict and you’ll get worse than a down vote if you don’t follow the guidelines in How To Ask Questions The Smart Way and had first RTFM (read the manual) and STFW (searched the web) and have put in great effort and be truly stuck before posting.
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Before downvoting, we could look at the user’s profile and some of their posts and if they seem very new, we could cut them some slack and/or send them a PM instead of downvoting.
It is hard to see the context of the timeline that this was written in. There were less than 1300 total accounts on this instance and several hundred online at the time. I looked up several communities that only had 1-3 posts and almost no interaction. So I decided to pick an interest and make a couple posts. This felt like a dead end, I wasn’t ready to give up, so I wrote this to hopefully help it feel a little more worthwhile grinding out some more posts. I had no way of knowing how much this place would grow in a few days.
Positivity shouldn’t be a rare thing. In regular analog life, social accountability to one’s peers is a mask people wear to hide who they really are. The anonymity of this place is the only time people take off this mask. This is a perfect mirror, if the person is smart enough to recognize their own reflection. For that reason, everyone should want to be their best self here. This is who you really are when no one else is pressuring you in an otherwise accountable way. Why not make a positive impact with that.
Agreed, being positive shouldn’t be a rare thing for sure. However what people view as being positively impactful is different.
To me it is not helpful or desired to essentially lie to people by patting them all on the head with an upvote which is the equivalent of saying ‘good post’ even if the post added no value or worse sucked. While upvotes may provide a burst of dopamine to each user, it won’t do them any favours in the long run. And once they realise everyone is getting upvoted regardless of content, the upvotes will come to be viewed as meaningless anyway.
Furthermore, upvoting is the lowest effort and lowest impact option – If one wants to be more positively impactful and take more effort than just blindly upvoting every post, they could reply or PM to welcome new members to the community, direct them to helpful FAQs/resources, etc.
Furthermore there will be many communities which will all have their own values and expectations so if I’m in a community where mods put a rule to upvote every post, then sure if I want to participate in that community then I will do that. And if on the other end of the spectrum, if I’m in a community where mods have a rule for no low effort/value posts, if I want to stay in that community I will certainly only upvote posts that meet that rule. And of course those are both extreme cases and most communities will fall somewhere in the middle.
Anyway regardless of everything I’ve said, in the end how we add value to this platform is based on our unique values and preferences. It sounds like you are more connection-focused and I am more education/knowledge-focused. There is nothing wrong with either as there is nothing wrong with you upvoting all posts and inspiring others to join you. While I may have a different philosophy, I am also a huge fan of the need and benefit of diversity of thought and so I am quite glad you are a part of the community and that you want to make Lemmy a welcoming place – your kindness and care will help make the community better.
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What’s difficult is finding this website in the first place, most people don’t understand terms like instances and all the server details, it would have been fine to just share this main link and tell people to recreate communities
There is a bit of a learning curve, but it is not terrible. Based on the growth numbers so far over the last few days a small competence filter may be a good thing IMO. Maybe it will be too much for the most negative potential users to overcome.
I know I should read about all this more, but I’m just gonna jump right in and figure out how to comment and post on my own. I still have no idea what an instance is, but atleast I’ve found communities and I even posted a few comments so I seem to be doing just fine lol
This was exactly why I decided to jump in and learn. I know why I dislike most platforms and I can see the potential for something much better, here.
Already it reminds me of the early days of reddit, before memebarf, trolls, and shitposters took over. I know it’s inevitable that it’ll end up here too, but the reprieve is nice.
So far, yes! Much of this takes me waaaaaay back to the early screechy interweb days. Maybe the nostalgia has me in its grip, I dunno. :D
Nicely written! I’m trying to participate more but it’s gonna take some time for me to get used to it 🥹
No worries, you’ll get there when you get there.
Heck yeah. As soon as I figure out what all these buttons do I look forward to engaging with some of these communities. Thanks for the advice, hope many take to heart
On that note, does anyone know the difference between upvote and boost?
From what I can tell, a boost seems similar to a retweet, in the sense that items you’ve boosted then appear on your own account. An upvote is just an upvote.
Good to know, thanks!
I’m trying to upvote all that can, mostly because I’m not very good at commenting lol
Yeah, we just need a bit more of a push. I think some people may be a bit too fixated on reaching Reddit’s numbers; we really don’t need to. I don’t care if the top comment has 50 upvotes instead of 50,000, what I want is more comments, more posts, more experts in a field sharing their invaluable opinions.
Obviously it will take some time to reach the level of granularity some subreddits have. Like, we have a design sub, a good design sub, an ashole design sub, a crappy design sub (which is like asshole design, but unintentional), a design design sub (for awful designs that are also somehow aesthetic)… And all this without going into specific design subs (web design, brand design, structure design…). Yeah, we may not have all those for a while, we enthusiasts may all have to interact in a general Lemmy Design community, but guess what? That is how Reddit got where it is now.
Personally, I am enjoying the process. I’ve been lurking Reddit for years, reading awesome posts, and informing myself on all kinds of topics from people I won’t ever begin to compare to. But Lemmy, for the moment, feels more intimate to me, I am starting to recognize specific nametags, to interact with real human beings (not a sentient blob of like-minded thoughts). It feels like being at a bonfire enjoying the moment with a couple of people, and I think that by itself has it’s own charm.
I kinda like it. Reddit can feel disconnected, comment and move on kind of thing. I’m curious where this is in say a year. I will miss my smaller intimate communities, but this is one general intimate community so it works.
The current growth rate over the last few hours, just on this server instance has been around 275 users per hour. If that was completely sustainable, in one year, there would be over 2.4 million users on this instance.
That’s pretty crazy numbers! Here for it.
This feels like when you find a really good smaller streamer and can actually talk to people in the chat and make good friends with some and become part of a cool community where every voice is heard… before the streamer hits it big and the chat scroll is so fast you can’t even see your message among the omega luls and kappas and pogchamps and kkonas and the streamer can’t possibly respond to anything because there’s just too much garbage
This moment is beautiful. People are understandably looking forward and hoping that they can recreate all of their niche communities. But I’m just enjoying this moment in time where we have a group of people figuring everything out together and trying to build something better than what we had. Even if Lemmy does get hugely successful, it’ll never again feel like it does at this moment, when all of the users care so much about being positive contributors.
Yep, that’s exactly how I feel too and you said it beautifully! I’ve been through this with a handful of platforms at this point and somehow it never feels any less bittersweet, :').
I will ask, is this how being part of a forum back in the day felt? Because that’s the “feeling” I have right now.
Yes. It’s like a BBS forum right now. It’s the feeling of seeing usernames as human beings, instead of anonymous trolls. Feels good man.
I think putting effort into actively participating is also the best way to truly quit reddit.
I mean, now everyone is angry because of what’s happening and we’re flooding alternatives with enthusiasm because of this particular moment, but will it last?
When you’re so angry about something it’s because you deeply care, and as long as we care there’s always the risk of going back to it when the “anger moment” will pass, because let’s be honest, it will pass sooner or later.
So we need to stop caring, and the best way to do it IMO is being involved as much as possible here, find new people, make new connections, create/participate in new communities, so there’s no chance we’ll miss anything of what’s “on the other side”.
I’ve been ready to leave Reddit for a long time. I’m not angry at Reddit… It’s more just continued disappointed. The site was built off of effort from the communities but the corporation won’t listen to us for guidance and changes.
The only thing I worry about is that most people won’t even hear of alternatives like Lemmy and that will impact adoption. I fear that only the degenerates and extremests will be the ones to make the changes. I hope that isn’t how it plays out.
most people won’t even hear of alternatives
I’m still active on reddit, a lot of people are worried about the future of the platform, they’re asking questions about alternatives and where fellow redditors are going, lemmy and kbin are mentioned everywhere, people are also directed to r/RedditAlternatives.
We’re trying to answer questions as best as we can, we’re still very new to the fediverse but the little we know is enough to get people started. Some people are even actively reaching out to others to let them know alternatives exist.
And those who don’t ask (or don’t lurk) most probably don’t care, those are probably the ones that would go on using reddit no matter what, and that’s ok, each individual has to decide for themselves.
Dumb question but was is the difference between Lemmy and Kbin?
I don’t know all the details sorry, I’m still very new to it all, but it seems they’re just different software implementing more or less the same thing, they’re also connected with each other.
I think of it - for example - as LibreOffice and Softmaker Office, they’re different software implementing the same thing (an office suite).
Other people can answer much better than me as what the differences are in terms of functionalities, though from what I’ve seen so far (I joined both), it doesn’t seem they differ much, just minor details.
I wanted to add that Kbin has better integration with Mastodon if you’re into that.
(Some people may also have ideological issues with Lemmy devs, so that could be a reason for choosing Kbin)
Ah yes, there’s a tab specific to mastodon posts, so that’s a reason.
But joining kbin only because you have issues with the devs doesn’t make sense, they’re federated, you see all lemmy posts there and you can interact with them like your account was on lemmy.
IMO it’s better to join a server that blocks main lemmy and lemmygrad if you don’t want to see their political views, there are a few who block them.
I fully agree with you, but for full transparency some people do have a problem with it still (e.g. https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110476830253102884 )
I’m so excited to see actual people posting real comments and it’s feeling like I’m part of an actual community. This is pretty cool - and I’m going to try and participate a lot more instead of just lurking like I used to.
Instead of bots and trolls right? Yeah me too :)
Can we troll and be a dick here too?
Pioneering work is hard but very rewarding. Definitely a fun time which we all should use to really shape things how we would like them to be
I have set up two communities that are core to my personal interests (probably not mainstream) but hopefully others will find their way here from reddit to add to them. I am excited about getting away from that, to a more decentralized format. I joined Mastadon shortly after Twitter imploded and now I’m here because of reddit.
Hmm I wanna set up communities but I’m scared no one will come and I’ll be left feeding them alone. I wanna make a !kdrama and either !Xianxia or something like that for Chinese fantasy novels. But who’s even interested in that? Idk. !books and !fantasy are more likely to catch on but I’m not interested at all in general genre literature.
I’d subscribe to !xianxia
I made two communities and I’m the only member for now. Trust me, though. If you’re interested, others are interested. There are basic steps you can take though if you want to grow a community.
First. Know where to find other people with your interests. Facebook groups, discord servers, WordPress blogs are all good general places.
Second. Maybe make a blog. WordPress has a large community. Make posts, use tags that might show up in keyword searches. Make sure your blog has links to your Lemmy community. You can have that blog auto post on other social media like Mastodon or Facebook.
The point is this: if your community has no members for a while, it’s just likely that nobody knows about it. Lemmy is still tiny. You will have to fish from bigger ponds for a while.
Edit: corrected spelling error.
If you’re interested, others are interested. There are basic steps you can take though if you want to grow a community.
If I’m interested, and someone else shows interest, I go for it! I usually do just point at it and wait tho cuz… life do be like that.
By the way, I noticed you said “mastadon” here, and I checked your bio and you also spell it “mastadon”.
I don’t know if it’s intentional. In case it isn’t, the spelling is mastOdon with O. (im especially sensitive to this spelling cuz as a native spanish speaker the o is pronounced differently than a in the word ‘mastodonte’).
That’s my error. lol Thank you. I have really been reading the O as an A.
Long time reddit lurker, coming out of my shell one uovote at a time.
Hell yeah! Ask questions, introduce yourself, make a post about things you like or seem interesting to you.
I do not see why we should upvote everything we see. If barely anything gets upvoted, content will still be there and will likely be at the top (if all comments have just 1 vote they all have equal chance to be at the top).
The Reddit guidelines looked good to me. Upvote if you think it’s relevant. Downvote if you think it does not belong there. Don’t do anything if it doesn’t fall in these two cases.
I’m really glad I found this place. I’ll do my best to spread it and be active
That’s what she said!
Seriously Mark, seriously?
Unrelated. But I didn’t know this. You don’t have an account in lemmy.world yet you could comment here? I’ve read up about the whole decentralised model. But how do I comment without logging in?
I find it hard to see how this site can ever challenge the huge user base of Reddit and how they have a relatively active community for basically every topic in existence. But maybe things will snowball.
from a tech standpoint… when the core development community departs a project, that project dies - its almost always a given. reddit is such a giant that it may never die and I dont expect its core to be completely gutted. but quality content attracts more of the same and I feel that we are beginning to get quality core people here. the reddit husk can continue to shamble on, I don’t care.
I agree, actually. The people upset about the 3rd party apps unfortunately don’t represent the majority of the users of Reddit. I have several friends on a friends discord I run that never used a 3rd party app at all. They just used the base reddit client like insane people; but they did/do it. For them nothing is changing, and that’s going to be most of the people.
Unless…all the blackouts some how affect enough of them. If their favorite subreddits die out, then maybe they’ll notice. But overall, I feel like it’ll either take a while for Reddit to die out. Or it’ll just continue chugging on, except a lot of the people putting in the work to moderate and post content will maybe have moved on (which may end up eroding the platform there, too).
But we’ll see for sure.
In my mind, it only needs to be a fraction of the size of Reddit to be potentially successful. I’ve been using online forums since the 90s, back in the day there were some forums with great long-lasting communities that had only a couple of dozen regular members. Sometimes a smaller forum is better than a larger one. Granted it’s different since forums generally specialised in one topic, but don’t forget the days where you didn’t need to be a huge all-encompassing platform to be successful, especially when you’re not trying to make money from it.
Totally agree. It’s called social loafing. From Wikipedia: “In social psychology, social loafing is the phenomenon of a person exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when working alone. It is seen as one of the main reasons groups are sometimes less productive than the combined performance of their members working as individuals.”
In large communities like Reddit, users are less likely to participate than in a small community
Sometimes I miss the 90’s and early 2000’s forums. Smaller and positive communities with good moderation. Hope this inherites that spirit.
#MakeTheWebDecentralizedAgain
I’m not old enough to remember forums, but recently I was lurking around archives of some old forum and, the community around it seemed so special that I hope we can achieve something similar. Obviously, back in the day internet wasn’t so massive like it is now, so perhaps that feeling of closeness would be difficult to achieve (?)
