this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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Let's discuss how to efficiently promote Lemmy to potential new joiners (feddit.org)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) by Blaze@feddit.org to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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To follow-up on the Reddit thread yesterday, here are a few elements that can be interesting to discuss.

Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy

Just quoting "Lemmy" or pointing to join-lemmy.org can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance. Recent post by a new joiner 9 days ago, they had to change server 2 times to get a satisfying experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536.

Using something like

"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users

Feel free if you have any questions"

Can already point them in one direction, and avoid them getting lost in the too many options.

If people want to debate the choice of those two instances, I'll add my thought process in the comments.

The Lemmy feed looks as depressing as Reddit's All, and how to mitigate that

Some feedback I received when promoting Lemmy the way above

Just checked out lemmy to see if it’s different from reddit. Im very disappointed lmao.

First post I see is a comic about cultural appropriation with an ifunny watermark. Next are several posts about the proton vpn ceo “going full maga.” And finally a post I saw on Reddit days ago that is ragebait making fun of the cybertruck.

Yikes. It’s the same exact thing.

--

Lemmy still has a pretty obnoxious tankie problem. Even if you block the .ml instance, pretty much every thread about US politics or world news on any major instance gets hijacked by the same handful of trolls and their associated vote bots. Hopefully this will become less of a problem as more sane people join, but just as a word of caution, be aware that you will be called western imperialist scum by a bunch of 14 year olds.

--

Lemmy is utter rubbish, it's as if their entire userbase consists of the top layer of scum carefully siphoned off from the Reddit cesspool. It got the worst of the annoying political echo chamber and "very smart" argumentative users from Reddit.

I just clicked on half a dozen random Lemmy servers, and all of them had at least one link about Trump in the top 5 posts. Even ones that seem like they're supposed to be about tech.

Normal humans want the Reddit of 10+ years ago back. We don't want to use a different site colonized by the same modern day Redditors we loathe interacting with.

--

To be fair, you can't say they're wrong. Open https://discuss.online/ , by default you'll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.

What I try to do in such instances is to give something like

"While politics are important, you can still very much block them. Here are an example of some communities that can interest you:

I also wrote a long post about that issue that you can read here https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/

As a side note, I recently started a discussion on !fedigrow@lemm.ee about a potential political-free instance for new joiners, feel free to have a look: https://feddit.org/post/6819084

Lemmy is too small, 42k monthly active users is nothing

Discuit, the centralized alternative to Reddit, currently counts 181 weekly active commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/NlAdOWAp

You can also mention that NodeBB is now federating with Lemmy:

That's all for now, happy to discuss in the comments.

Note: if you're not interested in promoting Lemmy, feel free to hide this post, you are able to do this on specific posts if your instance is running 0.19.4 and newer

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[–] manicdave@feddit.uk 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

A thought that just hit me in the shower.

I don't feel like lemmy is too small. It quite comfortably fills all my lazing on aggregator time without getting stale. The thing is, like many here, I'm a libertarian leftist politics nerd that's into linux and self hosting.

That description describes a sizeable chunk of this project's userbase so enough content is being posted enough to saturate the feed.

If you want the project to expand into other niches, you will have to post into the void about whatever you're into. Seed forums with TV shows or photography or hiking or warhammer or whatever you're into and encourage others to do the same.

All forums are dead at first but if you want people to come and talk about pottery, you're going to have to make that forum cozy before it gets enough interaction to become self sustaining.

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 7 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

An official Android and iOS app called "Lemmy". If you wanna go big, you need the mobile platform.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)
[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 6 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

When you search for "Reddit" in the app store and it also shows an app for Lemmy, we are getting there.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 4 points 13 hours ago

Reddit is going to pay enough for this to never happen

[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 13 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (2 children)

I've noticed that people forgot how long ago the Reddit blackout was (about 19 months ago?), and Lemmy has improved a lot since then. Back then Lemmy was like pre-alpha, super buggy, and servers were very unstable. And we have way more 3rd party apps/frontends now.

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1i7gufa/hundreds_of_subreddits_are_considering_banning/m8ktmgh/?context=9

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 6 points 16 hours ago

I still remember when federation was barely working. We've made good progress since then

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 3 points 16 hours ago

Also, why not mentioning one instance when making that comment?

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong. Open https://discuss.online/ , by default you’ll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.

The fact that they (or you) complain about the "All" timeline having the same stuff in all servers shows they have no idea what they're talking about: that's the entire point of an All feed! (plusminus stuff like defederation). It would make more sense to compare the Local feed of instances, IMO.

Besides, the default sorts are active and popularity nowadays, so it only makes sense that stuff that we care about and have to have words with, takes the forefront. If you want to solve that the solution is not "let's ignore what's going on around the world", it's "post more cats" and "post more ich_iel". Or just use the Scaled sort, I don't understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.

And that's right there with the complaint about the 42k users too. The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about. Complaining that for the next people to come in "I'm going to be called a westerner imperialist" is delicious hypocrisy on not noticing how indoctrinated they are.

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[–] thoro@lemmy.ml 9 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

Sounds like we're filtering out the exact type of people I would never want to come from Reddit. Dunno why y'all want them.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 7 points 19 hours ago

I generally try to avoid political shit here myself, it's too depressing and I'm not sure reddit-like forums is really a good format for that.

But for those who are out there posting cybertruck memes, thanks for scaring away the MAGAs for the rest of us. It is much appreciated.

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[–] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 1 points 12 hours ago

Two thoughts:

  • I'm subscribed to 160 communities, most very small, but see interesting stuff due to the Scaled option - also deliberately avoid the big news communities. Evidently, it takes time to join 160 small cs, so to get started it could be handy to have an all/local except list, and remove the biggest news /memes unless people tick a box saying they like such. Or make an algorithm that prioritises stuff related to what I upvote (which is how other social sites seem to get people started - e.g. i just tried rednote and it quickly learned i like mountains and trains) - but i guess that's hard to implement as each instance would need to work out 'related to'.
  • 2nd point - there are other user-interfaces - I'm using Alexandrite which has a better layout than lemmy default, but how to make this easier (instructions suggest docker, how many casual users will do that ...)?
[–] confuser@lemmy.zip 9 points 20 hours ago

Shoutout to lemmy.zip, y'all are a great instance!

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (10 children)

Honestly, there needs to be a setting for lemmy admins to specify the default comms displayed to not-logged and new users. Just the firehose of the /all or local is not particularly attractive to most people.

EDIT: Went ahead and opened a feature request

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 20 hours ago

Agree. I'm of the opinion that the default view for guests should be Local, Scaled. Or alternatively, Local, Popular. But never All, and certainly not mixed with Active.

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[–] lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

Prevent opinion downvoting by disabling downvotes globally.

50 upvotes, 90 downvotes, that's not problematic at all, but there is the huge total score of -40 in this case that could lead to the deletion of the post or comment.

By the way: My instance is one of the few with downvotes disabled. So, if you want to give me feedback on this, I can only see comments...

Opinion downvoting was the most toxic feature of Reddit and led to perfect echo chambers. We should have left it there.

[–] Jayjader@jlai.lu 1 points 2 minutes ago

I think downvote anonymity is the bigger part of the problem, not downvotes in general. Unless I'm misunderstanding, what you're proposing amounts to "if you want to downvote in a community you'll need to make an account on it's instance". This would be a nice option to have, but it should also remain an option.

In your +50/-90 example, showing at least the instance provenance for votes allows more (sub)cases. If I can see that 55 of the downvotes come from the instance hosting the community, that's potentially a very different situation than if only 5 do. Or if 70 of the downvotes come from a pair of instances that aren't the community host. Disabling downvotes flattens these nuances into the same "-40", which I agree isn't great when it can lead to deletion - but I'd argue that's also an entirely separate problem that might be better addressed from a different angle.

Revealing from which instances downvotes come from doesn't prevent opinion downvotes but it allows dulling their bite. The same is true for opinion upvotes.

From my understanding votes are more-or-less already somewhat public on lemmy between it's implementation and what federation needs to function properly. We should embrace the nuances federation brings to the problem instead of throwing it away entirely.

So much thought has been put into "how do we convey the different instances' character and their relations to each other to new (potential) users in a way that doesn't a) overload them and/or b) scare them away with content that rubs them the wrong way" in communities and posts like these, when potentially we just need to render more visible the data that is already there.

I'll acknowledge up-front that the "just" in the previous sentence is carrying a lot of weight; data viz is not easy on the best of days and votes have so little screen real-estate to work with. On top of that, any UI feature that can make what I'm suggesting palatable and accessible to non-power users would also need to be replicated across most popular clients. They're written in a motley assortment of programming languages and ecosystems, and range from targeting browsers to native smartphone OSes, so the development efforts would be difficult to share and carry over from one client to the next. Still, they're called votes: there's a lot of prior art in polling software and news coverage of elections from the past few years that should be publicly accessible (at least in terms of screenshots, stills, and videos of the UI, if not a working version of it to play around with).

On top of this, I don't know how much effort this would require on backend devs for lemmy (and kbin/mbin I forget which is the survivor, and piefed, and any other threadiverse instance software I'm currently unaware of). I wouldn't expect keeping track of vote provenance to prove immensely difficult, but it could cause some sort of combinatorial explosion in the overhead required by the different sorting algorithms proposed (I'm ignorant on how much they cache vs how often they're run for lemmy, for example).

I can't foretell if this would "solve" opinion downvotes on it's own, but I do think it would contribute to the necessary conditions for people to drift away from the more toxic forms of it. It could also become another option for viewing feeds on top of "subscribed"/"local"/"all" + the different vote rankings.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 5 points 16 hours ago

Blahaj does it as well

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Single topic forums are still doing ok out there on the wider Internet. Create more well moderated, single-topic, federated forums, and then promote those specifically to users who care about those topics.

Don't sell Lemmy to end users. Lemmy is a solution for admins. Sell the specific websites to end users.

[–] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Echoing this, with some slight adjustments:

Promote the specific sites/communities to people, and on sites that permit it, share links back to specific posts/comments that you found interesting/amusing/etc. from said sites/communities.

Reddit got popular off the back of changes to Digg and people mentioning/sharing stuff from Reddit there. I'd imagine TikTok also grew in popularity from people sharing stuff from it on other major platforms like Instagram/YouTube/Snapchat/Twitter, much as now RedNote's growing in popularity from people mentioning it on TikTok and other platforms.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 3 hours ago

sites that permit it

So Bluesky nowadays, based on Meta and Facebook recent removal of Pixel fed and Lemmy mentions

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[–] Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Some personal thoughts:

about the content when you first open lemmy: I joined reddit some time around 2015 and it was not exactly the most welcoming experience with the type of content you see by default either. Still, I had seen smaller communities with cool content and I joined anyway and just learned to use it enough to tailor my feed. Lemmy becomes much nicer after awhile of hanging out and discovering new and cool communities!

In my personal opinion the "Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy" part is the most important. Fediverse IS confusing when you check it out the first time. It took me awhile to make an account because people kept telling to choose an instance that fits you. I know it sounds stupid but it really kept me away from making an account for awhile.

I instance-hopped a couple of times because I joined smaller instances (the recommendation everyone gives you) that then disappeared / were abandoned by the admin. That was not a very nice experience. I know lemmy.world is too big, but honestly it is a very easy and nice starting point to lemmyverse (so is sopuli!).

Also: really appreciate the effort you are putting into growing lemmy, Blaze!

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 11 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Hello,

Thank you for your comment!

I joined reddit some time around 2015 and it was not exactly the most welcoming experience with the type of content you see by default either.

I think the main issue here is that Reddit in 2015 didn't have to compete with modern Reddit. Nowadays, you create a Reddit account, you get a few subs suggested depending on your interest and your geodefault, so that's enough to give you a first tailored experience without being first drown into All content.

We can't really replicate that on Lemmy (hopefully one day we will), so the best we have is what I listed above: tell people they should focus on laid back communities.

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[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

https://discuss.online/c/patientgamers

This link doesn't work. There's only 3 communities for patientgamers: world, shitjustworks, and ml

https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=patientgamers

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

It's SJW, I'll edit.

Fixed

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 18 points 1 day ago (31 children)

Thought process about discuss.online and sopuli as recommendations

There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/)

  • Lemmy.world is too big
  • Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )
  • sh.itjust.works names contains "shit", which can deter users: https://feddit.org/post/4255611/2825351
  • lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric
  • feddit.org, is German-centric (sidebar in German first, Matrix chat is in German, meta community is in German)
  • dbzer0 federates hexbear
  • programming.dev is topic-centric
  • blahaj is queer-focused
  • discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
  • lemmy.sdf.org does not defederate anyone
  • lemmy.zip is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad
  • beehaw is way outdated
  • infosec.pub is topic-centric
  • aussie.zone is country-centric
  • midwest.social is region-centric

I ended up with discuss.online and sopuli.xyz as they have

  • neutral names
  • long running history
  • good downtime
  • active admins
  • defederate hexbear and lemmygrad

If people have other suggestions, feel free

[–] IronKrill@lemmy.ca 1 points 15 hours ago

Good reasoning all 'round! Although Lemmy.ca doesn't require you to be Canadian, so would be a decent recommendation for any NA user. As long as they don't mind some more Canada posting in the Local feed.

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[–] Free_Opinions@feddit.uk 7 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

This is the best platform for constant live updates about what the people you don't like are up to. Then there's articles about everything that's wrong in the world and also some memes - mostly political.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

You forgot about the Linux memes

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[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 9 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I’m for the sink or swim mentality. Point them here and if they come up with an excuse to not be here then they probably weren’t going to be a good contributor anyway.

I’m fine with being selective. There is no reason we need 1M+ MAU for the sake of the network, we aren’t trying to turn a profit

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 16 points 23 hours ago (6 children)

There is no reason we need 1M+ MAU for the sake of the network, we aren’t trying to turn a profit

There's also no reason a topic as popular as TV shows relies on 3 posters to keep the main community active: !showsandmovies@lemm.ee

We don't need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement

[–] Zero22xx@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

We don't need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement

Definitely agreed with this. And less always (understandably) angry political posters, more escapists that want to chat about movies, games etc. It becomes like that snake eating itself because people that want a break from real life come here and see nothing but the same 24 news cycle as everywhere else. And then, speaking for myself, searching up certain niche communities and finding them either non-existent or with 3 posts from 1 and a half years ago.

I've been thinking of porting a couple of my old review posts over here from my banned but not yet closed Reddit account. Just so that, for example, the next time someone visits the Ghibli community there'll be 4 posts instead of 3.

And the Sonic communities are pretty disappointing too, considering I'm always seeing it mentioned in the wild these days. Makes me think (or hope) that there's a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.

Reddit is sadly still unbeaten in searching up a TV show that you enjoy and finding an entire community built around it. And those communities never took a lot of members. So it shouldn't be impossible here.

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[–] DavidGarcia@feddit.nl 12 points 1 day ago (3 children)

"Reddit but you can block the part that annoys you"

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[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 6 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

The best promotion is to be awesome.

>Lemmy, is awesome (y/n)?: _y

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