Ask Lemmy

Less politics, less news, less "I'm mad about this so you should be mad about it too" rage posting/armchair activism, less "ist's and ism's". Less preachy shit about capitalism bad, communism good (or maybe .ml should just be blocked by default?). Less bitching about Reddit (I swear, I've heard less about friends' exes than some people bitch about Reddit here). Less "hurr durr power tripping mods" circlejerking.

More content about cool stuff, hobbies, amazing feats, movies, books, TV shows, etc.

This place has much of the latter but it's completely overshadowed by the former to the point you have to almost dig for it. Even blocking the overt news, politics, and political "humor" communities, it still seeps in to comics and memes and unrelated communities.

There's still plenty of good in this world, but you'd never know it from looking at what's always topping the feed here.

And a new user checking this place out is going to be immediately hit in the face with all of the former and probably not even see the latter.

the biggest hurdle i see right now to expanding the threadiverse is how often people here are just absolute assholes to each other.

cultivate the niche hobby subs, thats really all that reddit still has going for it because it reached critical mass.

Midnight rave.

Honestly, I think we have way too many communities. Cull them back to a small set of fairly broad communities: Arts, Tech, Politics, etc. Once those are active enough, then start to subdivide as the sub communities grew to a sufficient size to self-sustain.

What happened instead, was people tried to create all the same communities that reddit has, without the people to sustain them, and now it looks like a ghost town.

I think the most valuable thing we can do for the fediverse is to contibute by posting in communities we care about, thus helping them be active, and engage in posts made by others in general. In short, don't lurk, don't be passive.

If I want to read discussion about a new movie or game that all seems to be on reddit, so I guess the lesson is to try starting that sort of thing here and hope it picks up. With a smaller user base you have to accept that individual posts may not get any traction though. I do think having discussion other than Linux and whatever Trump is going on about this week would help to grow the platform.

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Honestly I'm happy the Fediverse doesn't have the Reddit user base. I'd rather try recruiting people from various forums on specific topics to the Fediverse. Like homebrewing (alcoholic beverages) is still happening in independent web forums that I think would be neat if they got federated, but I don't think they in turn are interested in a Fediverse user base.

The main hurdle is onboarding. Normal people wont understand federation. All they know is Login with Google, that's it.

First thing is gain enough support in the presumption that increasing userbase is a desirable outcome.

Chasing bigger numbers for bigger numbers sake is one of the biggest problems with capitalism

Can we pool some money together and advertise somewhere or put stickers at coffee shops in big cities. Some of my other thoughts are to have influencers plug it, put adds on blogs especially hobby blogs and niche blogs if that’s who we’re trying to attract.

Reducing the amount of doomsday content on the front page, which I'm trying to help out with by starting !Nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social

Post good content, post links to that content to people it would be desirable to have on here. Have enough other good content that they are inclined to stay.

For profit services don't need to die. Let the influencer morons stay on them so the rest of us don't have to deal with them and their idiot followers enshittifying another platform.

You make a very good point. I myself have noticed sites like Lemmy.world are a bit of a ghost town compared to other forums. I think the main reason is that sites like Reddit are still more popular. And that's either because people started using Reddit when it was actually good and are clinging to nostalgia, or because people don't know that Lemmy exists. Or both. I recently saw a post on Reddit where someone claimed that Reddit is the only usable forum on the internet.

To answer your question: Convince people that Lemmy is what Reddit was trying to be back in 2006.

Nothing.

Twitter was fine until it got popular, as was Reddit.

waiting for more reddit purges? thats sadly is the only way. other ways, reddit just have all the communities that lemmy doesnt.

currently reddit is very careful about massive purges now, they are just doing background ones, even if they increased thier filtering and sensitivity of bot? detection. they want to avoid bots being to pervasive on site to make it seem like its mostly users.

We should start making little comics about how people who aren't on Lemmy all go to hell and put them in random places.

Can I ask why a bigger user base equals better? I’d there a technical reason?

I think there are a huge amount of internet refugees that are now lost. I miss healthy topics, resources and niche forums. But for me they won’t come back because all that info will get scraped and infiltrated. So I question even if the numbers arrived would that equal genuine and contributing communities.

I like this place this size. I’d like more engagement but I think a lot of people are reassessing what they want from the internet and that’s that. We can’t force engagement we can see the result of that at Reddit.

Try to be welcoming and kind.

Leak the funhole.

Stay upprayed fam.

Just keep using it. Ask questions, post solutions, as time goes on they will be more relevant.

Post everything here.

Today I Learned is a good one for old info, as people post repetitive stuff all of the time, so when people look up an unusual fact etc.. They get brought straight to one of those.

DIY, Woodworking, hobbies etc. and all the main things that people want to look up.