So, lemmy is a project I have been following since the beggining. With federation here, it seems like everything is aligned for it to become the reddit killer, pardon my expression.
What do you think is missing from lemmy for it to have a massive engaging community?
Just more people knowing about it. No one knows it exists.
Also, more normie subreddits. A lot of people join reddit for specific communities. The most active Lemmy communities are political or tech focused. Art communities like imaginarycityscapes or nosleep and fan communities for shows and movies draw in a lot of people. Lemmy’s userbase is made up largely of people who are able to comprehend what federation is, which is limited to people who understand what a server even is, which has an impact on the type of content.
I did creatre a video about it at https://youtu.be/5axSUJj0bBY to try help spread awareness, and on Odysee at https://odysee.com/@GadgeteerZA:4/lemmy-an-open-source-decentralised:4?r=A7MvvHF3JLvcGpn8umRYnJ1oybsg3cse.
I’m on lemmy, but I’m still not too sure to still understand what a federation is. Sometimes I feel like I’m missing a lot of content…
This is honest of you and a fair point: federation can sometimes be invisible. The basic idea becomes clear if you think about how you access websites. Think of Facebook. When you go to it, you type “facebook.com” in the address bar. And you go there. Notably, if you want to use Facebook, you can only go to “facebook.com”. This is different with federated systems.
Federated systems make it possible to go to, for example, “fb.com”, which will have its own version of Facebook, different to “facebook.com” or “facebookfed.com” or “333.com” (if someone decides to call their version that). Each one of these websites will have their own servers, their own logins (so you’d have to create different accounts), rules, and mods.
Sometimes, those websites talk to each other so that content is shared between them. That way, you can publish once in fb.com and another person can see your post in facebook.com. Other times, depending on the service and the version/instance, you’ll have a sort of private Facebook.
So federation here means that there are many different servers (‘instances’) that run the same software. These servers talk to each other so that you can see the content of the rest of the instances, in the case of the Fediverse. The Fediverse is a federated (hence the name) network of different services including Lemmy, Mastodon, and PixelFed. I’m not entirely sure, but I think the idea is to be able to share content in between all of those (someone plz correct me or explain this to me? hahahah).
Federation is also tied to certain values, like owning your own data. For example, Facebook’s servers hold all of your Facebook data. But, in the case of Lemmy, if you were to run your own Lemmy instance in your room, you would own your data (assuming no hacks or other shenanigans). This autonomy and privacy goes along well with the values surrounding Free and Libre/Open Source Software, where anyone can copy, modify, and run their own versions of code.
So you get this synnergy of FLOSS and federation that brings a bunch of people who are pumped to share stuff on websites like Lemmy, a FLOSS and federated link aggregator!
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Donations. For example, the Mastodon instance that I’m in sometimes publishes its financial situation. Most of the time the donations cover the server fees comfortably. But since the amount of users keeps growing and people post more, those donations are sometimes not enough. Only once has it been at a point in which I was worried.
Note that since there are less metrics being systematically hoarded from users, the servers need less power to make similar services work. For example, I bet Reddit’s servers have to account with every little movement I do there. But here, in Lemmy, you can see the source code and notice that there’s very little tracked.
Lemmy in particular is powered by Rust. This makes it more efficient than running a server in, for example, Ruby, which is what Diaspora does. But this is specific to Lemmy and not to the Fediverse, since different Fediverse instances can run their servers using different languages.
Thank you very much kind stranger for this explanation. The structure is now clear for me. I understand the usefulness of having different servers/websites. However as a user, how can I retrieve content from a server in which I might have interest but don’t know it exist?.. Also, it’s going to be a nightmare remembering of all password/account… Hopefully the fediverse, as you explained it, will make it more and more user-friendly. I had heard about it before, but did not get what it was all about. Now I do! Thanks again and all the best
fan communities
Like they can only sleep with a fan or using white, pink or brown noise?
I’m not sure I agree with success = massive engaging community. One metric of success is if users engage and stick around… @nutomic posted a relevant point in another thread
For corporate social media it is definitely a competition, but I dont think it makes sense to see the fediverse in the same way. We dont make more money from having more users, in fact having more users results in higher hosting cost and more moderation effort. Maybe there will be more donations, but thats far from certain. So I am totally happy even if Lemmy doesnt grow, as long as it provides an alternative space that some people find useful.
Everybody seems to be in a rush to see this thing grow huge, or to solve all of their desires (federate with mastodon!) That people see it this way though and that make about it means they have a passion for it.
My 2c to help it become “successful”
- Donate funds to the devs to allow them to continue to develop or expand the project
- Post content outside the core foss/privacy loop
To be exact I think this is the first time I see someone speaking about the “competitive feature” of general world and refusing it.
@nutomic@lemmy.ml should be a teacher in high schools here…
Besides being fully finished (it’s not even on version 1.0 yet)? I’d say topic variety. Currently most of lemmy’s content is very techy stuff, which is enough for people like me who are into that, but reddit has active communities for a lot of interests. Lemmy stuff is like, privacy this, linux that, tor this, development that, while reddit is more like, privacy this, conlang that, drawings this, water that, politics that other thing, etc
I think this is the kinda stuff that will come over time as people start using Lemmy, tho. Art nerds, water nerds, bird nerds, etc will come around and create communities for their interests, and people who are interested in those things will come to share their interests too
This is one thing the community could help us with,sharing lemmy around and growing its userbase and communities. I mainly just want to work on the code, and I’m not too good at sharing lemmy around.
oh damn, happy cakeday comrade. I think this is the first time I’ve seen one
Thx!
That is very understandable, and the work you do is very appreciated
The one thing i find very strange - people on lemmy aren’t posting about covid all the time. Everyone on reddit, in the news, and in real life, is talking >50% of the time about covid. But here, not a peep.
And that’s very good! I’m tired of covid-related posts, 99% of them are useless and don’t provide any interesting content. When I subscribe to the technology communities I don’t want to read about covid, I want to read about technologies!
Of course, if you interested in covid-related content, just subscribe to specific communities about it, but don’t post it in other communities
It makes me think that the lemmy userbase is really very strange. Maybe I don’t notice because I’m strange too.
There must be a huge divide between popular interests and popular lemmy interests.
Not a good or a bad thing IMO. Might be a shock though for early users, once lemmy gets popular.
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I have been Reddit user for years, because I found the technical communities there that I liked. Since a couple of weeks I am using Lemmy and didn’t look back. Yes we need more people in the communities, but I already like the content I am able to find here. Reddit is more massive, but there is a lot more thrash there as well. I would like to see projects like LineageOS, Pine etc. moving their presence here.
Agreed. Community or much less toxic and more human.
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Hey, I’m new to Lemmy and I can tell you about the missing part - clients.
I accidentally found Lemmy client in F-droid (lemmur) it’s pretty good, but lacks a lot of QoL features.
I think, having multiple clients for all platforms will help with userbase and content.
Add Lemmy clients to Google Play, Apple App Store, Amazon App Store, Huawei App Store, etc.
More clients -> more people find out Lemmy -> more users will join Lemmy -> more content will be posted by these users.
Of course it’s my own opinion, not pretending to be the only way
I just joined because i saw the client on fdroid and remembered the project.
That client is so good. My phone is old and lowend, lemmur probably lack functionalities and I struggled to find the dark mod BUT the experience is really smooth and fast better than any reddit client I tried (except redreader but it’s another approach)
I’m very happy to hear that!
but lacks a lot of QoL features.
lack functionalities
In case of any feature requests/bug reports I invite y’all to post about them in !lemmur@lemmy.ml, we translate them into trackable tasks for development so we will eventually get to those :)
You both are doing a great job BTW, Lemmur keeps getting better and better 👍
Thanks!
but lacks a lot of QoL features
do you think you could elaborate on that? :) do you have any specific features in mind?
Already posted one of them to the lemmur community and found other things already posted, too (example: goto comment from notification)
I think something that definitely is still missing is an obvious way to migrate existing communities over to lemmy as gracefully as possible. Some kind of bridging, perhaps via bots, would be nice and it looks like I am not the only one thinking this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1542
A build in RSS post bot would be nice. Maybe with an option to not federate posts made by it. This would allow linking Lemmy more easily to an existing website and also do somethink like a blog aggregator (planet).
it would be nice but that would also drive in a lot of spam.
Time.
I think there’s a lot of QoL features missing that make it less user-friendly than most sites and the difference is pretty stark when you compare it to reddit especially. Some examples:
-Being able to “view all images” so that you can just scroll down without having to open every image manually
-Being able to open videos from within the site
-More filters/sorting options. You can’t sort by controversial comments, you can’t search by community/post/comment, you can’t view all submitter’s comments
-Being able to hover over an image and have it open (with extensions like imagus, hover zoom, etc)
-Having a preview of your comment below (the preview button doesn’t do that)
-A better search function. Right now it’s not very accurate and sometimes doesn’t yield results.
-Being able to expand the comment box you type in
-Smaller margins. Right now, everything is in the middle. This is fine for individual comments, but once you start getting lots of replies, where everything is inched over slightly, then comments far down the chain are basically thin strips of text.
-a phone app
These are some that stand out to me. I agree with other commenters that the site is still new, and unknown. But if people do discover this site and find it’s functionality to be annoying, then they may be turned off from using it, especially when they’re likely more comfortable on other platforms already.
try lemmur on fdroid
Thanks.
Thx for these, enhancing search is what I’m working on currently.
An expanded image view isn’t a bad idea either.
Thanks. That’s good to know.
i wish there was some kind of moderation feed where i could see all the posts from communities that i moderate, where i could mark them as seen. that way moderation would be much easier.
also ability to search in communities. or alternatively some kind of tag system for search, where i could specify search parameters, for example query like that “
problem -c:lemmur” could search only in community !lemmur the phrase “problem”There is one thing that none of the reddit-clones have -> languages.
Language-based sub-domains, just like wikipedia. The way reddit and lemmy do languages just isn’t sufficient.
@nutomic@lemmy.ml is currently working on language tagging for posts and comments. Ideally we’d like to see even single communities have multiple languages in one space. Currently, its mostly language based instances and communities.
Tagging doesn’t sound like the right choice, like it would not work well. But I’ve learnt that nutomic’s plans (and yours) are usually more sophisticated than they first appear.
You’ve seen how wikipedia does it with subdomains - it’s a perfect solution.
But on second thoughts, that could be implemented very easily. You would need to make separate fr.lemmy.ml, pt.lemmy.ml… instances. The only code change needed - alongside the “subscribed local all” filters add an “all instances with the same language domain prefix” filter.
Tagging has many powerful uses. But we may not need to wait for tagging, just to get languages segregation.
Your proposed solution doesnt really help, because then you just separate all languages on their own instances. But they would federate with each other, because most people speak more than one language. Then users will still see posts/comments in languages they dont understand. The advantage of language tagging is that every user can decide which languages they want to see.
add an “all instances with the same language domain prefix” filter
was meant to solve that.
But TBH, this is the way the world is going. People are finding that sub-dividing things into categories is too limiting. Using tags works better. Why shouldn’t it be the case for filtering languages too?
I am sure that full isolation of the space is the worst thing you can do together with 1 lang communities and also an innecesary waste of resources.
It seems like there needs to be people who know how to build an instance community. It would be great to have a history, philosophy, psychology instance that someone builds into a thriving community of experts. Same for science, music, photography and a dozen things others are interested in. They don’t need to be niche or dogmatic, but there should be a reason to join.
Many people seem to think the constrained by design, under active development flagship is going to spawn reddit level communities, but the point of the whole thing is to go build or find your own. So far several of the instances have been regional or politically divisive which seems to serve a need, but online-extroverted leaders with a desire to put themselves out there seem few and far between (those can build are probably building for-profit exit strategy communities).
Anyway, if there was something missing, I would say community builders.
Yes this one. But you can’t force this kind of thing. They will come spontaneously or they won’t.
The only thing we could possibly do is publicise lemmy better. It is too well hidden and unknown.
The other thing could be, thinking of communities that don’t already exist elsewhere and starting them here. Or finding communities that are becoming toxic on reddit and inviting the users over. No point trying to compete with already thriving subreddits.
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We’ve been lucky that our growth has been slow enough that the moderation workload has been manageable, but its gonna be a constant struggle as we scale up. I’m really glad to be part of a community committed to standing against white supremacy and bigotry.
Quality over quantity all the way
Yah lemmy in my book already has what it needs to be successful long term which is a core community of relatively friendly, interesting people
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I plan on setting up my own server within the next couple months, but thorough tutorials would be a good way to boost the community I imagine.
Lemmy is new. REALLY new. It’s not as mature as other federated services and naturally also doesn’t have their userbase. It’s too early to say anything at this point. We need to wat for development to progress, users to come overtime and in the meantime share stuff from outside so we can have content to view here.
I think that an important part of the development process is users’ feedback.
