How do you feel about the massive influx of users?
I honestly can’t say about the influx. Since I’m part of it.
But man…
This does feel like home.
I was already loving Mastodon.
Honestly, the real question is:
What took us soo long…
I was lurking on Lemmy for a long time now read only mode, not signed up, but never had the urge to actually making an account.
I try not to have so many feeds where I’m active at once, to try and better manage the time I spend on this feeds.
Twitter and Reddit were the ones I engaged the most
Twitter became Mastodon and Reddit became Lemmy on that matter, so that I can focus on being active and helpful whenever possible.
So, what took me so long…?
Definitely something I will be asking myself for a while, since so far the experience here have something that reddit just don’t. The quality over quantity aspect.
Finally…
Thanks for having me here, I hope I can contribute the best I can to maintain Lemmy awesome as it is. I don’t post or reply like a madman, but I like to participate on constructive discussion every now and then.
what took us so long
“Inertia is a property of matter” -Bill Nye the Science guy
What I mean by that is that it takes a force to move a large mass. People behave in much the same way. It takes a push to get people to move in large numbers from one place to another. I personally have been philosophically very pro-fediverse ever since I heard about it, but I was waiting for it to reach a critical mass before really switching over.
That, and for Lemmy specifically, its history of being a tankie forum. Without the Reddit refugee migration, if you joined Lemmy as a single user, you would be alone among communists and eventually get bullied into leaving. Already in 2020-2021, Fediverse users knew about Lemmy, but they avoided promoting it because of its userbase. This Reddit situation provided the push to get many normal users over to Lemmy at once to drown out the communist users.
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That’s a good point. Personally I like when there’s a diversity of political opinions that are able to have reasonable discourse. My favourite political subreddit for a while has been /r/stupidpol. It has lots of Marxists, but lots of internal variety in terms of viewpoints, and respectful debate has always been allowed there while also maintaining a lighter atmosphere.
Hey man, I’ve felt mostly the same than you migrating to lemmy. A while ago I tried mastodon but it really didn’t click with me, how do you do to find people to follow and so? I was only getting recommended the same like 10 guys. I like gaming and programming if it helps.
For Mastodon?
I use it the same as my Twitter, mainly googling mastodon lists of know profiles there, the I copy/paste in the search and follow them.
On Lemmy it’s easier, just do a search for the communities you’d like to join, for example:
Gaming at beehaw.org is amazing. Subscribe to that if you didn’t already.
Sometimes understanding how to cross instances can still be a bit cumbersome though.
There is pretty cool support for relative links though! As long as your instance knows of a community, they’ll work.
- [gaming@beehaw.org](/c/gaming@beehaw.org)
- gaming@beehaw.org
And if your instance doesn’t know a certain instance exists, you just have to paste the url into your search bar to get it working: https://beehaw.org/c/gaming
I just joined Lemmy because someone on reddit mentioned in it a comment on a thread regarding the blackout. It’s kind of cool getting into a community while it’s still relatively small. I’m excited to see how things grow.
I hopped over here permanently tonight. Uninstalled boost on my phone, and I made Lemmy.ml my homepage. Reddit is just too depressing right now to keep it as my default.
When on a Lemmy site on mobile, in Firefox you can go to the three-dots menu and select “install”. You get a shortcut on your phone that will take you to an app like version of Lemmy.
Im using the Jerboa, official Lemmy mobile app on Android
Is Jeroba official? I thought it was third-party
I think it’s supposed to feel that way, since it’s not on the official LemmyNet github org, and located on one of the developers’ accounts instead afaik
AFAIK you are correct. I don’t think lemmy has an official app and the only 3rd party app that exists of any substance is jerboa so I suppose right now it is kind of the official Android app while mlem is the iOS counterpart. But only because there’s nothing else atm
Reddit is just too depressing right now to keep it as my default.
It really seems like the front page is just a list of politicians, companies, and people doing terrible things.
As one of the new users, I’m broadly in favour
I also approve of me joining Lemmy.
The approval rating has never been higher!
Yep same :)
As someone who is also new, I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes!
I went from Digg to Reddit and now I’m looking for a new home. I’m really liking what I’m seeing here!
Came here looking for a new home too!
Agree, it feels really similar to Reddit but in better :)
I’m a reddit refugee, Apollo was my most loved and most used app for years. I was really disappointed about this situation, but after checking out Lemmy, I’m starting to feel really excited about this. I like what I see so far and I think there is a lot of potential, and it is kind of fun to be here now while communities are still smaller. Onwards an upwards! I’m also checking out the beta for the iOS app Mlem, more work to be done but also good potential here. I’ve also been doing iOS dev work for about a decade so maybe I’ll see if I can help contribute to that project in some way.
I’m starting to be grateful to Reddit for giving me the nudge that I needed to explore the fediverse. I did have a look at Mastodon a while back (and I may have even joined an instance there, I’m not sure!) but was overwhelmed by not understanding it. I think being part of an exodus where there is lots of advice and support being given specifically for us is really helpful in making me feel like this is somewhere I’ll stay.
Welcome! Not an iOS user, but kinda frustrated with reddit either way.
how can i install the mlem app? i didn’t find it in the app store :/
same this is me too
Hope people have patience and stick with it. I have no interest in going back to reddit.
It makes me hopeful for the future. Enthusiasts priming the pump for people embracing a more sustainable and less exploitative business model to organize the Internet. Instead of putting all the information on a big centralized locked down platform we share the load and costs between instances.
I love what is happening now, it is pretty much the biggest display of resistance against big tech I’ve ever seen in my life by a long shot. I’ve seen most of the internet gradually decay to a shadow of its former self so this is a return to form and a switch to a better model in the long run.
People are finally adopting the Fediverse and if the adoption rates keep up we might start going mainstream with all the advantages and disadvantages, but it will be alright since Lemmy is both federated and FLOSS. Lemmy is a Rust-based, AGPLv3 platform and that means it will be protected against corruption in the foreseable future, I hope.
EDIT: Over 30% of Reddit already went dark!
It’s close to 50 % now. You can watch the realtime stream here - https://reddark.untone.uk/
Is it of all Reddit or just of the subs listed as participating?
Subs listed I believe
That’s what I thought too
That tracker only covers the ones that go private though! There’s a bunch that are going restricted so they can automate posts that will still show in r/all and other feeds. That way reddit’s algorithm doesn’t just pull up other subs and effectively hide that a protest is occurring.
Anyone know how many subs are on Reddit in total? I’m wondering what total percent of the site is going dark.
I’m a new user but I’d love to see this place explode in popularity!
I am also part of the influx, but I’m worried that this is going to be a short lived thing and people are going to go back to reddit.
people are going to go back to reddit.
Realistically, there is no reddit to go back to. After the company goes public, Reddit as we knew it, will cease to exist.
The shareholders will want to be make maximum profit. This means that ads are going to be everywhere. They are going to outsource hosting services to horrible companies, in order to cut down hosting costs like video hosting and image hosting. Features that existed in 3rd party apps are going to be paid features in the official app/webapp, etc.
Reddit is gone. It’s lost. It will not be there as you knew it to go back to. It’s now a case of where to next and for the time being, lemmy and feddiverse looks the best.
I think the concept of “enshittification” will become more apparent to more users. Younger people, who are more technically literate, and have seen social media rise and fall I think will be more willing to adopt platforms like Lemmy. Reddit was a “place for weirdos” for a long time until the general public noticed it and began to post comments and posts to YouTube/Instagram/Twitter. Lemmy just needs time.
One thing I always like to say to people, is “The internet was cooler when your parents didn’t understand how it worked.” I think the concept of Lemmy appeals to and will start to appeal to a lot of people soon.
sidenote, i really love that “enshittification” has more or less become the proper term for this
Yeah Cory Doctorow really nailed it with that article.
I look forward to the announcement by Merriam-Webster.
Same. That one article changed the lexicon for a lot of people.
AKA The profit motive
Jokes on you because middle-aged people are the children of the people who built the internet.
Source: I am middle-aged and also 25 years younger than Tim Berners-Lee
All that may be true but that doesn’t mean there’s enough people who are motivated enough to put effort into a reddit alternative – all the reddit design updates suck for the informed user but the whole point of the updates is to keep the much, much larger casual audience hooked, and it’s yet to be seen if a reddit alternative is viable today without the casual audience. Hopefully there’s some good signs over the next few days when the blackout gets rolling
if we pull a critical mass of those that create and consume quality content, organic effects begin to compete with entrenchment. if not, I am ok-ish with that too. if I have to exepriece the world burning down around me, I would prefer to do so in better company than reddit.
It’s very unlikely that Lemmy will ever be as big as Reddit, but this influx might have it reach a tipping point where it can start to grow users organically.
Indeed, for this kind of service users attract users. I’ve been checking in on Lemmy periodically for years and the content just wasn’t there (for me). But now, with plenty more users, I’m seeing a lot more value in spending more time here.
Yep same here, I’m hoping this is the watershed moment for Lemmy and I can start spending more on here and eventually stop using reddit (or be forced to when they take away my third party app). I don’t generally create much content, but like participating in the community via comments, so it’s hard to be a force for change when nothing is getting posted and no one is commenting.
Unlikely. Why do you say that? Wasn’t reddit once small?
12 years Reddit refugee here:
So far the concept is VERY promising but it still does all feel a bit wonky. Signing up was a headache and took me hours, sign in still sometimes work sometimes not… A huge of development will be required to get lemmy where it needs to be to really compete with Reddit, but so far, I’m very hopeful and happy!
It is also very hard to subscribe to other server’s community (or subreddit equivalent).
E.g.: i had account from beehaw, if i want to subscribe a channel from lemmy.world i need to see the list of community from lemmy.world comminity list, but I cannot subscribe from there because i dont have lemmy.worlda account. So i need to back to beehaw and search it again in community search bar.
In jerboa android, I didnt even see a way to search new community
Would be nice if there is a way to subscribe other server easily
I went through https://browse.feddit.de and subscribed to a bunch of communities that matched what I had on Reddit.
Yeah, just found that out the hard way myself. I got to lemmy.world and suddenly was no longer logged in etc… That is something that def needs improvement.
Agreed. There’s a similar issue on Mastodon that’s been confusing people for years and still hasn’t been addressed, let’s hope Lemmy prioritizes it a bit more!
In Jerboa, there is an icon on the bottom that takes you to the search function. I’ve been able to “join” communities from other instances using it
It’s a bit wonky but so was reddit. I expect it to improve quickly with it’s sudden interest.
At least for me downloading their app jeroba makes the experience much nicer. Haven’t had the issues I had on the website though it’s a bit taxed because of the influx of users. Expected.
Is Jerboa android only? Didn’t see in the app store
Yes, there’s an apple one but not sure if it’s official. Mlem or something.
Yeah, android only. For iOS, there’s Mlem.
Afaik Mlem is iphone’s lemmy client
Right? I can’t wait to see how it improves as time on. I didn’t have any real problems with joining on my end, though. When you signed up, was it the approval process on your instance, or just confusing? If it was the approval process, that’s probably specific to lemmy.ca.
I first tried signing up on lemmy.ml, that was impossible. Various hours of trying just got me the “click the signup button and it starts rotating and… nothing”
Then I went to lemmy.ca, there signup worked, but sign in at times gives the same “button rotating” thing and then nothing. Try again, and it works.
Its a minor issue, but a very visible one that I would say should be fixed ASAP because its the first thing new people see and you don’t want the first experience to be tiresome.
The infinitely rotating button happens if their email settings are invalid- just discovered that on my instance. I have mine set to open but require email validation and everything seems to happen instantly, but if they require admin verification it may be bugging out and not telling you.
It’s because there is some approval process involved I think to avoid bot/troll accounts. I join lemmy.ca cause I live in Canada. :D
That’s fine that they have an approval process, but then the user interaction should be different. IT should immediately say that my request is under review and they’ll get back to me asap or something, instead of a “this process is frozen” indication
Same here!
Think of it like moving to a new house rather than picking up your house and moving it to a new neighborhood. The excitement comes from the differences even if you miss the other place.
I just moved to a different instance and logged in there, browsing ml subs.
I felt the same at first too. The longer sign-up issue makes joining a pain, but I think it’s worth it.
Part of what I’m coming to love about the lemmy side of things is how free of filler and bots it is. By making a tiny barrier to entry, that’s going to prevent that kind of thing to a degree.
May I ask why signing up took hours? I didn’t even need to confirm anything via email, so I took me like 10 seconds.
I used sh.itjust.works though, I think it’s meant to, well, just work. Maybe the process on other instances is more complicated?
I signed up via beehaw and the sign up page said the request has to be manually approved.
Is there a thread or a com where we can discuss improvements for UI and other stuff? c/lemmydev or something?
I’m not one of the new users but I’m happy because the Lemmyverse feels much more alive now compared to a year ago. ☺️
I would love for the federated model to become a gold standard for how successful platforms ought to be run.
An idea so old is new again. The Internet and it’s early services (Usenet, email, IRC, etc.) we’re all designed from the start to be decentralized. After 20+ years of people consolidating into centrally-controlled mega platforms, I’m happy to see things coming full circle.
Agreed, platforms should compete by providing better UX and features, not by abusing network effects and walling off themselves to hold communities and accounts hostage. In a way the fediverse provides a common carrier that is neutral to the users and platforms connected to it, which enables competition in the same way that guaranteeing equal access to physical internet infrastructure to new ISPs is essential to preventing ISP monopolies.
Tried Lemmy a couple months ago and tbh it felt dead, love this new influx just hope new communities keep popping up
Same here !
the reddit blackout is for like two days i expect that 90% of them will stick to the two days and business as usual afterwards. their bottom line is to continue running mods of their communities, even if they acknowledge that was is going on with reddit is bad. they shouldnt have announced a scheduled, limited blackout.
i expect some fringe communities to come here and stay but it will always be business as usual on reddit
therefore Lemmy needs to have a reason for people to stick around, communities offering something that isnt otherwise available, even just a refreshing change of community culture
Honestly it’ll probably be closer to 99.999% of users will stick around Reddit. The largest Lemmy instance is smaller than the smallest subreddit I follow and I suspect that’s probably the case for most people.
Here’s what will happen… Reddit blackout starts, people come to Lemmy, 8 out of 10 are confused by the way things work and bail instantly. 2 out of 10 might stick around, try to sign up, but everyone hammers the top 3-4 instances and they have a bad first impression. A few days later everyone is back at Reddit and Lemmy is right back where it was a month ago.
I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt I will be.
I think that there will be people who remain on Lemmy permanently. This group will remain small, and insignificant. But hopefully there will be enough people to prop the instances up with content. At which point Lemmy will begin to grow slowly; this slow growth imo is the most important. But yeah alot of people will go back to Reddit and forget all about Lemmy. And that’s ok.
Small
Insignificant
I see you’ve been talking to my ex
this is the most redditish comment I’ve seen so far.
remains to be seen if that’s a good thing or not, but I did chuckle over the familiar joke
I was about to say the exact same thing! I checked and sure enough that commenter joined in the last few hours.
I’ve purged my account… and passed the Rubicon. I’m on Lemmy now or just reading news sites.
You’re exaggerating, I can definitely see how Twitter users changed the general atmosphere of the Fediverse, at least on the instances that I have used in the past. As for Reddit, I think it will be something similar to that, not everyone is going to migrate but Lemmy is going to be significantly bigger, better and THE place to go if you want to ditch Reddit. Also, it’s not like having a big portion here of social media audience is going to do a lot of good. I have serious doubts about people being able to give value to the community if they can’t even figure out how to register on an instance other than the main one
Yeah Reddit’s core users are pretty technical. At least the ones who joined before the big popularity boom in the last 5 years. The old school redditors will probably end up on lemmy.
lemmy feels more like reddit once did than reddit does now.
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Was originally introduced to reddit by a calculus professor who set up a sub for the class to collaborate - it was a different time.
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Definitely.
You’re talking about ~70% of reddit and you’re probably right. Let’s see. If lemmy gets an app with a better UI, it’s going to be that way for sure. An embeddes image and video viewer is missing, for example
As a reddit refugee the image and video viewer has been the only speedbump for me. That is other than not being hooked up to a firehose of content, but i feel that will come in time.
Regardig videos it doesn’t really matter cause 90% of the time you have to open the video source with the browser or another app anyway. But re. images, since lemmy can view them in the post, why it doesnt just allow to put them full screen? I should look at the code
It has been fixed in the last build
yep. it’s about quality, not quantity - we’ll reach critical mass easily enough, and that’s all that matters for the short term.
You still need a minimum of people for things to work. And a lot of subreddit equivalent are still completely empty.
of course. but Lemmy really does have potential - it’s a more accessible platform than Mastodon and reddit users are more aligned with the strategy of decentralizing via the fediverse. this fits.
we gotta start somewhere.
I personally don’t understand wanting to go back… reddit is so unpleasant as it is. All that made it tolerable was 3rd party. I’d rather go back to imgur than reddit.
As (another) reddit refugee, in order to compete with reddit, Lemmy needs to invest in its mobile apps, and make other servers easier to access.
Well unlike reddit the official app is great for lemmy.
There’s an official app?
I only know of Jerboa (for Android), but I don’t think that’s an “official” app
It kinda is. It’s made by one of the devs
One of the devs of the protocol? (forgot what its name was)
There’s a git repo for something called remmel(?) which I think is an iPhone client. But without someone publishing it to the App Store, no one will use it.
There is an app in the pilot thing called mlem. It’s the ios client for lemmy
I use jeroba but it’s android. There’s also lemmur but it won’t load for me on that and jeroba is the"official"one.
I tried lemmur on fdroid but I think it’s dead. Hasn’t received updates in months and will not load anything.
[closest thing to] the official app
You mean the Android app? Unfortunately I can’t even login with Mlem on iOS.
mlem is under heavy development. Chances are the issue you encountered has been fixed in an update
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Agreed. Website needs some improvement as well
