It's no secret that Lemmy is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Reddit. The issue it faces however is that it's still relatively niche and not many people know about it. I propose that we change this. By contacting the mods of large subreddits and asking them to make and promote relevant Lemmy communities we could substantially increase the amount of people who discover the fediverse. What's more, I don't think this is would be a hard sell considering many mods are already pissed off with Reddit due to their API changes. I believe that this is the time to act, so this is a call to arms, to help grow the fediverse into the future of social media!

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[–] jayrodtheoldbod@midwest.social 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm really not interested in this being a Reddit clone. Several of the subreddits I wanted to be rid of have already popped up, here, while the better side of Reddit isn't really showing up, especially since Reddit re-opened and purged pesky mods so they could all get back to their scrolling.

Oh, yes lawd, that's what I need. I need fucking antiwork to shit up the place with their misery vibe while 196 goes skipping back to Reddit and takes all the fun times with her. Sign me up.

I wanted to become involved with a completely different community, with different mores, a different feel, and its own vibe. Fuck Reddit. I left that place looong before the blackout thing, I got tired of its toxic culture that sucked the life out of me after a few minutes.

Now that's starting to leak into Lemmy and I'm frankly eyeing the door.

If you liked Reddit, you need to go back there. I didn't like Reddit. I don't want to go back there. I don't want there to come here, either.

The joy of the Fediverse is that growth is nice but we don't NEED growth. A lot of you can't understand that. You can't understand that the platform will NOT fail if it doesn't get the kind of exponential, runaway growth that you associate with social media success. We do not actually need to hit TikTok numbers, ever. We need steady, slow user growth from people wanting something different, that's what. If the Fediverse becomes the Linux of social media, fine.

So no. No to this idea. Let Reddit stay on Reddit, thank you.

[–] MiniBN@jlai.lu 6 points 1 year ago

So we are gatekeeping lemmy now lmao?

[–] jadegear@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

Disagree with this take in general (growth is worthwhile if only to shift communications platforms in general to open and federated protocols) but I don't think Lemmy is quite where we need it to be in order to sustain a migration. Finding a good instance is still tough, the idea of federation isn't easy to grasp for a new user yet, and the UX is still hammering out bugs. (Big thanks to all the devs that already work on Lemmy and all those that shifted over with the Reddit exodus for driving it to new heights so rapidly.)

An ideal migration from my perspective would have them find instances that cater to their interests and views and would allow easy defederation if undesired. Also, more control for the end user in what communities they see on their feeds when going through discovery (new/hot/etc feeds).

With better user controls for self moderation and better distribution of users across multiple instances I think we can have our cake and eat it too: growth towards a free world of communications without bogging us down by dealing with the folks/attitudes we find repugnant.

[–] h3ndrik@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I agree and disagree.

If it's one or the other I'd also say we don't need growth. But truth is: We have to be of a certain size so that talking about niche topics works. Currently there are communities that just don't work because it's just one person or a very few active people and it's not enough for a conversation. It's just, we need to grow in a healthy way. In certain places and we need to attract just the right people.

But altogether it's what i've been saying about free software and/or platforms for years now. We don't need to compare ourselves to something else, we don't need to clone something else... This is our little cozy place. If i wanted everything to be like on reddit, I'd just go there and not spend my time here and complain.

One thing I disagree is that Lemmy is becoming like Reddit. I met a few nice people here. And it did and still does feel different. And maybe this place is big enough to be a home for all of us. From people who are 'toxic' in other people's eyes to people that just want to talk about 80s computers. I think we need a few things to change and a technical solution to the problem so that people can get along. We already have federation and some servers de-federating others because of fundamental disagreements. I think moderation has to be enhanced. And we need to stop showing the 'ALL' feed per default. That just contains silly memes or lots of low quality content. That'd be a good start.