I hate big tech controlling social media. I desperately want social media to be federated.
I really love community-driven social media like Reddit. Lemmy feels… too small. I really loved that Reddit let me jump into any niche hobby, and instantly I had a community. Lemmy, you’ll be lucky if that community even exists, and if it does, chances are nobody has posted in ages.
On the other hand, Lemmy is full of political content lately. I’ve basically been doom scrolling everything US election-related, and it’s really starting to take a toll on my mental health.
I know I can filter content. I know I can post and be the change I seek. Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.
Not sure what the point of this is, or if it’s even the right community to vent about this. I just really want to replace Reddit, but I find myself going back more and more (e.g. r/homekit is very active compared to Lemmy version).
Well Lemmy is a possible replacement for Reddit but, putting aside my strong biais for Lemmy, it doesn’t have to be a Reddit replacement for everyone and it is still building itself up. Here is a few tips to improve your time in hope you’ll find on the fediverse the space you look for :
- Try write post on dead looking community. Follower counts have a hard time synchronizing btw instances. A lot of people may be waiting for some activity to happened.
- Try opening niche community in their original instance. The posts wrote on a distance community before the first lemming of your instance opens it are invisible and must be added one by one (by entering it URL in your instance search function). You might found interesting content you missed.
- Try reposting content you see on Reddit on Lemmy. Copy-Paste it and add something like “R*eddit content - OP : @[email protected]” somewhere in the post. You might not have as much response as OP but it can stir up interesting conversation.
- Try to make an account on the twittoverse (Mastodon, *key…). The community on the microblogging side of the fediverse is much bigger and diverse. You will be able to boost your lemmy content and link it to hashtag so more people may see it. Answer to the original post will even show up on Lemmy. But second level comments will not fediverse well.
- Try to post articles, general question or to do anything to bring some animation to your niche community. Regularity in low engagement content will still bring people that will sooner or later start to engage.
- Don’t hesitate to crosspost any related post to your favorite community. Community are silos, instances are silos and the lemming populating is very fragmented. By linking communities together, you’ll bring people with the same hobbies than you to the community they did not find out yet. -Don’t hesitate to answer at old post. Us lemmings don’t have enough activity to complain about people writing back months later, especially in niche community.
Cheers!
The timing of it all just didn’t add up. Reddit started small, too. By the time Reddit failed, Fediverse was still in its infancy, and the communities either stayed in corporate hell or found somewhere else.
It’s all I have for proper threading. I won’t forgive Reddit for how they treated me and my communities. But, if you are willing to use Reddit, I’m sure it’s going the have user advantage (and because of that niche interest advantage) for quite a while. I hope it serves your needs and brings you joy.
You might try building a community here, but that is the “slow boring of hard wood” and it can be difficult to find joy in, especially at first.
You’re right in one sense; the community is small and can have an echo chamber effect like any “small village.” But you can also try other instances, or other Fediverse things or start your own. It goes like this; Reddit had success because they served you interesting things on a silver platter, using extensive venture capital to make it as slick and addictive and popular as possible. Lemmy is not built on capital, at least not on the same scale as Reddit; it is built on labor. You gotta decide what your ideal is.
Cath 22 ? If you cant be ass’d moving why would others, you’re just enabling the enshitifcation to continue
Community is what you make it.
It’s still a tiny echo chamber like it was a couple months ago when I cut back on Lemmy use. It can get pretty repetitive and boring to read. I came back to Reddit because the user base was larger and there were more perspectives I could hear from.
I am still using both. I have never been a big poster, but I like to think I can engage in discussion on just about anything,except Linux, and I really try (but fail) to avoid political shit, and so I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.
But I’ll keep coming back, I’ll hopefully contribute in some mental way to the growth, and perhaps niche subs can grow in popularity. One of my personal favorite subs on Reddit is homeimprovement, and it’s simply a matter of quantity as far as getting it just as good here.
Reading the comments here made me realize something.
It’s nice to have good content for niche communities that you enjoy but that’s always been a tall order. As in, a lot of things have to go right to get that organic community feeling and I’ve honestly always thought of it as a privilege and not a right.
I’ve seen plenty of communities die for various reasons or just been in a position where I didn’t have passion to go and talk about my niche interests.
So what’s my point? Niche communities are the icing on the cake of a good platform. When we mostly have for profit platforms and little main stream interest in standardized alternatives, you got to be more realistic.
Yeah I want to get off Reddit but this place is small and is very political. It’s a tiny echo chamber. A very very small one.
Imagine taking the technical and stubborn creme of the crop redditors and that’s who’s mostly on lemmy. It used to be those who wanted an open source community, but it got it’s user bumps during the reddit exodus. I would have never heard of lemmy if it wasn’t for the fact I used reddit exclusively through the redditsync app. And when that shut down I came here naturally on the backbone of the developer going here.
I’ve been here since. The community isn’t bad. I still get responses on niche things like gardening and fish tank related issues I had. It’s just 3 comments vs 30. But somehow it’s better. Because on reddit I can’t even get a post posted half the time, and the other half I find out I’m banned from that sub because of a comment I made years ago on a completely unrelated post on a sub I don’t even know.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way around it. Fediverse is small, and while we should always encourage people’s migration, it will probably remain small for the time being.
And freedom to express everything combined with people learning their behavior on algorithmic content will be an issue until a strong Fediverse culture is established. The times of pioneers are over, the times of “truly a place for everyone” are not yet there, and in between, we have a very weird mixture, sometimes bringing out the worst of many people.
I hope Fediverse will survive through this phase, and if yes, bright times will be ahead. But it will take a lot of work. Many non-political communities have already started blocking political content, and for the time being, I believe that’s for the better. People need a place to chill and have a corner of their own, not face what they ran away from in the first place.
Use one of the apps so you can filter out content. “Trump, Trump’s, Republicans, Musk” seems to take care of the problem so far.I think I have some communities blocked and maybe a user or two aswell.
I don’t want another app. I use lemmy exclusively in the browser, and that feature is missing :(
Try using one of the PWA’s, like Voyager. Just go to vger.app in your browser. It’s still a browser-based front end, but it has more features than the default interface
You should check out something like Tesserect, it’s a 3rd party front end for Lemmy that includes a lot of quality of life features, including word filtering. The demo is here: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/
If you like it, you could petition lemmy.world to offer it as an option directly.
Yeah, I withheld using an app until very recently for that exact feature. I miss the browser for other features though, not sure what to do. I’m using connect, maybe I’ll try a couple others or some other solution.
I know I can filter content. I know I can post and be the change I seek. Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.
It doesn’t look like you mentioned subscriptions, which gets you out of the ‘all’ / ‘filtering’ side of things entirely. But just as with Reddit, you’ll need to spend time building your personal feed over time and tweaking it.
The good news is that there’s no limit to your subscriptions (unlike Reddit’s cap of 50 displayed at any one time), but that you’ll need to use the right tools to search the Fediverse to find those communities you want to subscribe to.
The main tool I typically use seems to have a bug right now (based on the recent software upgrade?) but I suspect will be back up in a few days. You might take a look at this, tho, plus other resources.
I like it as a platform but the userbase just isn’t there.
Don’t let your desire for something you want right now ruin something you can have in the future. At one point r/homekit didn’t exist, didn’t stop you from not caring.
I know I can post and be the change I seek.
Imo, this is your answer. I’m not sure exactly what other solution you want. Content will not appear on Lemmy without someone first posting it. Advertising the platform to help draw people in is also important.
You have fallen for the ultimate trick: wanting a “big” community.
You only get that from big, centralized social networks that want to maximize the amount of content you are fed, because it maximizes your ad views, and their profits.
Embrace the smallness. Lemmy still has room to grow, and having lot of different options for communication that aren’t all owned by billionaires is a good thing. The fact that it isn’t constantly trying to earn your attention is a feature, not a bug.
I don’t think it’s that we want “big” communities, necessarily, as much as we want active communities. For instance, if there’s a niche game I want to talk about, it’s currently a roll of the dice whether or not there’s a Lemmy community for it, and then if it does exist already then it’s pretty much guaranteed to see 2, maybe 3 posts per week, tops.
That’s really the only thing I miss about Reddit, being able to pretty much always have a discussion on any topic you’d want, at any given time.
For instance, if there’s a niche game I want to talk about, it’s currently a roll of the dice whether or not there’s a Lemmy community for it, and then if it does exist already then it’s pretty much guaranteed to see 2, maybe 3 posts per week, tops.
Why not create a thread on a genre community like [email protected] or [email protected] ?
For niche things, you kinds have to go to reddit.
I mean the worst of reddit is on mainstream topics like politics anyways. You’re less likely to see toxicity in like a gaming subreddit. (Less likely than politics anyways)
Or to the category community. You might not find an active group dedicated to Dodge Ram transmissions, but there’s at least one group for Cars, or maybe even Trucks!
People wanting more activity than the small exclusive private club Fediverse has become isn’t a trick or capitalist fallacy, they just want other people to see their fucking posts. Is that so strange and wrong? Why post things if no one is going to see them? You’re seriously missing the point of a social media, if you really think having small nearly dead spaces is a good thing.
A while back there was some issue with the Lemmy code and people kept being served posts that were over 6 months old. Peple started replying and the original posters were often “wow, you found my post!” It was kind of awesome.
