I haven’t gone back since Apollo shut down, and not planning to, but I am curious.
I’m jumping between Reddit and Lemmy. Some subreddits have all of their mods booted out (r/GoCommitDie and r/OpenAI are two I can think of). Some subreddits have decided to flag their subreddit as NSFW but are being threatened by Reddit to reverse that move, and many have returned to business as usual.
Let’s face it. We’ve lost the API protest. All we can do now is make Lemmy popular and make it attractive to other users. Give people an incentive to actually join here. Our job here is not to make Lemmy a copy of Reddit. We need to make Lemmy different (in a good way!).
And here’s an unpopular opinion: we need to make Lemmy easy to use and understand. If normies find Lemmy difficult to use or understand, then we’re fucked.
My personal opinion is that normies might get confused by the fediverse and might be turned away by thinking they need to make an account on every single instance in order to participate in them. I am not proposing that we get rid of federation. What I am proposing is that we somehow make it clearer to everyone that all you really need is one account and you can get access to everywhere. I don’t know how we can do this, but I’m sure there is someone who knows.
For the normies, I just saw someone recommend the wefwef app on reddit and now here I am.
It’s 2023, people don’t need to know how the fediverse works, they just need to know which app to install.
Content is nice. It feels like reddit of old.
This is going to be great.
I’m not really a normy, but the simple act of making an account is not obvious. With that barrier of entry, most people will simply never be able to join here.
Ha! Even after creating an account, figuring out how to log in to Jerboa took a Google search.
I kinda am, and found it easy enough. Read some stuff and signed up, jumped in and figure it out as I go - am I missing something? There doesn’t seem to be barrier to entry for anyone who can use a phone or computer.
Good. Its an intelligence gate.
Lack of technical expertise does not equate to a lack of intelligence.
It does though. Its not the technology… Its the critical thinking and problem solving. It could be a stone puzzle.
Please help, I can’t for the life of me work out how to Sign Up!!!
GTFO!
Please, anyone that dumb - force them to stay on Reddit. Don’t let them in!!!
Most people start by ending up on the join Lemmy website and are bombarded with info about the fediverse, and the description of each server makes it sound like you can only interact with local commities. If you link someone straight to lemmy.world I imagine they will have no problem signing up.
Oh, ok - I missed something.
I started by looking at BeeHaw from a link - but couldn’t get in.
Then Lemmy.ml, which promptly failed to do much of anything, I actually made 5 accounts with the same username in Bitwarden (just join, then search up my BendyLemmy and ‘auto-fill and save’…).
When Lemmy.world stopped responding (last week I also got tons of errors with Lemmy.ml) I just took a back seat, did something else, then spotted several ‘upgraded!!!’ posts in my feeds.
I’m all for improving the user experience here on Lemmy.
But what I find not so appealing, is targeting mass adoption in a way that dumbs down the community we’re building here.
As long as we just make Lemmy a great place to be, the right kind of people will keep joining.
Meta knows exactly what to do to bring a billion new users to a new social media site, and all you have to do is look at Threads to see the kind of community they are cultivating.
Lemmy does not, and never will, have the moderation power to contend with that many bad actors. I’m perfectly fine with Lemmy having a tiny learning curve to keep out the dregs.
Isn’t it possible to also create a gatekept community on the fediverse by just filtering to “local” on an instance that has the same current state barriers to entry? That’d prevent you from seeing the posts on instances that have lower barriers to entry.
I mean just having someone that has good real world UX skills (as in, good UX for normies) to redesign join.lemmy would probably already solve 90% of it.
I think account transfers is another thing what would help alleviate the pressure from choosing an instance.
I have good (I hope) UI skills, as in, I am good at designing good looking frontends. How do I apply to design the join.lemmy page?
Probably through the GitHub would be my guess.
We didn’t lose. Reddit lost us and will continue to lose.
Reddit offers nothing without its (human) users. They can chatGPT all the posts they want to try and look busy, but people are gonna notice the lack of original thoughts and leave. It will be slow and it won’t be complete, but it is happening.
Fediverse services need to lead with the “all” feed. People don’t want to be pressured to pick a server without knowing what’s on it or where everyone else is. When you go to reddit, the first thing you see is the r/all feed. The posts and content is what gets people to join.
“People are gonna notice the lack of original thoughts”
My gamer in christ we go to reddit and redditlike sites to avoid original thoughts
Making cute little infographics could help. Even Reddit had them way back when people didn’t really “get” what all the voting was about or why people were so into bacon.
This is the oldest one I could find with a quick Google search, but I am sure there were older ones as well.
Right now, you DO need multiple accounts. Instances are down all the time, federation either breaks or is intentionally broken through defederation even between relatively large instances, … it gets tedious.
That’s just growing pains from a sudden mass migration, the hug of death if you would.
User base growing organically over time will make this happen less and less.
Lemmy as a software will get more sophisticated, the people running the software will get more used to how things operate and be able to buy more/better hardware, etc…
Right now things are just a bit chaotic from thousands of people jumping ship at the same time.
People don’t care about it being growing pains or what will happen, they’re trying it now.
And people will try it in the future when it is a better experience, too. Both things can happen, I promise you.
I feel like I haven’t seen enough of that happening in the past though. Can you share some examples of where you’d seen it? Maybe Steam? No Man’s Sky?
What other apps debuted early to a poor public reception that got people to come back and try it again and successfully change their minds?
Lemmy now has over an average of a million posts a day up from 300k a month ago. It’s experiencing massive massive growth NOW despite no venture capital being thrown at it. I don’t know why you are asking about sleeper hits when you are literally posting on one. EDIT: I’m an idiot. Misinterpreted the “1 million posts” post from yesterday as a daily total not a cumulative lifetime total.
This isn’t my experience.
I usually hate this response… But I haven’t had any issues, this is bizarre to hear for me.
maybe drop the word federated. That word makes little sense here.
What is the confusing part?
Honestly I feel like the barrier of entry for normies is a good thing. What’s the confusing part about Lemmy and the fediverse? Maybe I’m missing something
You’re just being obtuse if you think that there’s no confusion for the majority.
The absolute vast majority aren’t techies, they aren’t open to learning and they have been used to centralised simplicity.
Just trying to explain home instances, federation and defederation is more than enough to lose the interest and understanding of a vast majority.
Now the barriers do lend themselves to an entirely different feeling and community base. Whether that’s good or bad is down to personal taste. But Lemmy isn’t going to compete with reddit until the process is streamlined and the thinking required is mostly removed.
deleted by creator
I tried to explain Lemmy to my gf since she was on reddit a lot, but quit for other reasons. Her eyes glazed over, and she gave me a “wow that sounds cool” , like i was our toddler, excitedly telling her about a leaf i saw.
While it’s true that the majority of people may not be tech-savvy or open to learning complex new software, it doesn’t necessarily mean that normal people don’t adopt new software at all. Throughout history, we have seen numerous instances where new technologies and software have gained widespread adoption, even among non-technical users.
Consider the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. These platforms started with relatively niche user bases but eventually expanded to reach millions, if not billions, of users worldwide. The key to their success was not only their technical features but also their ability to simplify the user experience and cater to the needs and preferences of a wide range of individuals.
In the case of home instances, federation, and defederation, while they may sound complicated and unfamiliar to the average user, it’s important to note that successful software platforms often find ways to abstract complex concepts and provide intuitive interfaces. If the process is streamlined and the thinking required is minimized, it becomes more accessible to a larger audience.
Moreover, it’s worth considering that as technology becomes more pervasive in our daily lives, people are becoming increasingly comfortable with exploring new software and digital experiences. The rise of smartphones, mobile apps, and the increasing reliance on digital tools for various tasks indicate a growing acceptance and adoption of new software by the general population.
Therefore, while it’s true that there may be initial barriers and confusion, it is possible for new software like Lemmy to compete with established platforms like Reddit by focusing on simplifying the user experience, addressing the needs of non-technical users, and gradually building a community base that fosters familiarity and engagement. It’s important not to underestimate the potential for normal people to embrace new software when it offers compelling features and a user-friendly interface.
The best analogy I’ve found so far is “it’s like having an email address; having a different server after the @ is not an impediment to your participation. Just know that you can only login to the server where your account is set up.”
I am using this example! That’s a great way of explaining it.
I’m still slightly confused about aggregating or if that is even possible. I guess I just need to have a separate account for NSFW stuff lol
Tbh the lemmy home page that’s supposed to walk you though joining needs to be cleaned up. The page kinda assumes you are somewhat tech literate, and doesn’t really do a good job at explaining how to navigate the fediverse.
Be the change you wish to see in the world…
Because you’re right and I don’t know how I would clean it up lol
My favorite thing over there right now is r/videos, which only allows text descriptions of the video you were going to post. It’s way more entertaining than it has any right to be.
Dammit.
Thank you!!! >:(
How would I even access it without rif?
You can log out of rif and it will work, though no porn
Looking at logged out Reddit really takes the proverbial paper bag off. It’s so unappealing.
Revanced patched version of the reddit app without ads and other bloat, or through a web browser with ublock and RES.
Or a Revanced patched version of RiF itself
Unfortunately I res doesn’t work on android.
Ot even on firefox dev?
/r/all has top posts from very obscure subreddits now
My Frontpage has much much less churn.
As long as we keep making this place good and active, it will be attractive. With the increased spam bots and degraded moderation, people will start looking elsewhere
What infuriates me are subs that act like nothing is happening. I can understand not wanting to get involved with drama but actively supporting the devs by pretending everything is fine is vile to me.
IMO the protests are having an effect. I haven’t been on there for 2 days (full disclosure: was given 1 week suspension under dubious pretense while I was mass editing + deleting all my comments), but, before then there was a huge undercurrent support for the protests but a lot of outright hostile naive complaints regarding them. At this point it feels like the majority of those that are willing to leave have left, and the rest is a dumpster fire of increased hostility. Everyone is angry for seemingly ridiculous reasons. You can’t post anything without somebody saying something absurdly contrarian within a day or 2. TBH I really think there’s a ‘instill anger’ bot program (and its replicants) running amok now and the moderators can’t (or are unwilling to) keep up with it.
I read a post somewhere that really vibed with me. It said that they use Apollo and Reddit was just a backend. When Apollo died, Reddit did too for them.
Boost just died for me a hour ago, and Reddit with it. So now I’m here.
Yeah. The end of Boost was the end of Reddit for me, too. Now I’m here and trying to figure out Lemmy. So far so good…I think?
My Reddit feed was the result of months of “hide X subreddit” and finding words to blacklist so it’ll take a while for Lemmy to mature into something like that, but whatever.
Same. It lasted even longer than it should have
Me too 😭
Removed by mod
Same but Reddit Is Fun, Lemmy is kicking ass though.
RIP.
There are dozens of us… Dozens!!
This is such a mood, all the subreddits tagged as NSFW can only be viewed on the official app now and I refuse to use the official app over joey… So onward to lemmy I go!
Oh I really vibe with that
I love the sound and view of a good trashfire, so I sometimes go look and see how hard it’s burning.
So /r/madlads Mods did what madlads do: They made everyone a moderator just like /r/politicalhumor did from the beginning of the protest. I brought the idea up to the /r/pics mod just to let them know. Would be funny as hell.
Postwise, Bots started reposting content from 2-3 years ago, ChatGPT was spotted multiple times as a replying user and smaller subs returned to normal, but are slowly drowning in spambot posts or switched to approval-only due to the failing tools.
EDIT: A major antispambot on reddit closes down today by unbanning EVERY SINGLE SPAMBOT on reddit. Did I mention that I love watching things burn down?
To me it feels like the whole ordeal shook reddit quite a bit and made maybe the top 10% of the users drop out of the bucket this way, going to the Fediverse (flavors: lemmy, kbin, mastodon) as far as I can tell right now. Tildes and squabbles got some users, too, but IMHO those seem to be not doing well so far.
They didn’t unban all spam bots, they just aren’t adding any more to the ban list.
Jesus that’s hilarious! Make everyone a mod, I’d love to see that spread.
Good stuff. Trashfires are nice. I first looked at tildes, but invitations were nowhere to be found. Glad I checked out Lemmy mext, I’m really having a great time.
I apparently have 10 tildes invitation codes from 5 years ago when I tried it out. If anyone wants them, send a DM. Personally, I find it too restrictive there as they want everything serious - no jokes. Lemmy is more my speed.
You have to send an email for a Tildes invitation if you don’t personally know someone on there. It took me like 5 days to get the return email and it did go to spam. You can PM me if you still want an invite or go here for the site and sign up info.
i like dumpster fires too so i’ve been checking it out too and i’ve learned that the subs i frequented are so niche that not even spambots have caught on yet; which i think is odd considering that they’re nearly all porn/porn-ish related. they don’t exist in the fediverse either and i was wondering if cutting off the (seemingly) only source of that content was a good idea; but just now i noticed that the active mods for a few of them are not mods anymore and also some of the biggest contributors haven’t contributed anything in the last week or so maybe my decision won’t matter.
Turning everyone into mods is a horrible idea, because reddit will hand over ownership of any sub doing any kind of protests to the first mod that contacts them and asks for it. At least one sub was taken over because of that by a person who had basically no clue about what they were doing.
It’s dangerous and just asking for Reddit to take over.
You’re not wrong, but that’s also the point. Let Spaz try to run the site with sycophants and no real content creators.
I suspect that mod teams who were serious about protests from the beginning knew that they would eventually be replaced. They’re just doing as much damage as possible and dragging it out now. Spaz will win, but they can make it a Pyrrhic victory.
Hmm, i checked out the FP and a few of the subs I used to frequent. Front page seems to have more TikTok style crap than ever, like “guy gets punched!” or “someone makes annoying food!”. Relationship advice: “get divorced!!”.
City subs seem about the same as before. Medical subs I used to read seem about the same and holy shit, am I glad I’m not reading those every day. Same questions and memes that have been rotating through for like 5 years, and the confounding pattern where the community consensus on issues changes from week to week or post to post. One week it’s “this term is offensive and I hate it” and 50 people are “YEAH! That’s right!” and then the next, “don’t you know about this term, it’s perfectly valid” and 30 people are “YEAH! Use your brain if you have one broo!!”. And the questions like “does anyone else with this condition suffer from these extremely common effects that are listed in every medical article about it?” So anyway whether reddit has gotten worse or not, seems like I was ready for something different.Removed by mod
That rules, but for the wrong reason.
seeing a shit ton of spam
Yeah, Spez is gonna learn what happens when you don’t have free labor from the mods anymore. The janitor is not important until he fails to show up for work.
Let it burn.
Yes it’s all ads and hate porn now. I saw people advocating for murder of delivery drivers and I had to drop out of that shat
I never really realized how bad reddit slowly became until I’ve settled into lemmy/kbin, everything is mostly peaceful here (for now, maybe)
No joke there are chatgpt bots going around, even in smaller subreddits.
The Finnish language r/Suomi is shut down so the Finn’s have moved to the English language r/Finland, making it all confused with languages now.
Most subreddits are no longer private, but a lot of them are still protesting in various ways. If I were an advertiser viewing the chaos on Reddit, I’d hold off on buying ads there.
Reddit has made it easy now that my mobile apps are gone. Also, my main account got permananned on Tuesday apparently out of comment posted 5 years ago about spez. Also, a niche sub I followed was taken over by a Nazi when the historical mod got kicked out by reddit and now that’s gone too.
Reddit has slipped into being irrelevant very quickly.
My main account got permabanned for “sexualization of minors” after I made a comment criticizing a guy talking about what he’d do to 4th graders. Sent an appeal… and got permabanned on ALL of my accounts for “recurring offense”.
Maybe spez wants to turn all of Reddit into jailbait again.
Reddit: “Someone reported a theft. What do you know?”
You: “Yes, I reported the theft. Here are the details of the perp.”
Reddit: “When we turned up you were the only one here. You sound like you know a lot. You’re under arrest for theft.”
That’s about the level of effort. I would wager that nobody really checks whether the admins or whatever they call their safety squad are doing a realistically good job… probably just metrics like “banned 150 people last week”.
I got a full IP ban from reddit because I asked a guy how he kept his calm and didnt flip his shit at his clients, after he just made a big post about how his clients were complete and utter idiots who made him ahve to come back at all hours of the day to fix their stupidity for over a year.
According to reddit, replying to a guys post with a relevant question constitutes severe harassment.
I wouldn’t say Reddit is irrelevant at all, not yet and maybe not for a long time. But I don’t care about Reddit at all anymore. I think that when Boost for Lemmy comes out I won’t even look back on Reddit
What sucks is there’s still a few very good subs with big communities that don’t seem to be moving to the fediverse, which is still too geeky for a lot of people. However, now that Reddit is banning active members and moderators, it’s a matter of weeks until the whole thing turns into 4chan-on-a-bad-day. At this rate we’ll all get back to usenet by 2024.
I’ve been using Connect for Lemmy, and seems on par with Boost already.
I disagree. Reddit is dead in the water. They’ve driven away their most valuable volunteer content generators and workforce who made their entire product. There’s nothing left.
It does, however, still have value. I suspect that we’re about to see what a site looks like when thousands of traditional bots and LLMs start talking to each other without human intervention.
The Dead Internet theory is becoming reality right in front of our eyes. I can hardly believe it.
