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Conversations like this are why I want more people, especially "normies", in the Fediverse (old.reddit.com)

submitted 3 days ago by Cryophilia@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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When we have a critical mass of people, we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics in an organic way.

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[-] Fizz@lemmy.nz 102 points 3 days ago

The thing is that "normies"(I hate the term) weren't on reddit when it was the size of lemmy. The only experience they have is joining it after it had 10 years of development reached critical mass of users.

So we are stuck being compared to an impossible standard. When I compare Lemmy to old reddit lemmy hands down blows it out of the water. Old reddit had cp and racism on the front page every single day for years.It was hard to use and hostile to new users.

I've seen lemmy pop up in search engine posts already which was cool to see. Ive also seen lots of high quality intelligent posts granted they are only tech related but we will grow.

[-] nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 25 points 3 days ago

I tried to use Reddit for years and absolutely hated it. Finally after virtually every internet search for any question i had lead need too Reddit I decided to aquire a taste for it.

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[-] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 12 points 3 days ago

I guess that's a fair point, but I'd rather shoot for what's good instead of settle for "better than terrible".

[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

Incremental improvement is bad?

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[-] Anon518@sh.itjust.works 43 points 3 days ago

we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics in an organic way

In my experience, many of the people claiming to be experts on reddit are spreading misinformation. This goes for Twitter too, and probably most other large social media sites. People love to be seen as an authority on a topic.
Reddit is anything but organic, and is getting worse and worse in this regard.

[-] Keegen@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 day ago

The eye opening moment is when one of these threads touches on a subject you know a lot about and the top upvoted comment is spouting complete bullshit. See it once and you start to doubt the credibility of every other highly upvoted comment that looks legit but could be just as wrong, you simply don't know enough to immediately disprove it.

[-] Anon518@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

Exactly.

[-] actually@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

I have a conspiracy theory that most users who are an expert don’t post much about that.

For example I am an expert on two things most people find obscure; and for all my comments I just avoid talking about them. It’s too hard to wrap up an idea without lots of background information, there are no short posts or comments I can make about it.

Almost all the highly upvoted stuff are short. Were I to try to make an expert post it would be totally ignored. So why bother for me when I can snarky about things I know nothing about ? More fun !

I think experts who write short terse pithy comments that hit the mark, at a timely fashion, are rarer than hens teeth

[-] awwwyissss@lemm.ee 6 points 2 days ago

Yeah, reddit is corporate plastic these days. Fake, cheap, unhealthy.

[-] 4shtonButcher@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 2 days ago

I see people in that thread recommending to avoid lemmy.ml - what’s up with that?!?

[-] Mjpasta710@midwest.social 33 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

If you're asking in good faith.... Most of lemmy.ml is a tankie echo chamber that silences or outright bans any dissenting discussion.

Try bringing up the facts surrounding Russia, China, Cuba, or North Korea...

Only lies and good vibes for tankies are permitted.

[-] cowpattycrusader@thelemmy.club 11 points 2 days ago

I did not know this and posted a serious question on a thread dismissing starvation under Stalin as fake news. Ban was swift and responses were brutal. I thought it was just isolated trolling at the time.

[-] 4shtonButcher@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 2 days ago

Thanks, I honestly didn’t know! I’ve only really adopted Lemmy for almost daily use a few weeks back and mostly read tech related stuff and it’s been blissfully apolitical for the most part. Some of it is on .ml - I now understand the issue and will look out for it/support communities on other instances where possible.

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 15 points 2 days ago

!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca has a dedicated thread

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[-] MimicJar@lemmy.world 15 points 3 days ago

we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics

Lol we have that now... just be sure to phrase your question in the form of a Linux distro.

But to be serious I do think we're heading that way, but it's going to take a long time, likely as long as it took Reddit (if not longer).

[-] andrew_s@piefed.social 18 points 3 days ago

That comment chain demonstrates a real appeal of Reddit. Even for something like a post-episode TV discussion, a critical mass of people means that not only can you have the discussion in the first place, but there might be some extra info from someone who worked on the set, or attended an audience taping.

You can click to see the rest of the comments to see plenty wrong with Reddit too, but it's not like there's any particular drive to prevent the elements of Reddit culture that I find annoying from coming to Lemmy too.

I'd be surprised if there's ever a critical mass of people on a federated app though. If there is, it's more likely to be on something with the proper funding, that hides the details from regular users (e.g
it'll be BlueSky, not Mastodon). On Reddit, Lemmy has a reputation for being too complicated, for the mundane reason that is. Too much stuff that should happen doesn't, and the answer to why are the stuff that 'normies' don't want to hear (LW and PD instances are both a bit unstable atm), or they're so unintuitive that that they'll need answering forever (e.g everything around discussion languages, instance blocks, newly-discovered communities , etc etc).

I've just seen a user accidentally submit the same post to the same community multiple times (the worst I've seen is 4 times). Preventing that is some real 'web dev 101' shit. Federated apps can be an interesting hobby for inexperienced devs (like me), and mildly diverting for anyone who wants to use them as a user, but a critical mass of users?! Forget about it.

[-] jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world 16 points 3 days ago

All the others will get bought out and enshittified. The future is not there.

The Fediverse has the potential to be the future. It's gated behind open sourceheads not being all...open-sourcey about. Making it clunky to use and badly designed and then pulling the establishment economist "you poor schlub you're just too dumb to get it" card, thereby shooting their own efforts in the foot.

If they can make it open source AND easy to use/intuitive/well designed, then we have a solid future. If not, the future still won't be those other places.

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[-] Blaze@feddit.org 21 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

an organic way.

Not sure if that defines current reddit if you have a look at /r/TheoryOfReddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1gdpeyp/this_bot_thing_is_dystopian_bot_copied_my_post/

On the other hand, I found this interesting thread on !houseplants@mander.xyz today: https://lemmy.world/post/21385568?scrollToComments=true

Feel free to have a look at !newcommunities@lemmy.world for niche communities

[-] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 27 points 3 days ago

It's not just about the communities. We push communities a lot, and we do need more communities. But fundamentally we need a lot more PEOPLE.

[-] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 1 points 6 hours ago

Hard disagree.

A million empty communities simply makes all of lemmy look like a barren wasteland nobody uses.

We, if anything, need to stop making a community for every single edgecase that someone might ever one day want to talk about, and focus on the basics, until there's enough people interested in some random niche thing to justify adding the community.

That is to say, it should be organic community growth led by users making a more specific community from a larger community, and not server admins making, for example, 421,000 different sports team communities hoping users will somehow magically appear and use any of them.

Lemmy is still at the scale that a single /c/NFL could more than adequately handle the entire volume of people talking about NFL games, and we don't really need a /c/ for each league, team, player, and coach or whatever.

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 6 hours ago

I agree with you, but not sure if that's what the person above meant.

But yeah, centralization should happen. We could probably close 95% of the existing communities and regroup on the last 5%

!football@lemmy.world for instance covers most of the needs for that sport

[-] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 1 points 6 hours ago

My read was 'we need to make more communities, AND we need more users' and I'm not sure why more communities solves anything since I've shown Lemmy to several actual real touch-grass kind of friends and they're all like 'but why? there's nothing there.'

Which is both very wrong, and completely understandable because if you go searching for a community about something, you'll find a whole lot of no activity ones and that's just a misleading and confusing presentation which they're taking the wrong impression away from.

I don't think there's a group of users who are just sitting out there waiting for a community about Longaberger baskets to make the jump off reddit, but there are a LOT of people who would move if it looks like it's not just another "reddit killer" with lots of empty zones of nothingness.

[-] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago

My point was that needing more people is the root issue. So while I didn't explicitly make your point, I do agree.

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 5 hours ago

with lots of empty zones of nothingness.

Indeed. Trying to solve this with !fedigrow@lemm.ee, but it takes time

[-] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago

Exactly! Yes!

I get downvoted everytime I point out that a healthy network comes with users. Lots of users. Users of all kinds. Users you don't agree with. Users you do agree with. I said that the userbase of threads being on Lemmy would be a culture clash, but it would be a sign of a growing fediverse concept.

Everyone else says if the threads users federated with Lemmy, they would personally block the instance. Which just shows how much of a bubble the people here want to live in.

I work at an airport. You will never see a more diverse group of people from a bigger selection of places than at an international airport. I don't agree with all of them. I don't agree with the majority of them. But I can converse with them. I can make small talk for 10 minutes.

I treat the fediverse as I treat the real world. I wouldn't look at these people and say "You're banished from my existence for having conflicting politic or religious beliefs! Begone from my presence! You do not deserve to exist in my world!"

But thats how people here treat "outsiders" or "normies".

I want the fediverse concept to grow. I want the idea of a concept that's immune to corporate ownership by design to BE normalized.

Because right now, it's a niche interest that 98% of people have never heard of. Corporations want to keep it that way.....if they've even heard of the Fediverse. They might to be too busy exploiting labor, and polluting the planet with their private jets and resource sucking plants located in places that already have water shortages.

Yes I'm talking to you Nestle, and you Starbucks CEO. I don't know how this comment turned into a rant against them specifically, but fuck Nestle, and fuck Starbucks.

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[-] OpenStars@piefed.social 14 points 3 days ago

We are far too unwelcoming to normies currently. Many people on Reddit reporting coming here to check it out only to not enjoy it and remain there.

100% of every single person that I've ever told about Lemmy irl gives me grief about how politically extremist it is. Like not just "no thank you, if you don't mind" but "FUCK NO, WHY WOULD YOU SHOW ME THIS!?". I mean, I'm no lover of capitalism but... if we want normies, we have to make this place more palatable. The likes of Facebook, X, and Reddit are grandfathered into the public consciousness - like it or not, convincing someone to come here is basically meaning to leave there, if only for part of each day (which Mbin is strongly helping with, by also conjoining Mastodon with Lemmy).

As an experiment, go to Lemmy.ml and sort by Local. The very top post is currently this one: https://lemmy.ml/post/21925926. This does not make me feel welcomed, being a citizen of the USA. Mind you, I get that there is a certain degree of "Truthiness" to it - especially if you ignore all of the thousands of years of history that predated the very "discovery" of this Western-most continent (even by Leif Erickson) - but true or not, it turns people away. An admin account even specifically decries people not liking it:

Judging by the downvotes, a lot of Lemmitors have no idea how the world works. Just living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—must be nice.

So, this post isn't going to be removed anytime soon, although beware of downvoting it - you might be kicked out of all communities that exist on that instance, including those you've never so much as heard of existing (yes that's a real thing, see MANY cases described in MANY communities across the Fediverse, e.g. !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com).

Note I did not cherry pick that example. That is literally the first post that I saw. Every time I do this, I can always find such an example in <10 seconds and half of that is going to Lemmy.ml in the first place.

I mentioned Mbin as being one potential solution. Sublinks is another (but in the meantime there's Tesseract on dubvee.org if you like that). I switched to PieFed myself, though there are quite a large number of issues with it (e.g. zero new posts from all the super cool Star Trek memes made in the last 3 days from https://piefed.social/c/tenforward@lemmy.world are showing up here - tho tbf this is far from the only instance that is struggling to catch up to updates with Lemmy.World). If you want to remain tied to the actual Lemmy codebase there's lemmy.cafe and quokk.au that defederates from hexbear.net and lemmy.ml (the former also defederated from Lemmygrad.ml). But so long as people keep joining e.g. lemmy.world or lemm.ee, they are going to have to discover how those instances are by themselves. Except they won't, and based on my experience, instead they leave - and then blame me for even having mentioned Lemmy to them in the first place.

We are fooling ourselves, to think that we can have our cake and eat it too. If you make fun of someone - e.g. people in the West including in USA, UK, Germany or other EU nation, etc. - then why would those very same people want to join in despite the "joke"? It's really not that hard to understand: we either make the Fediverse more welcoming to normies, or we give up hoping that they will come in spite of everything. And based on the MAU (monthly active users) stats, this is basically peak Lemmy right now without much chance to grow further - and if anything we're declining. I mean, I'm writing this to you from a non-Lemmy sourcecode-based instance right now.