This is not going to be a blogpost about “Why do people still use Reddit instead of everyone moving to Lemmy?”. I noticed that even with Mastodon users, who already understand and like the advantages of decentralized platforms, the usage of Lemmy is extremely small, and more people use Reddit. Most of them haven’t even heard of Lemmy. To be fair, the Reddit usage also seems to be fairly low.
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Just because they know the Fediverse, doesn’t mean they know Lemmy.
For more than 50% of all Mastodon users (that’s more than 25% of all Fediverse users), the Fediverse equals Mastodon. For large parts of the rest, if it doesn’t behave like Mastodon, it’s disturbing.
Besides, how are they supposed to learn about Lemmy anyway? Yes, in theory, Mastodon and Lemmy are federated. In theory.
In fact, however, they’re almost completely incompatible. Lemmy is all about groups. It doesn’t support any interaction between users directly. Mastodon, on the other hand, is about users interacting with each other directly. It has no support for groups whatsoever. At all. Nada. Zilch.
One of many reasons why there’s almost no interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy that’d demonstrate to Mastodon users that Lemmy exists by confronting them with Lemmy content.
By the way, the latter won’t work anyway. Mastodon doesn’t show you what software a message came from. Thus, most Mastodon users assume that everything they see comes from Mastodon.
217 comments on this in 24 hours says to me that there must at least a few people using lemmy
on reddit it would be 6000.
30K users is small potatoes. even niche subreddits have userbases larger than that.
With most of the replies from bots…
What would it have been if asked on 2010 Reddit?
I’d wager not much more than here.
Yea, once a post is up on reddit for even 3 hours its not worth interacting with because no-one will see what you have to say anyways. Honestly its what makes Lemmy better to me.
This is exactly one of the reasons I like this more. Writing anything of reddit is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean. This comment here might only be read by 10 people, but 10 good, real people will actually read it.
Thank you for the compliment ☺️
Yeah but thats better than most niche message boards back in their heyday. Probably better than y incubators message board to.
A big chunk of reddit traffic and users are bots. Another large segment are more recent arrivals from India (check out how many Indian topics make the front pages on the weekends when USA/UK traffic is low.) While I can’t prove it I have a hunch that Spez hired a bunch of Indian clickfarms to pump the numbers before the IPO. Maybe he just promoted in India more to get an influx of users for the IPO or maybe they are mostly “social media marketers” hired to sell health/peptide supplements (seriously there are services that do that on Reddit so be careful ever taking any such advice from them.)
But my point is that the quality of users is pretty weak and I’m certain American advertisers have noticed by now. 300ish real, quality users is a better engagement metric than 6000 bots.
I’m a 31 yr old dude that just found out about this along with what the fediverse is. When I found out, I was researching this stuff so it took me some time to understand it all and I still don’t think I fully understand it all
Part of the problem is there’s a lot less to it than it feels like there is. The analogies we use to teach to non-tech people don’t quite match up.
It’s simply a structured way to log in and send messages back and forth.
You can use it to stitch together forums, link shares, social media, video sharing, or image sharing sites.
But we really don’t bind things together all that tightly. At best you can follow someone on pixelfed or mastodon. Since there’s truly no minimum wiring, a lot of services don’t even really fully communicate with each other. So we end up mostly with mastodon <-> mastodon links and lemmy->piefed<-lemmy links.
activitypub is a protocol. like email.
instances are just what provider you want to use, gmail, hotmail, outlook, etc.
and the ‘platform’ lemmy, piefed, mastroton, pixelfed, is just the aesthetics
Unlike like email the fediverse servers defederating / blocking each other more.
dogmail can send to birdmail but not to catmail.
unlike
Google does a lot of “defederating” (for lack of a better term), it’s one of the reasons why setting up and hosting your own email is one of the nightmare sections of selfhosting communities.
I use Lemmy. And you do. And 1000 other people do. So I’d say it’s big enough.
And Reddit was small for years and years when it started. I don’t even think I really started using it till around 2013-2014. Didn’t have a username or anything just came across it through Google searches. All websites take a while to build a userbase.
This I think is the main problem to adoption. It’s very hard to come across Lemmy results on a search engine even if I’m trying to specify Lemmy. (Not that search engines matter for most people these days what with the LLM executive summary pushing out real web pages, who needs resources when you have slop, am I right? \s)
It took me a long time before I signed up. I think I lucked for at least a year. I didn’t want to join an instance and then regret it. And all instances have their own small novel of rules, that I need to read through to know if I agree with. And even if you do, you have to send an application and get approved as well.
It almost scared me away - I’d imagine the same goes for a lot of people.
That is what we want people to believe. It’s nice and cosy without the ‘mainstream’ users. ;)
So, saying ‘nobody uses X’ is a bit of a stretch considering that whenever it’s said, there’s proof to the contrary that people use said thing. People use lemmy at times, but the problem is as it has been pointed out before many times, is that lemmy is still too niche and small when compared to larger platforms.
One of the big reasons I can think of is, is that Lemmy just doesn’t have the span of community as someplace like Reddit does. You’re not going to find a Darts lemmy instance, you’re not going to find a MentalHealth lemmy instance or anything. On Reddit, there’s hundreds of micro-communities that cover a range of interests that anybody can join and talk about.
Lemmy only seems to focus on just a handful of things; Politics, Memes, Games, Piracy, Linux, News, Technology and Asking Questions. That’s great and all but, just about anyone has these in spades. Not everyone wants to cycle through those things on a daily basis, they’ll want something more. But it’s going to turn people off from Lemmy immediately when they migrate from Reddit.
Yeah sure, we can tell them to make an instance to cover that niche itch, but once it’s built, it can be months to even years before it gets attention. And nobody wants to spend time just running around like an annoying salesman to get people to join said instance just to feel better about converting someone else over from one side to the other.
Another reason is that - moderation can be ass. Yeah, some moderators on Lemmy have the mentality and maturity of an edgy 15-year old who spends too much time online for their own good. And we can all see it in plain sight on the modlog so I don’t even need to explain.
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Few people like to be the first(ish) one on the dance floor.
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It’s slightly harder to sign up for than Reddit, so people interested in this kind of thing usually just sign up for Reddit (or stay there).
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Most people don’t care about the advantages Lemmy affords us; they care about what’s on TV tonight or which celebrity is dating which celebrity.
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Where do all those meme posts about “Lemmy is bad name / bad branding” come from? I’ve seen it recurrently enough every time someone launches a FOSS thing that I would normally suspect it’s part of a LLM farm or a scam attempt from some sort of naming / patents agency, but I’ve seen these reactions from long enough (2015-ish).
It’s named after a famous musician that was active for like 30+ years. Half the results when you search “Lemmy” are him, not the platform. Oh, and he had an unfortunate collection of Nazi memorabilia - he claimed it wasn’t because he liked the nazis just that he liked the look of their shit…
FOSS often ends up with bad names unfortunately. People never know what is going to become big when they start a project and they might get a giggle out of the name when it’s a small project. By the time the project becomes big enough that the name might actually start being a problem, it is also known by that name and changing it could significantly impact how many people keep using it. Unfortunately, a name change is often a touchy subject for any project.
Coca-Cola the drink is named after the drug and no one complains. Plus, words can have and acquire more than one meaning during their lifetime (see eg.: “fine” which means all of bad, regular and good).
Coca-Cola literally contained drugs when it was invented… The name wasn’t in conflict, it was extremely descriptive. I feel like that analogy only works if we find out that Lemmy was originally created for the sole purpose of discussing Motorhead.
Like, you asked where these posts complaining about names of Lemmy (and other FOSS projects) comes from and the above is the explanation. Just because you disagree doesn’t mean all the people that do agree are a psyop or bots, lol.
I’m offended now 😱
I think you guys have a great chance to capture Reddit’s exodus. I used it for about 16 years and me and all of my friends have realized how awful it’s become. People are looking for a new platform. I’m going to try and help by opening PRs against the repos.
Reddit has been exodusing for multiple years now. At some point, people are going to have to stop caring about the gorilla down the road and just be good, and I think Lemmy is good. Posts that make it to the front page often have over 1K reputation! It’s far from Reddit big, but it’s still big!
Because you get banned from communities by mods too extreme for reddit or the USSR
I think because people are the same no matter what platform they’re using and you’ll end up with the same kinds of arguments, trolling, or derailing everywhere. But they already have platforms they’re on for those, so why switch?
Lemmy would have to be pretty different and because humans are the same everywhere, I’m not really seeing that difference.
I see it somewhat when browsing contents in other languages because the culture is different enough to lend itself to different contents, or at least different arguments that are less tiresome than what I see on English platforms…
the predicted commie red wave revolution are all here in their dozens, actually about 2000 of them
revolution!
