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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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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:
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.
We should all defederate from .ml. That would be a huge step. We need to excise these extremists in order for the community to grow.
I still haven't done that but have noticed a lot of calls to do it. It's not all bad on .ml, I'd never make it my home instance but it's no where near lemmygrad levels of CCP loving tankie trash
I mean... true but...
There's only so much Russian outright propaganda I can stomach at one time, so even if it's "less" it's still "too much" at the same time?
https://lemmy.ml/post/21927716 - edit: to be clear I'm not talking about the post, but rather the comments within it.
I think my user blocking has been effective since I don't see content like that coming out of .ml. ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ should be a day 1 block for new users.
I just checked and in the last year I haven't had to block any instance except nsfw, which is surprising because I never see grad users in my feed. My lemmy experience has been more variable from low effort, snap judgement, or reddit-like comments coming out of .world.
Day 1 users aren't taught who and how to block people. Instead, my personal friends have blocked Lemmy entirely. They are happy with the likes of Reddit, which tbf does have more support for niche issues, as this whole thread is discussing.
It is a difficult problem to entangle: how to compete with Reddit, and what specific steps we could do to help. One way that I was suggesting is to better separate the "I hate the Western world" posts from... you know, the places that said posts are talking about. Bc while it is most definitely possible for someone to curate their personal experience on the Fediverse (especially those who use Arch btw, or at least are okay with popping open and editing a config file somewhere), it would sure be more welcoming to particularly normies if that wasn't mandatory right out of the gate?
I'm not sure. Maybe I'll try to spend more time in this community, it doesn't pop up on my main feed that much but I usually find the topics interesting. I think there are a lot of directions lemmy could go and I don't want to commit to one idea yet. Categorizing sounds like a big effort even if it's automated.
Future updates to Lemmy already plan to include labels for communities iirc, although I am not sure about if instance labels would be included at first or not. And even if those are applied by instance admins, for maximum friendliness it seems like it would be good to reach out to the very communities that they apply to while making those labels. e.g. going from lemm.ee to Hexbear could perhaps say "come here if you aren't afraid to get dunked on and we will argue deep points together, though be warned that people indoctrinated by Western socioeconomic capitalistic thought processes may be in for quite a difference of opinion!". Lemmy.ml could be "we support older-style Marxist–Leninist thinking, but note that we strongly enjoy making fun of the West, so beware ye who enter here - we will educate you properly!"
Instead, visiting Lemmy.ml says "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers", followed by a link to "What is Lemmy.ml" which as you can see is broken, pointing to a post that appears to no longer exist.
Perhaps this is all hopelessly naive - but it could be tried before abandoning it? I have been known to throw a jab or three at the expense of my own home Western nation (USA) - though it definitely comes across differently when done externally, and also by people who very much seem to not be joking when they talk about literally murdering people. (I mean, I am aware that that never happens in Russia or China, where someone can fall out of a window, then shoot themselves in the back of the head, then fall down a flight of stairs, then shoot themselves in the back of the head again, then fall down another set of stairs, and finally out of a second window... but in any case, this vehemence seems directed at the peoples in the Western nations, and regardless of its degree of truthosity - a word I made up entirely just now but wish that I could use from now:-D - it scares away the normies for sure.)
Anyway there are only so many instances, and only so many communities, and most do not need such a warning, or possibly the instance ones could be automated as applying to all communities on that instance. So it's very doable. As compared to now where it is full federation vs. full defederation, offering literally nothing in-between (unless you have an app that can implement a block of all comments from users on a specified instance).
Btw PieFed tries to avoid the need for all of that by an automated system of its own, applied to each user evenly across the board - e.g. if you have more downvotes than upvotes, then an icon appears next to your name (this system seems able to be gamed though, especially wrt such ideological differences where many would upvote while many others would downvote, each side having different ideals about what is to be considered worthy).
Love the words. Once of my early positive impressions of lemmy was coming across longer form comments. It's so hard to get thoughts across in tweet format especially when we're all completely anonymous with potentially wildly different perspectives. I'm following your ideas here and I'm rarely opposed to experimentation. I have learned from experience that there's more to successful implementation than is apparent before you start and even the best plans can't account for real world testing.
It's been a couple days now but I think that manipulation of automated processes is sort of what I was alluding to when I didn't want to commit to an idea. People will figure it out and fuck with it.
I guess my approach is more about patience and subtle changes (outside of experimenting in small time limited areas). What we're talking about would be a major change in the context of lemmy and it's too complicated to predict the outcome of something like that. As a fun thought, there is some point in the history of reddit that would have set it onto the path it arrived at today. Maybe awards? The voting system? The composition of moderators? Changes should be done cautiously and gradually. Onboarding is a pressing problem, but I think it could be treated in isolation until a sites-wide solution is more obvious. Lemmy is doing great! Lemmy users are capable of self managing the issue of ideological influences across instances, even if it appears haphazard it seems to work, maybe, for now. Loads of problems to address outside of this as well.
I'm also a fan of sudden chaotic changes. I have a 'be careful but also break it if you want' thought process. I love the theory of evolution and I think as much as we want to be careful things are going to happen we don't want and can't predict and it can be fun to just throw a wrench in the motor and see where it takes us.
We are already experimenting with Lemmy, daily. The Rexodus happened, bringing an influx of users to this platform, and that crowd now wants different things than the prior one. And normies would want still more divergent matters. Though it matters little what people want, and more what people will expend effort to build.