anyone else remember 2010/2011 reddit? Just me? Feels like that tbh back when everyone was fleeing from slashdot and digg. 31yo millenial since I've already dated myself lol
Lemmy is a great place to BS about whatever is going on with the world at any given moment. I think the “small” size of the user base increases the quality of the discussions. You have to jump through some hoops just to get here.
But that small overall population and the barriers to entry mean we don’t have a busy community for almost any hobby or topic you’d like to discuss. And that’s fine, there are still websites and forums and search engines.
I think the fediverse should replace the corporate internet long term, of course. For what it is right now though, and especially Lemmy in particular, I’m not complaining.
I never understood how people would complain that a site with thousands or tens of thousands of users is "too small". I feel like that is a real sweet spot, you can have actual conversations and interactions that matter a bit more. Meanwhile, the constant flood of posts, comments and spam on the top social media sites made me feel like nothing I write will even matter, since all the posts will be buried under the information flood in the matter of minutes.
Yeah sometimes even parts of mastodon feel like they're getting too impersonal. Like I'll be in a conversation and realise I don't any of these people
If you just want to look at and respond to anything there is enough people. If you want to find specific, niche communities then it's still pretty small.
There's definitely a difference with scale.
On reddit, I was never on the default front page or /r/all. I was subbed to a hundred niche communities.
On lemmy that's harder in 2 ways. The first is the critical mass you need to keep a community active, and the second is fragmentation.
For instance, I was super active in the scuba and underway photography subreddits. Not only is the community tiny here, but which scuba sub do i go to? With multiple instances, there's no default community named "scuba."
https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=scuba
All of them are inactive, seems like it's not a very discussed topic here
Yeah.
I miss it.
I just checked those communities on Lemmy.ca and part of the problem is that they weren’t federated to Lemmy.ca so I subscribed to them to make connection then hopefully you will have more Canucks diving in ;)
It would be neat if same-topic communities somehow could somehow merge into a single community view via federation. There are probably some downsides to what I'm considering, but it seems like it could help alleviate fragmentation while allowing the "same" communities to be hosted across multiple instances. If one instance defederated from another, the community posts in that instance would be excluded from the combined view.
Maybe even a simple opt-in/out of a combined view for communities that truly want or need to stand alone. Not sure if this goes against the core concepts of federation or not. It seems like a nice compromise at a glance, if it could be implemented well.
PieFed already has such Categories of Communities, it's a really nice feature. PieFed has a lot of such things actually - like hashtags, the ability to block all users from an instance without requiring admin approval, YouTube embeds, etc.
Unfortunately PieFed is not quite ready for the masses as its more foundational features aren't finished yet, like much of the times a Notification won't point to whatever caused it for whatever reason, and it lacks user tagging, and search options.
But it's nice to see these kinds of features functional already!:-)
I would say the population size makes it a little easier to recognize the more friendly responses too. I feel on Reddit the friendly responses are quickly buried by the more spiteful ones.
it's as varied as it is big, though
because of that, naturally, people share the same communities
I see the same person everywhere, and I bet there are some that may even recognise me
Mostly lord of the ring memes and saddam hussein
Fr. I'd say a comment I leave on reddit has like a 3% chance of meaningful response that might turn into even a brief meaningful interaction.
I think that conversion rate is vastly higher on Lemmy, much closer to like 30-40%.
That's a difference so profound so as to be nearly incomparable.
So do I wish Lemmy was a bit more active so the front page was always fresh? Sure. Is it a very small price that I am enormously willing to pay for the significantly better experience here? Yeah, abso-fucking-lutely.
When you get tired of Hot or Scaled sort, try switching to New, especially of All - it has many additional benefits like discovering new communities to join. You can find things there that you may really enjoy, yet receive barely any attention - e.g. poetry - so that you would basically have never seen it while sorting by Hot.
this post is a combination of circlejerking and coping
This depends on perspective. Reddit is much better for most very specific communities, but also much more of a time sink than Lemmy due to just how much larger it is. In terms of reclaiming some of your time back using Lemmy is a great alternative to Reddit because you can't scroll forever, forcing you to stop. This is thoroughly in the realm of a feature for me, not having Reddit on my phone or PC is much better in terms of how I use my time.
I feel like I’m even starting to recognize user names throughout the platform
Yup. A certain flying squid comes to mind.
There have been so many times I’m in a conversation , and then boom realize it’s FlyingSquid
They are my homie at this point
Ohh yes... But it also shows how small Lemmy still I.
I dont think its so active at least not topics i'm most interested in. Privacy has only one lemmy instance that is active. Security has only 1 instance but no one ever discusses there, it's just sharing Security news and 0 comments. Talk about crypto is pretty much completely dead as well which is strange.
I decided to stop starting fights here and exclusively drop my payloads of spite upon the denizens of Facebook groups and getting right in rightwinger's faces.
As such, I now don't have much of a use for Lemmy other than news and flicking the occasional Russian apologist off of the bottom of a string of comments like a dangling turd.
We are growing somewhat of our own, genuine piracy group here, though, which is rather impressive. I wouldn't be surprised if practical groups like /r/selfhosted moved over here just for ease of use.
Actually there is !selfhosted@lemmy.world which is an active community.
Active yeah, but I wonder how close we can get to the reddit side just being a referral here.
It's not enough that Lemmy succeeds.
Reddit must burn.
Im not sure if i want all The toxic assholes from Reddit coming to Lemmy.
It feels much more human on Lemmy. Reddit was mostly bots and training models. Do we have any statistics for Lemmy on percentage of bot users posting to the platform, who pretend to be human?
Sometimes I miss chatting with the bots on Reddit. The platform always kept you emotional and scrolling. All the gore, violence and other sensationalistic content. All the arguments arguments arguments always against you. It was a plastic experience.
I kind of feel like Reddit is the biggest bar in the world and having a conversation there feels like it. If you aren’t loud and early, you can’t really participate in a meaningful way. The smaller crowd of Lemmy is a sweet spot for me. Enough people that it’s not dead, but small enough that I can still participate in conversations.
Most popular english communities are already too big though. They're always flooded with comments, and sometimes everyone says exactly the same, such as if they didn't read through the comments before commenting themselves. Discussions on, e.g., c/ich_iel@feddit.org are much more fun.
Hipster dive bars have always been cooler than the "hip spots" anyway.
Memes about the Fediverse
