Ask Lemmy

This may be something you don't want to hear so please bear with me. I've been here since the reddit drama started.

There isn't much engagement here. If you compare a post here to a post on reddit, there will be zero comments here and 100 to 1000+ on reddit.

Another issue is each instance has its own version of the same community. This isn't a bad thing but it separates the comments and increases the reposts. If I'm scrolling all, sometimes I see 5+ of the same post with zero comments on each.

Another problem, it's not inherently easy to sign up. There are hundreds if not thousands of instances. If the instance you pick shuts down or goes down for a bit, well... you're SOL. I've lost two accounts on two instances that shut down.

Another problem, since it's not mainstream, there's not much content in niche communities. A lot of the niche communities that start up post a lot of bot content which no one engages with and then the community dies.

I still advocate moving over but there is a lot of work to be done to get the masses moved over.

1. Not enough niche communities. Like, not even close. Example: there are communities for general Android or general gaming, but not one for Android gaming or mobile gaming.

2. Harder than Reddit to sign up. There's an extra step which is instances. So first you gotta understand what instances are, how they work, and which one is suitable for you.

3. Reddit is still doing fine, or at least not bad enough for the masses to care about jumping over to Lemmy

Network effects, mostly.

Habits are hard to break.

I'm predominantly here because my habit was tied to a 3rd party app that stopped working with the API changes.

I'm still here because it's good, but it was the habit being broken that pushed me here in the first place.

The fediverse requires more effort.

Why are you asking us, instead of them?

Lack of diversity, imo.

If you’re (edit)NOT(/edit) into Star Trek, Linux, coding, or politics there’s not that much content. Which isn’t gonna attract too many new people, and is probably alienating to many of the new users checking out the fediverse.

I hate the ads & the Reddit app, but Lemmy feels like more of an echo chamber than Reddit does.

1. They don't know about it.

2. They are lazy and or incompetent (so many times I've seen people saying they can't figure Lemmy out when it's literally the same as Reddit on the surface. Just make an account somewhere and start using it.)

3. They are bots.

Not going to lie, I prefer it that way. There's just enough people here that it's engaging, but not too many that it will turn into a cesspool like reddit did. Let's just let it attract the right users naturally for as long as possible. We don't need to mass market it and bring every reddit user over.

Because there is no content here.

Every time I have a question about a TV show I'm watching, its always Reddit that have a discussion thread, never Lemmy.

I'm not. But it's probably the same reason as WhatsApp in Europe. Why be on WhatsApp when you can be on signal (or whatever). The answer is: that's where the people are. The fediverse is amazing. And I've totally switched over and don't use reddit anymore. But it has but a tiny fraction of the users compared to reddit.

For example. /r/TipOfMyJoystick has multiple posts daily. !TipOfMyJoystick@retrolemmy.com hasn't had activity in months. It's the nature of a smaller user base.

The fediverse lacks basically all of my niche communities and the ones that exist have zero engagement. I'm basically only on Lemmy at this point for political stuff. Politics anything is a shitshow on Reddit, but seems decent on Lemmy. But that's just really not enough.

Though to be fair, Reddit's 'suggested' posts feature is I believe destroying niche communities on Reddit these days, so I'm not sure how much longer those will keep working for me either. Moving away from explicit subscriptions and turning your home feed into just a lesser version of /r/all is a good way to ruin most communities over time I think. I feel eventually Reddit will just become Facebook for millennials where your feed is completely divorced from anything you might actually want to see and is entirely an algorithm instead.

More content.

Do your part people, post and/or engage.

I have a coworker who recently excitedly explained how Reddit works to someone who'd never heard of it. Never mind that all the features he was raving about are here on Lemmy without the bots, Nazis, karma farming, corporate enshittification; he's seen as the tech savvy person in the building.

Here I am with a 13+ year old Reddit account, nuked, and quit after the API debacle and have never returned. Just sipping my tea and enjoying my Community feed. There's just some things people have to figure out on their own.

Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.

I'm guessing its because there is a ton of people already there creating content. Its almost impossible for 50k users to produce as wide of a range of content compared to a platform of 100M but i think we do ok here.

I haven’t been on Reddit in two years now.

I mean i would have never came here if i didn't get banned from reddit,not because reddit is better but because it is what everyone uses and is considered the norm.

I didn't even know Lemmy existed.

reddit is more addicting, and has more communities not found in the fediverse. and likely most cant be replicated easily here. many like some specific niche forums, like school, degrees, specific diseases where peopel share thier experiences and treatment plans ,,,etc/. whatisthisthing, or reddit drama,etc.

even politics/news dont get as much engagement as on reddit, even if you exclude bots/astroturfers.

bit of a paradox. weak specific instances but the only way it will go up is to get more people

Why is everyone still on Xitter when they could be bloomscrolling with kind, elderly trekkies on Mastodon instead?

I'm here, so keep that in mind, but as far as I'm concerned and objectively speaking, Lemmy does not offer what most casual users / general public want nor does it really operate the way people expect. Whether or not that's a good thing or bad thing or something in between is more subjective, so I'll leave it at that.

For example, if I want to scrap my account and start new, fine. But with Lemmy, it's been forced on me at least 4 times, and several other times I have done it because the instance I was on was unstable, had unacceptable technical issues, or just too much outage. Reddit definitely has outages and other issues like that, but those are generally addressed in minutes to hours, not days/weeks/months.

I've long given up on finding a place here for my main hobbies. There are communities, but I don't enjoy talking to nobody, posting to myself. If I wanted to do that, I'd just get a Twitter account and tweet into the wind. So, honestly, I can see the appeal of going to Reddit so you can actually discuss things and share with other people.

Those are just two examples of things that might keep the average person away. Of course, there are plenty of issues and concerns with Reddit and other social media platforms, but as long as they continue to work in a manner that people understand and expect and offer what folks want, most people aren't going to go seeking out alternatives that have many more downsides, relatively speaking.

We are here.

They're scared of Dessalines

I scuttled my own account on reddit by intentionally getting banned. That way I had no option to return.

If everyone from Reddit just went over to lemmy.world and sh.it.just.works instead of making accounts all over the fediverse and maybe even hosting their own instance, then we’d just have the same problems that we did with Reddit, just at a different domain.

The fediverse will grow in due time. But thinking of it in terms of supplanting Reddit, or replacing twitter isn’t a good mindset. Decentralized social media and activitypub are tools to build better experiences, not replace the enshittified entrenched ones.

The same reason most people are still on Facebook and Instagram I suppose. It's what they know.

Most probably don't know about it yet.

Enjoy that while it lasts.