Asklemmy

We like it this way. Please stop pulling this thread.

It’s almost exactly a copy of reddit

The magic of reddit isn't just the structure of the website, it's the fact that there are so many people posting to diverse niche subjects. Although one structural thing lemmy is really lacking is the wiki and post flare components; those help give experts a reason to make effortful contributions as they do not fade into the ether after a few days.

That said, if reddit was new in 2025 or 2020, I don't think it would take off as much. It gained popularity in a previous time of the internet and is now coasting off that.

The hard-core leftist/communist/anarchist slant scares a lot of people away. Im a left leaning liberal but not a leftist. If I were conservative I think this site would drive me crazy.

The joining process is too cumbersome and a few things like cross posting across instances are way too complex for people to easily understand.

Many people stick with what they know and often won't or can't change unless forced to. Being first to market creates a persistent market majority.

This isn’t an issue of Lemmy itself, but I realized after I made the switch that I personally am a bit burnt-out from the Reddit model in general at this exact moment.

I’m using other Fedi apps more at this moment in time. I’ll probably be more active later in the year, but it’s a nice little break being on the smaller Fediverse apps where things are a bit more personal with the people I’m interacting with, which has been fun for me.

I think Lemmy/Piefed will grow to get more Reddit sized with time. Personally, I get like 10x the engagement on comments and posts here than I ever did on Reddit, which to me makes it much more joyful to be around.

On top of the myriad of things others have mentioned here, it hasn't gotten bad enough/inconvenient enough for the average redditor to switch platforms en masse.

The API fiasco moved the needle a little bit, but not by enough. The multiple ban waves moved it even less. Theres still millions of people on reddit and that disincentivizes anyone to make the first move.

My hope is that when they get rid of old.reddit, it will cause another mass migration that could tip the scales a bit more, but I'm not holding my breath. Because now, reddit has hundreds of thousands of bots creating fake engagement that simulates human activity to those unaware of LLM-pattern speech. So that's another unknown unknown.

Here's to hoping, though.

Reddit removes (or at least did at one point) any lemmy links or posts trying to get people to switch to Lemmy.

Amongst stated reasons, "signing up" is more difficult here. Its not as straightforward a process and content isn't as spoon fed to you as other platforms. The tech literacy needed to get here isn't high, but as I learned the average tech literacy is abysmal.

About 10ish years ago when I was 14, I helped some people print something. They tried printing something from a computer plugged into the printer, an error popped up saying "printer not connected". I thought, thr printer must be, yknow disconnected. Some 6 people had gatherd trying to troubleshoot this but were stumped. I pointed out the error message that kept coming up, didn't click. I followed the cables from the pc to the printer, it was disconnected, I plugged it in and reported back. They where stumped on how I possibly knew what was wrong or how to fix it.

I am not good with technology, but im good enough to know im not good with technology. I have found most people, even those younger or same age tend to not be tech literate.

Finding the application and filling it out for any random federated instance may seem like nothing but it requires an ammount of literacy many Americans dont have.

Because in my opinion people are used to reddit, and is the biggest one, baiscally everyone else is there, why changing for a platform where you have evem to choose " an what? An instance?"), with a fraction of the users.

I stopped using reddit after the api rules changes, i quit twiitter as sson as that nazi guy bought it.

The main socials I use are mastodon and lemmy.

How many of my friends are on madtodon? 1 or 2, how many of them are active there? 0. And i think my nbers are even higher than wjat i think they should be because most of my friemds works in the IT

People unfortunately just wants everything quickly, without hassle, and are not prone to change.

A question on reddit? Probably you'll get an answer in few hours. On lemmy? You are luckynif you'll get one.

I have a small crafting page, that I'm trying to spread using only mastodon, it's much harder. These are the reasons I think.

And most people don't even care about the content of if their timeline is 85% ads and suggested pages.

They will just scroll. Algorithms are shitty, but who cares. Everyone is there...

Reddit is bigger, more established, and Lemmy is smaller and more unknown. As reddit gets worse Lemmy will get bigger.

Among other reasons, there’s no marketing budget.

over half of reddit is bots, little to no bots here

As long as it stays semi-obscure, the powers that be won't notice it much so maybe it's a blessing and not a curse. Reddit didn't start as a shithole, you know. 😕

The network effect. It's big enough that small forums get enough posts to stay active which keeps more people using it.

For example Lemmy has a 3d printer forum that has a few posts a week. Reddit has forums not just for 3d printing but for every specific model of printer and each gets a much activity as Lemmy's generic forum.

If I'm searching for something, Google will show Reddit content but not Lemmy because there isn't an answer on Lemmy.

Its hard to break into peoples minds with no advertising budget.We can't tell people on reddit about Lemmy because reddit bans your account.

Lemmy got a ton of traffic after the api black out and it did an incredible Job at retaining a lot of those users. There were 200k active users and Lemmy was much more unstable at the time. Active users did fall off as expected but 50k stayed for 2 years. Thats great in my opinion. If we had another migration wave I reckon the retention would be even higher.

For someone to switch from reddit to Lemmy three things need to happen

1. They need to know it exists

2. They need to dislike reddit or centralised corporate controlled social media on an ideological level.

3. They need something disruptive to happen. Either a ban or a change they dont like.

FOSS has a reputation for poor UX, and not for nothing either. Users who value slick, easy experiences tend to drift towards corporate software for basically all software solutions because corporate solutions can use money and the corporate hierarchical chain-of-command to respond to user requests faster than open-source self-organizing governance systems.

because reddit actively prevents promotion of the fediverse and its platforms.

if you want to help, convince an entire sub to move their community to the fediverse. we need all the people we can to realize they do not need reddits walled garden.

also, keep in mind lemmy.world is one site of hundreds and only 1 of dozens of platforms that intercommunicate. different platforms offer different features.

im using https://moist.catsweat.com/ which runs the mbin platform. no lemmy involved, but i can see and respond do your post. check out https://fedidb.com/

for example heres my interface hovering your account shows something like karma and includes downvotes;

It's popular enough for me

There's only so many Linux furries on the planet

Because it's not a website. It's a connected network of sites that requires a bit of a learning curve to really use.

In my experience, people will move with their interests.

I've been using reddit for probably 10-15 years. I used to send links to my wife(then girlfriend), but she never used reddit.

In the last year she made a reddit account after moving off of tiktok.

Now I'm on Lemmy pretty much full time because I prefer smaller communities and more specific topics, also less normies.

Trying to browse reddit is like talking with boomers and AI now. No thanks.

At this point I've probably been banned from reddit over 5 times.

Usually for sarcastic remarks.

You are applying the thinking of wholly owned platforms and how to judge their success. They have to grab a sizable and hopefully growing number of users who keep coming back to be successful. Because they need the data from their users and/or their eyeballs on ads for commercial success. None of that applies to the fediverse really. It can grow as slowly as it wants to or not grow at all. As long as there is a small percentage of people who spend time and money to keep the instances going. This laced corsage of economical necessities is much tighter for a centrally hosted platform which will have a thirsty boardroom to answer to. Popularity isn't so much the factor why reddit is/was more of a success, it is/was the quality of information others got from it and it definitely used to be the ease of getting to it. People who got pissed off at reddit will slowly add to our numbers here (or another iteration of a service like Lemmy) as the idea of becoming your own algorithm becomes more normal for the non-techy minded users as well. We're playing a long game that we don't even want to win.