this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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Let's discuss how to efficiently promote Lemmy to potential new joiners (feddit.org)
submitted 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) by Blaze@feddit.org to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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To follow-up on the Reddit thread yesterday, here are a few elements that can be interesting to discuss.

Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy

Just quoting "Lemmy" or pointing to join-lemmy.org can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance. Recent post by a new joiner 9 days ago, they had to change server 2 times to get a satisfying experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536.

Using something like

"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users

Feel free if you have any questions"

Can already point them in one direction, and avoid them getting lost in the too many options.

If people want to debate the choice of those two instances, I'll add my thought process in the comments.

The Lemmy feed looks as depressing as Reddit's All, and how to mitigate that

Some feedback I received when promoting Lemmy the way above

Just checked out lemmy to see if it’s different from reddit. Im very disappointed lmao.

First post I see is a comic about cultural appropriation with an ifunny watermark. Next are several posts about the proton vpn ceo “going full maga.” And finally a post I saw on Reddit days ago that is ragebait making fun of the cybertruck.

Yikes. It’s the same exact thing.

--

Lemmy still has a pretty obnoxious tankie problem. Even if you block the .ml instance, pretty much every thread about US politics or world news on any major instance gets hijacked by the same handful of trolls and their associated vote bots. Hopefully this will become less of a problem as more sane people join, but just as a word of caution, be aware that you will be called western imperialist scum by a bunch of 14 year olds.

--

Lemmy is utter rubbish, it's as if their entire userbase consists of the top layer of scum carefully siphoned off from the Reddit cesspool. It got the worst of the annoying political echo chamber and "very smart" argumentative users from Reddit.

I just clicked on half a dozen random Lemmy servers, and all of them had at least one link about Trump in the top 5 posts. Even ones that seem like they're supposed to be about tech.

Normal humans want the Reddit of 10+ years ago back. We don't want to use a different site colonized by the same modern day Redditors we loathe interacting with.

--

To be fair, you can't say they're wrong. Open https://discuss.online , by default you'll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.

What I try to do in such instances is to give something like

"While politics are important, you can still very much block them. Here are an example of some communities that can interest you:

I also wrote a long post about that issue that you can read here https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/

As a side note, I recently started a discussion on !fedigrow@lemm.ee about a potential political-free instance for new joiners, feel free to have a look: https://feddit.org/post/6819084

Lemmy is too small, 42k monthly active users is nothing

Discuit, the centralized alternative to Reddit, currently counts 181 weekly active commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/NlAdOWAp

You can also mention that NodeBB is now federating with Lemmy:

That's all for now, happy to discuss in the comments.

Note: if you're not interested in promoting Lemmy, feel free to hide this post, you are able to do this on specific posts if your instance is running 0.19.4 and newer

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[–] freamon@community.nodebb.org 2 points 52 minutes ago* (last edited 48 minutes ago) (1 children)

Oh, yeah. It's still ongoing. You can track the progress at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/api/alpha/routes.py if you like. At the bottom of that page, things with a 'Stage 1' are what's left to do.

The remaining stuff is mostly to do with chat / notifications. Once done, a basic app could be released, and then improved to include stuff that's missing (things like uploading an image to post or a comment, and viewing reports)

EDIT: sorry, this was meant to be a reply to another comment. Still getting the hang of NodeBB. Now will this edit work ...

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 51 minutes ago

Great, thanks!

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 1 points 33 minutes ago (1 children)

The thing I hate worst about Lemmy is that a lot of people are dickheads about their opinion, which often is barely different from the persons' opinions you see them aggressively shitting on. In other cases the opinions are pretty different but start with the same basic premise, yet some users see no common ground at all. It's become really disheartening honestly. There are probably more than 30 users like that which I had to block for my own sanity

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 32 minutes ago

It's human nature. Mods can help with that, so it's also community dependent.

[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I’m for the sink or swim mentality. Point them here and if they come up with an excuse to not be here then they probably weren’t going to be a good contributor anyway.

I’m fine with being selective. There is no reason we need 1M+ MAU for the sake of the network, we aren’t trying to turn a profit

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 5 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

There is no reason we need 1M+ MAU for the sake of the network, we aren’t trying to turn a profit

There's also no reason a topic as popular as TV shows relies on 3 posters to keep the main community active: !showsandmovies@lemm.ee

We don't need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement

[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 1 points 26 minutes ago (1 children)

I get the frustration with not having a lot of active posters in a community despite diligence in posting and promotion on !newcommunities@lemmy.world. I’ve had the same frustration trying to operate !fantasyfootball@lemmy.world the last two seasons. I am not going to keep it up this offseason

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 24 minutes ago

Sorry to hear. How are the NFL communities doing on Lemmy in general? I'm a bit active on !football@lemmy.world (the other one), it's moderately active but still niche.

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Single topic forums are still doing ok out there on the wider Internet. Create more well moderated, single-topic, federated forums, and then promote those specifically to users who care about those topics.

Don't sell Lemmy to end users. Lemmy is a solution for admins. Sell the specific websites to end users.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 1 hour ago

Difficult to sell a forum to people where most mods on Reddit are going to remove posts mentioning it: https://lemmy.ca/post/37657096

People on specific forums are probably happy where they are and aren't going to switch from their established forums. The strength of Reddit and Lemmy is to be able to have several forums accessible from the main site.

The last place that's left is /r/RedditAlternatives, where you just have people who want, well, a Reddit alternatives, and they usually don't mention their preferences.

But I agree with you to an extend, !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com is a good example of focused forum. It's a bit unique on Lemmy unfortunately.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Honestly, there needs to be a setting for lemmy admins to specify the default comms displayed to not-logged and new users. Just the firehose of the /all or local is not particularly attractive to most people.

EDIT: Went ahead and opened a feature request

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Isn't that what /api/v3/community/hide allows? https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35617930

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Not really. That just hides it from /all. Just because not want new users to get dumped into /c/politics, or /c/slop, doesn't mean I want to hide their existence from everyone.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 1 hour ago

Ah, indeed. Thanks for the feature request

[–] DavidGarcia@feddit.nl 7 points 3 hours ago

"Reddit but you can block the part that annoys you"

[–] Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 8 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Some personal thoughts:

about the content when you first open lemmy: I joined reddit some time around 2015 and it was not exactly the most welcoming experience with the type of content you see by default either. Still, I had seen smaller communities with cool content and I joined anyway and just learned to use it enough to tailor my feed. Lemmy becomes much nicer after awhile of hanging out and discovering new and cool communities!

In my personal opinion the "Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy" part is the most important. Fediverse IS confusing when you check it out the first time. It took me awhile to make an account because people kept telling to choose an instance that fits you. I know it sounds stupid but it really kept me away from making an account for awhile.

I instance-hopped a couple of times because I joined smaller instances (the recommendation everyone gives you) that then disappeared / were abandoned by the admin. That was not a very nice experience. I know lemmy.world is too big, but honestly it is a very easy and nice starting point to lemmyverse (so is sopuli!).

Also: really appreciate the effort you are putting into growing lemmy, Blaze!

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Hello,

Thank you for your comment!

I joined reddit some time around 2015 and it was not exactly the most welcoming experience with the type of content you see by default either.

I think the main issue here is that Reddit in 2015 didn't have to compete with modern Reddit. Nowadays, you create a Reddit account, you get a few subs suggested depending on your interest and your geodefault, so that's enough to give you a first tailored experience without being first drown into All content.

We can't really replicate that on Lemmy (hopefully one day we will), so the best we have is what I listed above: tell people they should focus on laid back communities.

[–] Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

That is interesting, I didn't know that about modern reddit.

And I agree I hope that we do get something like that. I've been thinking for a while that merging https://lemmyverse.net/communities with instance specific account creation would be really cool, but it has just been a passing thought without much further thinking. I always recommend that link to new people on lemmy (also put it on my account description). But sadly it doesn't have recommendations based on interests / geolocation, Although it does let you filter accessible communities based on your instance, but it could possible also have a tool "choose an instance for me based on my location / interests".

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 5 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 54 minutes ago) (2 children)

have a tool “choose an instance for me based on my location / interests”.

https://join-lemmy.org/ kind of does that, but the results can be a bit off. I just tried "Technology", and the first result was lemmy.today, which is fine, but doesn't defederate anything, so maybe not the best choice for a new joiner.

"Gaming" gave https://sub.wetshaving.social/ as the first result, not sure it's the best recommendation.

Edit: defederate, not federate

[–] smokebuddy@lemmy.today 1 points 56 minutes ago (1 children)

I signed up on lemmy.today and can see and interact with I'm pretty sure everything, I'm not sure what is meant by doesn't federate anything?

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 54 minutes ago

Sorry, typo, I meant "defederate". Lemmy.today indeed shows you everything.

[–] Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 5 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah... I understand that we need to spread out more but honestly I think join-lemmy.org should not be the first stop for someone new to lemmy seeing the results you are getting. I agree with you Blaze, point them directly to an instance or an app.

Found this pretty cool that on the voyager for lemmy test web app you can specify the local feed of an instance: https://vger.app/posts/lemm.ee/local - although not sure if that is the best way to "market" lemmy, the local feed of lemm.ee actually looked nice.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 2 hours ago

Yes, that's a cool features of Voyager

[–] twinnie@feddit.uk 8 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Just a thought I’m having, but rather than just spamming Reddit with Lemmy links maybe we should promote it more on Linux type areas, at least people coming from there will find their niche content here.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 6 points 3 hours ago

Isn't every Linux user aware of Lemmy by now? I've seen a few posts about it on a few Linux forums during the API fiasco

[–] Mr_Blott@feddit.uk 2 points 2 hours ago

I had to read your title three times before I realised you weren't trying to convince carpenters to join

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 12 points 4 hours ago (4 children)

Thought process about discuss.online and sopuli as recommendations

There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/)

  • Lemmy.world is too big
  • Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )
  • sh.itjust.works names contains "shit", which can deter users: https://feddit.org/post/4255611/2825351
  • lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric
  • feddit.org, is German-centric (sidebar in German first, Matrix chat is in German, meta community is in German)
  • dbzer0 federates hexbear
  • programming.dev is topic-centric
  • blahaj is queer-focused
  • discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
  • lemmy.sdf.org does not defederate anyone
  • lemmy.zip is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad
  • beehaw is way outdated
  • infosec.pub is topic-centric
  • aussie.zone is country-centric
  • midwest.social is region-centric

I ended up with discuss.online and sopuli.xyz as they have

  • neutral names
  • long running history
  • good downtime
  • active admins
  • defederate hexbear and lemmygrad

If people have other suggestions, feel free

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

join-lemmy needs to have a better interactive flow to select a server. What they have is difficult and slow to maintain and doesn't take into account server stability or newness (new servers are more likely to stop working once the admin discovers they don't like hosting, or they have a terrible mod experience). But the lemmy devs are not interested in either doing things like allowing servers to tag themselves, nor utilize sites like the fediseer which already does that. So we end up with a bad "join" frontpage which people like you end up just avoiding which goes to show how bad things are.

There used to be a very nice interactive lemmy server selection site at one point which guided you based on interest/subinterest as self-tagged in fediseer, but I can't remember the domain anymore :(

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

There used to be a very nice interactive lemmy server selection site at one point which guided you based on interest/subinterest as self-tagged in , but I can’t remember the domain anymore :(

Yes, it rings a bell too but don't remember it either :(

But the lemmy devs are not interested in either doing things like allowing servers to tag themselves

Indeed, that's probably a whole topic altogether. If people want to try working on a better join-lemmy website, that would be great, but it seems like people are already spread too thin.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

Yes, it rings a bell too but don't remember it either :(

Ah found it: https://pangora.social/

Sadly it's gone offline. sigh

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 hour ago

@Ategon@programming.dev how come you took it down?

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 1 hour ago

Ah yes!

[–] a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

It probably depends on what audience you are talking to. Privacy advocates, Anarchists, AI-Imagegen-Fans and digital pirates are probably a good fit for dbzer0, even with hexbear federated, and a LGBT-positive audience would feel at home on blahaj. So while promoting generalist instances per default is a good move, if the subreddit has a well-defined audience, a recommendation for a "specialized" instance might work better.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 3 hours ago

Indeed, but usually I promote on /r/RedditAlternatives, and don't have any way to know what the user's interests are.

[–] astro_ray@piefed.social 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I am not entirely sure how appropriate my reply is since you name lemmy specifically, but since one can subscribe to particular topics in piefed, I am leaning towards it more than lemmy as an alternative to reddit.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Once Piefed will get Thunder as well as an iOS app, it will become an alternative. That's the main blocker I have now recommending it. Besides that, it's a quite good Lemmy alternative.

[–] freamon@community.nodebb.org 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

@blaze@feddit.org Thunder is written using Flutter / Dart - meaning that it's cross-platform. I've compiled the version for PieFed for windows, linux and macos, so as long as I'm able to get it working for Android, it should also work for iOS. I'll need to be someone else who does though, 'cos my mac is too old, and I don't have an iphone.

Bonus screenshot:

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 1 hour ago

Amazing! So what, the Piefed API is already there? I thought that was still ongoing

[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 6 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

How's Lemmy.cafe? I believe they defederate the Big 3 Tankie instances. Dunno what their downtime or admins are like.

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[–] 4Robato@lemmy.world 4 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

I think one of the biggest barriers of the fediverse is decision paralysis.

So stop looking around! Go to https://lemmy.world/ and join :)

If you want to expend extra time, there are more servers and you can join a different one, if you are undecisive join the one above :)

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 3 points 3 hours ago

Lemmy.world is known to be slow in some areas due to its size

[–] nitrolife@rekabu.ru 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Just my opinion: No need to focus on reddit. The world is not focused by that platform, and there are other people on the Internet.

To attract an audience, you need exactly to attract an audience. Add indexing by search engines, Add SEO optimization for lemmy-ui, etc. People can find interesting instances exactly in google search after that without any provisioning. That's why web search engines be created.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Lemmy is a very similar platform to Reddit, it makes sense to target those people.

web search engines

The sad thing is that search engines aren't really at the best at the moment, and with Google and Reddit deal, it's not like they are going to promote alternatives forums that much.

[–] nitrolife@rekabu.ru 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Google and Reddit deal, it's not like they are going to promote alternatives forums that much

There is more than one search engine in the sea.

And that would be an argument if it weren't for a completely broken CEO headers in the web interface. I can't attach a screenshot because I changed the web in my copy to the Photon. In general, there are tons of SEO mistakes. At least according to Yandex Webmaster page.

UPD: for example api don't have robots.txt method. As result I generate new pages lists for best search optimization with self written script...

[–] rglullis@communick.news 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Content is King. You can have a good chunk of people that manage to go through the UX issues, they will still leave if they don't find what they want. The mirror bots (alien.top, lemmit.online) were meant to help with that, but the people here would rather complain about the post volume instead of learning how to follow only the subscribed communities.

Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third. My proposal to separate user/local instances from topic-based instances has been rejected here, even after I offered to put them under the governance of a wider admin group.

Now, I'm tired of this culture and small thinking. Fine if you want to be proselytizing and convincing people "at retail", but this will not be nearly as impactful if we had a dozen people who had the courage to setup a Lemmy instance with Fediverser.

[–] a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

The issue with the mirroring, at least how it was done, is that it was too much content for not enough users, creating the feeling of a deserted mall. If my comment disappears in a flood of posts, it's no better than when my comment disappears in a flood of comments (like it does on reddit). (Lets forget about the part when one guy started copying entire threads including their users, which was not well thought out)

A way of combining communities into "multilemmys" would be great. I can understand why there's pushback for separating topics from users. A Lemmy instance is not just a basket for specific topics, it's a expression of ideology, and as such ideological arguments about the moderation in your proposed structure are guaranteed. It also would reduce comments with minority viewpoints to a minimum.

A slow and steady promotion of lemmy is the best that can happen - from what i learned in the last year a slow and steady influx of people is preferred by the majority, and not a flood of people that can't be handled by our culture.

I like efficiency too, but some things do get lost when speeding things up too much.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 58 minutes ago* (last edited 54 minutes ago) (1 children)

(Lets forget about the part when one guy started copying entire threads including their users, which was not well thought out)

That was me. ;)

And sorry to disappoint you, I thought about it a lot. Mirroring the entire thread was less about the benefit the (few) users that are here and more about the potential to bring the masses of Reddit users who are stuck there because they (rightfully) claim that they do not have any other place to find their niche content. Mirroring the entire thread was also a way to ensure that we were (a) breaking the monopoly on the conversation and (b) creating an incentive for app developers to create a hybrid Lemmy/Reddit client, that could read from Lemmy and post to both, which would effectively make the transition away from the siloed network completely transparent.

The one thing that I didn't get to execute properly was that I should've completed the two-way bridging before enabling the full mirrors.

A Lemmy instance is not just a basket for specific topics, it’s a expression of ideology...

  1. This is booooooring. So boring. This is the kind of thing that keeps people away. To the absolute majority of people, social networks are about FFF: Friends, Family and Fucking.
  2. It's not an exclusive option. If you are part of 5% of people who want to be in the small, niche group are still free to do so. The other 95% of people who just care about gorging in from the content hose would be perfectly happy by following from the larger topic-based instances.

A slow and steady promotion of lemmy is the best that can happen

This is what the Mastodon crowd would also say. Now they are seeing constant churn and watching Bluesky grow, and have to bury their faces in the sand arguing stupid things like "Bluesky might be winning, but they are not really decentralized". Yeah, it is true. It's not "really" decentralized. 99.98% of the world will say "so what?" and continue to use it.

I'm tired of consolation prizes and moral victories. I want the web to be free, and I want it to be free for more than just a tiny niche of ideologues. Slow and steady will not win against Big Tech.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 53 minutes ago (1 children)

Friends, Family and Fucking.

Agree on FB, IG, and Twitter, but which of those are on Reddit?

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 36 minutes ago

I missed another F, for Fun.

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