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 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) by Blaze@feddit.org to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
90 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance.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 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours 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 2 points 3 hours ago

Great, thanks!

[–] DavidGarcia@feddit.nl 11 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

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

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[–] nitrolife@rekabu.ru 4 points 5 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 4 points 5 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 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours 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...

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 13 points 7 hours ago (14 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 4 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours 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 2 points 4 hours 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 3 points 4 hours 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 3 points 4 hours ago

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

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 4 hours ago

Ah yes!

[–] a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 6 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 3 points 6 hours ago

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

[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 7 points 7 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.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

I have my main alt there. It's pretty good, but there was an issue with the thumbnails that got resolved a few days ago. Also, the instance is much smaller than the two others (64 users per month), so I sometimes have to subscribe to some medium-size communities before nobody did before. Federation can get a bit clunky at times too, and I have to pull myself some posts or comments to "unclog the pipes".

Discuss.online has 140 users per month, sopuli 496

[–] astro_ray@piefed.social 1 points 5 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 3 points 4 hours ago (2 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.

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[–] 4Robato@lemmy.world 7 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 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 6 hours ago

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

[–] twinnie@feddit.uk 9 points 6 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 6 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

[–] rglullis@communick.news 4 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (6 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.

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[–] Mr_Blott@feddit.uk 2 points 5 hours ago

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

[–] Lvo@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Make the notion of different servers only visible to power users. It has an negative effect on tech illiterate gen z people who assume everything is as easy as signing up somewhere and getting guided by tbe algorithm.

Also the discovery of content needs to somehow be possible to make it all come together in one feed without having to go through different servers. I think maybe it gives the impression that users are missing out on content, while on platforms like Reddit everything is quite "centralised" (ow no xD).

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 6 hours ago

In the past I used to only link to one instance (sopuli.xyz), but since the whole jury nullification story I thought it would be better to have both a USA and Europe servers.

[–] TheObviousSolution@kbin.melroy.org 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Promote Mbin. The only bad thing it has going for it is that it cannot block entire instances, which is odd because one would think blocking domains would do this. It also has a number of pet peeves, but none I've found to be as bad.

Or just link to this: https://jointhefediverse.net/

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

https://jointhefediverse.net/

That's a good resource for people wanting to learn how it works behind the scenes. Most people don't want that, they just want a link to click and see what the platform looks like.

The one issue with Mbin is the lack of mobile apps. I know there is !interstellar@kbin.earth, but Lemmy really is the best in that regard.

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