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 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance.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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[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 6 days ago

@spaduf@slrpnk.net

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 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

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 week ago

Agree. I'm of the opinion that the default view for guests should be Local, Scaled. Or alternatively, Local, Popular. But never All, and certainly not mixed with Active.

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[–] Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 25 points 1 week ago (2 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 13 points 1 week ago (6 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.

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[–] Blaze@feddit.org 22 points 1 week ago (27 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 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 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 :(

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[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week 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 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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

[–] a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 week 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.

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[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I've noticed that people forgot how long ago the Reddit blackout was (about 19 months ago?), and Lemmy has improved a lot since then. Back then Lemmy was like pre-alpha, super buggy, and servers were very unstable. And we have way more 3rd party apps/frontends now.

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1i7gufa/hundreds_of_subreddits_are_considering_banning/m8ktmgh/?context=9

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 9 points 1 week ago

I still remember when federation was barely working. We've made good progress since then

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[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 19 points 1 week ago (4 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 6 points 1 week 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.

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[–] DavidGarcia@feddit.nl 14 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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

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[–] thoro@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Sounds like we're filtering out the exact type of people I would never want to come from Reddit. Dunno why y'all want them.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 7 points 1 week ago

I generally try to avoid political shit here myself, it's too depressing and I'm not sure reddit-like forums is really a good format for that.

But for those who are out there posting cybertruck memes, thanks for scaring away the MAGAs for the rest of us. It is much appreciated.

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[–] twinnie@feddit.uk 10 points 1 week 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 7 points 1 week 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

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

The fact that they (or you) complain about the "All" timeline having the same stuff in all servers shows they have no idea what they're talking about: that's the entire point of an All feed! (plusminus stuff like defederation). It would make more sense to compare the Local feed of instances, IMO.

Besides, the default sorts are active and popularity nowadays, so it only makes sense that stuff that we care about and have to have words with, takes the forefront. If you want to solve that the solution is not "let's ignore what's going on around the world", it's "post more cats" and "post more ich_iel". Or just use the Scaled sort, I don't understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.

And that's right there with the complaint about the 42k users too. The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about. Complaining that for the next people to come in "I'm going to be called a westerner imperialist" is delicious hypocrisy on not noticing how indoctrinated they are.

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[–] confuser@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 week ago

Shoutout to lemmy.zip, y'all are a great instance!

[–] Free_Opinions@feddit.uk 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

This is the best platform for constant live updates about what the people you don't like are up to. Then there's articles about everything that's wrong in the world and also some memes - mostly political.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You forgot about the Linux memes

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[–] manicdave@feddit.uk 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

A thought that just hit me in the shower.

I don't feel like lemmy is too small. It quite comfortably fills all my lazing on aggregator time without getting stale. The thing is, like many here, I'm a libertarian leftist politics nerd that's into linux and self hosting.

That description describes a sizeable chunk of this project's userbase so enough content is being posted enough to saturate the feed.

If you want the project to expand into other niches, you will have to post into the void about whatever you're into. Seed forums with TV shows or photography or hiking or warhammer or whatever you're into and encourage others to do the same.

All forums are dead at first but if you want people to come and talk about pottery, you're going to have to make that forum cozy before it gets enough interaction to become self sustaining.

[–] 4Robato@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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 :)

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[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

An official Android and iOS app called "Lemmy". If you wanna go big, you need the mobile platform.

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[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week 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 19 points 1 week ago (6 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

[–] Zero22xx@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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

Definitely agreed with this. And less always (understandably) angry political posters, more escapists that want to chat about movies, games etc. It becomes like that snake eating itself because people that want a break from real life come here and see nothing but the same 24 news cycle as everywhere else. And then, speaking for myself, searching up certain niche communities and finding them either non-existent or with 3 posts from 1 and a half years ago.

I've been thinking of porting a couple of my old review posts over here from my banned but not yet closed Reddit account. Just so that, for example, the next time someone visits the Ghibli community there'll be 4 posts instead of 3.

And the Sonic communities are pretty disappointing too, considering I'm always seeing it mentioned in the wild these days. Makes me think (or hope) that there's a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.

Reddit is sadly still unbeaten in searching up a TV show that you enjoy and finding an entire community built around it. And those communities never took a lot of members. So it shouldn't be impossible here.

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[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The best promotion is to be awesome.

>Lemmy, is awesome (y/n)?: _y

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