This is not going to be a blogpost about “Why do people still use Reddit instead of everyone moving to Lemmy?”. I noticed that even with Mastodon users, who already understand and like the advantages of decentralized platforms, the usage of Lemmy is extremely small, and more people use Reddit. Most of them haven’t even heard of Lemmy. To be fair, the Reddit usage also seems to be fairly low.
You must log in or register to comment.
2/3 of polled Mastodon & co. users use no link aggregator, neither Threadiverse not siloed ones.
Maybe microblogging is good enough for them?
I would say Lemmy has bern growing more rhan pifed. Lemmy is still “new” compared to Reddit. A lot of users like the Reddit UI compared to Lemmy’s barebones (like on Voyager).
In my view, people go to the areas where good content is happening, not different communications architecture.
“nobody”, nearly 50k people.
Asking people on mastodon if they use lemmy also doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t use mastodon because it’s not threaded, people on mastodon probably don’t use lemmy for a similar reason. I’m not sure how many people use both threaded and unthreaded platforms, but it feels to me like the two layouts attract different people.
The people love algorithms, even if they don’t admit that. Reddit and the other platforms invest a lot of money to make people more addicted, and it works. Lemmy on the other hand… well people quickly engage with lemmy.ml and think what the fuck is this place
Lemmy and Reddit usage are relatively low compared to their respective social media siblings. I’ve always believed the reason is in the difference in how they’re structured. Most other social media is wired around people as the primary structural unit. “Who’s saying what?” Reddit and Lemmy are instead wired around topics. “What are people saying about this?” And I assume the difference in popularity is evidence for how most people themselves are wired.
Maybe because they’re spread out over a bunch of different instances?
Social networks live and die by network effects. People don’t use Instagram because it’s the best. They use Instagram because that is where their friends are. Either everybody uses a site, or nobody does.
Since a few weeks I actively post lots of news in several mostly already existing communities. But it is frustrating. I do not see much user growth. If it just would be 1-2 new users per week I’d be happy…
I tried to post regularly in a few existing community. View were up, engagement null. I didn’t knew what to do either.
sue 2: Users could agree on one community. Or (a functionality Lemmy doesn’t have), similar communities could be grouped or linked together. Instead of choosing between Linux@lemmy.ml and Linux@lemmy.world, users could follow a combined “Linux” topic.
Doesn’t PieFed do exactly that?
Yes, and it consolidates comments from cross-posts. Very neat.
Its very cool.
The UX still has a long way to go.
I’m very tolerant of shitty tech and like a struggle, and even I am often like wtf.
Signed up to piefed.zip the other day, and the default feed is just horrendous
Most users will just quit instead of trying to figure out how to fix it manually.
No proper onboarding
Alexandrite is pretty great
Finding communities can be confusing: There can be multiple communities about the same topic on different servers: For example: Linux@lemmy.ml and Linux@lemmy.world
I agree that finding communities can be confusing, but I don’t think the problem is the naming.
For example on Reddit if you wanted to talk about video games you’d look at /r/gaming. However over time, since that was a “default sub”, it became a bit of a mess and instead /r/Games was the community to have real discussion about video games. But of course over time that too became a bit of a mess and /r/TrueGaming was the best place to talk about video games. In fact for a long time /r/True<topic> was a common way to find the better community.
Of course the name of a community might be confusing to an outsider. On Reddit if I’m a fan of Game of Thrones there is /r/GameOfThrones, but what if I’m looking for something a bit more meme worthy, well that’s /r/freefolk.
And that’s true even on Lemmy. What if I want Star Trek memes? Well that’s !tenforward@lemmy.world
I think discoverability is something that can be improved. Of course at the moment so many communities are so small, so looking at all of them isn’t really much of a problem. You can usually find what you’re looking for.
I think its okay the way it is. Too much attention leads to many reposts, karma farmers, bots, now AI bullshit etc.
I think it’s too empty a lot of times. Mainstream topics are nicely populated but a vast amount of specific communities are just one person posting links over and over with a handful of upvotes and zero comments. Sometimes I see posts here and have to go to Reddit to see what the community thinks about it, because on Lemmy the post is completely dead.
I say this in all of these threads: more users does not mean a better experience.
Instead, focus on making our communities the best they can be.
I think that’s only true after a certain amount of users.
I joined Lemmy a couple of years ago and I already notice more user engagement. I would like a little bit more, such that more niche communities can have an ecosystem of posters instead of a single one doing most posts. But not much more indeed
