How exactly did Reddit become a top website and what does Lemmy need to do to eventually get there?

I think we should prioritize SEO.

If you get a link to a Lemmy post you can’t see the contents nor the comments of the post until you click a further link. Or at least I can’t.

And that means google can’t either.

We need to get to the point where people are adding “Lemmy” to their search posts like they do for Reddit today.

Doing a google search for “best budget backpack Lemmy” should bring up results like “best budget backpack Reddit” does today.

Counter point: lemmy doesn't need to do anything to become a top website. Just stay decentralized and independently run. If that's meant to be a "top website" so be it, but that's not why I'm here.

I think people are forgetting that Reddit didn't start off with communities (subs), they came later. Reddit got big the same way all sites that don't have a built in audience (e.g. Threads users basically being Insta users) - time and commitment.

Lemmy is not going to be as big as Reddit for a long, long time. Everyone has fallen into this habit of thinking all Reddit mods are power crazy egomaniacs and some are, no doubt, but the good subs on Reddit required dedicated time and effort to build up. Curating, introducing and constantly readjusting rules and expectations and at some point a good sub reaches a tipping point and it's popular.

All this will take time with Lemmy. Community mods will need to be as dedicated as Reddit mods were. And, as a side issue, this commitment to making and keeping a community great is what spez and his idiot gremlins have just thrown away. It's not about user numbers for Reddit, it's now a priority for them to get mods who are willing and able to put in the amount of work the mods they just alienated had. Subreddit engagement stats are mostly going down take a look at the number of posts and the number of comments for r/askreddit, it's a steady decline.

Lemmy might not ever get as big as Reddit but it will grow if mods stay committed and users keep posting and commenting. If that happens, that same tipping point will come.

The goals of federated social media and corporate social media. Unlike siloed corporate social media, the fediverse platforms are not meant to compete with one another for being the 'top dog' so to speak. The idea is just diversity amongst the platforms and different options for people with different preferences. Since the fediverse is not concerned with revenue or appealing to a venture capitalist, competition is unimportant and I hope it stays that way.

I mean I don't mind the current state of Lemmy right now, in fact I'm actually quite liking how it is right now. It'll probably take a lot of time to even get on the same level as Reddit if it ever does, however I'm seeing so much users, moderators, and devs who are committed to making this platform work and that in and of itself is amazing to see. Things like this actually show there is a human side to technology and that we can make it work. Anyways that's my food for thought.

Dopamine reward loops, good content and a reasonable UX.

• If you gave a good, detailed answer with sources, you got rewarded for your effort with upvotes more than a low effort answer. This kind of appreciation motivated quality content generators to generate more content.

• as usercount grew to a certain threshold, you basically got users from all sorts of domains generating quality content covering pretty much all topics

• while official UX was horrible and 3rd party apps were needed, the basic system of sorting and indendation of answers allowed for long, detailed discussions which could be navigated and followed effortlessly.

"If you make it, they will come".

It maight not be fast but there is huge potential from what I have experienced so far.

The brand promise of Reddit was pretty simple—it was the “Front page of the Internet”.

It did not get popular because of the sub-communities or that there was a sub for everything ( at least not at first ).

Reddit became a thing because it was a single destination that aggregated and curated interesting content from the web that “interesting” people could comment on. If you were only going to make one stop on the Internet, it could be Reddit. Uses could share the main URL by word of mouth and new users would get the same experience. As content grew, Reddit became high ranking in search results.

Lemmy does not really offer the Reddit experience to a new user. New users do not want an offer to find an instance or create one, they want to experience the content, get addicted, and come back.

The closest Lemmy has right now to early Reddit is Lemmy World but how do new users know that? Actually, I guess old.lemmy.world is the closest. :)

Reddit got massive because it had very vibrant communities and lots of them that inspired a loyalty in its uses.

I was brought to Reddit by a previous user, and I brought several of my friends to Reddit.

For lemmy to get there, you need thousands of communities.

Want to know stuff about Rav4? There's a sub for it.

Want to know about accounting? There's a sub for it?

Want to know about what's happening in Oklahoma city? There's a sub.

Lemmy isn't anywhere close to this point. In fact most subs are very dead.

Reddit experienced migrations earlier from disgruntled users at slashdot and was already somewhat known and in use among the tech crowd before the Digg influx. It already had a sizable user base before which is why it was able to absorb so many users. Service issues and downtime were pretty regular issues at the beginning though just as they are now on Lemmy.

Reddit was big before the Digg migration and got bigger still. It didn't happen overnight, it took many years. Reddit also benefited from celebrities and other influencers using it to become the default site for this type of content. Lemmy's problem is there's no void to fill, Reddit took a hit from the API fiasco but it's still going strong because 99% of the users didn't care, or returned soon after. Every subreddit I was in that chose to close down has returned to normal operation, and it's not even 2 months later.

I like Lemmy, I'm going to keep coming here to see how it grows. Right now, it's not even close to being a Reddit alternative. It's barely hanging on, but I wish it the best.

What happened is that Digg died, allowing reddit to thrive for over a decade with no competition. The admins learned from this and have been rolling out their shitty changes bit by bit, instead of all at once like Digg did. Eventually it's all going to collapse. You can't be king forever.

The software architect of lemmy is unfortunately doomed. The very concept of how it works means exponential storage and bandwidth needs as it grows in sublemmits and instances. A better design would have been instances being the sublemmits themselves, and leaving it up to the clients to subscribe and aggregate them into a feed. This way scaling is a lot more horizontal, and communities that get too big can scale up individually or purge old data without affecting the rest of the system.

I think social media designed like "Reddit" is just THE logical way to structure social media. That's why I think there is just an inherent demand for a platform like Reddit. Because of the network effect, social media platforms strongly tend to centralize. More users > more content > more users > more content > ... it is a self-reinforcing cycle favoring centralization. So that is the reason why reddit is popular, it was "the first", it is big. The only reason why people would ever leave is if Reddit themselves screw themselves over. Luckily for us, they do all the time.

Where Reddit really fails is how powerful admins and mods are, and regularly abusing that power. To fix this, you need to change the incentive structure so that power goes to the users themselves. Lemmy is already better at this because of its federated structure.

But I would go a step further and make communities work more like git. Anyone can fork any communities, meaning they create a new copy of a community but under their management. If enough people switch over to that fork, they get to keep the name of the sub.

That way mods and admins are incentivized to act in the best interest of users at all time, because if they don't, they are easily deposed.

As a bonus it would also result in making new communities from two groups who shouldn't have been together in the first place. Essentially creating more and more specialized communities more closely matching the wants of the users.

This is different to Lemmy or Reddit where you would have to create a new sub, with zero content to depose a mod/split the community.

You essentially make the process to switch out mods as low cost as possible for users. Thereby massively increasing competition, increasing quality and user satisfaction.

Ideally this would all be built on top of some base data storage layer like IPFS or something, so you don't have to literally copy over all the content any time you fork a community, but you just copy the references to where the content is stored.

Also hosting should be as simple as possible, ideally on some decentralized hosting service, like some of these crypto solutions.

This would basically remove all barriers to creating and maintining your own communities, except for hosting cost and moderation.

If you had to design the perfect social media platform, I think that would be it.

Videos. We are missing Videos.

Almost every subreddit is fun until it grew then it goes downhill. I agree with people not wanting this to grow like Reddit.

As why Reddit grew, Digg is one and another is the format was perfect for the time.

Although growing too large not desired for Lemmy, but theoretically if you want to grow it:

First major issues and outages need to be dealt with.

Developing and deployment best practices should be followed.

Registration must be easy and open

SEO optimization

Securing funds

Getting noticed by the media often which may require some controversy.

Mod tools and supporting brands.

As you see many of these ,at end up be bad for users.

I think we’re looking at this wrong. “Lemmy” as it is won’t get popular. It’s an underlying platform to create an internet forum. Individual instances are what may get popular

You’re not likely to read “cocksucker619 on lemmy said so and so” in a news article. Whereas “dickrider69 on an internet forum called dickriders.world said so and so” is a more likely proposition

Search engines, they don't catalog Fediverse sites properly because of the heavy dependency on domains! :/

It should try to grow larger than in currently is, but not try to be a top website.

Trying to do the latter will involve clashing with online legal regulations, politicians, and compliance to a much greater extent than is required now. Furthermore, it will be inundated with "normie" culture if it strives to be as popular. If you make it accessible to the lower common denominator, you get the lowest common denominator.

What Lemmy needs: buy the top search term for the word Reddit in the Apple/Google app stores.

We need reddit to mess up a couple of times before Lemmy gets to a critical mass, where active users keep growing instead of shrinking.

We also need Lemmy to focus on improving its SEO so people land on it organically.

I imagine these things would make Lemmy explode more:

1. Influencer influencers influencers. Have Mr Beast mention how he will give half a million dollars to whomever makes the best post on a Lemmy board or something and you have it made.

2. Individual users can find a way to profit from it, be it pushing a t-shirt to only fans or whatever and you'll see an influx in ads, er, posts.

Real answer: ease of use

If I wanted to find a particular subreddit for whatever, it was as easy as typing in the name of the show or hobby. And it linked to other similar / related subreddits

Or someone would link to another subreddit in a comment.

Here I'm having to sit and learn what an instance is and if the community I was in transfered over, and if they did where did they go. It's turning away alot of the less tech savvy people.

Does it need to be as popular as reddit? I don't think so, anything that grows too big becomes a hassle and a problem. But to grow it would need easier interface or ability to find/interact with other communities.

Reddit just faked it all until it made it basically. The creators of it are even on the record talking about it.

Lemmy could do the same if it wanted.

I think the turning point to mainstream appeal will be when major existing websites switch their attached discussion forums to Lemmy, which will inject a huge amount of new users into the ecosystem.

Reddit initially wanted companies to be able to set up their own official subreddit as their official forum and the private subreddit system is designed for that function.

So, say something like cnn or tmz set up their own Lemmy instance where they only post their own content for people to discuss, as having that inbuilt existing userbase mitigates the most painful part of setting up a new social media. The share button might get replaced with "go to our lemmy instance" button, and the snowball will just get bigger and bigger.

The day that gets rolling is the end of web 2.0 social media as we know it.

Could be as simple as simple word of mouth and then delivering an amazing experience/product. It worked for sriracha.

What lemmy or kbin need is more users, plain and simple.

A huge stepping stone would be to give users a better understanding of how the fediverse actually works. I’m a tech guy and I was pretty confused the first week I joined. I think most people here are tech people.

I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, but I believe it would lead to a much more consistent stream of newcomers.

Make one instance the default one. Then introduce others gradually. Too confusing for first timers. I was scratching my head the first time.

Reddit grew alot when it got known that they did AMAs with celebrities and world leaders. All the tabloids would report on it. It's difficult for Lemmy or even Reddit to repeat that without having someone in a paid full-time position to arrange and facilitate the interview.

Another thing is the size of the userbase. It got to the point that the sources for specific news were on Reddit, making it the first to have details on the stories, so it was often referenced in actual news outlets.

I’d rather not have Lemmy become a top website. I don’t need to see anime porn and onlyfans thots.

It doesn't need to. Pray that it doesn't.

Reddit got there slowly but surely. What will help here is just making an attractive product that works, there's still a lot of bugs for developers to fix. As you user you can help by submitting content.

Reddit has so many users. Give Lemmy time.

I think better integration with peertube would help. Videos are very popular on reddit and they require a lot of resources for an instances to host its own.

I honestly think reddit got way too big and that led to its downfall, but yes growth would be good and it's a good question.

Ultimately I think it's sort of like Python and C#. Python got big by being easy to use, with great community management, and it took decades to reach its peak of popularity. C# got big because Microsoft threw a ton of money at people to use it. Of the two, Python's popularity seems to be lasting longer.

I suspect this will be the case for all the new sites and protocols popping up in The Web 2.0 Crash, or whatever the history books call it. We'll see a few sites like TikTok and Threads that "buy their friends", get a ton of overnight popularity and then fade away, and we'll get a few "institutions" that take their time building healthy communities over tens of years. ActivityPub didn't wow me with Mastodon but I'm pleasantly surprised by Lemmy, so maybe the Fediverse will be one of those institutions... but personally I still think there's room in the market for RSS to make a comeback.

Digg died.

One thing I've also seen people mention that could help is weighting the hot and active algorithms to prioritize smaller communities on the home feed. I remember that Reddit's algorithm did that and it made it significantly easier to see content from communities that weren't just the largest memes and news communities.

What I think lemmy needs 1 it needs to feel like a website to the user 2 single login you join and automatically get put on a server that isn't overloaded 3 search you need to be able to search for any sub you want right on the app 4 this is something that a user wont see but is important for them a unified system of raising money for instances

We need to have something that they cant have or is lower quality like communities like c/techsupport

I'm 50/50 on it.

I don't want Lemmy to become too big to the point where it's skirting on becoming the very shithole Reddit currently is.

I'd want Lemmy to at have a healthy amount of clout where it can be it's own thing without pressure.

Lemmy is not a website.