I honestly can't say about the influx. Since I'm part of it.
But man....
This does feel like home.
I was already loving Mastodon.
Honestly, the real question is:
What took us soo long....
I was lurking on Lemmy for a long time now read only mode, not signed up, but never had the urge to actually making an account.
I try not to have so many feeds where I'm active at once, to try and better manage the time I spend on this feeds.
Twitter and Reddit were the ones I engaged the most
Twitter became Mastodon and Reddit became Lemmy on that matter, so that I can focus on being active and helpful whenever possible.
So, what took me so long...?
Definitely something I will be asking myself for a while, since so far the experience here have something that reddit just don't. The quality over quantity aspect.
Finally...
Thanks for having me here, I hope I can contribute the best I can to maintain Lemmy awesome as it is. I don't post or reply like a madman, but I like to participate on constructive discussion every now and then.
"Inertia is a property of matter" -Bill Nye the Science guy
What I mean by that is that it takes a force to move a large mass. People behave in much the same way. It takes a push to get people to move in large numbers from one place to another. I personally have been philosophically very pro-fediverse ever since I heard about it, but I was waiting for it to reach a critical mass before really switching over.
That, and for Lemmy specifically, its history of being a tankie forum. Without the Reddit refugee migration, if you joined Lemmy as a single user, you would be alone among communists and eventually get bullied into leaving. Already in 2020-2021, Fediverse users knew about Lemmy, but they avoided promoting it because of its userbase. This Reddit situation provided the push to get many normal users over to Lemmy at once to drown out the communist users.
Hey man, I've felt mostly the same than you migrating to lemmy. A while ago I tried mastodon but it really didn't click with me, how do you do to find people to follow and so? I was only getting recommended the same like 10 guys. I like gaming and programming if it helps.
It makes me hopeful for the future. Enthusiasts priming the pump for people embracing a more sustainable and less exploitative business model to organize the Internet. Instead of putting all the information on a big centralized locked down platform we share the load and costs between instances.
I love what is happening now, it is pretty much the biggest display of resistance against big tech I've ever seen in my life by a long shot. I've seen most of the internet gradually decay to a shadow of its former self so this is a return to form and a switch to a better model in the long run.
People are finally adopting the Fediverse and if the adoption rates keep up we might start going mainstream with all the advantages and disadvantages, but it will be alright since Lemmy is both federated and FLOSS. Lemmy is a Rust-based, AGPLv3 platform and that means it will be protected against corruption in the foreseable future, I hope.
I just joined Lemmy because someone on reddit mentioned in it a comment on a thread regarding the blackout. It's kind of cool getting into a community while it's still relatively small. I'm excited to see how things grow.
I hopped over here permanently tonight. Uninstalled boost on my phone, and I made Lemmy.ml my homepage. Reddit is just too depressing right now to keep it as my default.
When on a Lemmy site on mobile, in Firefox you can go to the three-dots menu and select "install". You get a shortcut on your phone that will take you to an app like version of Lemmy.
I’m a reddit refugee, Apollo was my most loved and most used app for years. I was really disappointed about this situation, but after checking out Lemmy, I’m starting to feel really excited about this. I like what I see so far and I think there is a lot of potential, and it is kind of fun to be here now while communities are still smaller. Onwards an upwards!
I’m also checking out the beta for the iOS app Mlem, more work to be done but also good potential here. I’ve also been doing iOS dev work for about a decade so maybe I’ll see if I can help contribute to that project in some way.
I'm starting to be grateful to Reddit for giving me the nudge that I needed to explore the fediverse. I did have a look at Mastodon a while back (and I may have even joined an instance there, I'm not sure!) but was overwhelmed by not understanding it. I think being part of an exodus where there is lots of advice and support being given specifically for us is really helpful in making me feel like this is somewhere I'll stay.
So far the concept is VERY promising but it still does all feel a bit wonky. Signing up was a headache and took me hours, sign in still sometimes work sometimes not.. A huge of development will be required to get lemmy where it needs to be to really compete with Reddit, but so far, I'm very hopeful and happy!
At least for me downloading their app jeroba makes the experience much nicer. Haven't had the issues I had on the website though it's a bit taxed because of the influx of users. Expected.
It is also very hard to subscribe to other server's community (or subreddit equivalent).
E.g.: i had account from beehaw, if i want to subscribe a channel from lemmy.world i need to see the list of community from lemmy.world comminity list, but I cannot subscribe from there because i dont have lemmy.worlda account. So i need to back to beehaw and search it again in community search bar.
In jerboa android, I didnt even see a way to search new community
Would be nice if there is a way to subscribe other server easily
Yeah, just found that out the hard way myself. I got to lemmy.world and suddenly was no longer logged in etc... That is something that def needs improvement.
Right? I can't wait to see how it improves as time on. I didn't have any real problems with joining on my end, though. When you signed up, was it the approval process on your instance, or just confusing? If it was the approval process, that's probably specific to lemmy.ca.
I first tried signing up on lemmy.ml, that was impossible. Various hours of trying just got me the "click the signup button and it starts rotating and... nothing"
Then I went to lemmy.ca, there signup worked, but sign in at times gives the same "button rotating" thing and then nothing. Try again, and it works.
Its a minor issue, but a very visible one that I would say should be fixed ASAP because its the first thing new people see and you don't want the first experience to be tiresome.
Think of it like moving to a new house rather than picking up your house and moving it to a new neighborhood. The excitement comes from the differences even if you miss the other place.
I felt the same at first too. The longer sign-up issue makes joining a pain, but I think it's worth it.
Part of what I'm coming to love about the lemmy side of things is how free of filler and bots it is. By making a tiny barrier to entry, that's going to prevent that kind of thing to a degree.
Realistically, there is no reddit to go back to. After the company goes public, Reddit as we knew it, will cease to exist.
The shareholders will want to be make maximum profit. This means that ads are going to be everywhere. They are going to outsource hosting services to horrible companies, in order to cut down hosting costs like video hosting and image hosting. Features that existed in 3rd party apps are going to be paid features in the official app/webapp, etc.
Reddit is gone. It's lost. It will not be there as you knew it to go back to. It's now a case of where to next and for the time being, lemmy and feddiverse looks the best.
I think the concept of "enshittification" will become more apparent to more users. Younger people, who are more technically literate, and have seen social media rise and fall I think will be more willing to adopt platforms like Lemmy. Reddit was a "place for weirdos" for a long time until the general public noticed it and began to post comments and posts to YouTube/Instagram/Twitter. Lemmy just needs time.
One thing I always like to say to people, is "The internet was cooler when your parents didn't understand how it worked." I think the concept of Lemmy appeals to and will start to appeal to a lot of people soon.
All that may be true but that doesn't mean there's enough people who are motivated enough to put effort into a reddit alternative -- all the reddit design updates suck for the informed user but the whole point of the updates is to keep the much, much larger casual audience hooked, and it's yet to be seen if a reddit alternative is viable today without the casual audience. Hopefully there's some good signs over the next few days when the blackout gets rolling
It's very unlikely that Lemmy will ever be as big as Reddit, but this influx might have it reach a tipping point where it can start to grow users organically.
Indeed, for this kind of service users attract users. I've been checking in on Lemmy periodically for years and the content just wasn't there (for me). But now, with plenty more users, I'm seeing a lot more value in spending more time here.
I wonder how hard it would be to convert some of the existing apps to use Lemmy. I guess the federated aspect makes it more complex and will require more development than just switching the API, but the UI could stay similar.
An idea so old is new again. The Internet and it's early services (Usenet, email, IRC, etc.) we're all designed from the start to be decentralized. After 20+ years of people consolidating into centrally-controlled mega platforms, I'm happy to see things coming full circle.
Agreed, platforms should compete by providing better UX and features, not by abusing network effects and walling off themselves to hold communities and accounts hostage. In a way the fediverse provides a common carrier that is neutral to the users and platforms connected to it, which enables competition in the same way that guaranteeing equal access to physical internet infrastructure to new ISPs is essential to preventing ISP monopolies.
As cool as this decentralized approach to social platforms is, I have a hard time really seeing it going mainstream. There's too many barriers to entry (both physical and conceptual) for the average user
I think all new technology is like that. Ultimately I think what is needed is a single mobile app that aggregates fediverse services and makes it stupid simple on the UX/UI. Advanced users can still migrate to other servers and have more control/freedom, and less savvy people don't even knoww hat is happening.
the reddit blackout is for like two days
i expect that 90% of them will stick to the two days and business as usual afterwards.
their bottom line is to continue running mods of their communities, even if they acknowledge that was is going on with reddit is bad.
they shouldnt have announced a scheduled, limited blackout.
i expect some fringe communities to come here and stay but it will always be business as usual on reddit
therefore Lemmy needs to have a reason for people to stick around, communities offering something that isnt otherwise available, even just a refreshing change of community culture
Honestly it'll probably be closer to 99.999% of users will stick around Reddit. The largest Lemmy instance is smaller than the smallest subreddit I follow and I suspect that's probably the case for most people.
Here's what will happen... Reddit blackout starts, people come to Lemmy, 8 out of 10 are confused by the way things work and bail instantly. 2 out of 10 might stick around, try to sign up, but everyone hammers the top 3-4 instances and they have a bad first impression. A few days later everyone is back at Reddit and Lemmy is right back where it was a month ago.
I think that there will be people who remain on Lemmy permanently. This group will remain small, and insignificant. But hopefully there will be enough people to prop the instances up with content. At which point Lemmy will begin to grow slowly; this slow growth imo is the most important.
But yeah alot of people will go back to Reddit and forget all about Lemmy. And that's ok.
You're exaggerating, I can definitely see how Twitter users changed the general atmosphere of the Fediverse, at least on the instances that I have used in the past. As for Reddit, I think it will be something similar to that, not everyone is going to migrate but Lemmy is going to be significantly bigger, better and THE place to go if you want to ditch Reddit. Also, it's not like having a big portion here of social media audience is going to do a lot of good. I have serious doubts about people being able to give value to the community if they can't even figure out how to register on an instance other than the main one
I personally don't understand wanting to go back... reddit is so unpleasant as it is. All that made it tolerable was 3rd party. I'd rather go back to imgur than reddit.
Yeah, the curse of success. Everyone seems to be hoping for the swift death of Reddit but I dunno. It getting shittier but still existing might be the best outcome.
It's not going anywhere. I'm sure like 90% of people there don't care at all what is happening. Probably more than 90, considering that about 5% used third party apps.
I think the Redditors joining Lemmy will certainly change the culture, both for the better and for the worse. Comments got pretty toxic on Reddit while I feel like the toxic comments on Lemmy were rare.
BUT, that could be a sample size thing. I'm curious to see if the ratio of toxic comments per active user would have been the same.
More people = more problems I am certain but this is a social network and without people it will fail. We must all make an effort to be the change that we want to see in the world.
I don't foresee a problem in the immediate future aside from higher server load, but in terms of culture, only people who believe in a new social network will be willing to join.
In 5 years however when this is a great place to be, a large number of people will join who don't respect the legacy. The departure from Digg to Reddit felt like this too, I hope that the federation aspect will ensure this is longer lived.
remember... federation is your friend. federation gives you the freedeom to change house (instance) and/or look for better communities on any other federated instance from your own instance.
A little bit worried. I am a recent migrator myself so this may a bit hypocritical, but I feel a lot of people will want to "redditize" here, just like how people tried with mastodon a couple months ago or (in a larger level), how people want Linux to become "another Windows".
These are not replicas, Lemmy doesn't work like Reddit, neither does it try to be, and that is by design, not a flaw. Things work differently, over and under the rug, and I think users should be entitled to doing some small effort to readjusting and have an open mind.
I'm all for UI/UX improvements, like most community projects, the front design part is more of an afterthought, and in that matter Lemmy has a lot to improve, but always keeping in mind what it is aiming to be.
For example, I am thinking in working on some simple browser extension to rearrange the UI in a way similar to Reddit's (nothing fancy, the upvote/downvote and collapse buttons locations, simple things). Maybe even some redirecting magic so if you open a link to another instance's community, it instead opens it in your current one, so you can still interact without having to go to your instance and search this one.
If anything, as a FOSS and federated content advocate, I wish this project nothing but the best so that one day we can escape the clutches of greedy companies.
Well it's a link aggregator and forum, just like reddit, but I feel like lemmy needs time for its own culture to coalesce - rather than expecting reddit culture to be imported or just exist here.
why not contribute directly to the project, given it's open source nature rather than a browser extension? I'm also thinking about contributing some stuff, I think a lot of the federated part right now is really confusing and obtuse to new users especially.
I'm realllllly just hoping we don't choke the "main" instances completely to death before the lemmy backend can have some developer hours dumped into it to support better per-instance horizontal scaling.
Yeah. It's gonna be a rough first couple months. App development needs to catch up. Server support needs to catch up. Many subs need to figure out how to move over their communities. I'm tempted to start making communities and just copy-pasting the side bars and pinned threads, but Im not a mod for anything, so it feels like it'd be plagiarism.
No trumpers ever made their way to lemmy that I know of, besides a small instance that closed a couple months back. That might be when GenZedong was quarantined and the tankies migrated to lemmygrad, not entirely sure.
I wouldn't expect such a sharp dropp-off at the end of it again though, even if it was temporary black-out or something, I'd expect there to be more of a trail
Whilst I’m somewhat sad to be here (Reddit has eaten up a significant portion of my time over the past 10+ years), I’m happy to be learning new things and exploring a new way of doing things.
I agree with the scalability issues. Instance owners are going to run up against whatever they can afford to pay. If a given instance grows to a point where the hardware required to run it would be too expensive, then the admin has a choice: Donations, payment, and/or sponsorship.
All have their pros and cons.
Assuming "Lemmy" becomes popular (there's a ton of barriers preventing this so far). there's inevitably going to be consolidation between whoever can afford to support the largest instances.
Also, I think the most confusing part about the whole "fediverse" is that each instance is the entire "platform" of whatever it's trying to be.
This IMO creates massive fragmentation and a ton of confusion. Which one is the "authoritative" instance? Oh there's none? Oh...well...Hmm.
I'm sort of starting to think of it like this:
Reddit (or whatever fediverse whatever) is like a single shopping mall and the stores are subreddits. Each store needs a unique name.
Lemmy is like a bunch of shopping malls with each shopping mall having its own set of stores.
Stores within a single shopping mall must have a unique name, but can use the same name as a store in another mall. For example, you'd be hard-pressed to find two Foot Lockers in the same mall, but you're likely to find them in pretty much every mall you visit in the USA at least.
I've known about Lemmy and Tild.es for some time, but both just seemed so immature. I figured I'd give Lemmy a solid chance to show support for the blackout and because I'm likely to quit Reddit entirely if they don't reverse course (I may quit regardless), and I'm happy to say that this doesn't feel like a downgrade much.
There are plenty of communities for what I'm looking for, so I'm not giving up a lot switching to Lemmy. I'm going to give it a solid chance over the next week or two and do my best to contribute, and if I'm liking it still after that point, I may be able to contribute dev resources (maybe I'll help out with a mobile app or something).
Je trouve ça incroyable, je me suis inscrit ya à peine une semaine et les postes avaient genre 50-100 upvote max et la ça touche les 800. Puis c'est sympa de voir d'avantage de contenu.
Hey everyone, let's not be quick to downvote just because it's not in English today. As proud Lemmy users, let's seize this opportunity to showcase our incredible diversity. Let's demonstrate to the world just how unique and amazing we can be. Together.
Je comprend clairement ce que tu veux dire, même si je suis perso un peu perdu parce que en catégorie "Hot" ou "Active" j'ai toujours les mêmes premiers post qui reste pendant 2 jours entier et que c'est un peu frustrant quand je l'ai déjà bien vu
I find the hot/active categories pretty confusing too. It would be nice to be able to show subbed communities either across the top of the page or on a sidebar like old Reddit.
I just hope that it will be more distributed than Matrix and not everyone registers on lemmy.ml (matrix.org in case of matrix) so the decentralization works for real here instead of 90% (exaggerating, don't know the numbers) of the user base sitting on one instance :)
with how much .ml is struggling to handle the load I would've expected even more to pick different instances, though the situation seems better than how mastodon.social was during the twitter migration
the upcoming centralization issue sounds like it'll be the communities themselves all being hosted on .ml, not accounts. can't want to see how that one is gonna play out
That user does have a point. The higher a barrier to entry the less people you are going to get.
Though there is something to be said for the selection of people that get filtered out. While I appreciate large communities because of the variety of view points available, the quality increasing due to a barrier of entry has advantages too.
As a side note, thanks for writing up guides for people!
The higher a barrier to entry the less people you are going to get.
And that's ok. MOST redditors are lurkers who don't interact with the platform and/or bot accounts. Nothing good will come to this platform if these accounts move over.
Give the platform 2 minutes to figure out how it works and all is ok. This on its own is a great screening process.
Not that the platform is hard. It's just different.
Given the timeouts and load issues I've had on lemmy.ml today... Mildly concerned.
I'm part of the problem though, and really hopeful it goes well! Seems like the solution to the Giant Network problem we see at Reddit, Twitter, FB, etc
You know, it just occured to me yesterday that there might be a federated version of reddit. Looked it up and I was pleasantly surprised to see it's actually picking up a lot of users. Now if we could see a mobile app as polished as rif is fun, I'll be extremely happy. Move over reddit, let's go lemmy!
Just wondering though, how scalable is lemmy? What kind of hardware/connection would you need to host your own instance?
There's a few posts around about server setups that people are running. The major constraint seems to be storage. Lemmurs uploading gigs of data can get tricky to manage pretty quickly.
I'm not new to Lemmy, I've hung around here on and off a couple times since the start of the year. My biggest complaint about it for a long time was that many of the subs I was interested in were just dead or didnt exist on lemmy. With the new influx of users, I imagine that's going to change, even if it does take a couple more years.
Man, I been waiting for this for years. I thought with the way Mastodon grew it'd eventually grow into a wider growth among the fediverse but it seems to happen in fits and starts. Glad to see people are federating too and not all dumping into just the mainline instance.
Next I'd like to see major names move off YouTube and Twitch onto decentralized platforms but that's gonna take much more to get there, unfortunately.
I think probably a pluggable storage backend is the best move. For example, any cloud hosted instance could use a native document storage format such as dynamodb, which is often quite cheap or free for small use-cases.
Yup, I also got suspended for a week for "harassing" someone for asking them for proof because they were being a bigot. She realized she couldn't defend it and reported one of my comments, so another bigoted sub mod banned me and deleted all my comments. All of her nasty comments stayed up, though. Isn't Reddit great?
Don't blame the tool for the behavior of its user. You should try Stackoverflow. That place is toxically moderated...no, moderated isn't the right word. Gatekept. Ask one poorly worded question because you're trying to work something out and not sure how to phrase the question? Fucking amateur, you're banned! I moved to reddit to get away from the SO culture and I'm hopeful lemmy can fill that niche.
...and I too love challenging bigots. "Why" is a question they don't like hearing.
Hi everyone, I'm new to Lemmy! I had difficulties signing up yesterday but finally got it working tonight. I want to support 3rd party reddit app developers and reddit mods. I won't be revisiting reddit during the blackout. So far I'm really liking Lemmy so it's a strong possibility that Lemmy may replace Reddit for me :)