Since my favorite reddit app came to Lemmy I'm really keen on getting more people into the fediverse to pump up the volume of content around here. Are there any initiatives that we can assist to get folks onboard?
I had my wife join, and she likes it, but laments the slow pace of new material in the communities.
We need to cut back the bot traffic a touch. All new people coming and see are a million posts with no participation. It's good to have the content but we're kind of lacking in curation and a lot of what's coming over is not stuff we're interested in commenting on. As long as we just keep carbon copying Reddit and Twitter and the Verge and hundreds of other places, we're going to have a lot of empty post sitting around.
Actual discourse and discussion needs to happen. We're fairly low on trolls currently, which is a fantastic thing. But we also don't have a lot of spicy takes either.
More moderation, administration tools, better filters, easier ways to shut out bad actors. Right now the best we can do is defederate when somebody can't manage their clientele. And we're still way too bot-able.
More migration tools something I can to what mastodon does if you need to move instances.
#2: I've seen some spicy takes, at least in the politics communities. Others, people are generally just more chill. I consider that a feature.
#3: The upcoming 0.19.0 will let users block instances as well as users/communities. Filters are unfortunately a client-specific feature right now, but fortunately there are a lot of clients to choose from now.
#4: 0.19.0 has this. Users can export their profile settings data (including subscriptions and blocklists) and import those elsewhere.
Where do you see bot traffic? From my observations, Lemmy has the opposite problem than what you describe in your point 1: all threads I see do get plenty of comments (not as many as reddit, but still plenty), but we get relatively few new threads. Or does that only happen in specific communities? I don't look at communities I'm not subscribed to, maybe that is why.
‘New’ is a bot orgy, which is a real shame because quality posts get lost in it and it’s harder for them to gain visibility and traction in the wider instance. If you stick to subscribed communities you won’t notice, but for new users who haven’t curated their communities yet (or people like me who just like discovering stuff I wouldn’t think to seek out specifically), browsing the general aggregate can be a great way to discover content and communities to follow.
Or it would be, if it wasn’t bot bot bot bot bot bot thread, bot bot bot bot bot bot thread, bot bot thread, bot bot thread, bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot bot, wait a minute, thread!
I’d much rather see more discussion under the various posts then just an endless stream of what looks like just random links, mostly political, either supporting some democrat or trying to explain why some Republican is evil.
But also, when everyone agrees there isn’t really much to talk about, and if you disagree you wake up to an inbox full of the stupidest comments imaginable and a post with more downvotes that the original post even got upvotes for lol
If conversation is the goal, lemmy users who dominate the community right now don’t know how to have it