I was wondering what the point of lemmy was, if we can’t get a certain number of people, we won’t be able to thrive as a community and I don’t see lots of people joining even though it is an open-source and decentralised forum unlike reddit.

There are many obvious things lemmy could do better, should I make a report about it? I think we are lagging behind and not doing things which are obvious. A better GUI for mobile website would be one of the top suggestions I have. thoughs?

  • marmulak@lemmy.ml
    5·
    3 years ago

    It’s already better than Reddit. If someone doesn’t want to use it, that’s their problem, not mine…

    • Ninmi@sopuli.xyz
      4·
      3 years ago

      We’re not even at feature parity. Wikis are something that communities use extensively and I do think growth requires Lemmy to provide an alternative to that. Improving on Reddit isn’t as straightforward as improving Twitter, but sharing the burden of hosting costs and maintenance via proper decentralization, we could for example bring Reddit’s paywalled features over to Lemmy without any ads or payments.

      • marmulak@lemmy.ml
        5·
        3 years ago

        Reddit also now has a lot of “features” I don’t want and hope Lemmy never gets. As for the wiki system though, that might be an interesting addition.

      • nutomic@lemmy.ml
        3·
        3 years ago

        A federated wiki would be a major project on its own. Doing that as part of Lemmy seems unrealistic (unless its very limited). Better to let another project implement that functionality, and make sure that it federates with Lemmy.

        • Ninmi@sopuli.xyz
          2·
          3 years ago

          Unfortunately I think it will have to be made to foster communities, especially hobbyist communities the way Reddit does.

  • Evg@lemmy.ml
    3·
    3 years ago

    Good answers. It seems to me that there is no need to replace Reddit, copy it and try to be like it. A copy is always a weak resemblance. As Steve Jobs once said: I don’t want to do better, I want to do it differently. Lemmy have strengths, they need to be developed.

    • Reverse@lemmy.ml
      1·
      3 years ago

      Can you make a quick list of its strengths besides those that derive directly from federation?

      • Evg@lemmy.ml
        0·
        3 years ago

        I apologize for not answering for a long time. Spring, construction, constant moving.

        It’s so hard for me to immediately write about strengths, I got a little distracted, but I can only give advice. This applies to those who create this platform, developers. Make it stand out from the competition. You know for yourself what the strengths and weaknesses are. Make it so that anyone who puts another script (and there are plenty of them on the net) knows that his version is not very good and there is a better one - Lemmy. People are such that they will prefer to use the best, especially since installation and support is not very complicated here. Just don’t give anyone a chance. )

        You can improve endlessly, any product can be made better and better, and you yourself know this.

  • poVoq@lemmy.ml
    3·
    3 years ago

    Will Mastodon ever replace Twitter? Maybe… But probably not. But the Internet is a huge place and there is space for plenty of alternatives.

    • Jerald@lemmy.mlOP
      01·
      3 years ago

      I love this community but hearing your words I feel like we have collectively given up

      • poVoq@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 years ago

        You just have the wrong goals. It isn’t always about “winning”.

        • Liwott@nerdica.net
          1·
          3 years ago

          @poVoq @Owell1984 Is the goal of freeing internet from the domination (note : I didn’t say existence) of the GAFAM and their likes wrong? What would be the right goal?

          • poVoq@lemmy.ml
            1·
            3 years ago

            A good goal would be that people don’t feel social pressure to keep using these services and have alternatives to them.

            • Liwott@nerdica.net
              1·
              3 years ago

              @poVoq But that would require either that their users leave them for open platforms (ie being replaced by them, in the sense that I understand it at least) or that they become open themselves. Right?

              • poVoq@lemmy.ml
                1·
                3 years ago

                Why? As long as there are sufficient people on the open platforms to interact with and it is just as socially accepted to tell someone to get an account on Mastodon etc. as it is for people to expect you to have a Facebook account right now, it doesn’t really matter that many people also still use these commercial platforms.

                • Liwott@nerdica.net
                  1·
                  3 years ago

                  @poVoq For there to not be any social pressure to join closed media, it means that people should use the open ones at least at much. Otherwise, one would always be tempted to use more the closed media so as to gert faster replies from their friends, and progressively abandon them, cause more people to switch to more use of closed social media… So the closed media snowball eventually may get back its current position.

                  The obvious way to get to the desired state is to replace closed media screen with open one. Another solution, which I hadn’t considered is to just add open media screen time, thereby raising the total. But I don’t think that alternative is much desirable…

  • abbenm@lemmy.ml
    2·
    3 years ago

    I was wondering what the point of lemmy was

    What was great in the early days of Mastodon is that, for those who could remember, it recaptured the feel of the “early” internet. You could feel distinct and interesting voices, patience and willingness to get into deepdives, where the payoff was from one to one interactions with personalities deeply interested in interaction itself and passion projects.

    That made it have a value in and of itself that didn’t depend on competing platforms.

    That said, you can feel echoes of typical internet culture all throughout the fediverse now. I don’ think you should measure success or failure on replacing reddit, but its great to have a place ready and waiting to absorb communities that become (say) disenchanted with bad mods.

    So the model for replacements I think would be looking at how facebook replaced myspace, and how reddit replaced digg. In both cases, there was widespread user disenchantment at substandard designs and redesigns that disregarded interests of users. I think that kind of catastrophic incompetence and disregard for users was unique to a particular era, and there probably have emerged some industry standards and best practices to stop that from happening in our current internet, for better or for worse.

    I think with reddits redesign, it has become increasingly frustrating to the user base, and there is a prospect that user disenchantment with reddit could lead to something, but I think its a long shot. The important thing to remember about reddit is that they caught a wave of exponential growth by not fucking things up, and staying more or less consistent with their product.

    I think the best thing Lemmy can do is be consistent and keep doing what it is doing, and not try and reinvent itself. I actually think the website’s functionality on mobile is truly fantastic, the best I’ve experienced from using a website in place of a dedicated app, so I wouldn’t worry about it. I think so much of Lemmy is right in its current for, and 99% of the issue with fediverse products is that the ui/design is being terrible, and it took Mastodon to kind of teach people that it mattered. So yeah, I think the main thing is to not mess with success.

    • rauba_code@lemmy.ml
      2·
      3 years ago

      IMO, what is good for open-source web solutions, is that, if someone doesn’t like the vanilla frontend, one can write a new community-based frontend as a web, desktop or mobile solution, like Whalebird. It greatly expands user’s choice and it is a good selling point but goes unnoticed.

      Regarding new features, it is a matter of the communitations’ protocols (ActivityPub, etc.) New features should comply with the specification and not introduce platform-specific ‘spin-offs’ as they would threaten the maintainability of the protocol and interoperability between platforms and in the long way ruin the whole fediverse. However, I have not read the specification of ActivityPub and what it can do. Maybe I have to try it first because it looks very promising.

    • Jerald@lemmy.mlOP
      02·
      3 years ago

      with due respect to everything you said I don’t think this is a major success, even “our own” people (GNU Linux and FOSS enthusiasts) are in a greater number in Reddit. I think Open-source projects like Lemmy lack the aggressiveness required to make it big.

      • sexy_peach@feddit.de
        1·
        3 years ago

        You seem to see a lot of problems. Do you have solutions and where is your place in those solutions?

  • cipres@lemmy.ml
    2·
    3 years ago

    You can’t and don’t need to replace Reddit. The way Lemmy is built will make it a much more viable and trusted platform for the long term.

  • MrGamingHimself@lemmy.ml
    2·
    3 years ago

    It’ll never replace reddit, but the hope is that it’d have a big enough community that it would be a viable alternative.

      • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.ca
        1·
        3 years ago

        Has lemmy fixed their nonstandard activitypub? I heard that lemmy and mastodon couldnt interact because of it. However, i could be wrong. Just joined this morning

        • darth_tiktaalik@lemmy.ml
          1·
          3 years ago

          Just tried to load post via fosstodon and it presents itself as a link to the lemmy op rather than having it load as an interactive thread.

          But at least friendica <–> lemmy communication works smoothly.

        • nutomic@lemmy.ml
          1·
          3 years ago

          Lemmy and Mastodon federate just fine since December (except for some minor problems).

  • Mad@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    3 years ago

    I don’t think there’s a need to replace Reddit, Lemmy just needs to serve as an alternative for those that want it. And I think there’s plenty of people here for a thriving community. I also think it functions perfectly fine for the most part. The mobile website looks great, and we even have a great mobile app. I’m not sure how reports work with Lemmy, but if you do have any gripes then by all means report them. The one major thing I think is wrong with Lemmy (and honestly the Fediverse in general) is how bad federation is. Communication across instances should be straight-forward and seamless, but it’s often just broken.

    • Jerald@lemmy.mlOP
      12·
      3 years ago

      there aren’t plenty of people here. we need more. we need to be a better alternative.

        • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
          2·
          3 years ago

          Just a note that active monthly on lemmy, means you’ve posted or commented. Reddit might be using that more loosely, as in someone who just views the site. In that case their numbers might be highly inflated, include webcrawlers, etc.

          • triplenadir@lemmygrad.ml
            1·
            3 years ago

            Oh good point, Reddit are almost definitely including people who just vote, and probably people who just view 🤦 Is it easy to get “unique ‘people’ who looked at it” numbers off Lemmy instances, to make a fairer comparison? (Not optimistic that Viacom will be releasing numbers of how many humans they think are actually using Reddit any time soon…)

            • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
              1·
              3 years ago

              For logged in users, there is a table that checks if you’ve read a post, so it’d be possible yes. But IMO just viewing something shouldn’t count as “activity”.

              • triplenadir@lemmygrad.ml
                2·
                3 years ago

                You’re saying you don’t want to add metrics just to have a dick-swinging contest with Reddit’s fake numbers? Confusing 😂

            • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
              0·
              3 years ago

              I think we have this as an open issue, but haven’t done anything with it yet. I wouldn’t mind reactions as long as they’re activitypub compatible.

              • Liwott@nerdica.net
                2·
                3 years ago

                @dessalines I think you misunderstood, I meant to ask whether comments and votes to lemmy post from other platforms are counted in Lemmy’s activities?

                • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
                  1·
                  3 years ago

                  Is it reactions, or votes? Afaik only lemmy votes are federated. What other platform has up and downvotes?

  • Shaggy0291@lemmygrad.ml
    1·
    3 years ago

    It’ll take time and commitment from its early userbase, but eventually it should pull in enough people to become a self sustaining counterculture community to the swamp that is reddit. People don’t come here for the content, but rather the community itself.

  • uthredii@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 years ago

    Reddit is really good for hobby/niche content. Reddit communities have become the largest online communities for quiet a few different interests where previously the largest communities would be independent forums.

    It would be great if some forums decided to use Lemmy. I guess there are barriers to this, e.g. user interface changes might not be wanted and it might be difficult to export/import the forum history.

    • Jerald@lemmy.mlOP
      12·
      3 years ago

      I dont know if it was even possible to do that. Atleast us gnu Linux users should be here in a larger number I guess

  • Liwott@nerdica.net
    1·
    3 years ago

    @Owell1984 Not specifically Lemmy, but I do hope that someday the fediverse can replace the proprietary social media. It’s biggest strength is that all fedi-platforms are designed to communicate with each other, thereby effectively having a common pool of users (for example, I somehow use Lemmy when commenting on this thread, while I am actually doing it from a Friendica instance) instead of (only/mainly) competing to grab users from each other.

  • art@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 years ago

    Honestly I don’t really see a need to replace Reddit. This conversation always comes up and open source alternatives. Mastodon was never designed to replace Twitter. It was simply to be an alternative. Linux was never designed to replace windows, etc…