I got the idea of this thread because of this comment
I know it’s kinda depressing seeing all this empty communities, but I think the problem is that it’s still all concentrated around privacy and tech. To create awareness of lemmy We should create more “casual” communities and share those threads outside.
As I already pointed out in the linked comment, I’ll not dislike some cat tax.
Oh, absolutely. And this goes for the Fediverse at large as well (and also Gemini.) You need more casual content, more art, music, games, conversations, spaces to socialize, etc. That’s what makes online communities popular.
EDIT: So, to the downvoters, I’m assuming that private, FOSS social spaces should only ever be used to discuss privacy and FOSS? Lmao. This is ridiculous.
For an alternative platform to flourish, it must attract people with a wide range of interests, not just tech and FOSS. This has to be combined with good moderation policies.
The exact opposite of this is Ruqqus: many of the platform’s users don’t have really any hobbies or actual interests. They just want to spout racist garbage together in their echo chamber, which is enabled with the platform’s reliance on “free speech” and loose moderation policies. When the racists and other idiots dominate Ruqqus, any people with actual interests leave it and any efforts for the platform to “clean up” just go to waste.
100% correct. This is the unfortunate current reality of alternative platforms. They are either dedicated specifically to tech discussion, or they are harbors for human garbage to spew diarrhea from their mouths. If we could get more normies on the Fediverse it would eventually snowball and it would be very popular, but the question is just how to get that started.
In addition to a cat tax, I’ve been thinking about communities that could be more action oriented, and features that could make communities on Lemmy less about mindless content consumption and more about real-life and socialization.
e.g. I’ve considered starting a sublemmy for de-pollution where users collect litter from their communities, then post the amount of trash they have collected (by weight or volume). There could be a running total updated in real time, before & after photos, and events. I don’t know if there is any interest in a community like this here.
Nice idea, but there’s a privacy problem: not everyone wants to let people know where they live. Unless it’s ok to use a throw account and delete it after some days.
Lemmy hasn’t been federated for very long yet, and there are still some rough edges. I only just signed up and had to read the doc to find out how to subscribe to a community on another instance (I guess you have to search for it as !<community>@<instance_url>). I also wasn’t seeing posts on that community from my instance.
I think Lemmy is off to a great start here, but I’d hate to see people turned off because of UX issues. It’s all solvable, but it just needs time and effort.
As an example, I’ve been using Matrix personally for years, but it’s only in the last year or so that I feel comfortable recommending it to my non-technical friends.
I think it’s just a matter of time for Lemmy to get enough polish to start attracting more people. And I’m really looking forward to that!
Welcome! If you can think of any concrete way to improve Lemmy (like easier subscribing to remote communities), please open an issue.
Thanks!
And for sure! I’m hoping to find some time soon to go through the doc and browse the code. Among my many other projects :)
For instances i just DDgo-ed “lemmy instances”, but I still didn’t create another account for them
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Write a howto for those users how to get their non tech friends, families, co-workers on board
That’s exactly what you should avoid lol. People don’t join because “hey, join this decentralized network, it’s free!”. People join because of content, to comment or post.
There are a lot of ideas of communities to create, but I don’t want to associate them with my nickname (I feel guilty to not let others create them and doing it myself). But maybe I can create 2-3 “casual” communities.
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I have been an active proponent of trying to steer Lemmy in the direction you explained. Lemmy needs to not just be a Hacker News ycombinator + 5% extra content. It needs to not be another Reddit either.
Content should be posted as content comes. Meeting some post generation quota is for the systems based on the attention economy.
I think that it unfortunately has to be all tech and political for now. Some person not interested in both is very unlikely to find their home here, even if there was more cat content or idk stuff about guitars.
I am trying to say that it imo is nearly impossible to find enough people to sustain those communities.
just less leftist politics indeed and less lemmy focused content would be great for sure
just less
leftistpolitics(fixed)
and with leftist focused i just mean… … remove that huge ass leftist community part
nothing against it it just cements that it is leftist and that is political
get me?
