I love lemmy so much more.

Not to mention reddit banned me lol but for some reason it felt like a weight was lifted.

Why do you think lemmy hasn’t ‘gotten up there’ yet like reddit?

The only thing that makes me sad about lemmy, is there arnt many posts.

Unless I’m filtering wrong.

Do you guys have any lemmy sub/community suggestions?

What do you think of lemmy?

  • comfy@lemmy.ml
    9·
    2 years ago

    1. Reddit is a private company founded in 2005, valued at $1.8 billion dollars and employing around 350 people. Lemmy was founded two years ago and is run with relatuvely little funding (I would say approximately two paid employees and a dozen or so volunteers, distributed around different instances). That’s not comparable. At all.

    2. Most people aren’t banned from reddit. Your personal experience is rare. If someone isn’t banned from the biggest platform, they need a motivation to leave. Why would they leave? I know why YOU would leave, but why would THEY leave?

    3. Most people coming here, not all but most, are doing it because they were banned from reddit. As a result, they just try to recreate reddit here, instead of making something better, a better culture or a higher quality of community. Lemmy is treated by the majority as a ‘free speech reddit’ and nothing more.

    4. Strong political bias in the popular communities may be distasteful to the majority of people who would use a reddit-like site, who tend to be pro-capitalist liberals.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
      3·
      2 years ago

      We’d love to be able to start a proper open-source programming collective, with the ability to hire more programmers than just the two of us to add features and make lemmy better, but the money just isn’t there. Its difficult to compete with a multi-billion dollar company that’s able to pay high salaries and mobilize hundreds of skilled programmers ( even tho I still am veryy proud of what we’ve been able to do with our limited time, and all the contributions people have made to lemmy ).

      Its not a specific problem for us either, all open source projects need more funding than theyre currently getting to thrive. Twitch streamers make more money than open source devs, its a pretty sad state of affairs.

      IMO pretty much the only reason reddit is beating us, is the first-mover advantage. I noticed a long time ago that adding more features doesn’t improve the lemmyverse’s user count. Its only when reddit alienates certain groups, that we see large influxes of users and new instances. Otherwise people are happy to stay on reddit, because that’s where communities already are.

      /r/piracy is probably the next big community that could migrate to lemmy. Reddit keeps banning then unbanning piracy-related communities, and file-sharers will see that their position is precarious there. /r/privacy should move to lemmy, the reddit redesign is a bloated mess of spyware.

      • comfy@lemmy.ml
        2·
        2 years ago

        I agree, the first mover advantage is huge. These are social sites, merely being a “better” product isn’t enough (but I do think it’s necessary).

        I suppose an advantage for us of reddit’s position (that is, bound foremost by venture capital and profit, and therefore to reputation and popularity) is that we will inevitably see more entire communities alienated and cast out, and Lemmy is demonstrably already in a position to catch them, as we’ve seen with /r/GenZedong, /r/ChapoTrapHouse (hexbear) and /r/chodi (bakchodi). Like you said, /r/piracy is basically an inevitability, or even a gateway (if they said something like “If you want to share links, visit /c/piracy”). I wonder if it’s worth keeping a watch-list of places at risk, or places that might want to come for cultural reasons like /r/privacy or /r/foss (EDIT: I also wonder if the gateway strategy could be useful for political subreddits if there are boundaries they can’t cross due to site rules despite the subreddit moderators being fine with it)

        In that case, it seems ironing out all the major usability bugs for newcomers is the best strategy rather than adding new features.

      • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
        21·
        2 years ago

        Just going to tell you that r/privacy, r/PrivacyGuides, r/opensource are largely politically agenda controlled subreddits by Americans and other Westerners, that often downplay the harms of Big Tech and CIA, and prop up and fearmonger and actively encourage hate against China/Russia. You can see top posts from the past 2 days about Beijing stealing and creating dossiers of data on every single American adult, for starters.

        They will never come, and if they do, they must never come here. Growth of Lemmy at the expense of grifters is the worst kind of growth, no matter the desperation.