On join-lemmy.org, the project is described as “A forum and link aggregator for the Fediverse”. In the previous post, multiple people mentioned that this is not a good description. However I have a hard time coming up with anything better.
So please post your suggestions below, and upvote the ones which are both accurate and easy to understand for new users. Later I pick one of the most upvoted options for the website.
By the way the second title “Follow communities Anywhere in the world” will likely go away (see the pull request for frontpage redesign). After this is decided I may also make another post to get suggestions for the longer description text below (“Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. …”).
Edit: Please only post concrete suggestions in top-level comments, and use replies to discuss. And here you can see how a few other Fediverse projects do it:
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Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I collected the ones which subjectively seem best, here is the list for a quick overview:
- An open source discussion platform for communities.
- Lemmy, a decentralised discussion platform for communities
- Lemmy is an open-source social network that functions as a global web of independent forums
- A decentralized network of forums
- Discuss interesting topics and join communities on the Fediverse.
- A discussion platform that can’t enshittify. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.
Based on these suggestions and the discussion, the best option seems to be: A decentralised discussion platform for communities.
I will keep making more updates to join-lemmy.org based on this post and the previous one. Once that’s done I will likely make another post to show the results and gather additional feedback.
I think the shortlist is good and “A decentralised discussion platform for communities” is a concise and quite easy for a layperson to understand! I would like to hear copywriter’s/marketer’s idea for an even shorter “slogan” (“frontpage of the internet”, “dive into anything”, “what’s happening?”). This is the type of stuff people will remember and gives an overview of what the service is about, not only what it is. Keep up the good work!
Lemmy: Wow that’s a lot of communists
Lemmy: the Mastadon of Reddit.
Absolutely no way, this will never work. It should be “Lemmy: the Mastodon of Reddit”
Communities, free from corporations.
Lemmy has limited federation with Bluesky and Threads. Lemmy itself isn’t being given with a non-commercial license so if any Lemmy instance grows large it’ll likely monetise and become a corporation.
Too long; Didn’t read: Read last paragraph.
We need to understand the target audience if we want to get a good description. Speaking for myself, I would set the target audience to chronically online people who want to leave corporate walldoms, but I’d also choose a type of communication that focus on the actual service instead of comparing it to other serices. I’d not copy paste description from inspiration source. I’d be willing to reimagine what it is that we are developing.
I’d use communication that is less branded, and more understanding of the soul of the service. Its like saying “orange soda” instead of “fanta”, “search engine” instead of “google” or “car” instead of “Toyota”. The difference is by using this kind of language, we move ourselves away from dependency on the producers towards dependency on the tool.
Understanding the soul also requires that we have a culturally connected understanding of that which we discuss. That is to use less technical communication and more down to earth communication. To not play into sophistication. Less abbreviations, less techno jargon, more plain english, more understanding the equivalents of real life. For example, in the Gemini Protocol of small web, they use the word “capsule” instead of “instance”, which it feel more physical and more real. “Instance” on the other hand makes it sound like a computer thing and not related to reality.
About the soul, we should ask ourselves what the service feels like. Lemmy feels like small townhalls, or like a guy in the street yelling “Guys! What do you think of this drawing.” Perhaps a little gossipy or something like that. Ask yourself, what does lemmy feel like for you? Or what do you want lemmy to feel like? From here I choose “townhall” simply because it works for the purpose.
The above example also gives weight to the idea of physicality. When something feels physical, it feels real, and we feel drawn to it. In contrast, the abstract “instance” makes it more of a curiosity. We can talk of “towns”, “homes” or “hives” instead of “instances”. We can talk of “continents” of loosely connected hives instead of fediverse of platforms of instances. From here I choose “hive” because it distinguishes itself clearly to prevent misunderstandings.
With the physicality and smallness of “hive”, we can also encourage small scale thinking. Because no hives has a million bees. If you see a hive of a million inhabitants, you are going to be drawn towards smaller hives.
I’d also center the attention away from platforms and towards the hives and their interconnectedness. In this way we emphasize the decentralization aspect. The willingness to associate with other hives. I frame this as a hive being “open”.
This means we can talk of fediverse instances as open hives. Mastodon becomes shortletter hives, pixelfed becomes open gallery hive, peertube becomes open video hive.
So to be blunt, I’d suggest open townhall hive.
Lemmy is an open townhall hive that offers public sharing of links, letters and images.
Seize the means of communication /s
I agree that federation is the central feature of Lemmy, besides it being libre software, however the term “federation” is something that already requires a newcomer to open up a search engine at best or get scared by the unknown and leave at worst.
It should exist, but in very layman’s terms, something like:
“A social platform for independent online communities of all topics, owned by people and not corporations, all in one place”
Mastodon also does a pretty good job on their main page, it’s easily understandable by anyone, and scrolling down gives you a much better picture of what it really does if you are interested enough to learn.
it’s decentralized reddit. or better yet, a decentralized network of forums.
i usually make the email analogy, where you can use any provider to access the same email network preventing vendor lock-in, but i don’t think that’s very catchy.
“Decentralized network of forums” is probably the best way I’ve heard it described, as an elder millennial who grew up on multiple disparate forums.
The email analogy doesn’t resonate with me because I, as a Gmail user have less than nothing in common with any other Gmail user. On the other hand, the idea of being able to log into my car enthusiast forum and interact seamlessly with people from a video game enthusiast forum is much closer to how I think the ideal Lemmy experience would go.
Forum for the fediverse
“A forum for the Fediverse” is my preference
I would rework the other stuff, like the whole branding because all that hacker green doesn’t help in feeling the communities. And the images for the same reason… Also there are some features that are worthless listing like “you can have an avatar”
Also the censorship thing…
Let’s say that the homepage kinda reflects the state of lemmy people as a group right now and it’s not so nice imo
Focussing on being a clean forum with nested answers and human curated algorithm and idk, just pointing some low hanging fruits
On a side note I wonder if having the page as onboarding for users instead of explaining the software is the right target. Ideally it should be communities trying to outreach to have people on their servers, not the software asking to join people who use the software (?)
But I digress.
On a marketing level point of view, while we are clearly the small fish, it’s not bad to leverage being enemies of Reddit. Like in the past we’ve seen much more Apple vs Microsoft while now they ignore each other.
“Reddit if was not owned by venture capitalists who keep ruining your life” lol (too long)
Anyway, is there any kind of data to know if people actually join lemmy by joinlemmy site?
A community poll for Lemmy users would be good.
Youre right, the whole website could use an update and redesign. As none of us Lemmy maintainers are designers, its very hard to do this well.
There is no tracking/statistics on join-lemmy.org, but some new users mentioned it, and mentioned that the site could use improvements (which I’m doing now).
social media without the censorship
The best sentence will depend on the target audience. Is there a way to know who would be that audience?
Also, responding more directly to your question, I’ve got a frame challenge: What about two or three short sentences, like what Mastodon does?
A platform that is truly democratic. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.
A platform where you’re truly free. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.
A platform that can’t enshittify. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.
That third one I like, because it’s a differentiator that Lemmy has in comparison with ButterflyX or whatever Jack the Twitter Guy is working on right now; Lemmy is not at risk of enshitifying, unlike ButterflyX.
Also, if it’s important to differentiate Lemmy from Mastodon or other Fediverse platforms, the sentences could start with “A discussion platform”.
Also, here’s a take where I tried to make no reference to electronics:
A bustling room filled with tables, each filled with people talking about what they find interesting, where the conversation topics are always chosen by the table and always changing, and where you’re free to set up your own tables with your own topics.
or, more succinctly,
A bustling room filled with tables, where each table is filled with people talking about what they find interesting, a room where you’re free to set up your own tables with your own topics.
Also, I just realized that every time that I edit this post you get notified becase I @ed you. Sorry!
And, finally, happy cake day, @nutomic@lemmy.ml!
I’d love to edit my previous post but I don’t wanna spam you.
As to target audiences, I think it could be helpful to specify the personas that we’re building the sentences for. Does the persona know what the Fediverse is? Do they know what enshittification is? Do they know what open source is? Do they have strong opinions about surveillance capitalism (even if they don’t know the word for it)? Or are they clueless regarding all of these topics?
My suggestion assumes some knowledge of these topics. To be clear, if I’d single out a suggestion of mine, it’d be:
A discussion platform that can’t enshittify. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.
The target audience is basically anyone who comes across Lemmy somewhere, looks for it via search engine and ends up on join-lemmy.org. So in other words, anyone really. Including people without any prior knowledge, nor technical knowledge.
On joinmastodon.org I only see a single sentence at the top: “Social networking that’s not for sale.”
Btw I didnt get any extra notifications from this comment, so no worries. And thank you!
Ah. Thanks for the target audience explanation.
What I mean with Mastodon is that, immediately after “Social networking that’s not for sale”, you see more sentences: “Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see. Radically different social media, back in the hands of the people.”
I think the technical details, such as open source and federation are not going to click with people who don’t know those ideas. However, open source and federation can create something that, for those people, is valuable.
So the question is: what does Lemmy offer that clicks with people who don’t know technical details?
This is up for discussion, of course. But I’d argue there’s “freedom”, “choice”, “human (and not corporate) communities”, “made for people, not for profits”…
That leads me to my suggestion:
A discussion platform that is truly free. You choose your feed, not a corporation. You choose where to set up your account, not a corporation. You choose what communities to be a part of, not a corporation.
or
A discussion platform that is truly free. You choose your feed. You choose where to set up your account. You choose what communities to be a part of. You choose, not a corporation
The bolded text is like Mastodon’s first sentence. The rest of the text is like Mastodon’s other sentences.
The technical details can be explained later in the page, just like Mastodon does it.
Ah yes there is the short description at the top. At the moment it talks a lot about “it”, good idea to make it more focused on “you”. How about this?
Lemmy is a discussion platform that is truly free. You choose which communities to be a part of and which posts to see. You can use extensive blocking and filtering tools to sort and curate your feed. You are in control and not a corporation, so there is no tracking, advertising nor secret algorithms. And you can follow the development in the open, or get your own ideas included.
Lemmy talk about it: open source for open discourse.
Or just:
Lemmy talk: open source for open discourse.
Lemmy talk: open discourse with open source.
Why not shorten ever further and make it: open source discourse
Yep, you’re right!
I vote this one.
Social media for the antisocial.
No tears from peers, a place to leer without fear (No corporate ears.)
Link aggregation without the agitation.
Look at stuff. Do things. No ads.
These are more like taglines.
Every time I described Lemmy or Reddit to my friends I’ve always said that it’s something like “A forum with more fora inside”, and then I explain the federated part.
