Did Reddit get massive because of Digg users making a beeline towards them or were they already big before that?
Why is everyone in such a hurry to make lemmy into a Reddit clone?
I would just love to see more users in the communities I care about! I loved Reddit for that reason alone. Here I can find the memes, news, and opinions that I care about, but none of my hobbies. I really miss it to be real with you.
Yeah, I get annoyed at the people acting like this place is perfectly fine as it is. It isn’t. It lacks content. It has repetitive posts. And as far as I’m concerned, growth will iron out those problems over time. It doesn’t need to be all at once, but I am looking forward to it. 60k active monthly users is nothing. Reddit has 450 million active users. It’s hard to overstate how much larger Reddit is. Even if you’re a hipster opposed to Lemmy growing to a Reddit size, it isn’t even remotely close to being that large yet. And as far as I’m concerned it still hasn’t reached the mass it needs to turn it into a super engaging community just yet. I’m rooting for it to become more engaging and I’m doing everything I can to increase that engagement, but we really don’t need the smug in denial “it’s perfect right now” attitude.
Reddit has 450 million active users.
Yes, but how many are bots? Trolls? Bigots? Spammers? Antivaxxers? There is some content that lemmy is better without.
I’m wondering if it’s possible to get the same level of broad esoteric discussion without also welcoming the same toxicity that made reddit the superfund site it is today. Is toxicity a function of size, or is it a function of an environment in which toxicity is encouraged?
I used to moderate a fairly large subreddit and I think I can answer the bots question. There are millions. We’d get hit with multiple spam campaigns with thousands of bot accounts that were seemingly prepared for months in advance to get around our account age restrictions. Most users would never see any of it because we managed to catch most of them. It also happened under almost every post that hit /r/all.
I wish more subs were run like how you described yours. In my experience, too many mods were willing to overlook obvious bot accounts (new to the sub, just older than the account age cutoff, no history, all showing up to the sub for the first time on a given thread and saying the same thing) as long as the bots were sayin’ stuff they liked.
It’s why I was so happy when lemmy became popular enough to sustain conversation. I hope the mods here and on other instances don’t engage in the behavior I described, as I consider it principally responsible for the toxicity that ate reddit.
The bots we had were mostly karma-farming to appear legitimate in other subs or were spamming links to phishing sites and such. Lately we’ve had some that were trying to write actual comments but due to our subreddit language being German, it just came out as garbled english-german nonsense. It was a humor/meme-based sub, so we were an easy community to target.
Is toxicity a function of size, or is it a function of an environment in which toxicity is encouraged?
Both.
Exactly. One doesn’t happen without the other. If growth equals increase if trolls/bots- then grown equals strict moderation. Struck moderation equals power hungry mods.
Voila! You now have Reddit.
Well said.
For me what made Reddit great was not the big wildly popular communities. It was the small niche communities that were (IMHO) only able to form in their shadow and you need a critical mass of people before you can have that.
if mastodon is a federated twitter clone, what else is lemmy than a federated reddit clone?
For me it is not a clone, it is a replacement/improvement.
Evolution or revolution?
Why not both!
Bigger than right now would be nicer to fill out the niche communities.
Because I’m tired of reading the same stories all day long. I like the latest news and lemmy is slow.
So we don’t have to move again.
because reddit has all of the content and ease of use while lemmy has neither and we want to see lemmy succeed.
Lemmy is succeeding just fine right now.
Reddit’s “content” is way more rage-baiting, fake AITA stories, culture wars both-sideisms, publicfreakout schadenfreude, and basic-tier iFunny memes, re-posted by waves of bots. All reddit is “succeeding” at is being a firehose of diarrhea.
I prefer Lemmy’s slant towards technology-related news, and polite discussion in earnest without painfully unfunny “and my axe” responses.
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Was Lemmy not designed as a reddit clone? Community/post/comment system with upvotes and downvotes, volunteer moderators, generally the same sorting filters, crossposting - hell, they even display your date of join as a “cake day”. The influence is obvious.
That’s not a bad thing, take the good and leave the bad, but if anything I think Lemmy needs more unique features that Reddit never had.
If you want lemmy to be like Reddit, you’re not getting the bad without the good. When it grows in number, it grows in trolls, bots, fascists and pedophiles.
Take your pick.
Yes, it will have those things, and in fact already does. There are trolls, bots, fascists, and even pedophiles already. This is an extremely sad and disturbing reality of online spaces. The only thing we can do about it is ensure moderators and instance admins have the tools to deal with it.
Right. However the more popular it gets, the more moderation will be needed. See what heavy moderation did to Reddit?
You couldn’t even post on many subs without proper formatting and or your posts were removed if you didn’t put it in the megathread.
I’d rather lemmy remain small.
See what heavy moderation did to Reddit?
I was a moderator on Reddit off and on for like six years, so yes I did. Heavy moderation is the only thing that kept larger communities on topic - r/Askhistorians being the shining example. The amount of effort required to keep spaces from devolving into low effort hodpodges of memes and such was notable.
But it was worth it. Lemmy will grow, and moderation will probably have to grow as well, but I hope that the mod-user relationship here will be healthier and we can rely more on good faith interpretations of rules so we don’t need to resort to pages of detailing no one will read.
r/Askhistorians being the shining example.
You are so right about this! I will goto whatever service has that again
And how do you filter out the heavy handedness of mods like what was on WhitePeopleTwitter where if you didn’t fall in line with whatever agenda they followed, you were banned and reported to Reddit admin?
With growth, you can expect this to happen here.
Well I expect that the federation model that allows multiple communities to grab the same namespace combined with instance admins that will be more active in removing openly hostile users and mods will help.
Its a really great Fark.com
So that I can use site:lemmy.world instead of site:reddit.com when I’m googleing things
For more interesting and easily discoverable content. Really that’s what people want at the end of the day.
Idk, for people that left their ex, y’all are sure obsessed with your ex.
I think we should prioritize SEO.
If you get a link to a Lemmy post you can’t see the contents nor the comments of the post until you click a further link. Or at least I can’t.
And that means google can’t either.
We need to get to the point where people are adding “Lemmy” to their search posts like they do for Reddit today.
Doing a google search for “best budget backpack Lemmy” should bring up results like “best budget backpack Reddit” does today.
This isn’t the only answer but it’s a big one. Having both the communities where people can authoritatively answer niche questions and the ability for new people to find those communities/questions is absolutely critical.
It doesn’t help that the thread URLs are some old school “post/4268567”.
I also noticed that the markdown format is included (e.g. the hashmarks for headings, asterisks for bold/italics) in search results while every other site doesn’t look like that.
Yea it’s a shame the URL isn’t
post/5784366/title_formatted_for_url
I think people are forgetting that Reddit didn’t start off with communities (subs), they came later. Reddit got big the same way all sites that don’t have a built in audience (e.g. Threads users basically being Insta users) - time and commitment.
Lemmy is not going to be as big as Reddit for a long, long time. Everyone has fallen into this habit of thinking all Reddit mods are power crazy egomaniacs and some are, no doubt, but the good subs on Reddit required dedicated time and effort to build up. Curating, introducing and constantly readjusting rules and expectations and at some point a good sub reaches a tipping point and it’s popular.
All this will take time with Lemmy. Community mods will need to be as dedicated as Reddit mods were. And, as a side issue, this commitment to making and keeping a community great is what spez and his idiot gremlins have just thrown away. It’s not about user numbers for Reddit, it’s now a priority for them to get mods who are willing and able to put in the amount of work the mods they just alienated had. Subreddit engagement stats are mostly going down take a look at the number of posts and the number of comments for r/askreddit, it’s a steady decline.
Lemmy might not ever get as big as Reddit but it will grow if mods stay committed and users keep posting and commenting. If that happens, that same tipping point will come.
What is most interesting about that site you linked is further down the page - it shows the number of subs still growing - but that graph cuts off at 2022. The post and comments per day plunged in early July and have not recovered. And the top poster and commenter is the same user - u/deleted
And as you say, reddit has alienated a heap of good mods - and they are the true foundation of a site like this, not users
I checked a politics, publicfreakout and trashy, they all had subscribers going through the roof. I think they’re fucking with the sub numbers.
When do the sub number counts finish… if its 2022, like it is with askreddit, thats why. A graph going up to this month would likely show a dropoff
July of this year, hover over the last and it says July 2023. https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
That’s interesting to see this steady decline way before the most controversial changes.
I think that may be stemming from the earlier changes when they shut down a large number of fairly popular but controversial subs, that drove some active commenters away. Plus they started getting very ban happy in the last couple of years, that absolutely has a damping effect
Also, there needs to be an established code of conduct in how to interact with users. For example, if i make a post on reddit that violates a subs rules, it get‘s either removed or put in quarantine and I get a message so I know what happened. In Lemmy, your posts may just vanish without you ever knowing how or why.
I mean I don’t mind the current state of Lemmy right now, in fact I’m actually quite liking how it is right now. It’ll probably take a lot of time to even get on the same level as Reddit if it ever does, however I’m seeing so much users, moderators, and devs who are committed to making this platform work and that in and of itself is amazing to see. Things like this actually show there is a human side to technology and that we can make it work. Anyways that’s my food for thought.
I’m pretty much of the same mind, but I do think a user base increase would be good. Some of the subs are kind of dead right now, and that’s a bit sad. But I think the quality of the average user is WAY higher than reddit it anywhere else I’ve hung out. And that quality is related to the quantity being low. What’s the right size? I have no idea. We’ll see how it goes.
Dopamine reward loops, good content and a reasonable UX.
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If you gave a good, detailed answer with sources, you got rewarded for your effort with upvotes more than a low effort answer. This kind of appreciation motivated quality content generators to generate more content.
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as usercount grew to a certain threshold, you basically got users from all sorts of domains generating quality content covering pretty much all topics
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while official UX was horrible and 3rd party apps were needed, the basic system of sorting and indendation of answers allowed for long, detailed discussions which could be navigated and followed effortlessly.
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“If you make it, they will come”.
It maight not be fast but there is huge potential from what I have experienced so far.
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The software architect of lemmy is unfortunately doomed. The very concept of how it works means exponential storage and bandwidth needs as it grows in sublemmits and instances. A better design would have been instances being the sublemmits themselves, and leaving it up to the clients to subscribe and aggregate them into a feed. This way scaling is a lot more horizontal, and communities that get too big can scale up individually or purge old data without affecting the rest of the system.
I assume this is a larger theme across the Fediverse?
Could you expand on what causes the massive bandwidth needs? I’m have a vague idea but I’d be very curious to know.
If the design itself is bad, then something will eventually spring up that will replace it. That’s the beauty of nascent platforms; they haven’t completely cornered the market.
Reddit got massive because it had very vibrant communities and lots of them that inspired a loyalty in its uses.
I was brought to Reddit by a previous user, and I brought several of my friends to Reddit.
For lemmy to get there, you need thousands of communities.
Want to know stuff about Rav4? There’s a sub for it.
Want to know about accounting? There’s a sub for it?
Want to know about what’s happening in Oklahoma city? There’s a sub.
Lemmy isn’t anywhere close to this point. In fact most subs are very dead.
Reddit didn’t start out like that either. If Lemmy is to grow, it will take years of dedicated active use from us.
Reddit was big before the Digg migration and got bigger still. It didn’t happen overnight, it took many years. Reddit also benefited from celebrities and other influencers using it to become the default site for this type of content. Lemmy’s problem is there’s no void to fill, Reddit took a hit from the API fiasco but it’s still going strong because 99% of the users didn’t care, or returned soon after. Every subreddit I was in that chose to close down has returned to normal operation, and it’s not even 2 months later.
I like Lemmy, I’m going to keep coming here to see how it grows. Right now, it’s not even close to being a Reddit alternative. It’s barely hanging on, but I wish it the best.
My experience has been the communities are growing and getting more active. I’m seeing a lot of new communities with new posts in my feed as well.
Almost every subreddit is fun until it grew then it goes downhill. I agree with people not wanting this to grow like Reddit.
As why Reddit grew, Digg is one and another is the format was perfect for the time.
Although growing too large not desired for Lemmy, but theoretically if you want to grow it:
First major issues and outages need to be dealt with.
Developing and deployment best practices should be followed.
Registration must be easy and open
SEO optimization
Securing funds
Getting noticed by the media often which may require some controversy.
Mod tools and supporting brands.
As you see many of these ,at end up be bad for users.
I think the turning point to mainstream appeal will be when major existing websites switch their attached discussion forums to Lemmy, which will inject a huge amount of new users into the ecosystem.
Reddit initially wanted companies to be able to set up their own official subreddit as their official forum and the private subreddit system is designed for that function.
So, say something like cnn or tmz set up their own Lemmy instance where they only post their own content for people to discuss, as having that inbuilt existing userbase mitigates the most painful part of setting up a new social media. The share button might get replaced with “go to our lemmy instance” button, and the snowball will just get bigger and bigger.
The day that gets rolling is the end of web 2.0 social media as we know it.
Hi, can you explain what Web 2.0 means? Is it an actual software version or just referring to the currently pervasive paradigm of having one central authority owning and running a website? What comes after Web 2.0? Is there a Web 3.0?
Search engines, they don’t catalog Fediverse sites properly because of the heavy dependency on domains! :/
I imagine these things would make Lemmy explode more:
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Influencer influencers influencers. Have Mr Beast mention how he will give half a million dollars to whomever makes the best post on a Lemmy board or something and you have it made.
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Individual users can find a way to profit from it, be it pushing a t-shirt to only fans or whatever and you’ll see an influx in ads, er, posts.
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Nnnnoooooooo! Don’t make Lemmy a top website! The more popular something is, the more vapid and full of spewers it becomes.
