Memes about the Fediverse.
Other relevant communities:
I mean have they seen how good Ice Cubes and Mlem look? How can they choose the default Twitter and Reddit apps over those masterpieces.
Yeah, a lot of people have quit Twitter over Musk being a huge douche and migrated to... Blusky. And they think they've done something really great. It's sad.
To be fair, Twitter is so bad now that Bsky is an improvement.
And Bsky has to appear trustful as they need to attract users.
That's how they all begin.
Of course, but if the most urgent priority is to get people off Twitter, then Bsky is a better alternative at the moment.
Hopefully at some point Mastodon and Keyforks will catch up on discoverability
It blows my mind that all these services announcing their leaving of X haven't spun up their own Mastodon instance.
social.transitchicago.com sounds just fine to me.
It's easier for them to join a centralized platform like Bluesky, be it for the users count alone
Mastodon is not a twitter clone.
Bluesky is a twitter clone, without musk. That's all these people want. They've never heard about the fediverse. They're not protesting corporate centralism.
They just don't like twitter being a right wing agenda. They want a twitter experience circa before musk bought it, simply because it was left wing before.
That's bluesky. That's not mastodon.
Bluesky is...fine. Currently, it operates the way that I wish Twitter did. It lets you curate your feed, it shows the feed in chronological order, and finally and most importantly it has a critical mass of users so there is actual content there, rather than every 5th post complaining about how everyone is on another platform or not using Linux.
Really, the only issue I have with it is that it is owned by a corporation. But like Twitter and Reddit, I am willing to abandon it for something else when it gets shittier.
I guess most people don’t want to wade through dozens of “eat the rich” posts every time thay open their favorite social media platform.
Nah, people get overwhelmed by choosing a server instance.
Both true.
Or any political content at all. Most people just want to look at funny cats or memes.
Other people want absurd humor without the racist degeneracy of other outlets.
If all the average users were here, it would be just as awful as Reddit became when it hit mainstream acceptance level.
Remember that subreddits there were quality when small but sort of became too large to have character after a certain threshold, I seem to recall 300k subscribers and up being about where that delineation was.
Lemmy could stand to be more popular, but not too popular or it would attract the bottom feeders that make stupid one liner comments and upvote wrong answers.
Enjoy the smaller lemmy while it lasts
Edited for clarity, gotta drop the reddit shorthand
"The problem isn't corporate, the problem is audience size."
Shut the fuck up about this.
Lemmy isn't anything right now. No impact or relevance, no practical effect in terms of community and influence. It's just small conversations and mild entertainment.
If you enjoy that, go ahead. But don't campaign to hold the whole fediverse project back.
Just get together in a niche instance with your small town types and defederate if the project successfully becomes a full fledged alternative. The Internet needs a successful full scale alternative to corporate social media to have a chance at recovery from enshittification.
In other words: Advertising works.
Lemmy doesn't have much to offer compared to the "billionaire run" social media.
This is the real answer. I forget the exact numbers, but the vast majority of people on reddit are just lurkers. When you have an enormous user base, that still translates to lots of content to consume. Lemmy has way less content and very small communities (if any) for most niches.
Of course you can point to bots on reddit inflating those numbers and that Lemmy has more meaningful interaction, but that's not what most are looking for that are on reddit.
Also, as others mentioned, there's no negative engagement algorithm drivers on mastodon like there is on Twitter. Fact is, a lot of people just like to be angry and combative.
Good point, if I just wanted to lurk reddit would be fine for that purpose. But the users are so wretchedly toxic that commenting is a no-go.
Voyager, Thunder and Arctic blow the Reddit app out of the water
The problem is that the app doesn't mean much to people if it's not serving up the content they want.
This is not entirely true, at least as phrased here.
So all of this is not "nothing", even though yes it is also not "everything" either.
It's unfortunate, but there's a real chicken-and-egg problem here. Those of us who are on here are here because of how strongly we believe in the ideal of it, but for the average person who just cares about talking about their favourite interests, there's a serious lack.
I'll use two examples, one that you clearly care about, and one that I do. /r/stopkillinggames is hardly super active, but in the last 3 weeks it's had 11 posts with a cumulative 68 comments. !stopkillinggames@lemm.ee, by contrast, has had just 8 posts, all by a mod, with just 6 total comments. /r/AgeofMythology is very active with artistic appreciation posts, balance discussion, and advice just within the last 24 hours. !aom@lemm.ee has failed to attract a single post from anyone other than myself, and it's been over 3 months since anyone other than myself has left a comment. It's disheartening, not being able to have conversations about the stuff you love, when you know that just over there it would be so easy.
Lemmy's excellent if you want to talk about politics, or open source, but there's not a huge amount outside of that. The Star Trek communities are pretty good, but they pale in comparison to a great sub like /r/daystrominstitute, and the amount and depth of discussion on ttrpg.network is slim compared to /r/pathfinder2e, /r/dndgreentext, /r/dndnext, etc. And these are some of the best-supported hobbies on Lemmy.
So as much as I'm staying here and trying to do my part to make it better, and frequently encourage others to join...I also can't really blame people who don't.
(I feel less charitably towards people on Twitter. Because that place is a total shithole, and Mastodon is surprisingly good, if you like microblogging platforms. Plus even Bluesky is better than staying on Twitter, and it has most of the celebrities and micro-celebrities some people might want to follow.)
It’s disheartening, not being able to have conversations about the stuff you love, when you know that just over there it would be so easy.
Have you tried more generic gaming communities? !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works is quite active, I'm sure a regular thread about AoM there would definitely get some traction (or even just a one-time promotion thread)
The problem with more generic communities is that you might be sharing it with more people, but they're not people who are engaged with the topic. And that's what I really miss. The deep conversations on theorising, community drama, etc. that can only come from a large number of people who are really interested in the subject. Posting to a generic community limits the type of discussions you can have to those that are more accessible to a generic audience.
As another example, just now I've been playing Kerbal Space Program for the first real time (I toyed around with it briefly many years ago, but didn't try career mode and completing contracts). Right now, I'm struggling to understand why something I'm doing isn't working. I would love to be able to go to !kerbalspaceprogram and ask an audience of people who know what they're talking about. Sure, I could try my luck in !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works or something even more generic like !games@lemmy.world. But neither of those are really the appropriate venue for something that's so specifically only of interest to people who know about KSP. Posting "I've been playing KSP lately and really enjoying it" makes sense on patientgamers. Posting a detailed scenario of what I've been doing and what I've done in the past, and asking why it doesn't work for me right now even though it seemed to work before...probably doesn't.
Another example: I've been posting every useful or interesting guide or analysis of Age of Mythology I've come across to !aom. It wouldn't really feel right to post that kind of thing to patientgamers. But I probably will post when the upcoming expansion comes out to more generic communities
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe posting niche game-specific content to generic communities is a good way to bring attention to them for more people who would be interested in it, while also bringing attention to an audience that didn't know they might be interested in it. I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this. Maybe I should put a post in !fedigrow@lemm.ee for this discussion?
To add to Blaze's point: as lemmy's still small, there's not much point to super specialized communities when the more general ones are "slow" enough that pretty much any post you make can remain "newest" for 2 days straight.
Honestly, if I weren't politically as far left as I am, lemmy would have scared me off a long time ago.
And you need to be a particular kind of weird person to sift all the random posts. The average user actually wants an algorithm.
You're talking about people that are content with "the internet" being google, facebook, instagram, snap, tiktok, youtube and twitter, nothing more.
As a non tech expert, in my view, the biggest concern for the fediverse to grow, presently, is how difficult it can be to sign up.
Go to a instance listing, try and choose one, signup... all of this should be acessible but mostly invisible for the average user. The user should only be questioned what sort of content they mostly intend to browse, have a NSFW explicit option, perhaps a server location preference, and that should be it.
Beneath the hood, this process should trigger a call to the network requesting a user slot for any server that could cater to that generic profile the prospect user filled. Even bans should be handled differently, in my opinion.
Imagine to go over all that... To end up on .ml
You're 100% on point. From first attempt to getting my final account it took me a few weeks. Had an instance close down days after joining, another blocking communities I was interested, sign up denied...
In fucking reddit you don't even need a real email
The fediverse is like a cafe with an unusual menu and interesting conversations. Most social media is like a McDonald's in Altoona PA.
I wish that lemmy had the population to sustain more niche communities.
Which one is Ice Cubes? First time I hear about it
It is an IOS client for mastodon that uses a glassy design aesthetic.
Another contributing factor is that Lemmy & Mastodon "care about privacy". Odd, in my opinion, for a public social network.
Their interpretation of that is that they don't send referer headers. So to any site receiving Lemmy traffic, we're invisible.
That coke-rush is just temporary and afterwards, leaves you feeling like this:
Obligatory reference to SNL's parody take, though more for Oscar the Grouch: https://youtu.be/kqpak5lFxvs.
Honestly, I would use Lemmy more except that some posts are just people being overly negative or strangely political in the comments. There are good communities without this don’t get me wrong but it can get old