Be friendly to other Lemmites. Encourage them to post and comment.
Post and comment whenever you can.
If you have niche hobbies or interests, try posting about them into an appropriate community.
Social networks and message boards get more popular as they get more users. Bring friendly and posting regularly should help us maintain the user base.
I personally enjoy that Lemmy isn't as popular as Reddit. It feels more home-grown and friendly because it's not as large. That being said, contributing to and engaging with the content you enjoy is a good start. Finding a niche here can be great and there are tons of interesting communities to contribute to!
Network effects are quite difficult to overcome. Lemmy’s largest influxes of users have been when Reddit does something unpopular enough to warrant people looking for other places. Same was true when Reddit became popular because Digg made bad decisions, or Facebook when MySpace did.
The answer is that Lemmy almost assuredly will never be as popular, but at least its future is not dictated by the profits of a company, or censorship imposed by or on that company.
The best we can do is make Lemmy a viable alternative (it is) and ensure it is of a high quality.
Enshittification is a symptom of capitalism at work. Over time products are laser-focused to be as profitable as possible. Scale isn't the issue, capitalism is.
You're totally right. Lemmy has no way of earning money outside of donations and the only way to earn money from donations is to make an actually good platform, no one will donate if it becomes shit.
I agree somewhat in the context of centralization. But the spread of the fediverse is a good thing. If Lemmy grows, alongside decentralization, then it should stay true to its roots.
Because of a severe lack of content. On Reddit you can find a community for basically anything. On Lemmy there are only a few alive ones. E.g. there are very few alive country communities.
There only thing Reddit has over Lemmy is their awesome niche subreddits. Outside of that they have nothing and being more like Reddit is not something we want. With attention comes heavier moderation.
I would say it’s slightly more than this: The vast majority of Lemmy is comprised of only a few things—politics, tech, memes—and it’s hard to find discussions or opinions about almost everything else. The main value of reddit to me is (was?) that you could find a lot of input from people involved in a wide variety of fields, from niche hobbies to more generic areas of interest like history, philosophy, or medicine.
I’ve actually found that there are people on Lemmy with similar levels of expertise, and they’re willing to share it just as well, but they have fewer opportunities to do so, because very few threads get posted outside the 3 main topics. Several times I’ve come across useful and interesting insight, but it was in the comments of posts only vaguely related, so it would have been difficult to find intentionally if I hadn’t run into it.
So, perhaps, this is what could improve Lemmy: starting more discussions about different topics. Perhaps this will attract more people to read them, which might attract more people to post.
Factually untrue. There just aren't enough people interested in certain topics who are regular users of Lemmy & Piefed to have those communities be thriving.
Why are you being so patronising? It does not work. I told you it doesn't work. Your patronising comments don't help. I've tried it. I've seen others try it. To get niche Communities off the ground requires a latent interest in that community's subject matter. You cannot just make it spring out of nowhere.
There's admittedly some things I miss from Reddit like bigger niche communities, but I would never want this to get as popular as reddit, because then you'll end up just getting the same problems as reddit down the road and we'll all have to migrate again. And who wants that?
If we could somehow keep the bigger Communities the same size they are now, while growing niche Communities, that would be ideal. It's logically impossible though.
I don't think the community is a reason to migrate away. If you end up disliking the community in lemmy then you are probably on the wrong instance, just chose the instance with the community you prefer.
For me I'm not using lemmy because I dislike the reddit community, Although that might be because I haven't spent enough time on reddit to hate it. But I am using lemmy because it has better privacy, it is not enshitified and it is not likely to ever become enshitified and it follows the ideals of decentralization and free software.
Up/Downvoting is so 2015. Instead, comment on any interesting posts, and especially the ones with zero comments. This platform is meant to be about discussion, and not just mindlessly sharing links or memes.
I, personally, am more inclined to check out a post if it has at least one (non-bot, non OP) comment.
Not everything needs to be put in words though. Simply saying "I agree" with nothing more to the comment is just wasting everyone's time, except for the single person they replied to getting an ego boost. The thing about comments is they're public, they're for more than just the recipient. You're trying to make comments like DMs, where people can privately circlejerk until they're both spent.
I understand what you mean, and agree that not everything needs to be put in words. At the same time though, it's really healthy to expose yourself to others even if you just write "I like the way you formulated this." or "Makes sense, I hadn't thought of it like this before". That way it turns into a real discussion - a bit like in the real 3d world.
Up/ downvoting is basically anonymous and adds nothing to the discussion.
And, sometimes, other users misunderstand our comments, and then we need to respond to them to get our point through. All of this is a healthy way to challenge our thinking.
Because there are not enough niche communities on Lemmy. For example as a queen fan, lemmy has no queen community but the r/queen community is thriving with many posts going up every day.
Also lemmy is currently very underfunded and the only way to really help that is by having more people.
At one point reddit also had no queen community. Someone created it and built it into what it is now. You can do the same here, that's kinda the point.
You might be right, but this would only work to an extent. You also need enough people who are interested in in that niche community, you can't just put a ton of effort into creating a community and sharing it around and expect it to become popular.
Reddit is a for profit website owned by rightwing idiots pretending to be a community space rather than a volunteer effort to help rich reddit chuds train their AI crap.. so the problem isn't inherently about the popularity here.
Regardless though, I want more people here based on the principle that when good things happen to me it is better if they happen to others and I should endeavor to destroy any barrier to seeing a fluid relationship between my wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around me.
I think the ideal would be not how to make it "like Reddit", but how to help niche and smaller communities have more members. Unfortunately, I think the easiest way is just to get more users to Lemmy in general.
It is not just niche topics, I find quite a bit of things that are not (in my opinion) niche, yet there is very little participation in Lemmy. Take for for example Postgresql. By now it is one of the most widely used databases yet there is a minuscule number of posts and users in the related communities.
Another example. Just did a search for largest communities in Reddit.. One of them is music with an estimated 38 million redditors. In Lemmy the largest two music communities seem to be 9.9K (![email protected]) and 18.9K (![email protected]). That is an astronomical difference for something that is as mainstream as it gets given the broad topic.
I think the best each one of us can do is to participate and post as often as possible in the communities we would like to see grow.
I understand the motive, I too am on some niche communities that sometimes didn't have posts for months. For that i use reddit (but the old interface). Now let's see your question.
No, we can't make lemmy as popular as reddit, but we can turn lemmy into a reddit twin, and make it popular, by pushing only one instance like .world.
The social media that popularised fediverse the most was mastodon, and yet it's because they pushed mastodon.social as the default, making a large part of the userbase think that mastodon is only mastodon.social.
People do not even notice things more complicated than buttons "join", "login", or "post". They are lost on join-lemmy.org because they don't know why they should choose a server, read description, understand whatever is federation, and they'll prefer going back to their comfort zone.
But hey, social media experience enshittifies as the userbase gets bigger, and i came here by fleeing reddit so please don't
People do not even notice things more complicated than buttons “join”, “login”, or “post”. They are lost on join-lemmy.org because >they don’t know why they should choose a server, read description, understand whatever is federation, and they’ll prefer going back >to their comfort zone.
Agree on this 100%. When I first found Lemmy I had no idea what instance to join, why it matter, or.. why it really didn't matter all that much.. It was just confusing.. and the first instance I joined ended up closing.. which was less than an ideal experience as it was without notice and the instance just disappeared. Took me days to even find out why they had closed. Then took me several more days to find the next instance to join.
Federation is both a weakness and a strength in that there may be people who get turned off by that initial complexity.
Then, some people who join may see low volumes on communities they care about and end up not joining.
Why do people always go for Reddit as this comparison? It's not even the most popular social media. Is it because the question "How can we make Lemmy as popular as Facebook" makes it clear why that isn't something the users would want?
I imagine it's because Reddit is closer to the format of Lemmy and it's something we're more familiar with. I also wouldn't have known that Facebook was more popular because it's not something that anyone in my circle uses, but a lot of them use Reddit.
if you mean all the niche communities, then sub Reddit could provide a link to a lemmy alternative but no sub Reddit allows promotion so it's pointless.
since being banned from Reddit, i have felt there is something missing since i can't interact in my niche communities any more sadly
When I'm on Reddit, which is only if I fully exhaust myself on Lemmy that day, and I see someone complaining about Reddit, I make a point to let them know about Lemmy.
We should probably gate keep discussion to try keep the standards high in threads where it makes sense. But from what ive seen its already pretty good and conversation feels very human. If we got a influx from reddit id want them to adapt to lemmy culture and not come here and be redditors.
Banned my 8 year old account for spam. God damn the account was not even active for 4 months why did you ban it reddit? And no replies from mods either. I liked reddit but lemmy is nice too and niche!
For one , think lemmy's default U[XI] could use some improvement
Needs more diverse userbase that's not just (tech|news)
Maybe ATproto support ? Wafrn (activitypub tumblr clone) seems to integrate it , bluesky has more diverse userbase (2nd point above's common complaint about activitypub side of the 'verse and wy peops tend to go to bsky instead)
Bluesky is a for profit venture with a marketing budget it uses to sell the idea the platform is decentralized.
Bluesky is not decentralized and there is no realistic business plan proposed for how to lucratively monetize a truly decentralized network. Bluesky MUST turn a profit, this isn't an inconvenient detail, it is a crisis the company is on the clock to solve like any heavily speculative venture capital funded startup is.
The only way this works is if actual meaningful decentralization is always "on the horizon" for Bluesky as something the for profit company can periodically point to and say "look how close we are!" while never taking meaningful steps closer.
Bluesky silicon valley techbros will point to their cool blogpost about how they set up a hobbyist project on Bluesky outside of the central network and it will remain a pipedream or like the end of a rainbow for 99.9% of us, an impossible promise that flies away as fast away as we chase it.
Bluesky theoretically has the capacity to be decentralized. I am sure people will show up in this comment thread and provide a whole lot of technical specifications about mostly proof of concept features that demonstrate that Bluesky is in some sense technically decentralized. Maybe not anymore? That seems a bit less common these days it seems.
To all of those responses theoretical or prophesized lol I ask in turn -why then has the CEO of Bluesky not ruled out serving ads to users as a way of monetizing the currently unprofitable nascient social network?
This isn't a conversation about details no matter how much people will try to steer it there with an air of expert authority. This is a conversation about values and how we embue them in the structures of our communities.
Bluesky is a for-profit business with investors who will seek a return on their investment. Until proven otherwise we must assume they will monetize similarly to the way every other social media company has so far. The words that people who work for Bluesky are less important than this basic economic reality.
::: spoiler To Explain Specifically
The basic idea of the Bluesky architecture at least how I understand it as it is implemented now is that yes anybody can host their own node to a network in Bluesky, and one can theoretically form alternative private networks between these nodes that are unconnected and thus decentralized from Bluesky the corporation/central servers themselves.
However, to join the main conversation, the main endorsed centralized channels of conversation all the people you want to talk to are on, you have to fully subscribe to the centralized authority of Bluesky and their servers in terms of everything, content moderation, ads, whatever when you participate in that "channel".
This might seem like a small detail, it seems like I just said that Bluesky can be used as a decentralized social network and yes theoretically it can, but the fediverse, mastodon, lemmy, piefed, peertube and other software projects were designed to mitigate the suffocating of the periphery that the network effect creates. Communities here can grow from small pieces floating nearby other larger pieces, it isn't an all or nothing participation in one massive commons controlled by a centralized power that allows small private alternatives to hopelessly wilt in its glare...
So then what about Threads? That is a more interesting question, but even in this case my first question is why is Meta interested fundamentally in the fediverse... and why now? If they had any interest other than a narrow attempt to hedge their bets and jump on the bandwagon so they can say they are doing so, they would have funded tiny little accelerator projects exploring this kind of thing LONG ago.
:::
If you listen to any of this long rant, please ask yourself this question. Why are massive social media companies, with so much cash on hand they might as well be small countries, only putting serious effort into creating decentralized social media technology and building out the infrastructure NOW after the path forward was already blazed? Where were they when the fediverse was still just mostly a cute idea without practical infrastructure built out and standards agreed to?
When talking about whether a specific corporate social media platform is decentralized or not you cannot ignore this context, these foundations had already been laid and fairly well built up by a small rag tag team of developers working almost entirely as volunteers funded on a yearly budget so small it wouldn't cover a single dinner check for the executives of Meta.
An aside... also consider the implications of the massive amount of computation that the architecture of Bluesky is set up to require for moderation of channels with the claims they are making about needing channels to processed by servers to be fed back to nodes in turn. Consider the difference in power/leverage between small nodes and massive communities in a situation where moderation is done by humans doing moderation (with automated screening tools to help maybe, but ultimately human) vs when moderation is done by applying a prohibitively expensive amount of computing power to the raw firehose of conversation. The difference is who gets to moderate public spaces and who doesn't.
I don't mean automatically replicate anything, that would be pointless. But I'm still a reddit user myself, and from time to time I stumble onto something interesting, and I'd like to let it live on Lemmy as well.
The nature of the fediverse means bad actors could run rampant, jumping instances and usernames to turn the place into a shitshow.
The only reason it isnt happening already is that we arent worth the trouble.
The only way to avoid it once a certain size is reached is a paid moderation team with a mission statement to stamp that shit out, which means a budget is needed which means backers/investors/advertising... and tou get where this is going.
One thing desperately needed is a method for mods/admins to check for brigading behaviour. This place (the threadiverse, not this community specifically) is crawling with more reactionary toxicity than almost anywhere I've ever seen, but it's mostly cowardly ignorant people silently hammering the downvote button rather than saying out loud the thing that would get them insta-banned.
Also real blocks are needed - all we have right now is a glorified 'mute'. If I block an asshole, not only is it because I don't want to see their BS, but I also don't want them to be able to see my posts & comments, at least not from that account.
Learn to not care about being downvoted. Unless there's some dumb rule about too many downvotes leads to disciplinary action. You want echo chambers, I'm trying to get away from echo chambers, as are a lot of others i imagine
Bigger isn't necessarily better
This.
Yeah, sure , but I believe there is a Goldilocks zone we are not yet in
That's not what she said :'(
It's a reoccurring statement but I miss the niche subreddits. Yes I know I can start my own but Im not looking to become a moderator.
Social networks and message boards get more popular as they get more users. Bring friendly and posting regularly should help us maintain the user base.
Lemmites, that's a good word.
🤗
I personally enjoy that Lemmy isn't as popular as Reddit. It feels more home-grown and friendly because it's not as large. That being said, contributing to and engaging with the content you enjoy is a good start. Finding a niche here can be great and there are tons of interesting communities to contribute to!
Network effects are quite difficult to overcome. Lemmy’s largest influxes of users have been when Reddit does something unpopular enough to warrant people looking for other places. Same was true when Reddit became popular because Digg made bad decisions, or Facebook when MySpace did.
The answer is that Lemmy almost assuredly will never be as popular, but at least its future is not dictated by the profits of a company, or censorship imposed by or on that company.
The best we can do is make Lemmy a viable alternative (it is) and ensure it is of a high quality.
But why ?
Anything that gets that big turns into a shithole. Enshitification will find a way. So just don't.
Enshittification is a symptom of capitalism at work. Over time products are laser-focused to be as profitable as possible. Scale isn't the issue, capitalism is.
The catholic church has entered the chat.
Religion is a superstructural element molded by the mode of production and utilized to reinforce it.
Yeah, but it was around before capitalism.
Capitalism is just one mode of production, religion has changed and shifted to suit each new mode of production over time.
You're totally right. Lemmy has no way of earning money outside of donations and the only way to earn money from donations is to make an actually good platform, no one will donate if it becomes shit.
Just look at every single big subreddit lmao. The only way to use that site is to leave every single default and join smaller communities.
I agree somewhat in the context of centralization. But the spread of the fediverse is a good thing. If Lemmy grows, alongside decentralization, then it should stay true to its roots.
Why would you want that? I think of lemmy as an old message board. I think it's better that way.
Because of a severe lack of content. On Reddit you can find a community for basically anything. On Lemmy there are only a few alive ones. E.g. there are very few alive country communities.
Why?
I'd say concentrate on quality over quantity.
Exactly. I sort through the top 6 hours or top daily. There’s not a lot of posts, but they are all high quality ones.
Reddit is the opposite. I have to go through trash to reach a few good posts. Bigger =/ better
There only thing Reddit has over Lemmy is their awesome niche subreddits. Outside of that they have nothing and being more like Reddit is not something we want. With attention comes heavier moderation.
+1
Reddit can keep all the gigasubs. Let the niche fandoms trickle over here…
I would say it’s slightly more than this: The vast majority of Lemmy is comprised of only a few things—politics, tech, memes—and it’s hard to find discussions or opinions about almost everything else. The main value of reddit to me is (was?) that you could find a lot of input from people involved in a wide variety of fields, from niche hobbies to more generic areas of interest like history, philosophy, or medicine.
I’ve actually found that there are people on Lemmy with similar levels of expertise, and they’re willing to share it just as well, but they have fewer opportunities to do so, because very few threads get posted outside the 3 main topics. Several times I’ve come across useful and interesting insight, but it was in the comments of posts only vaguely related, so it would have been difficult to find intentionally if I hadn’t run into it.
So, perhaps, this is what could improve Lemmy: starting more discussions about different topics. Perhaps this will attract more people to read them, which might attract more people to post.
Why would we want to do that? Please don't.
So that we can discuss more niche hobbies with other people who love that hobby.
if you build it they will come
Factually untrue. There just aren't enough people interested in certain topics who are regular users of Lemmy & Piefed to have those communities be thriving.
well you gotta advertise too of course.
Why are you being so patronising? It does not work. I told you it doesn't work. Your patronising comments don't help. I've tried it. I've seen others try it. To get niche Communities off the ground requires a latent interest in that community's subject matter. You cannot just make it spring out of nowhere.
ok, sorry
Ooooh, no thank you.
Have you seen that place? Gives me the icks.
Porn.
Like any type of media, you win by getting porn on your side. Bring the NSFW content creators over and everyone else will follow.
There's a whole instance dedicated to porn, isn't there? At least there used to be, is it still live? My instance is defederared from it so idk.
Yeah the porn here is kinda lacking.
lemmynsfw dot com is a whole instance dedicated to that
you'll thank me later
But we need more
It worked for VHS
I would rather not. Lemmy is not Reddit.
There's admittedly some things I miss from Reddit like bigger niche communities, but I would never want this to get as popular as reddit, because then you'll end up just getting the same problems as reddit down the road and we'll all have to migrate again. And who wants that?
If we could somehow keep the bigger Communities the same size they are now, while growing niche Communities, that would be ideal. It's logically impossible though.
I don't think the community is a reason to migrate away. If you end up disliking the community in lemmy then you are probably on the wrong instance, just chose the instance with the community you prefer.
For me I'm not using lemmy because I dislike the reddit community, Although that might be because I haven't spent enough time on reddit to hate it. But I am using lemmy because it has better privacy, it is not enshitified and it is not likely to ever become enshitified and it follows the ideals of decentralization and free software.
As popular as that swamp?
Oh fuck no dude. Let's fucking not
Please no
Up/Downvoting is so 2015. Instead, comment on any interesting posts, and especially the ones with zero comments. This platform is meant to be about discussion, and not just mindlessly sharing links or memes.
I, personally, am more inclined to check out a post if it has at least one (non-bot, non OP) comment.
I couldn't agree more.
I appreciate you putting it into words instead of just upvoting
Not everything needs to be put in words though. Simply saying "I agree" with nothing more to the comment is just wasting everyone's time, except for the single person they replied to getting an ego boost. The thing about comments is they're public, they're for more than just the recipient. You're trying to make comments like DMs, where people can privately circlejerk until they're both spent.
I understand what you mean, and agree that not everything needs to be put in words. At the same time though, it's really healthy to expose yourself to others even if you just write "I like the way you formulated this." or "Makes sense, I hadn't thought of it like this before". That way it turns into a real discussion - a bit like in the real 3d world.
Up/ downvoting is basically anonymous and adds nothing to the discussion.
And, sometimes, other users misunderstand our comments, and then we need to respond to them to get our point through. All of this is a healthy way to challenge our thinking.
upvoted.
downvoted.
Keep the light alive as Reddit further enshittifies
Why would we want it to be? More people is what ruins websites. A big part of why reddit sucks is the large number of idiots.
Because there are not enough niche communities on Lemmy. For example as a queen fan, lemmy has no queen community but the r/queen community is thriving with many posts going up every day.
Also lemmy is currently very underfunded and the only way to really help that is by having more people.
At one point reddit also had no queen community. Someone created it and built it into what it is now. You can do the same here, that's kinda the point.
You might be right, but this would only work to an extent. You also need enough people who are interested in in that niche community, you can't just put a ton of effort into creating a community and sharing it around and expect it to become popular.
There is a difference between "more people" and "as many people as reddit"
This is true.
Reddit is a for profit website owned by rightwing idiots pretending to be a community space rather than a volunteer effort to help rich reddit chuds train their AI crap.. so the problem isn't inherently about the popularity here.
Regardless though, I want more people here based on the principle that when good things happen to me it is better if they happen to others and I should endeavor to destroy any barrier to seeing a fluid relationship between my wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around me.
I think the ideal would be not how to make it "like Reddit", but how to help niche and smaller communities have more members. Unfortunately, I think the easiest way is just to get more users to Lemmy in general.
It is not just niche topics, I find quite a bit of things that are not (in my opinion) niche, yet there is very little participation in Lemmy. Take for for example Postgresql. By now it is one of the most widely used databases yet there is a minuscule number of posts and users in the related communities.
Another example. Just did a search for largest communities in Reddit.. One of them is music with an estimated 38 million redditors. In Lemmy the largest two music communities seem to be 9.9K (![email protected]) and 18.9K (![email protected]). That is an astronomical difference for something that is as mainstream as it gets given the broad topic.
I think the best each one of us can do is to participate and post as often as possible in the communities we would like to see grow.
I don't really care. If it gets more popular, that's fine with me, but I'm fine with how it is now.
I understand the motive, I too am on some niche communities that sometimes didn't have posts for months. For that i use reddit (but the old interface). Now let's see your question.
No, we can't make lemmy as popular as reddit, but we can turn lemmy into a reddit twin, and make it popular, by pushing only one instance like .world.
The social media that popularised fediverse the most was mastodon, and yet it's because they pushed mastodon.social as the default, making a large part of the userbase think that mastodon is only mastodon.social.
People do not even notice things more complicated than buttons "join", "login", or "post". They are lost on join-lemmy.org because they don't know why they should choose a server, read description, understand whatever is federation, and they'll prefer going back to their comfort zone.
But hey, social media experience enshittifies as the userbase gets bigger, and i came here by fleeing reddit so please don't
Agree on this 100%. When I first found Lemmy I had no idea what instance to join, why it matter, or.. why it really didn't matter all that much.. It was just confusing.. and the first instance I joined ended up closing.. which was less than an ideal experience as it was without notice and the instance just disappeared. Took me days to even find out why they had closed. Then took me several more days to find the next instance to join.
Federation is both a weakness and a strength in that there may be people who get turned off by that initial complexity.
Then, some people who join may see low volumes on communities they care about and end up not joining.
Why do people always go for Reddit as this comparison? It's not even the most popular social media. Is it because the question "How can we make Lemmy as popular as Facebook" makes it clear why that isn't something the users would want?
I imagine it's because Reddit is closer to the format of Lemmy and it's something we're more familiar with. I also wouldn't have known that Facebook was more popular because it's not something that anyone in my circle uses, but a lot of them use Reddit.
Its like did no one use forums before Reddit? NeoGaf, Linux Questions, planet quake.
lemmy is better than reddit, popularity will ruin it.
I don't think the majority of people here would be happy if that happened.
we dont.
if you mean all the niche communities, then sub Reddit could provide a link to a lemmy alternative but no sub Reddit allows promotion so it's pointless.
since being banned from Reddit, i have felt there is something missing since i can't interact in my niche communities any more sadly
I don’t want lemmy to become as popular as Reddit
Keep bringing it up on Reddit.
When I'm on Reddit, which is only if I fully exhaust myself on Lemmy that day, and I see someone complaining about Reddit, I make a point to let them know about Lemmy.
Pornography & Video games (let's say Walkthroughs)
porn walkthrough? That's an untapped market
What do you think JOI is?
I meant those as seperate😂
We should probably gate keep discussion to try keep the standards high in threads where it makes sense. But from what ive seen its already pretty good and conversation feels very human. If we got a influx from reddit id want them to adapt to lemmy culture and not come here and be redditors.
Lemmy must become the free pornography capital of the internet
i dont think the lemmy servers would be able to hold for that long
Our goal is to make Lemmy the best place it can be. Whether that recreates another platform or not
only time and reddit can do that.
Banned my 8 year old account for spam. God damn the account was not even active for 4 months why did you ban it reddit? And no replies from mods either. I liked reddit but lemmy is nice too and niche!
my ten year old account was flagged for ban evasion, banned from the site as a whole because they refuse to let humans do the work.
yeah exactly same, I filed the complaint to the reddit mods or site mods but no response!
You can’t
Bluesky is a for profit venture with a marketing budget it uses to sell the idea the platform is decentralized.
Bluesky is not decentralized and there is no realistic business plan proposed for how to lucratively monetize a truly decentralized network. Bluesky MUST turn a profit, this isn't an inconvenient detail, it is a crisis the company is on the clock to solve like any heavily speculative venture capital funded startup is.
The only way this works is if actual meaningful decentralization is always "on the horizon" for Bluesky as something the for profit company can periodically point to and say "look how close we are!" while never taking meaningful steps closer.
Bluesky silicon valley techbros will point to their cool blogpost about how they set up a hobbyist project on Bluesky outside of the central network and it will remain a pipedream or like the end of a rainbow for 99.9% of us, an impossible promise that flies away as fast away as we chase it.
Bluesky theoretically has the capacity to be decentralized. I am sure people will show up in this comment thread and provide a whole lot of technical specifications about mostly proof of concept features that demonstrate that Bluesky is in some sense technically decentralized. Maybe not anymore? That seems a bit less common these days it seems.
To all of those responses theoretical or prophesized lol I ask in turn -why then has the CEO of Bluesky not ruled out serving ads to users as a way of monetizing the currently unprofitable nascient social network?
This isn't a conversation about details no matter how much people will try to steer it there with an air of expert authority. This is a conversation about values and how we embue them in the structures of our communities.
Bluesky is a for-profit business with investors who will seek a return on their investment. Until proven otherwise we must assume they will monetize similarly to the way every other social media company has so far. The words that people who work for Bluesky are less important than this basic economic reality.
::: spoiler To Explain Specifically
The basic idea of the Bluesky architecture at least how I understand it as it is implemented now is that yes anybody can host their own node to a network in Bluesky, and one can theoretically form alternative private networks between these nodes that are unconnected and thus decentralized from Bluesky the corporation/central servers themselves.
However, to join the main conversation, the main endorsed centralized channels of conversation all the people you want to talk to are on, you have to fully subscribe to the centralized authority of Bluesky and their servers in terms of everything, content moderation, ads, whatever when you participate in that "channel".
This might seem like a small detail, it seems like I just said that Bluesky can be used as a decentralized social network and yes theoretically it can, but the fediverse, mastodon, lemmy, piefed, peertube and other software projects were designed to mitigate the suffocating of the periphery that the network effect creates. Communities here can grow from small pieces floating nearby other larger pieces, it isn't an all or nothing participation in one massive commons controlled by a centralized power that allows small private alternatives to hopelessly wilt in its glare...
So then what about Threads? That is a more interesting question, but even in this case my first question is why is Meta interested fundamentally in the fediverse... and why now? If they had any interest other than a narrow attempt to hedge their bets and jump on the bandwagon so they can say they are doing so, they would have funded tiny little accelerator projects exploring this kind of thing LONG ago.
:::
If you listen to any of this long rant, please ask yourself this question. Why are massive social media companies, with so much cash on hand they might as well be small countries, only putting serious effort into creating decentralized social media technology and building out the infrastructure NOW after the path forward was already blazed? Where were they when the fediverse was still just mostly a cute idea without practical infrastructure built out and standards agreed to?
When talking about whether a specific corporate social media platform is decentralized or not you cannot ignore this context, these foundations had already been laid and fairly well built up by a small rag tag team of developers working almost entirely as volunteers funded on a yearly budget so small it wouldn't cover a single dinner check for the executives of Meta.
An aside... also consider the implications of the massive amount of computation that the architecture of Bluesky is set up to require for moderation of channels with the claims they are making about needing channels to processed by servers to be fed back to nodes in turn. Consider the difference in power/leverage between small nodes and massive communities in a situation where moderation is done by humans doing moderation (with automated screening tools to help maybe, but ultimately human) vs when moderation is done by applying a prohibitively expensive amount of computing power to the raw firehose of conversation. The difference is who gets to moderate public spaces and who doesn't.
I don't know how ethical it would be, and maybe it already exists, but a tool to replicate a Reddit post directly on a Lemmy instance could be useful
That gives you a ton of dead posts with zero comments and upvotes, some instances do it, but that just leads to dead communities
I don't mean automatically replicate anything, that would be pointless. But I'm still a reddit user myself, and from time to time I stumble onto something interesting, and I'd like to let it live on Lemmy as well.
Ah I see
I think most of us here don't use Reddit, so that option went right over my head
That's what feddit does ig
Why?!?! Don’t you like it here? You realize the quality degrades as more ppl arrive?
Dont be a traitor, keep your mouth shut.
Keep using it? Share links from it? How did you get on Reddit in the first place?
I fear that Lemmy will not scale properly, popularity will exponentially increase the load. It’s basically actions multiplied by instances
The nature of the fediverse means bad actors could run rampant, jumping instances and usernames to turn the place into a shitshow.
The only reason it isnt happening already is that we arent worth the trouble.
The only way to avoid it once a certain size is reached is a paid moderation team with a mission statement to stamp that shit out, which means a budget is needed which means backers/investors/advertising... and tou get where this is going.
Big L take
One thing desperately needed is a method for mods/admins to check for brigading behaviour. This place (the threadiverse, not this community specifically) is crawling with more reactionary toxicity than almost anywhere I've ever seen, but it's mostly cowardly ignorant people silently hammering the downvote button rather than saying out loud the thing that would get them insta-banned.
Also real blocks are needed - all we have right now is a glorified 'mute'. If I block an asshole, not only is it because I don't want to see their BS, but I also don't want them to be able to see my posts & comments, at least not from that account.
Learn to not care about being downvoted. Unless there's some dumb rule about too many downvotes leads to disciplinary action. You want echo chambers, I'm trying to get away from echo chambers, as are a lot of others i imagine
I don't want echo chambers, I want places that aren't full of reactionary assholes.
You're saying "stop caring about downvotes", well then, why not get rid of them entirely?
Is that supposed to be a "censored" version of a slur at the end of your comment?
bruh