A large enough userbase to support more niche topics. On Lemmy, like a lot of small communities, people tend to put the cart before the horse. They make places to share content for very niche topics but there aren't enough to warrant it. Plus sometimes you have mods in certain relatively niche groups that will remove content from their community because it is off topic, but their volume of posts is nowhere near enough for the occasional, technically off topic post to really matter. I see it in Discord servers too. Some places have more channels than users on the server. People get obsessed with categorization.
Nebula doesn't have its own comment system, so it's up to the individual creator where, if at all, they engage their viewers. Most if not all I've seen mentions reddit. Some may be on Bluesky too, but as far as I'm concerned Bluesky is just another proprietary platform that can turn into a monetization driven project.
I really want to participate in the jetlag discussions, but I don't want to log into my reddit accounts ever again. So I'm left with the nebula community here, which is better than nothing, but we're like 5 accounts that participate monthly.
This might be something to write to your favourite creators about. They want know if it isn’t brought to their attention, and I would certainly enjoy it too. Change takes time, but also effort by the early adopters.
Yeah, problem is I have no other way of contacting them than reddit, and I'm pretty sure my message will get auto-deleted and my account permabanned for trying. I don't care about the account, but a 10year old account with +80k karma does have some credibility, if I have to use that someday.
Agree that would be nice, though I'm happy Lemmy doesn't hound you every time you get an upvote or urge you to repost. Here at least every reply is from a person.
on piefed, you can do this for every comment. there is a little bell on the bottom right of the comment (in the web ui) which let's you turn notifications on/off
E: also, interstellar has this in the 3 dots menu on the comment
IMO it directly contributes to the perceived argumentativeness of lemmy. Comments feel a lot more personal and direct when presented in an inbox vs on the actual thread.
On reddit I turned off replies for everything except the times I was wanting a reply.
the niche communities over there, replicated here, but without the number of users some are ghost towns on lemmy. with them forcing popup logins piecemeal, we may get a boost.
also people scattered way too much to other similar platforms, when one instance shutsdown which is problematic.
also some politically heavy instances ban like they would on reddit.
Active communities. Some of the comms for my interests technically exist, in that they get one post every third month that gets 2 upvotes. Despite everything, these communities are still thriving on Reddit. Yet for whatever reason, any attempt to replicate them here fails. Smh
I’m not sure that it is a matter of time. Maybe I’m just being pessimistic, but I think the fediverse wave has crested already. There’s a reverse migration from Mastodon back to places like X/Twitter under way, and lemmy really never even saw the scale of adoption or attention that Mastodon saw.
I’m not worried that lemmy will go away any time soon, but I’m not sure it’s ever going to be mainstream enough to attract enough users to really support vibrant and diverse communities.
Yes, unfortunately the multiple instance nature of Lemmy is an obstacle for most people. I’ve been here for more than a year and I still struggle to describe what Lemmy is.
I'm not sure that's the problem. Maybe it is, but from what I see, most people never even get far enough into considering lemmy for its decentralized nature to become the blocker. I don't think it really even registers as an option for most of them.
The big commercial sites would do things like research studies and marketing campaigns to try to attract new users. Fediverse mostly relies on organic growth, driven by things like word-of-mouth. That's fine, in that it gives us a core group of users who really want to be here and know why, but I think there's an upper bound to our ability to attract new users that way.
I'm sure some will prefer that it works this way, but for me, I consider users of Reddit and X/Twitter to be something along the lines of hostages needing to be rescued. We can't save them all, but I'd love to get more people off of those sites.
Better specialized subgroups they can actually talk with people in you don't have to listen to everybody constantly whining about the billionaire class and how they don't get a chance to do anything in their life.
don't worry, those folks will invade your specailized subgroups to whine about their lives and billionaires, but at least if you mod you can ban them.
also, if you are moderately happy with your life, apparently you're a facist capitalist pig dog who is personally preventing another anonymous stranger on the internet from being happy...
Truthfully, Lemmy doesn't even have enough users for some mainstream interests, like sports. Lemmy leans very tech and selects for a certain type of user. But I'm sure plenty of people here are happy to have a place without daily NFL and NBA news.
Yeah, there's a few subs that I miss — particularly the ones for my city and my state — but r/twobestfriendsplay is top of the list. It was by far the sub that I most enjoyed interacting with since I joined years ago. Lots of power users who I'd immediately recognize by pfp.
The actual group that it's named after broke up a decade ago — they've been disbanded longer than they were a thing — but it was still loosely connected to a couple of the guys' ongoing careers, particularly two of them who host a podcast and stream separately. More importantly, it was a hub for discussion on games, movies, shows, comics, whatever, niche or popular, even if the relevance to the group was tenuous; the mods tried to block some topics but lost the battle on vtubers after the guys had Mori Calliope on the podcast, lol. I imagine it's even more lifted now that one of them streams with several vtubers.
tl;dr yeah I really miss some niche communities I'd been subbed to for years.
The issue is without some mass, small communities will likely not prosper. I can’t imagine if someone wants to create a community on spoon collecting that it would do well. We may just have to accept that for the next 5yrs the fediverse may just be larger communities with lots of smaller interests lumped in together.
Yes but more users doesn't necessarily make a spoon collecting community more viable.
Am easier pathway is to encourage existing users to visit this type of community.
Additionally, consider carefully whether the fediverse can support a spoon collecting community, or perhaps you should just post about spoon collecting in the general "cutlery collecting" community.
More users provides more diversity - More diversity provides the potential for more niche interests to arise - More active niche communities provides more reasons for existing users to stay - More active users staying on the platform inevitably attracts more new users.
And the Fediverse doesn't have all of those already?
These are inescapable in the modern age internet unfortunately, however the decentralisation of the Fediverse should help in alleviating those symptoms of an open platform.
That's interesting. I feel like my experience has been the opposite. I'll occasionally post things here, completely expecting some negative response (not looking for it, but I know how people are). For example, I posted a rant about an issue I was having after switching to Linux. Instead of negativity, I typically get responses more like "that's a valid criticism. Have you considered $x, though?", and the conversation continues quite pleasantly.
I feel like reddit was far quicker to jump to "no. You're wrong, and here's why...".
The only time I’ve been dunked on is by tankies when said that RT is pure propaganda.
Otherwise I like vibes here..sometimes the super hard line against Libs and Obama throw me off but an anarchy-socialist so it doesn’t bother me personally. Just a bit confusing when looking at the alternatives at the time.
Honestly yeah. I stuck with Lemmy for 3 years before caving and going back to Reddit because I was sick and tired of every single conversation no matter how unrelated circling back to Trumpa-lumpa.
Not to say Reddit isn't its own flavor of horrible. It's banking hard on social media addiction with all those post analytics and reminders to repost and boost engagement. Not to mention the fake AI users. Yuck.
I still sometimes steer people here because I still believe in a decentralized non corporate online space, it just needs to get past the self-selecting echo chamber phase. Once /c/mildlyinteresting isn't 90% doomer news articles I'll consider things a success.
What Reddit does have is niches. There's a sub for dogs, then there's a sub for labradors, and then there's a sub each for yellow, black, and chocolate labs. All of them are lively and active and most importantly on-topic.
Edit: this isn’t even really true. I just wanted to say something bad about reddit because they banned me for life for saying that Alex Karp should be yeeted into space and that Donald Trump rapes kids.
more diversity. currently lemmy predominantly has politics, tech, and memes. Anything else is a little rough around the edges or nonexistent
Particularly, I was a huge fan of the Tales from X-style subreddits. It was entertaining to be able to go into them, read some stories about it and see others responses, even if some of them you could totally tell weren't actually real. there have been communities made for some of the topics, but they're dead, and unfortunately, those types of communities aren't really communities that you can do too much with yourself unless you're actively in that same field.
As a member of the programming.dev instance, this just isn't true. Maybe those sublemmies on other instances are, but there's always posts, questions, and content on programming.dev.
And for lemmurs to stop being so binary and assuming every discussion is a war zone. Defend a Jewish person and you're a fascist. Defend a Palestinian and you're anti-semetic. Make a 'whore' joke and you're a misogynist. Criticise capitalism and you're a tankie. Accidentally and innocently misgender someone and you're transphobic. Defend trans folk and you're woke. Its all so bloody exhausting.
Real talk though, the militant Linux stuff is what really pushed me away in the end. I am legally blind. I literally cannot use desktop Linux due to lack of accessibility, but somehow that's my fault.
The never ending politics stuff is exhausting, sure, but at some level I can understand why people are passionate about it. The "FOSS or die" mentality just short-circuits my brain. Software is a tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver. If it works for you, more power to you, but it as often as not doesn't work for me.
That sucks, and I'm sorry you had that experience. To provide a viewpoint for your short-circuit, the FOSS software is a tool, yes, but the FOSS movement is politics and philosophy. To them (us, but I like to hope I'm less of a dink) software made unethically is similar to advocating for socialism or unions as a means of empowering the people against forces that would oppress them. For some people, using proprietary software might be like using products made by slave labour.
Some people who are more puritanical than myself might refuse to use anything that they can't use freely, the equivalent of you obstaining from using a laptop at all if Linux doesn't work for you. I think most people, myself included, would consider that extreme, but I bet you've heard from those extremists.
None of this is meant to excuse the people who've been crap to you, you should do whatever you need to. I'm just trying to explain why people get so worked up about it compared to a screwdriver. Or a hammer, say. A hammer and a sickle, even...
I was on the cusp of leaving Reddit just before the API fiasco, and Redditors treating every interaction as combat by rhetoric, a contest rather than a discussion, was one of the main reasons.
Yes, that happens here, but it's, like, the same two or three people every time. For several of your examples, particular usernames come to mind. The background vibe is much more chill, I feel.
I don't think any of that is Lemmy Official Opinion. it just shows there are all kinds of people here, some of them maybe a bit too sensitive in their topic.
This person just said they would like to be fascist anti-semetic misogynist tankie and transphobic without catching shit for it. In the old days of the internet, we definitely would have told them to shove their head up their ass
The sad part is that the centralized platforms that are popping up and adopting anti politic stances are feeling much friendlier. People here complain about centralized platforms, but all the fighting is ironically just pushing people over to those platforms.
More sumo fans. Of course then I probably wouldn't be putting in the effort to do daily match recaps, so at least it's inspired me to create more content, which lets me talk more with the fans we do have.
Larger active sports communities. There's a subreddit for every sport you want to follow, and even for each team. So you can get detailed news specifically for your team, go to game threads for real time discussion for any live game and even go lurk your rival team's subreddit to enjoy all the complaining after your team beats them. All of that only works with a large active user base and Lemmy just isn't there yet.
More niche communities that I don't have to manage to enjoy. TBF Reddit is pretty bad as a forum too. Car audio for example or really anything where the majority of the discourse is newbies wanting help gets drowned out by people repping popular brands, showing off pie in the sky builds that wouldn't sound good, or arguing about whether capacitors do anything.
Not really imo, it's mostly because traditional forums "bump" posts back up to the top. That promotes back and forth that's required in order to help people diagnose a problem to the actual solution, and as a result of not having a bump prioritization feature, a lot of people only ever speak once in the comments.
The actual Apollo app that’s still being developed by community volunteers. That’s all though, can’t think of anything else.
I mean sure, Lemmy has less content and interaction but that means (for me) that the content that’s shown has more value. Reddit had (and still has) lots of content but more often than not it is the same jokes, memes and questions daily.
Mlem is better for me than Apollo ever was, probably just due to how it’s open source and the community is so small and competitive from an app perspective.
Better SEO and forum answers. I hate having to search "my question + reddit" just to get an answer from a real person. Especially as reddit becomes botted to all hell
Interesting, but I don't think this allows mods to customize a community's HTML in the way that I have seen done on reddit (custom backgrounds, upvote/downvote icons, etc).
It doesn't, and due to the way lemmy frontends work, it likely won't ever natively have that feature. Something that might be possible though is a browser addon that applies custom CSS to communities when visiting them through mlmym? But someone would have to make that, and get moderators to submit custom CSS for their communities…
Thank you for sharing, I wasn't aware of this feature. But to be fair, PieFed has it easier here because it has a ‘main’ frontend (unlike lemmy, where all frontends are third-party as far as the main software is concerned) that you can apply styling to. Even then, it can only work on that main frontend and not any alternate clients.
I really need to follow PieFed more closely, to be honest. It has so much stuff…
edit: actually, I just noticed this:
The custom CSS/JS/Jinja needs to be submitted and approved first, but then a moderator could add it to the community as the official theme.
So I assume an admin has to add it as a possible theme first, right? If that's good enough, I guess something similar could be done in mlmym too. mlmym should already be very easy to style; it doesn't have a skins/themes mechanism, but that's nothing that couldn't be added.
I think I'm still favorable to the addon approach because it would mean that the custom style could work across every mlmym installation without needing admin involvement, but a theme system is also a reasonable compromise.
I feel I'm already at my limit with how many communities I moderate and try to post in, combined with being an admin on slrpnk.net. I would be stretching myself too far creating yet another community, especially one that requires original content to be created for it. :(
Users. While niche communities are good, the real numbers need to come for the regulars at r/movies, /r/politics, r/news, and r/funny. If you can get an entire fandom to quit and switch to lemmy that would be an absolute death knell for Reddit.
Awards. I know they were just a source of revenue for the corp, but they could also fund (donate to) the user’s instance receiving the award. Hell, they could also be set to donate to specific causes, selected by instance admins. The admins could give their users input on which causes to support, if the admins chose not to accept the funds themselves.
They could be optional to enable, and provide no special treatment or experience that the user would receive. They could even be not traceable per user, outside of admin consoles, which would make them useless as a way to accumulate internet points.
I’d bet there would be a good amount of folks that would take part in such an experiment. Instances cost real money to maintain, and making a sort of game of it might provide more donations than a simple “donate” button.
I’m sure there will be people who are vehemently against this idea, for privacy or who else knows reasons. There could be a way to scam money somehow, but if it was optional both as a way to give and receive by instance admins, there would be ways to kill it if necessary.
I never understood those comments on Reddit. Like, it sent you a message which you could reply to to thank the person directly. Why then also edit in thank you kind stranget into the comment itself? Always felt so performative and like you're making fun of it imo.
Doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult to do, and I just about guarantee that instances would receive much more in the way of donations if it were a simple click below a post or comment to do so. The whole settings and options don’t have to be a thing.
I don't think you're appreciating what you're asking. Payment processing and holding and distribution for a decentralized, non standard platform crossing arbitrary worldwide borders is among the most difficult things that could be implemented. Then you have to get buy in from hosts. Not happening.
i think it's kbin that has "reactions", which are basically the same thing with no cost. i do think a donate button is most likely a better idea for the people who frequent this king of site.
I prefer sorting by new. I want to give everyone a chance to be seen. Lemmy lets you default to it but reddit doesn't seem to have the option. Granted it doesn't make a huge difference on Lemmy because the community is so small, but on Reddit it makes a huge difference.
Mobile notification capability; I use the Voyager app to have Lemmy on my phone and if there’s a means to enable real-time banner notifications, I haven’t found it. Sometimes I’ll open it and see a bunch of things in my inbox, and it’d be nice to see that kind of thing as it comes in.
UI of Leemy needs improvement. We should be able to view the video/image without going to the details. A native Mobile application would be good. But this is understandable, because Lemmy is a non-profit decentralized project. Thanks to @[email protected] and @[email protected]
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A large enough userbase to support more niche topics. On Lemmy, like a lot of small communities, people tend to put the cart before the horse. They make places to share content for very niche topics but there aren't enough to warrant it. Plus sometimes you have mods in certain relatively niche groups that will remove content from their community because it is off topic, but their volume of posts is nowhere near enough for the occasional, technically off topic post to really matter. I see it in Discord servers too. Some places have more channels than users on the server. People get obsessed with categorization.
Support from Nebula creators.
Nebula doesn't have its own comment system, so it's up to the individual creator where, if at all, they engage their viewers. Most if not all I've seen mentions reddit. Some may be on Bluesky too, but as far as I'm concerned Bluesky is just another proprietary platform that can turn into a monetization driven project.
I really want to participate in the jetlag discussions, but I don't want to log into my reddit accounts ever again. So I'm left with the nebula community here, which is better than nothing, but we're like 5 accounts that participate monthly.
This might be something to write to your favourite creators about. They want know if it isn’t brought to their attention, and I would certainly enjoy it too. Change takes time, but also effort by the early adopters.
Yeah, problem is I have no other way of contacting them than reddit, and I'm pretty sure my message will get auto-deleted and my account permabanned for trying. I don't care about the account, but a 10year old account with +80k karma does have some credibility, if I have to use that someday.
Content and the number of users. Good lord there are so many dead boards on lemmy.
More topics, more people being active
More niche shit!
content
Easy way to look at the context of a reply.
Ability to turn off inbox replies from comments.
Agree that would be nice, though I'm happy Lemmy doesn't hound you every time you get an upvote or urge you to repost. Here at least every reply is from a person.
on piefed, you can do this for every comment. there is a little bell on the bottom right of the comment (in the web ui) which let's you turn notifications on/off
E: also, interstellar has this in the 3 dots menu on the comment
Same, seems like a basic thing to block the noise.
IMO it directly contributes to the perceived argumentativeness of lemmy. Comments feel a lot more personal and direct when presented in an inbox vs on the actual thread.
On reddit I turned off replies for everything except the times I was wanting a reply.
More apolitical communities
Agreeing with you here.
Visit popular on reddit and posts will be like:
Popular is based on you. So that's a personal list and problem.... r/All still works for me that's where it's not based on you.
I don't have a reddit account anymore. This is me as a non logged in user.
Otherwise, it'll just be 30 posts about shitposts, and then one post about pie.
the niche communities over there, replicated here, but without the number of users some are ghost towns on lemmy. with them forcing popup logins piecemeal, we may get a boost.
also people scattered way too much to other similar platforms, when one instance shutsdown which is problematic.
also some politically heavy instances ban like they would on reddit.
Active communities. Some of the comms for my interests technically exist, in that they get one post every third month that gets 2 upvotes. Despite everything, these communities are still thriving on Reddit. Yet for whatever reason, any attempt to replicate them here fails. Smh
They were small on reddit once too. Just a matter of time. Also helps if you post to them.
I’m not sure that it is a matter of time. Maybe I’m just being pessimistic, but I think the fediverse wave has crested already. There’s a reverse migration from Mastodon back to places like X/Twitter under way, and lemmy really never even saw the scale of adoption or attention that Mastodon saw.
I’m not worried that lemmy will go away any time soon, but I’m not sure it’s ever going to be mainstream enough to attract enough users to really support vibrant and diverse communities.
Yes, unfortunately the multiple instance nature of Lemmy is an obstacle for most people. I’ve been here for more than a year and I still struggle to describe what Lemmy is.
I'm not sure that's the problem. Maybe it is, but from what I see, most people never even get far enough into considering lemmy for its decentralized nature to become the blocker. I don't think it really even registers as an option for most of them.
The big commercial sites would do things like research studies and marketing campaigns to try to attract new users. Fediverse mostly relies on organic growth, driven by things like word-of-mouth. That's fine, in that it gives us a core group of users who really want to be here and know why, but I think there's an upper bound to our ability to attract new users that way.
I'm sure some will prefer that it works this way, but for me, I consider users of Reddit and X/Twitter to be something along the lines of hostages needing to be rescued. We can't save them all, but I'd love to get more people off of those sites.
more amateur porn. well more porn in general, but specifically amateur.
An active stopdrinking subreddit, and more active Sports sections.
Film and TV discussion threads!
Better specialized subgroups they can actually talk with people in you don't have to listen to everybody constantly whining about the billionaire class and how they don't get a chance to do anything in their life.
amen brother.
don't worry, those folks will invade your specailized subgroups to whine about their lives and billionaires, but at least if you mod you can ban them.
also, if you are moderately happy with your life, apparently you're a facist capitalist pig dog who is personally preventing another anonymous stranger on the internet from being happy...
More users. The scalability to accommodate more users.
Other than that, Lemmy pretty much has everything.
more users but not more bots like redbot
Ability to turn off reply notifications on specific posts.
More users to accommodate more active niche communities
Truthfully, Lemmy doesn't even have enough users for some mainstream interests, like sports. Lemmy leans very tech and selects for a certain type of user. But I'm sure plenty of people here are happy to have a place without daily NFL and NBA news.
Yeah, there's a few subs that I miss — particularly the ones for my city and my state — but r/twobestfriendsplay is top of the list. It was by far the sub that I most enjoyed interacting with since I joined years ago. Lots of power users who I'd immediately recognize by pfp.
The actual group that it's named after broke up a decade ago — they've been disbanded longer than they were a thing — but it was still loosely connected to a couple of the guys' ongoing careers, particularly two of them who host a podcast and stream separately. More importantly, it was a hub for discussion on games, movies, shows, comics, whatever, niche or popular, even if the relevance to the group was tenuous; the mods tried to block some topics but lost the battle on vtubers after the guys had Mori Calliope on the podcast, lol. I imagine it's even more lifted now that one of them streams with several vtubers.
tl;dr yeah I really miss some niche communities I'd been subbed to for years.
If it means anything, I know at least I don't participate in a lot of stuff because of AI
More users is not necessarily more better.
... but I do agree there are very few active communities.
The focus should be on making the fediverse the best it can be, rather than focusing on attracting users.
The issue is without some mass, small communities will likely not prosper. I can’t imagine if someone wants to create a community on spoon collecting that it would do well. We may just have to accept that for the next 5yrs the fediverse may just be larger communities with lots of smaller interests lumped in together.
Yes but more users doesn't necessarily make a spoon collecting community more viable.
Am easier pathway is to encourage existing users to visit this type of community.
Additionally, consider carefully whether the fediverse can support a spoon collecting community, or perhaps you should just post about spoon collecting in the general "cutlery collecting" community.
More users provides more diversity - More diversity provides the potential for more niche interests to arise - More active niche communities provides more reasons for existing users to stay - More active users staying on the platform inevitably attracts more new users.
More users also increases the appeal for bots, purveyors of misinformation, trolls, and assholes generally.
And the Fediverse doesn't have all of those already?
These are inescapable in the modern age internet unfortunately, however the decentralisation of the Fediverse should help in alleviating those symptoms of an open platform.
Of course we have them, but the ratio will increase as user numbers rise.
Federation does not protect us from these issues in any way. In fact it's very susceptible to misinformation through federation.
only if lemmy was the only 1 aggrgated site it would be more pervasive. but reddit is still too big right now.
90% of the answers in here boil down to more users.
active users specifically
Searching my username + lemmy in the search bar equals every instance except my own for +90% of searches :p
More users in smaller niche communities. Lemmy has less users in general, so smaller niche communities are practically non-existent here.
I don't can enough to post enough in there canning, but I'm hoping it's just well, we're all waiting for fall and the harvests!
Any amount of positivity and fun. Lemmy users just feel so miserable and argumentative.
I mean sign of the times but damn.
I miss being able to make sarcastic comments without someone telling me I'm the sole reason the world went to shit.
That's interesting. I feel like my experience has been the opposite. I'll occasionally post things here, completely expecting some negative response (not looking for it, but I know how people are). For example, I posted a rant about an issue I was having after switching to Linux. Instead of negativity, I typically get responses more like "that's a valid criticism. Have you considered $x, though?", and the conversation continues quite pleasantly.
I feel like reddit was far quicker to jump to "no. You're wrong, and here's why...".
Edit: correcting hypothetical redditor's spelling.
You were having an issue, not posting your opinion. What is there to be mad about? Also Linuxers will froth at any opportunity to do that.
oh yeah, either infinite Trumpa-lumpa or linux! so much linux! horrible!!
/s
The only time I’ve been dunked on is by tankies when said that RT is pure propaganda.
Otherwise I like vibes here..sometimes the super hard line against Libs and Obama throw me off but an anarchy-socialist so it doesn’t bother me personally. Just a bit confusing when looking at the alternatives at the time.
could be worse, you could live in a place where people are like that in person.
Honestly yeah. I stuck with Lemmy for 3 years before caving and going back to Reddit because I was sick and tired of every single conversation no matter how unrelated circling back to Trumpa-lumpa.
Not to say Reddit isn't its own flavor of horrible. It's banking hard on social media addiction with all those post analytics and reminders to repost and boost engagement. Not to mention the fake AI users. Yuck.
I still sometimes steer people here because I still believe in a decentralized non corporate online space, it just needs to get past the self-selecting echo chamber phase. Once /c/mildlyinteresting isn't 90% doomer news articles I'll consider things a success.
What Reddit does have is niches. There's a sub for dogs, then there's a sub for labradors, and then there's a sub each for yellow, black, and chocolate labs. All of them are lively and active and most importantly on-topic.
Reddit is basically facebook at this point.
Edit: this isn’t even really true. I just wanted to say something bad about reddit because they banned me for life for saying that Alex Karp should be yeeted into space and that Donald Trump rapes kids.
more diversity. currently lemmy predominantly has politics, tech, and memes. Anything else is a little rough around the edges or nonexistent
Particularly, I was a huge fan of the Tales from X-style subreddits. It was entertaining to be able to go into them, read some stories about it and see others responses, even if some of them you could totally tell weren't actually real. there have been communities made for some of the topics, but they're dead, and unfortunately, those types of communities aren't really communities that you can do too much with yourself unless you're actively in that same field.
And surprisingly Lemmy has very little programming content. The programming and learn_programming communities are almost dead.
As a member of the programming.dev instance, this just isn't true. Maybe those sublemmies on other instances are, but there's always posts, questions, and content on programming.dev.
In addition to this, most people just ask ai nowadays.
active niche and place based communities. the ones i’ve seen for my area are super quiet
More users.
And for lemmurs to stop being so binary and assuming every discussion is a war zone. Defend a Jewish person and you're a fascist. Defend a Palestinian and you're anti-semetic. Make a 'whore' joke and you're a misogynist. Criticise capitalism and you're a tankie. Accidentally and innocently misgender someone and you're transphobic. Defend trans folk and you're woke. Its all so bloody exhausting.
Oh I see, so you hate Free Software! Fucking typical, unsubscribed, and I will not be returning. 😛
Real talk though, the militant Linux stuff is what really pushed me away in the end. I am legally blind. I literally cannot use desktop Linux due to lack of accessibility, but somehow that's my fault.
The never ending politics stuff is exhausting, sure, but at some level I can understand why people are passionate about it. The "FOSS or die" mentality just short-circuits my brain. Software is a tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver. If it works for you, more power to you, but it as often as not doesn't work for me.
I understand if it would be a burden, but @[email protected] could probably give some advice. I think they are legally blind too.
GNOME with the orca screen reader should be at least useable
That sucks, and I'm sorry you had that experience. To provide a viewpoint for your short-circuit, the FOSS software is a tool, yes, but the FOSS movement is politics and philosophy. To them (us, but I like to hope I'm less of a dink) software made unethically is similar to advocating for socialism or unions as a means of empowering the people against forces that would oppress them. For some people, using proprietary software might be like using products made by slave labour.
Some people who are more puritanical than myself might refuse to use anything that they can't use freely, the equivalent of you obstaining from using a laptop at all if Linux doesn't work for you. I think most people, myself included, would consider that extreme, but I bet you've heard from those extremists.
None of this is meant to excuse the people who've been crap to you, you should do whatever you need to. I'm just trying to explain why people get so worked up about it compared to a screwdriver. Or a hammer, say. A hammer and a sickle, even...
😉
I was on the cusp of leaving Reddit just before the API fiasco, and Redditors treating every interaction as combat by rhetoric, a contest rather than a discussion, was one of the main reasons.
Yes, that happens here, but it's, like, the same two or three people every time. For several of your examples, particular usernames come to mind. The background vibe is much more chill, I feel.
I don't think any of that is Lemmy Official Opinion. it just shows there are all kinds of people here, some of them maybe a bit too sensitive in their topic.
agree on the first part, second part is just the modern internet sadly
Its always been this way.
This person just said they would like to be fascist anti-semetic misogynist tankie and transphobic without catching shit for it. In the old days of the internet, we definitely would have told them to shove their head up their ass
A bit, yeah
The sad part is that the centralized platforms that are popping up and adopting anti politic stances are feeling much friendlier. People here complain about centralized platforms, but all the fighting is ironically just pushing people over to those platforms.
Same with posts. I posted something to TIL and it was instantly tagged as self promoting my channel. That was my last post. Message received.
More sumo fans. Of course then I probably wouldn't be putting in the effort to do daily match recaps, so at least it's inspired me to create more content, which lets me talk more with the fans we do have.
Niche communities.
Poem guy
Roses are red
violets are blue
I'm not the poem guy
and it's time for lunch.
I appreciate the effort!
Being able to clear all notifications. It's a basic-sounding feature, strangely isn't implemented.
'mark all read'.
i have that, you don't?
Shareholder value! JK Reddit doesn't have that either. Zing!
a more active and bigger community
Larger active sports communities. There's a subreddit for every sport you want to follow, and even for each team. So you can get detailed news specifically for your team, go to game threads for real time discussion for any live game and even go lurk your rival team's subreddit to enjoy all the complaining after your team beats them. All of that only works with a large active user base and Lemmy just isn't there yet.
More niche communities that I don't have to manage to enjoy. TBF Reddit is pretty bad as a forum too. Car audio for example or really anything where the majority of the discourse is newbies wanting help gets drowned out by people repping popular brands, showing off pie in the sky builds that wouldn't sound good, or arguing about whether capacitors do anything.
isn't that mostly a moderation problem?
Not really imo, it's mostly because traditional forums "bump" posts back up to the top. That promotes back and forth that's required in order to help people diagnose a problem to the actual solution, and as a result of not having a bump prioritization feature, a lot of people only ever speak once in the comments.
The actual Apollo app that’s still being developed by community volunteers. That’s all though, can’t think of anything else.
I mean sure, Lemmy has less content and interaction but that means (for me) that the content that’s shown has more value. Reddit had (and still has) lots of content but more often than not it is the same jokes, memes and questions daily.
The Mlem app on iOS is very much like the Apollo app (or, at least how it used to be)
Mlem is better for me than Apollo ever was, probably just due to how it’s open source and the community is so small and competitive from an app perspective.
Better SEO and forum answers. I hate having to search "my question + reddit" just to get an answer from a real person. Especially as reddit becomes botted to all hell
Better UFO/UAP communities. It's pretty barren around here as far as this topic goes.
I would say the old.reddit interface but lemmy actually has that. :)
https://old.lemmy.world/
Interesting, but I don't think this allows mods to customize a community's HTML in the way that I have seen done on reddit (custom backgrounds, upvote/downvote icons, etc).
It doesn't, and due to the way lemmy frontends work, it likely won't ever natively have that feature. Something that might be possible though is a browser addon that applies custom CSS to communities when visiting them through mlmym? But someone would have to make that, and get moderators to submit custom CSS for their communities…
Lemmy might not support this, but PieFed does (without the need for a browser extension). There are some instructions here on setting it up:
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/developer_docs/09_Theming_Guide.md
The custom CSS/JS/Jinja needs to be submitted and approved first, but then a moderator could add it to the community as the official theme.
Mbin also supports it, and without needing approval.
Though it's not currently being federated, is that the same or different on Piefed?
Thank you for sharing, I wasn't aware of this feature. But to be fair, PieFed has it easier here because it has a ‘main’ frontend (unlike lemmy, where all frontends are third-party as far as the main software is concerned) that you can apply styling to. Even then, it can only work on that main frontend and not any alternate clients.
I really need to follow PieFed more closely, to be honest. It has so much stuff…
edit: actually, I just noticed this:
So I assume an admin has to add it as a possible theme first, right? If that's good enough, I guess something similar could be done in mlmym too. mlmym should already be very easy to style; it doesn't have a skins/themes mechanism, but that's nothing that couldn't be added.
I think I'm still favorable to the addon approach because it would mean that the custom style could work across every mlmym installation without needing admin involvement, but a theme system is also a reasonable compromise.
Had no idea !
I did not know about this, thanks !
It'd be kinda nice if we had a good Photoshop battles community.
Why don't you create it?
I feel I'm already at my limit with how many communities I moderate and try to post in, combined with being an admin on slrpnk.net. I would be stretching myself too far creating yet another community, especially one that requires original content to be created for it. :(
to be searchable by google
It is searchable with Kagi
A way to filter old posts by date. So, old posts in the past 24 hours, or one week, etc.
Image rotation
On a down note, /r/ukrainewarvideoreport. I liked following the progress of the war.
I assume you're aware of [email protected]
https://lemmy.ml/c/ukrainerussiareport
That’s just a Russian propaganda sub.
Lemmy has this too
Post and user tags
PieFed supports this, it would be great to see Lemmy support it natively as well.
Hopyfully they'll make it cross-compatible when it comes up.
You can tag users on Boost.
Show the total of my upvotes. I don’t want that to be used for anything like the karma score was. I just want to know the total.
Disable inbox replies
Users. While niche communities are good, the real numbers need to come for the regulars at r/movies, /r/politics, r/news, and r/funny. If you can get an entire fandom to quit and switch to lemmy that would be an absolute death knell for Reddit.
Awards. I know they were just a source of revenue for the corp, but they could also fund (donate to) the user’s instance receiving the award. Hell, they could also be set to donate to specific causes, selected by instance admins. The admins could give their users input on which causes to support, if the admins chose not to accept the funds themselves.
They could be optional to enable, and provide no special treatment or experience that the user would receive. They could even be not traceable per user, outside of admin consoles, which would make them useless as a way to accumulate internet points.
I’d bet there would be a good amount of folks that would take part in such an experiment. Instances cost real money to maintain, and making a sort of game of it might provide more donations than a simple “donate” button.
I’m sure there will be people who are vehemently against this idea, for privacy or who else knows reasons. There could be a way to scam money somehow, but if it was optional both as a way to give and receive by instance admins, there would be ways to kill it if necessary.
My ego demands more. Make it bigger, daddy.
This sounds far too complicated to be practical. If you want to fund an instance then do it direct. You don't need to game it.
I can also already see the hordes of ridiculous edits to posts "Edit: thank you for the award kind stranger". 🤮
I never understood those comments on Reddit. Like, it sent you a message which you could reply to to thank the person directly. Why then also edit in thank you kind stranget into the comment itself? Always felt so performative and like you're making fun of it imo.
Doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult to do, and I just about guarantee that instances would receive much more in the way of donations if it were a simple click below a post or comment to do so. The whole settings and options don’t have to be a thing.
I don't think you're appreciating what you're asking. Payment processing and holding and distribution for a decentralized, non standard platform crossing arbitrary worldwide borders is among the most difficult things that could be implemented. Then you have to get buy in from hosts. Not happening.
Why are you taking such time to shit on an idea that is obviously not going to be implemented? Are you the lead developer?
It does come across like shitting doesn't it. Wasn't my intention. I apologize.
i think it's kbin that has "reactions", which are basically the same thing with no cost. i do think a donate button is most likely a better idea for the people who frequent this king of site.
If kbin has it, mbin could have it. I f9rgot if it has, as in my time with an mbin account was very short. But piefed definitely has it.
I only ever got gilded two or three times on Reddit, but I remember the first.
Someone posted "I have been streaming a lot of Ice Cube lately."
I replied "You can't stream Ice Cube. That's just water."
I'd like to have comment sort order within a post set to TOP, rather than HOT when I enter. I switch it every time.
I suppose that's to improve churn, I get it, but I prefer to read the top comment first.
I prefer sorting by new. I want to give everyone a chance to be seen. Lemmy lets you default to it but reddit doesn't seem to have the option. Granted it doesn't make a huge difference on Lemmy because the community is so small, but on Reddit it makes a huge difference.
Agreed. I sorted Reddit by new.
Edited comment to clarify I meant sorting comments within a post.
More content. Everyone says that but sadly don't always post themselves to create content. I do what I can but I'd love to see more.
Nada
No instance owners that can ban you for saying something they don’t agree with.
that's unfeasible. instance bans are a useful tool. the solution to this is more instances.
An active elite dangerous community. It's the only thing i use reddit for
Same but with fairly niche NSFW stuff.
I'm curious..
They have enough users to support niche elite subreddits. Eliteminers off the top of my head but I'm sure there's ones for exploration and combat too.
I miss the Awoo videos. Puppies howling, Huskies going mental.
Dogs and other cute animals in general.
Mobile notification capability; I use the Voyager app to have Lemmy on my phone and if there’s a means to enable real-time banner notifications, I haven’t found it. Sometimes I’ll open it and see a bunch of things in my inbox, and it’d be nice to see that kind of thing as it comes in.
the way I've gotten around this is email notifications. IG it would be up to the app to implement push notifications?
An third party app made by talklittle.
wikis attached to the community.
UI of Leemy needs improvement. We should be able to view the video/image without going to the details. A native Mobile application would be good. But this is understandable, because Lemmy is a non-profit decentralized project. Thanks to @[email protected] and @[email protected]
I use jerboa which is a native mobile app for Lemmy right? I think there are more too.
if you tap the image preview it should expand, I mean it does that today
Gator Days comics. It's one of the only reasons I still go back sometimes.
Resizing images and videos by dragging them.