Conversations like this are why I want more people, especially "normies", in the Fediverse

The thing is that "normies"(I hate the term) weren't on reddit when it was the size of lemmy. The only experience they have is joining it after it had 10 years of development reached critical mass of users.

So we are stuck being compared to an impossible standard. When I compare Lemmy to old reddit lemmy hands down blows it out of the water. Old reddit had cp and racism on the front page every single day for years.It was hard to use and hostile to new users.

I've seen lemmy pop up in search engine posts already which was cool to see. Ive also seen lots of high quality intelligent posts granted they are only tech related but we will grow.

I tried to use Reddit for years and absolutely hated it. Finally after virtually every internet search for any question i had lead need too Reddit I decided to aquire a taste for it.
- Was it the format or the user base that drove you off?
I guess that's a fair point, but I'd rather shoot for what's good instead of settle for "better than terrible".
- Incremental improvement is bad?
Jesus, it was that bad? I am surprised they weren't taken down by the FBI.
- Read up on the saga of /r/jailbait sometime if you want to be utterly confused how the FBI didn't show up and arrest everyone involved with Reddit.

we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics in an organic way

In my experience, many of the people claiming to be experts on reddit are spreading misinformation. This goes for Twitter too, and probably most other large social media sites. People love to be seen as an authority on a topic.
Reddit is anything but organic, and is getting worse and worse in this regard.

The eye opening moment is when one of these threads touches on a subject you know a lot about and the top upvoted comment is spouting complete bullshit. See it once and you start to doubt the credibility of every other highly upvoted comment that looks legit but could be just as wrong, you simply don't know enough to immediately disprove it.
- I have a conspiracy theory that most users who are an expert don’t post much about that.
  For example I am an expert on two things most people find obscure; and for all my comments I just avoid talking about them. It’s too hard to wrap up an idea without lots of background information, there are no short posts or comments I can make about it.
  Almost all the highly upvoted stuff are short. Were I to try to make an expert post it would be totally ignored. So why bother for me when I can snarky about things I know nothing about ? More fun !
  I think experts who write short terse pithy comments that hit the mark, at a timely fashion, are rarer than hens teeth
- Exactly.
Yeah, reddit is corporate plastic these days. Fake, cheap, unhealthy.

an organic way.

Not sure if that defines current reddit if you have a look at /r/TheoryOfReddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1gdpeyp/this_bot_thing_is_dystopian_bot_copied_my_post/

On the other hand, I found this interesting thread on !houseplants@mander.xyz today: https://lemmy.world/post/21385568?scrollToComments=true

Feel free to have a look at !newcommunities@lemmy.world for niche communities

It's not just about the communities. We push communities a lot, and we do need more communities. But fundamentally we need a lot more PEOPLE.
- Exactly! Yes!
  I get downvoted everytime I point out that a healthy network comes with users. Lots of users. Users of all kinds. Users you don't agree with. Users you do agree with. I said that the userbase of threads being on Lemmy would be a culture clash, but it would be a sign of a growing fediverse concept.
  Everyone else says if the threads users federated with Lemmy, they would personally block the instance. Which just shows how much of a bubble the people here want to live in.
  I work at an airport. You will never see a more diverse group of people from a bigger selection of places than at an international airport. I don't agree with all of them. I don't agree with the majority of them. But I can converse with them. I can make small talk for 10 minutes.
  I treat the fediverse as I treat the real world. I wouldn't look at these people and say "You're banished from my existence for having conflicting politic or religious beliefs! Begone from my presence! You do not deserve to exist in my world!"
  But thats how people here treat "outsiders" or "normies".
  I want the fediverse concept to grow. I want the idea of a concept that's immune to corporate ownership by design to BE normalized.
  Because right now, it's a niche interest that 98% of people have never heard of. Corporations want to keep it that way.....if they've even heard of the Fediverse. They might to be too busy exploiting labor, and polluting the planet with their private jets and resource sucking plants located in places that already have water shortages.
  Yes I'm talking to you Nestle, and you Starbucks CEO. I don't know how this comment turned into a rant against them specifically, but fuck Nestle, and fuck Starbucks.
- Feel free to join us on https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ to promote Lemmy (most of the other subs ban it)
  I was just pointing that with 44k monthly active users, interesting conversations are already happening. A few of them are reposted on !bestoflemmy@lemmy.world , we could probably do a better job to repost them there more
- Do you invite ppl ?
- Hard disagree.
  A million empty communities simply makes all of lemmy look like a barren wasteland nobody uses.
  We, if anything, need to stop making a community for every single edgecase that someone might ever one day want to talk about, and focus on the basics, until there's enough people interested in some random niche thing to justify adding the community.
  That is to say, it should be organic community growth led by users making a more specific community from a larger community, and not server admins making, for example, 421,000 different sports team communities hoping users will somehow magically appear and use any of them.
  Lemmy is still at the scale that a single /c/NFL could more than adequately handle the entire volume of people talking about NFL games, and we don't really need a /c/ for each league, team, player, and coach or whatever.

That comment chain demonstrates a real appeal of Reddit. Even for something like a post-episode TV discussion, a critical mass of people means that not only can you have the discussion in the first place, but there might be some extra info from someone who worked on the set, or attended an audience taping.

You can click to see the rest of the comments to see plenty wrong with Reddit too, but it's not like there's any particular drive to prevent the elements of Reddit culture that I find annoying from coming to Lemmy too.

I'd be surprised if there's ever a critical mass of people on a federated app though. If there is, it's more likely to be on something with the proper funding, that hides the details from regular users (e.g
it'll be BlueSky, not Mastodon). On Reddit, Lemmy has a reputation for being too complicated, for the mundane reason that is. Too much stuff that should happen doesn't, and the answer to why are the stuff that 'normies' don't want to hear (LW and PD instances are both a bit unstable atm), or they're so unintuitive that that they'll need answering forever (e.g everything around discussion languages, instance blocks, newly-discovered communities , etc etc).

I've just seen a user accidentally submit the same post to the same community multiple times (the worst I've seen is 4 times). Preventing that is some real 'web dev 101' shit. Federated apps can be an interesting hobby for inexperienced devs (like me), and mildly diverting for anyone who wants to use them as a user, but a critical mass of users?! Forget about it.

All the others will get bought out and enshittified. The future is not there.
The Fediverse has the potential to be the future. It's gated behind open sourceheads not being all...open-sourcey about. Making it clunky to use and badly designed and then pulling the establishment economist "you poor schlub you're just too dumb to get it" card, thereby shooting their own efforts in the foot.
If they can make it open source AND easy to use/intuitive/well designed, then we have a solid future. If not, the future still won't be those other places.
- It might though - don't underestimate how much some sheeple prefer to simply be taken care of, rather than e.g. make a simple change to a config file. They will allow companies to sell all of their data, and not blink an eye. X is enshittifying for entirely different reasons (political ones), and Reddit for sheer stupidity, and Google as well, and... well but anyway, look at how many people are still on them, as opposed to here.

we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics

Lol we have that now... just be sure to phrase your question in the form of a Linux distro.

But to be serious I do think we're heading that way, but it's going to take a long time, likely as long as it took Reddit (if not longer).

We are far too unwelcoming to normies currently. Many people on Reddit reporting coming here to check it out only to not enjoy it and remain there.

100% of every single person that I've ever told about Lemmy irl gives me grief about how politically extremist it is. Like not just "no thank you, if you don't mind" but "FUCK NO, WHY WOULD YOU SHOW ME THIS!?". I mean, I'm no lover of capitalism but... if we want normies, we have to make this place more palatable. The likes of Facebook, X, and Reddit are grandfathered into the public consciousness - like it or not, convincing someone to come here is basically meaning to leave there, if only for part of each day (which Mbin is strongly helping with, by also conjoining Mastodon with Lemmy).

As an experiment, go to Lemmy.ml and sort by Local. The very top post is currently this one: https://lemmy.ml/post/21925926. This does not make me feel welcomed, being a citizen of the USA. Mind you, I get that there is a certain degree of "Truthiness" to it - especially if you ignore all of the thousands of years of history that predated the very "discovery" of this Western-most continent (even by Leif Erickson) - but true or not, it turns people away. An admin account even specifically decries people not liking it:

Judging by the downvotes, a lot of Lemmitors have no idea how the world works. Just living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—must be nice.

So, this post isn't going to be removed anytime soon, although beware of downvoting it - you might be kicked out of all communities that exist on that instance, including those you've never so much as heard of existing (yes that's a real thing, see MANY cases described in MANY communities across the Fediverse, e.g. !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com).

Note I did not cherry pick that example. That is literally the first post that I saw. Every time I do this, I can always find such an example in <10 seconds and half of that is going to Lemmy.ml in the first place.

I mentioned Mbin as being one potential solution. Sublinks is another (but in the meantime there's Tesseract on dubvee.org if you like that). I switched to PieFed myself, though there are quite a large number of issues with it (e.g. zero new posts from all the super cool Star Trek memes made in the last 3 days from https://piefed.social/c/tenforward@lemmy.world are showing up here - tho tbf this is far from the only instance that is struggling to catch up to updates with Lemmy.World). If you want to remain tied to the actual Lemmy codebase there's lemmy.cafe and quokk.au that defederates from hexbear.net and lemmy.ml (the former also defederated from Lemmygrad.ml). But so long as people keep joining e.g. lemmy.world or lemm.ee, they are going to have to discover how those instances are by themselves. Except they won't, and based on my experience, instead they leave - and then blame me for even having mentioned Lemmy to them in the first place.

We are fooling ourselves, to think that we can have our cake and eat it too. If you make fun of someone - e.g. people in the West including in USA, UK, Germany or other EU nation, etc. - then why would those very same people want to join in despite the "joke"? It's really not that hard to understand: we either make the Fediverse more welcoming to normies, or we give up hoping that they will come in spite of everything. And based on the MAU (monthly active users) stats, this is basically peak Lemmy right now without much chance to grow further - and if anything we're declining. I mean, I'm writing this to you from a non-Lemmy sourcecode-based instance right now.

We should all defederate from .ml. That would be a huge step. We need to excise these extremists in order for the community to grow.
- I still haven't done that but have noticed a lot of calls to do it. It's not all bad on .ml, I'd never make it my home instance but it's no where near lemmygrad levels of CCP loving tankie trash
go to Lemmy.ml
I'm gonna stop you right there, I've already found your problem. Try introducing them to instances that aren't militant.
But, since all of Lemmy is run by those guys, maybe just skip Lemmy altogether. I honestly don't see a future for it with them in charge.
- I just said "Lemmy" and they went forward from there.
  Helping people pick an instance is not as straight-forward task as many people claim. e.g. if you love programming, then perhaps programm.dev is right for you, except right now they are having enormous federation difficulties - e.g. https://programming.dev/post/20692281. They are far from the only ones doing so though - https://feddit.org/post/3524876 - and yet they do have more difficulties than most.
  Any instance that is not Lemmy.World itself is going to suffer right now, until the deployment of 0.19.6 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623. And yet people piling on top of the already too-large pile of Lemmy.World will only make the future problems worse. This whole "federation" concept is still experimental, compared to a single-server model like Reddit had.
  Blaze often tells people to go by default to lemm.ee. Which is one of the rare instances that defederates from none of hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, or even lemmygrad.ml. So if someone comes across this advice and follows it... BTW, Lemmy.cafe likewise defederates from almost nothing, except it DOES defederate from those big 3 (caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time - though there are so many other things about that instance that are so welcoming and friendly, and btw it is one of the very select few that are already running 0.19.6-beta! so a single admin yes, but one who seems VERY on the ball!).
  But ultimately you are correct: they control the sourcecode, so it is YOU who are using THEIR platform - and they WILL do it THEIR way, regardless.
  
  Until and unless more people switch to Mbin, PieFed, or eventually Sublinks. Admiral Patrick who developed Tesseract for dubvee.org and who has blocked lemmy.ml users has pledged to switch to Sublinks whenever it will come out. In the meantime you can view a demo, but I haven't heard of any developments for it for like half a year. So I switched to PieFed, and am posting several bug reports to help make it better. I advise people to check all of these options out just to see what's out there, though definitely more is yet to come due to the hard work from these very helpful developers!
  And credit where it's due: Dessalines is helping in his own way, to reduce people's dependency upon Reddit, and offering that codebase completely free of charge - that's not nothing. Though administering a server instance is an entirely different skillset... and if we want to see the Fediverse grow rather than shrink with time, I think that better fences are going to be necessary (or mere labels would be even better, except they seem to militantly refuse to do such - but could you imagine if "politically extremist" content had a label just like all the NSFW posts do? then we could all get along side-by-side in the same space).
  Nobody enjoys being punched in the face, or to see their (or why not ANY?) nation mocked - especially normies who may have DEEP knowledge of their subject matter, yet happen to not use Arch Linux btw, or may not be actual full-on communists (yet?).
- One problem is we get people from ml posting on .world and other sane instances.
(e.g. zero new posts from all the super cool Star Trek memes made in the last 3 days from https://piefed.social/c/tenforward@lemmy.world are showing up here - tho tbf this is far from the only instance that is struggling to catch up to updates with Lemmy.World)
For people reading this, that got fixed in the meantime
- The PieFed admins are super responsive. I've enjoyed every conversation with them I've had so far.

I see people in that thread recommending to avoid lemmy.ml - what’s up with that?!?

If you're asking in good faith.... Most of lemmy.ml is a tankie echo chamber that silences or outright bans any dissenting discussion.
Try bringing up the facts surrounding Russia, China, Cuba, or North Korea...
Only lies and good vibes for tankies are permitted.
- I did not know this and posted a serious question on a thread dismissing starvation under Stalin as fake news. Ban was swift and responses were brutal. I thought it was just isolated trolling at the time.
- Thanks, I honestly didn’t know! I’ve only really adopted Lemmy for almost daily use a few weeks back and mostly read tech related stuff and it’s been blissfully apolitical for the most part. Some of it is on .ml - I now understand the issue and will look out for it/support communities on other instances where possible.
!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca has a dedicated thread
- I honestly cannot find it. I find that Hexbear and Lemmigrad are frowned upon (hadn’t previously encountered them), but I actually find a few recommendations about Lemmy.ml. And many of my own subs are from there. I’d really like to understand!