Update: post deleted Most popular thread on /r/Redditalternatives is promoting Discuit, despite it having 185 weekly active users compared to the 44k on Lemmy. Feel free to chime in
I'd rather have people migrate over organically. I think Reddit was spoiled for me when it went from a niche collection of interesting people and topics to Facebook in a forum format. Almost anytime I go on r/all now i couldn't tell if the posts were recent or bot reposts from 5 years ago. The smaller subreddits still keep the spirit of the place going but the general community is just another social network.
Part of my problem is my niche hobbies have not migrated over or are trying their damndest but 99.9% stayed on Reddit and only 0.1% is here. Lucky that it is 0.1% and not actually 0%. I do try to be part of that 0.1%, hence modding !otomegames@ani.social.
I never went to r/all or any aggregate of top posts. I just left because some of my bigger hobby communities seemed meaner all of a sudden—wait, no, they are not meaner, they just forcibly sorted my home feed on mobile by controversial… and also the API drama, which didn't impact me because the app always worked fine for me, but I figured with the ragebaiting, might as well dip in solidarity with people actually being affected.
Nothing actually seems real on Reddit anymore. Comments are fake and every story someone tells is fake too. News is just pushed by propaganda algorithms. It’s all gone to 💩
Everyone either seems angry or like a bot. Before I couldn't pull myself anyway, now I get bored a couple posts into the front page and then I just check it a few hobby subs that I hope can move here someday (mostly TTRPG ones lol).
Because OP is suggesting we brigade that subreddit and actively encourage people to use Lemmy. I believe eventually the users more like the OG redditors will come naturally on their own. Like with content from Lemmy shared on Reddit or other social media. Wait for the content and audience to bring them over than to self-advertise too much too early.
I say let them try the website themselves. If they liked using that website, then it's okay. If they don't like it then it's okay too, maybe they'll try lemmy out.
Lemmy is federated, with communities scatered around different servers. If someone is gonna search for an alternative to reddit, I doubt they want to have to learn to navigate the fediverse.
Currently has 15 votes, while my comment suggesting people to try Lemmy as it's bigger is down to 2.
I'm not sure if Lemmy just has a very bad reputation over there in general, or if Discuit people are brigading the comments
People find the "which 'Gaming' community is the real one?" issue very frustrating, because they currently have the illusion that they have access to everything all in one place. The idea that you can't have a discussion with a million other people is meaningless to them, totally crushed under the weight of FOMO.
They look at Reddit, and they look at Lemmy, and they see that they're different, but don't really care why. They see that different (not more, just different) effort is required to navigate the space. They don't care that they just need a different mental model to understand the space -- they don't want one. And the design language of the space communicates to them that they don't need one.
I'm not going to get up on my soapbox and rant and rave about this today -- I'm too tired, and it's too busy of a week -- but this is what I mean when I keep saying we can't win against centralized social media by aping the UI. "Lemmy" just isn't a Reddit replacement in the same way that another centralized service is. A Lemmy-based website, sure. But not the network of them.
I think it could be the "Tankie Devs" FUD coming into play. People don't understand the devs don't control anything other than lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml, if they start injecting BS code, we could always fork it.
But one "Devs are Tankies" comment would just scare the neolibs and centrists away. (conservatives are never joining, that's not just a dev PR issue, its the userbase being too "left wing" for them, also, I doubt conservatives care about corporations controlling everything)
e.g. you don't have to know how it works anymore than someone needs to know how email or a combustion engine works - you simply click to go there and start reading stuff, if you like it then make an account and start participating as well.:-)
Lemmy requires heavy curation to block extremist content if one is so inclined (as I am), but wasn't Reddit becoming that way too when we left it? And on X I think it simply can't be done at all. It would be neat if we could add a "political" tag to filter by (like NSFW/NSFL), but meh, it is what it is.
Unlike some other instances, the default there is All, so they'll see the entirety of the Fediverse (minus Lemmygrad + Hexbear) even without an account or having to click anything at all. It's the perfect instance to recommend to the Reddit audience that is so heavily American (according to similarweb, 51%:-).
You are doing great work making sure that people are aware of what choices they have available to them - what they do with that is ofc up to them.:-)
I would be interested in helping with a coordinated effort to promote Lemmy instances on Reddit. Sometimes I check in on /r/RedditAlternatives and it's clear 90% of the people who would be happy with Lemmy have already left for Lemmy. But there are many threads where a simple "maybe check out Lemmy I like it a lot" could do a lot of help. It's not like users need to quit Reddit but every post on a Lemmy instance (even if it's also on Reddit) helps make our instances more appealing.
Perhaps setting up a community here to link to such threads could be a useful idea? And we could get talking points aligned as well.
Perhaps setting up a community here to link to such threads could be a useful idea?
Sounds like a great idea! Any reason these couldn't be posted right here in !fedigrow@lemm.ee? I think promoting the fediverse and growing the userbase falls well within the scope of c/fedigrow.
I wasn’t on Reddit for over a year but from what I’ve heard about /r/redditalternatives is that it’s a shitshow.
It's quite okay to be honest. Not that active, but that's mostly it.
If somebody is still on Reddit, direct recruitment over DMs might be better if there’s a candidate who might be interested.
The issue is that to DM you have to know who is actually interested, and you'll miss most of the lurkers. Also, this could be reported as spamming and get you banned.
I made a comment elsewhere in this thread, but I would be interested in helping out with a recruitment effort! Maybe it's time to set up a Lemmy "get the word out" community?
According to this post, disqus.com has a ton more traffic than LW. Specifically, 16.4M vs. a mere 496k for November. disqus says 2 pages per visit and 3.5 min duration while LW says 3 pages per visit and less than half that duration.
I guess a lot of people simply scroll memes and/or barely click on actual posts rather than leave the site by clicking on an outside link.
I think also that Lemmy trends more towards an older crowd than the teenagers on Reddit, which would be expected to skew the stats a bit in terms of speaking more, while listening less, etc. And too the way the posts load on Reddit I would expect to be engineered precisely to inflate the stats: instead of loading one page worth of posts if it loads a significantly smaller amount (1-3 posts at a time in the infinite scroll?) that could count as a new "visit" each time as someone scrolls? Similarly for disqus, if they do similarly (I have no idea).
Alternately, I don't know how the various app calls work - for Lemmy, or Reddit, or does disqus even have one - e.g. if the Lemmy ones in particular might not count as "web traffic" somehow.
In any case, they aren't promoting disqus as being higher in that list than Lemmy.World without any reason at all. It might not be a good reason but there is one at least:-).