Now it's a matter of sustaining and slow growth. Hopefully. Best thing you can do to see Lemmy succeed is participate: comment, post, doomscroll All+Top Hou ;)
It'll take a while for some of the smaller communities to get critical mass. And that's okay, probably. Critical mass is here for the larger topics already. I'll do my best to help :)
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but without a steady stream of content, this will not work. I look at "All" every day and I find content to be generally lacking.
We need to be organized and have a game plan for how to proceed over the next 3-6 months. Imo, we need to be scraping the top content from Reddit, and we need to be recreating all of the top subreddit communities.
I’ve been pretty happy with the content actually, what do you think is missing?
Not the person you asked, but so far it feels like I see more memes here than I did on Reddit. I don’t see a lot of news, and the communities I was subbed to on Reddit are not active here at all. That includes communities based around running, hiking, nature, and female fashion advice for example.
I have blocked most of the meme communities and all seems just fine to me now.
This helps, but ideally lemmy should make some changes that give smaller subs more equality with bigger ones in the sorting.
Right now even if a small community is active, it just gets drowned out by the bigger ones, even in your subscription feed.
I think they are working on tweaking the hot sort a bit more to make it more representative so the huge communities don't drown out the smaller ones especially in subscribed
Or some equivalent of a multireddit where you can look at some quiet communities as a block.
The memes are currently overshadowing a lot of other content types, due to how the hot sorting works. Even if a small community is active, it doesn't make it to your front page because its votecount doesn't compete with those of a bigger community.
The "best" sorting type which I hope will come eventually, aims to address this by including one post from each community, before including a second, etc.
This should help small communities which still have activity, to be seen more. Currently, I'm having to go look in smaller communities manually, to see if there are new posts.
Is there a GitHub issue I can follow for this sorting?
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378 and https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3622
I find Top - Day to be my favourite sort, even though Hot is much better. I've also subscribed to enough communities that my default is Subscribed + Top - Day or Subscribed + Hot. I'll often dip over to Local, but rarely All. Only downside of the Top sorts is that the shorter the time span, the higher the ratio of cute animal pics. Scratch that, it's not a downside.
Point being, that once you have enough active communities subscribed, that seems to be the best. Local is good if you are on an instance that meshes well with your interests.
BTW, I'm on Lemmy.ca, so Local will show me news from across Canada usually.
Using top sort like this is not even close to a solution.
I want to see posts from a community with ten subs, that get ten upvotes, meaning that post was really good for the people it was for.
Top will never show that. It will show posts that got a hundred upvotes first even if that sub has ten thousand users, meaning relatively, it was a worse post.
My point is that I WANT to see content from small less active communities. How else are they supposed to grow? Even my subscriptions are bad, never showing me all that I want to see.
I hear that, yeah the interest-specific communities haven’t caught up yet for sure. A lot of them have only a handful of posts if they do exist.
Definitely a lot of memes, but I feel like I am seeing a good amount of news though? Actually I feel like reddit was getting to be pretty spotty about news, there were a couple weeks I used both and lemmy consistently showed me the headlines much sooner.
I browse in compact mode on memmy and scroll past the memes usually fwiw, so it may just be a matter of my perception
Nor most of the local/regional communities.
I was on Reddit a lot to see chatter about games I enjoy. The presence of Destiny 2 or Diablo 4 players seems pretty quiet on Lemmy. A lot of game devs are on Reddit and I don't know how many of them have or will move to another platform.
Porn. Copious amounts of it in particular.
Lol, reddit used to be the same way actually, it was only relatively recently they removed porn from the front page.
There’s a toggle in your profile for it, and apps like Memmy have an additional setting to hide those posts just while you’re browsing the app
Honestly, I'm fine with Lemmy staying small for a good bit.
For me, Reddit and now Lemmy are time wasters. I come here to laugh at the memes, catch some news, and maybe see some bobs.
Sometimes news articles don't have any comments, so I'll just read the article and maybe add a comment, or just upvote and move on. Some more news content would be nice, and hopefully the local provincial/state and even city groups get some traction soon so I can leave reddit entirely instead of lurking local subreddits without signing in.
I am more than happy for reddit to become a lightning rod for bots and shills now that I have a basic understanding of this platform
I'd rather read a handful of genuine comments, discussion, and opinion/insights from real people on Lemmy than hundreds of divisive comments, bad faith arguments, bots, and irrelevant forum sliding jokes/tangential rants that have polluted reddit.
This opinion resonates with me, especially regarding the people on the other end. At this point I've nothing but positive experiences with folks here.
For sure. The rate of development has skyrocketed the last month or so, and letting Lemmy mature a bit, as well as all the apps under development isn't a bad thing. I still think it's a little technical, and I don't want to sacrifice any of the utility provided by separate instances and federation, so letting things mature a bit should help make things less fiddly for less technically inclined people.
In the meantime, a self-sustaining, engaged, and quality community is better than a large community.
Did you have a look at Reddit lately? The content quality is shit. Personally I find much more interesting stuff on Lemmy atm.
I actually started my full on boycott this week. Lol.
This may be the case, but I still think there must be stuff worth selectively grabbing, and there's no good reason not to...
I agree, there needs to be a plan for content. But I disagree on the means.
I disagree with reposting Reddit. If content isn't unique, people will just go to Reddit. Repeating memes is one thing (it's fun and nostalgic), but wholesale content duplication will just lead to drowning the signal to noise ratio.
We could autopopulate some content. That only works if the comment traffic is there too, or it's just shouting into the void. For example: it doesn't help to have a bot posting Reuters articles automatically to c/news if no one is interacting.
I plan to make a utility for myself to help with my own content. I really want to see c/printSF take off, for example, so I'm going to do my best there. But I can't do it for every community I want to see haha :)
People will only go back to Reddit if the user experience is better, and right now the only remaining Reddit app is a dumpster fire.
I agree that their app sucks. But Lemmy also has a lot of rough edges (particularly a lack of good mod tools).
Also, if you believe reddit's released numbers, only 3% of their users even used third party apps. So maybe their app sucks, but the users are oblivious and will keep using it.
I finally got rid of it for good when I realized it had been running in the background for 21 of the previous 24 hours in spite of having background updates turned off and was killing my battery life. It’s a shit app.
The app? The website is a dumpster fire. The Algorithm has been really screwed and has 2 day old posts sitting on users front page. The entire content there is garbage so I don't see how you can complain about the content here. Just post what you find interesting.
I am here for the comments, not articles.
I don't care about articles since it is usually just one person's opinion. I want discussion with other people, where ideas can be challenged and tested.
Adding links will not help that.
For me, personally, it is good enough right now. I do open reddit sometimes for smaller communities not active here, but if we keep it at this traffic, I will be satisfied.
One of my favourite things about Lemmy is the "New Comments" sort mode. It's great for finding those discussions.
How bout we not recreate the shit hole that is reddit. I can not express the relief I felt when I got out. You can't make me go back!
Let's focus on growing the niche communities we have instead copying other sites.
I absolutely understand and appreciate the sentiment, but we should not try to deny our origin story. Reddit was great for a long time there is much we can still learn from it.
That's the nostalgia talking. You'd had to browse for hours to find a couple of good posts. You only remember the good ones.
Partly maybe. I remember when I first joined reddit though. It was well right around 2013 when Facebook was really booming. I was completely disgusted with social media at that point. Reddit was like a whole new world for me with an entire culture and language to learn. It all clicked with me and I felt like I fit in and belonged. Watching it burn this year has been difficult.
Sort by top 6 hour and in settings hide read, and mark seen as read. Also try a third party app like Connect. That should help your All.