What the title says. I think there is still a long way for that to happen but i’ve been hopeful. What do you think?
Lemmy has a long way to go in terms of user experience before it can effectively compete with Reddit. The majority of new accounts in the last weeks have been spite users. That is, they’re here not because they love Lemmy - but because they hate Reddit.
That’s not a bad thing, per say. It doesn’t matter how people get here. It’s more important that they have a good reason to stay.
And the average user doesn’t care if something is federated or centralized. They just want a product that works and is simple to grasp. In my opinion, app developers are going to be the gamechanger Lemmy needs Stuff like Memmy (on the iOS app store today!), Mlem, Liftoff, Thunder are pretty much better than the official Reddit app. And that’s how most people consume content these days. When there’s no enshitification ads or microtransactions - there’s clearly going to be a winning experience.
It’ll take time, but as more Federation communities build - the less Reddit is necessary. As well, it usually takes a long time before people start catching on that the tools they once loved have turned to into bots and spam.
Mastodon is in it’s 7th year, and has like 8 million active users. Twitter had 200 million users by it’s 7th year. On one hand, Mastodon is the biggest Federation app. On the other, Twitter was 25x as large. Of course, Twitter is no longer the relevant “town hall” it once was - and is hemorrhaging users and respect. So who knows. It only takes a few celebrity endorsements to get countless folks switching. Who knows
That is, they’re here not because they love Lemmy - but because they hate Reddit.
Anyone remember the Digg exodus? This was exactly how Reddit got big.
Anyway I do think it’s a little more than just hate, though. I have poked around at Lemmy before but I’m starting to take it more seriously because I actually cannot use Reddit on my phone anymore.
In my opinion we need to make a distinction between social networks and aggregators with forum-like experiences. Reddit is easily replaceable because sharing links is like the easiest thing to do. I started using lemmy and not planning on using reddit again. So far i have abandoned all major social media. Only use whatsapp. The internet is rotten right now, however there are so many amazing things that are not social media that we are yet to discover and for those looking for information not people, the internet still has a lot to open. Social media is a cesspool.
I don’t really think that Lemmy or Mastodon will really replace their counterparts. At least not for now. As many have already said, the federation system is too complex for many non-technical people. It would take something like a de facto standard app, that abstracts everything federation related away and make it feel like another centralised solution.
Another point for me is the searchability of federated systems. Say you are searching for a technical problem right now, google will surely bring you to a related subreddit in just seconds. I have yet to see a Lemmy related search result.
I have actually started finding results for things on programming.dev on Google.
It’s less obvious because it doesn’t say lemmy, but I imagine this will be more common as more content is posted here.
Also, the technical issues involving new users is temporary. It may take awhile, but the user experience will gradually get better as time moves on.
I have actually started finding results for things on programming.dev on Google.
That’s good news!
I have actually started finding results for things on programming.dev on Google.
What was your search query, did you specifically call for a lemmy result or was programming.dev organically shown?
out of interest. how long do posts live? as long as the original instance is still running? - if so does this pose a problem for instance owners as data storage cost grow?
My position differs currently for Mastodon and Lemmy.
In the case of Lemmy, I’m not yet 100% sure. Lemmy’s strength may also prove to be a weakness I feel in terms of it replacing Reddit, in that the decentralised nature naturally creates a dispersion of the audience. While anyone on Reddit could create a community, having them in one place really funnelled people into logically named communities. On the other hand while subscribing to a number of communities for Lemmy, it’s not that infrequent to come across the same or similar community on multiple instances and then needing to work out where you want to go. On one hand it’s probably good to have the varying perspectives and culture this will bring, but I think it’ll also make it hard for users looking for that definitive place to go. It’s very much early days though and perhaps many of those communities will naturally assemble in mass on various instances once the dust settles.
We’ll see how that plays out I guess, and right now my Reddit use is at maybe 10-20% what it was and I’m really looking to invest my time here. I think with time that both Lemmy updates an 3rd party clients will make working across instances more transparent and in turn broaden appeal.
I’m more bullish for Mastodon in the short term. The reason for that is my usage concerns me looking to follow an individual rather than locate a community of individuals. Since people will have one account, there’s less impact caused by decentralisation as my interactions with a person I follow is very much 1:1 (unless for some reason they chose to create and maintain multiple accounts). If I want to follow Apple’s account, they’ll presumably have a single one versus there maybe being 6 viable Apple communities across Lemmy instances. I find my use of Mastodon in terms of user experience is much closer and familiar to Twitter than currently Lemmy is to Reddit. Additionally, once it’s enabled for ActivityPub, I think Meta having Threads throws significant support around that particular ecosystem, and brings it to the masses. Can’t imagine we’ll see a billion dollar company spin up a Reddit alternative that is Activity Pub integrated to give Lemmy that same boost, unfortunately.
To be clear I’m very supportive of both Lemmy and Mastodon and want both to succeed. I do think reddit being centralised has some benefits but, especially for people not looking to invest heavily in browsing across instances, and that it’s to be seen how Lemmy will evolve as it grows and if casual users will be able to sign up and easily find the communities and information they are after. The 1:1 person interaction for Mastodon I think simplifies things and Thread potentially will result in a massive boost for Mastodon. It’s early days for Lemmy and I can’t imagine in Jan or Feb that the majority of us here had even heard of it, let alone considered leaving Reddit. It’ll only continue to grow and I’m excited to watch it do so.
Fuck facebook. Nobody will federate with them except some “dumb fucks”.
The Mastodon developers and operators of mastodon.social seem pretty supportive based on what information they have so far, based on their blog post.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
The tone from that so far is that federation would be in the cards for them, assuming Meta implements ActivityPub properly.
Don’t think so, specially since they will be now working hard to kill it. How you ask me?
- For sure they will try to attack major instances with DDOS attacks, spam bots, etc. I mean, they do to each other all the time, Meta releases threads and now Twitter is flooded with porn spam accounts for example.
- There will be for sure some news in major media saying that Lemmy is a hotspot for pedophiles to gather, which will taint its image permanently. This being said, these kind of people will for sure try to use Lemmy for those purposes so specially admins need to be ready for it.
- They may try to “integrate” Lemmy instances into their services like Threads is already doing into Mastodon. By doing that they will try to kill its usage since people will be able to interact with it from their apps while giving them all their personal info and watching a shitload of ads.
It’s possible. I think the biggest obstacle is that the corporations feeding on people’s data are not going to just stand by while it happens.
Another big obstacle is the general UX of these platforms. Major companies have teams of user experience analysis and researchers that, while not always “winning” as compared to product or business driven decisions, absolutely have a (generally positive) impact on the product. Onboarding, retention, etc.
The fediverse has all the standard frictions of most OSS, like talking about itself, it’s technology, etc when the fact is 99% of users dgaf.
I might go so far as to argue the perceived complexity is a bigger barrier than the risk of sabotage from other businesses. I am optimistic the growing list of third party apps will help solve some of these issues, as long as they take things like the sign up process and server selection into their scope.
I don’t think UX will be that big of a problem, in the past the unofficial reddit apps were all better than the official one. Major companies design by committee and the UX is meant too maximize profit and engagement statistics for advertising, rather than be “good”. A lot of open source UIs are better than their paid counterparts. I think PopOS is far nicer than windows 11.
Nah, most open source UIs are really pretty bad. Most devs are horrendous designers.
Your comment about profitability is true when it comes to social media companies specifically but definitely not true for the industry as a whole. UX is a huge selling point for enterprise software and the goal there isn’t to drive clicks or views, because that’s not how those companies make money.
UX won’t be a problem as long as the maintainers are open to feedback and not stubborn about their current approach. And even if they are, an alternate front end could be introduced separate from the default one.
That and the servers are under such stress that it makes for a stuttery beginning for any new usrrs. Even just trying to upvote you and comment was a process. First this page wouldn’t load properly, then then the upvote didn’t show, then the screen jumped around when I tried to reply.
This site and any other will only replace Reddit etc if it’s got people. It only gets people if new users can use the platform. We’re not quite there yet. The people here now are willing to put up with growing pains but if it doesn’t improve soon people will move on
The problem is that everyone has consolidated on one gargantuan server. The whole point of the fediverse is to spread out so no one server is carrying the entire load. I’m currently using lemm.ee and have experienced none of the issues being discussed here.
But yes, I agree that it could be a potential turn off for newcomers.
At the time of this writing, I have accounts on two servers. One on the big server, and one on a tiny server.
Obviously, the gargantuan server’s biggest issue is performance. That will probably improve with time, but with its size comes some noticeable benefits, which I will touch on shortly.
The tiny server, which I actually joined first, is blazing fast, but I’ve run into constant issues trying to find communities and posts that the bigger server can find no problem. Initiating a federation request is not intuitive at all, and your average user is going to wonder why the hell so much stuff isn’t showing up when they click All on a smaller server.
I tried manually copying my subscription list from the gargantuan server to the tiny one. It was quite a chore, even though it got better in 0.18. Most of the communities returned a “not found” error. Having to retry a search several times or manually input the URL and reload the page several times until the server can find the community on the remote server is not something the average user is going to want to deal with, so they’ll end up on the huge servers that already know about the communities on the other large servers, if they don’t give up.
Hopefully this gets better, but that’s my best guess as to why everybody ended up on the gargantuan servers.
I’m testing out Mlem on iOS and so far it is a much cleaner experience than even the desktop version of Lemmy’s webapp. Lots of nice QoL features.
Yeah, the apps have been spotty for me, but at least the layout is cleaner.
Not a good sign when you need an app to properly use your website though.
We’ve been using reddit for years…
And? I don’t remember Reddit being difficult to use when I signed up a decade ago
I imagine reddit felt little different than this at launch in 2005. New services are never going to be perfect from the start and it’s obvious there is a community of devoted devs working on this project.
Create an account off of lemmy.world and see if you have the same issues. A smaller instance can handle things easier. It have 2 but use the one that was most up-to-date and responsive.
See that’s part of the problem. You shouldnt need to have to create a bunch of accounts just to use a site. People aren’t going to stick around to find time their social media. They want it to just work.
We’re still very early on. It’s not going to be a digg to Reddit style thing. But Reddit will keep making bad decisions and people will trickle over here over time and with each influx, things will have improved. I’ve been here a couple weeks and it seems like every day it gets better.
Also, the technical barriers aren’t as scary to people make it out to be. Yeah we won’t get all the boomers, which is very sad. But I’ve got some very tech illiterate friends who have started using memmy with no problems.
And do we even want to get as big as Reddit? Reddit was great 15 years ago. Then teenagers got smart phones and the olds spread out past Facebook and it’s been on decline ever since. I’d be perfectly happy if it got to like 20% the size of Reddit. Maybe not even that big.
Yeah we won’t get all the boomers, which is very sad.
I hope boomer is a state of mind, because otherwise you might be disappointed to learn how old some of us are.
I fundamentally disagree with the idea we will see a continuous trickle of users here as reddit makes more bad decisions. It will be waves, not a constant trickle. And each decision after the API changes will be incrementally smaller, driving fewer users away.
Right now we will also have a retention problem. People came here as an alternative to reddit, a d if the site is too slow, too hard to use because it is slow, then they won’t stay. Theyll fall back into old habits and go back to reddit, because it’s easier and familiar.
Edit: case and point: I’m using Jerboa. I just posted this comment, but when I did it took about 30 seconds, then I got a network error, and it didn’t seem to post but it had, in fact, posted. This is pretty normal on this app right now. I understand stuff like this will get ironed out, but for new users who aren’t fully committed it’s a BIG turnoff.
Decentralized nature of Lemmy is also going to be confusing for the average Joe. When they to go to web site of Lemmy and see a list of instances to choose from, with communities spread all over them they are just going to nope out.
Even a healthy competitor, niche, or mainstream would be so nice. Lemmy already hits with some solid weight imo.
And do what? Make a better product? The beauty of Capitalism is that consumers really are the final say on whether your product succeeds. You can make an app with as many addictive hooks as possible, but that doesn’t make those users permanent. And any sabbotage by Reddit will only dig in our heels at this point.
If the fediverse starts gaining traction, you can bet the mega-corps will use every dirty trick they have to co-opt it or, if that fails, undermine it.
Threads is already expected to be that answer. Mindless instagram folks won’t have a clue.
Threads is only slealing twitter’s user space, which i can totally get behind. Fuck elon musk. Even if it benefits the lizardman.
I hear what you’re saying, but Lemmy was created to oppose the capitalist exploitation cycle. With Lemmy, we aren’t consumers or a product. Lemmy is actually firmly rooted in anti-capitalism and arose because capitalism destroys choice.
Capitalism isn’t necessary for innovation. It is just the private ownership of things. Spez didn’t make Reddit great, for example. Other people did. Spez is just a do-nothing owner who is now the mouth piece for bigger do-nothing owners looking to wring out maximum profit from unpaid laborers.
I’d argue that capitalism stifles innovation, which is why everyone agrees that you need competition. A market economy. And broad anti-trust regulations, since capitalism is inherently authoritarian since it is a top-down hierarchical structure. A free-ish market is what allowed us to innovate so quickly.
But Lemmy is outside of that since it isn’t driven by profit.
People use “capitalism” in different ways. The person you responded to probably meant it as “free marked system”, which Lemmy absolutely fits into. Often “capitalism” is used to mean “profit seeking system”, which Lemmy doesn’t fit into.
Both of these uses are common.
As someone who is currently tutoring computer science courses for college, I think you greatly over estimate the average computer users ability to navigate a place like Reddit, let alone Lemmy. Most people I tutor for intro classes struggle to understand a file browser. Even for me Lemmy was slightly intimidating with how it jumps to the whole open source/ chose an instance thing before I could make an account.
Lemmy will need a basic app before it really jumps to the main stream.
My favorite is “Okay open up Explorer, no Windows Explorer, ok close Internet Explorer, open the folder looking one, no need to double click the folder, shit you just moved that folder into another folder, we need to undo, press Ctrl+Z, wait at the same time, well not the exact same time, press Ctrl a bit earlier… Ok, Edit pulldown and click undo… how about you shift over and let me drive”
Exactly that hahaha.
It makes me sad to see how inept 18-20 year old kids are at basic computer operation. I’m 28 so not that far away, but I find myself constantly thinking “how did you guys miss this”.
I spend most of my day as a tutor for an intro to Microsoft office class and I am continually blown away at how little people understand about devices they paid hundreds of not thousands of dollars for.
Mostly it is because iOS and Android abstract away the file system. I’m 43 and have been using computers since the late 80’s, one of my biggest gripes with android is the lack of a good simple file browser and text editor.
Phone OSs are definitely a big culprit but students entering college now would have most likely at a minimum been issued Chromebooks since middle school. While not perfect at least Google drive would give them a chance to get to grips with how to navigate files.
I’ve been using Solid Explorer for years. There’s likely something better now, but it’s served me well.
Omg kids struggle to understand simple file browsers now?
I have had multiple college freshmen taking an intro C# class that had no idea what a zip file was. How can you want to be a computer science student but be so disconnected from your own computer skills.
I kind of don’t think it’s that weird. I grew up with computers and I use one for work in a technical field where understanding them helps. But I also barely use one anymore other than for work or the odd game. People who grew up on phones and want to develop for phones or consoles might never have needed to use a computer but can still be interested in computer science.
Ironic.
Yeah, Lemmy doesn’t seem to like .gif. When I uploaded it using Jerboa, it converted to .webm, which, ironically, doesn’t seem to work in Jerboa. Seems to load fine on the web version of Lemmy, though: https://lemmy.ca/comment/867679
It seems really counterintuitive, but computer literacy has taken a huge nosedive since the early days.
I have a 9 year old son, and while it’s anecdotal I know for a fact he’s the only one in his class who knows what the different components look like and what they do. All his friends are major gamers, but they have no idea how any of it works under the hood, so to speak, nor are they able to do a proper Google search, or organize files.
It boggled my mind when I first realized it also. At least my son got a nice headstart, as he’s already into python and stuff. I’m proud as hell, lol.
Good on you for getting him involved early. I’m trying to do that stuff with my nieces and nephews but they aren’t really grabbing on.
Gonna remember this for when my boy gets old enough. Hope he is going to at least be slightly interested lol
Minecraft can be a great tool for learning basic logic gates and all that. That’s how we started at first.
It also helps that he’s way smarter than I was at his age, lol.
Not just kids. I’m surrounded by adults that need me to guide them through a simple buying process or to download files. My opinion is that the instance login is just a massive barrier that will make it impossible for the general public to make lemmy and Mastodon mainstream
I was a geek squad agent for several years and yeah the adults were usually more clueless than the younger clients. Computers have been a part of the work place for nearly 40 years… I’m not expecting most people to know hardware and maintenance but just being a competent user is rare.
Yeah the instances are really confusing for a normal user. Imagine if something like discord worked like that, where you had to have a separate account for every single channel you join.
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Old.reddit is great. Way better than their modern redesign.
It would need massive UI improvement.
Being on the internet used to be not cool.
Email and www. … .com was as foreign to the mainstream as the Fediverse is to the mainstream today.
The nerds build cool shit, the corporations chase the hot new thing to milk every last dollar out of the mainstream who want the cool new toys, and the mainstream inevitably ruins the cool new toy because they don’t understand how or why it was made in the first place.
This is the way of human nature. It has played out on the internet since the start (and probably well before that) and it will probably play out again on the fefiverse (just look at Meta).
shit, meta has no place in the fediverse. Evil bastards.
100%, and their advertisers don’t either, however do their users have a place in the Fediverse?
I think that Lemmy has the opportunity to replace Reddit, time will tell how far this can really go. Just weeks ago, posts on here were only getting hundreds of upvotes. However, now I’m seeing multiple posts hit thousands a day on lemmy.world. There are many improvements to make until then, some UI, and UX improvements. I know that many people still have trouble understanding the concepts of federation so until those can be resolved I still think that it’s not going to reach that level of accessibility. I think we all know how Reddit failed here and lost many users.
I don’t know if I want it to get as big as reddit is today. I went to Reddit from Digg and I think the sweet spot of people was around 2014-15 right before all the bots and corporate shills showed up. When they started advertising is when it really started going to shit.
If Lemmy ever gets too big I’ll prolly leave for something smaller again.
Part of the fun of Lemmy is it can be as big or small as you like. Just find a smaller instance that blocks any of the big places if that ends up happening.
I see where you’re coming from, I don’t like advertising and in order for Lemmy to really get as big as Reddit it would probably need a more robust monetization model eventually. I don’t care to pay for good services as long as they are useful and don’t steal my data. However since it didn’t start like that it’s never going to work out, many people won’t go for that.
I don’t mind paying for it either even ads are fine as long as they aren’t as bad as they were on the Reddit App.
Lenny is pretty good so far. Glad theres an alternative.
No, and they never have to.
I don’t think you need to have the largest following to have great value, even lemmy as it is right now feels great. I’ll actually want to dive into comment sections compared to the endless scrolling on reddit.
As long as there’s enough people using a platform for a variety of ideas and experience in topics, I think that’s good enough for me.
I agree. A vast majority of the userbase don’t mind the countless ads on Reddit or Twitter, on even FB. I think people are leaving FB because it’s not cool anymore, not because the UE has gotten worse.
I’m just glad that there now are smaller, more tailored for my preferences alternatives like Lemmy
Personally, I don’t even want Lemmy/kbin to become Reddit 2.0.
Reddit from 10 years ago is the goal for me. Reddit has become far, far too bloated for its own good, and that line was crossed a long time ago IMO. Let’s just enjoy what we have. Let all the normies stay on Reddit, the people I wanna vibe with are here already.
The problem is that nitch communities won’t get populated unless a lot of people join. The league of legends sub is the largest video game sub on Reddit, and here it’s barely active at all.
Yes I think about Hacker News, which isn’t technically sophisticated nor does it have a massive userbase (a little less than 1 million registered accounts).
It manages to have a steady stream of content and an active commenting base
A big part of it is probably having full time paid moderators to manage their community well.
Not everyone who left Digg went to reddit, and not everyone who left Myspace went to Facebook. “Replacing” reddit should never be the goal, it should be “be better than reddit”.
If this is ever to go mainstream, what we should be concerned about is making good, high quality original content. If people see us having fun and being nice here, they’ll want to join in too.
+1 for doing your part to build a nice community!
Quick plug for my own communities:
- !nowlemmyexplain@lemmy.world for my take on ELI5
- !lemmyscareyou@lemmy.world for my take on nosleep
now why did you pop off with nowlemmyexplain. the creativity jumped out with the name
I think it would be pretty difficult for Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin to become bigger than for-profit counterparts. For-profit businesses can raise loads of funding and spend all that money on lots of engineers to refine their platforms.
But I do think the fediverse is pushing big tech to alter their platforms. E.g. Meta planning to support ActivityPub in Threads.
What do you mean by “for profit”? Reddit apparently hasn’t been profitable since its inception.
But the promises of it becoming profitable at some point is what kept investors pouring money into it.
But that was obviously based on nothing factual. If Reddit could grow to that size without turning a profit (and by exploiting free moderation for its labor), why wouldn’t any fediverse site be able to do the same? The truth is that the the content is what drives growth. If the fediverse has the content, people will go to it.
Because the fediverse is made up of instances instead of being a monolithic company. It grows as a whole, not as some specific instances.
And besides that, good luck trying to serve ads to fediverse users. They’ll just go somewhere else.
Doesn’t that support my point? If anyone can spin up a fed instance, that means the growth could potentially be faster, not slower…
This is my first comment! :)
I really think that lemmy can be as popular as Reddit. I just downloaded an app called connect for lemmy on my android and the experience is just the same as Reddit. One good app (like Sync for Reddit, Apollo, etc.) might be what is needed.
I’m hoping the Dev of boost comes through
Same, I loved boost, have got the boost for Lemmy preload on my phone already.
Same, let’s go!
Not my first comment, but very long (11years) lurker, and I must say, Connect has both replaced the spot of RIF as well as the void in my brain.
I’m a bad fediverser and still have my Reddit and Twitter apps installed, but only until Rubén’s Boost stops working. Then I’ll be stuck choosing between Connect and Boost when Rubén releases his Lemmy client
Same here. I’m on Reddit until Boost stops working.
Seems I’ll be stuck on Twitter for a while, though, as most of the people I follow on Twitter haven’t moved over to Mastodon or at least started posting to both.
Just this morning I was debating if I should go ahead and start using Connect and then switch to Boost when it releases, or instead to just wait and continue using my browser until Boost.
For me, at least, I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into a single client just because I know what the experience is like from his Reddit client. I’m willing to try whichever clients are out there until I find something I’m fully happy with.
When I first started using it I did not think so. In the week or so since I’ve sort of wrapped my head around some of it, and now I think it’s certainly possible.
The biggest hangup in my opinion is the very concept. As a normie I get to the login screen and I see that it’s asking for an instance along with a username and password. That’s scary and you’re curious what that even is, so you Google it. And that doesn’t help at all. You’re fed a very technical description that feels like a brick wall of information. It’s intimidating.
Once you are set up on a large instance and logged into a good app, subscribed to some of your niches… Well in my experience at all clicked together pretty quickly. The only thing that’s missing from the Lemmy experience is traffic. I know there are already some pretty big communities and people are starting to say it’s too big or something, but there’s many interests of mine that are booming on Reddit that have a handful or less posts here. Naturally things take time, and I am genuinely starting to believe we’re on the way there with this platform (network of platforms?)
The way I’ve described it to non tech friends and family is “a bunch of different reddits, all with their own subreddits, but the different reddits can all talk to each other even if you only have an account on one. Then if one reddit has stuff your reddit doesn’t want to see, your community (or just the admins) can decide to disconnect from them.” It’s worked well so far.
Yeah, maybe there could be blurb during the sign up section when selecting an instance? That being said, I didn’t know what I was doing when I first signed up for Lemmy and chose Lemmy.world without knowing choosing the largest one didn’t matter.
Email and Usenet used to have the same barrier to entry, you needed someone to host and provide NNTP, POP3 and SMTP servers for you to access them. This was usually your ISP or IT department.
Modern internet users have become so conditioned by FB, Gmail, etc to think that the only way you can access content is though one of these monolithic providers. There are some users who think that FaceBook is the internet (just like Early AOL, MSN and CompuServe users of the 90’s).
I would like to see small ISPs provide federated instances for their subscribers, just like their email servers and the NNTP servers from days of yore. Since most independent ISP churn is triggered by word-of-mouth, it would be a great marketing platform.
