> The most similar thing to newsgroups today is Reddit, and I really enjoy following some communities.
Which in turn will die and give way to Lemmy (generally ActivityPub).
Which in turn will die and give way to Lemmy (generally ActivityPub).
So... don't know if that will ever replace Reddit. You really have to be a bit tech-savvy, and most users of the internet aren't.
Edit: And the instructions how to do it are buried away somewhere around two-thirds of the way through the text on this page (https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html), with way to much text on it for normal users to read it all or to not stop caring.
Just like email, you do not need to create multiple accounts to talk to people from other servers, unless they have blocked one another. I am confused, I find it likely that HackerNews readers would know this. Perhaps you're making a point?
> So... don't know if that will ever replace Reddit. You really have to be a bit tech-savvy, and most users of the internet aren't.
I'm sure this is a familiar argument to most of us here. People usually focus on technical solutions, making it easier, one-click, fool-proof. I fear that is a game corporations and centralised services have an advantage in.
I have an alternative. It's not an easy solution, but a social solution to this would be to have "family sysadmins". Someone in the family who is at least slightly tech-savvy, helping the other members of the family set up their accounts. There is no need for the average person to understand federation or to be tech-savvy in this case. In other words, "help your family and friends with their IT stuff instead of putting them in the control of big corporations".
Your idea of having people in your family/friends that help everyone else with joining such communities is nice, but it also depends on some factors: - Do you know such people in your family? - Do you have a family/friends? - Do you want to waste their time with your needs, and how many people must be served by one person?
It may work for some to many people to ask for help with something like this, but not for the masses I think.
Now, it might be that the learning curve is steeper than the existing solutions, but think of all the things you had to learn while using reddit:
- what is a sub?
- What is the difference between posting a link, a text, an image?
- How does voting affect the front-page?
- What is Karma?
- What is a DM?
Now, think of things you'll probably have to learn to use Lemmy.
- what is an instance?
- What is a community?
- How do I find communities to follow?
- What is the difference between "local" and "all"?
Why is it that "the masses" managed to learn how to use reddit, but wouldn't be able to learn Lemmy?
Life would be impossible without it.
(I do my best to avoid snarky responses, but do you realize how your comment amounts to pointless pontification?)
What do you get by "Well actually"-ing me on a completely innocuous aphorism?
It already did: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
It will be a slow descent for reddit, but if you take the "rule" of social media that splits content creators/active participants/lurkers as 1/9/90%, and if we assume that a substantial amount of the 1% is moving away from reddit, then it stands to reason that the other 99% will end up following the creators.
Yeah, network effects are still at play, but there is already a critical mass of people on Lemmy that want it to work. I find myself posting a lot more than I ever did on reddit (or even here) because I look at it as tending a garden.
In the domains of programming, suggesting that many of the 1% have moved away from Reddit, that is extremely optimistic... though that may be my visibility into fragmentation of communities across Lemmy.
https://lemmy.ml/c/java
https://programming.dev/c/java
Instances on beehaw tend to be more thriving, but this may also be a function of more active moderation... which is one of those things that people rail about being unfair and Stack Overflow over moderates (that's another thread).
The people who left Reddit appear to mostly be moderators who have gotten tired of moderating rather than people who are creating content / posts / commenting on Reddit.
https://programming.dev/c/cs_career_questions
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/
There was a surge a few weeks ago (especially as people hit private subs) - but it hasn't been sustained.
https://fedidb.org disagrees with you. Numbers are still going up, quite strongly.
User count from a year ago is 30k to 48k.
Post count is from 181k to 241k
The content on the site is memes and jokes with occasional world news.
https://lemmy.ml/?dataType=Post&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=Active
https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=Active
Mastodon is doing quite well. Lemmy... not so much.
TOTAL USERS: 405,020
MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS: 69,825
ACTIVE SERVERS: 1,175
TOTAL POSTS: 1,558,916
> The content on the site is memes and jokes with occasional world news.
So is reddit. And you are forgetting adult content.
I am not sure that one would claim that content creators are there rather than people copying content from various porn and making it accessible.
Do the graphs on that page suggest a substantial increase in the rate of content being submitted to Lemmy instances in the past year?
Memes and jokes are fine... if that's what you are after. I'll note that my /r/all page is devoid of most of them as the reddit subs that I'm on tend to not be as meme saturated.
If you are after deeper discussions of programming topics or hobbies, Lemmy doesn't seem to show the sustained growth or content being added that provides for interesting reading. https://startrek.website is probably the exception to this as they've maintained a rather focused set of communities and so it is easier to find content that isn't memes.
I haven't been able to find an equivalent of /r/DIY, /r/boardgames, /r/soloboardgaming, /r/books, /r/factorio (and its set of subs) on Lemmy.
If one wants to claim that the content creators of /r/memes have mostly left and gone to Lemmy... ok. I'm not as familiar with that subculture. If you want to say that the content creators of /r/books have left and gone to Lemmy - I have seen no indication of that happening.
> I haven't been able to find an equivalent of /r/DIY, /r/boardgames, /r/soloboardgaming, /r/books, /r/factorio
Then, let's get to it?
I created https://communick.news/c/makers, it would be great to have more people helping me bootstrap it.
For games, if there isn't a lemmy instance for that, I will gladly register a domain and set it up.
> and if we assume that a substantial amount of the 1% is moving away from reddit, then it stands to reason that the other 99% will end up following the creators.
Unless it is a reddit sub, where a mod has shut it down (and the community hasn't moved to another tangent reddit sub), I'm just not seeing a reduction in engagement on Reddit by the people who post.
The field of dreams approach for creating communities on Lemmy doesn't seem to be the most effective way at creating communities - especially if you, the person creating the /c/, aren't creating original content for it (long form posts) and actively working on discoverability of the /c/ (cross posting as appropriate).
Creating or gathering a community is a lot more work than just creating a /c/.
My claim is still that the people who left Reddit because of the latest mess were (a) not content creators themselves, or (b) looking for a reason to leave.
For group (a), this resulted in some subs getting made private and the communities on reddit readjusted to tangent ones.
For group (b), while a loss was not a significant one. On a casual sub that I moderate (and thus have access to stats for), I only see the number of unique users grow since January (the official iOS client use is 3x larger than Android, and 10x larger any of the other sources). The number of monthly active unique users for a middling activity cat sub is 36,000 (compare all of Lemmy at 69,000 monthly active users). I haven't seen any indication of a reduction in the posting of the 1% of content creators on Reddit in any of the subs that I moderate, nor anecdotally, any of the subs that I visit.
Completely agree. The point is, who will be creating new communities on reddit after all this?
> the people who left Reddit (...) were not content creators themselves
Like I said, it is an assumption. If the content creators are not leaving (or at least looking for alternatives) then I'm really sorry for them and their audience.
> Roughly 2.6M views a day, 300K daily uniques, 3 to 3.5M monthly uniques. It depends on how you count, of course.
It would be curious to see how this compares to 2023... but I doubt you'd see an order of magnitude change in either direction.
Some 2021 stats (not from dang though) https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
But to be fair I like my communities small, obscure, slightly unfriendly and without PR. Every good community I've liked had a phase of being nice to newcomers who were trying to fit and being hostile to those who weren't, so maybe there's something to it.
Having a blast on Tildes (Y) though.