This is not going to be a blogpost about “Why do people still use Reddit instead of everyone moving to Lemmy?”. I noticed that even with Mastodon users, who already understand and like the advantages of decentralized platforms, the usage of Lemmy is extremely small, and more people use Reddit. Most of them haven’t even heard of Lemmy. To be fair, the Reddit usage also seems to be fairly low.
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So, saying ‘nobody uses X’ is a bit of a stretch considering that whenever it’s said, there’s proof to the contrary that people use said thing. People use lemmy at times, but the problem is as it has been pointed out before many times, is that lemmy is still too niche and small when compared to larger platforms.
One of the big reasons I can think of is, is that Lemmy just doesn’t have the span of community as someplace like Reddit does. You’re not going to find a Darts lemmy instance, you’re not going to find a MentalHealth lemmy instance or anything. On Reddit, there’s hundreds of micro-communities that cover a range of interests that anybody can join and talk about.
Lemmy only seems to focus on just a handful of things; Politics, Memes, Games, Piracy, Linux, News, Technology and Asking Questions. That’s great and all but, just about anyone has these in spades. Not everyone wants to cycle through those things on a daily basis, they’ll want something more. But it’s going to turn people off from Lemmy immediately when they migrate from Reddit.
Yeah sure, we can tell them to make an instance to cover that niche itch, but once it’s built, it can be months to even years before it gets attention. And nobody wants to spend time just running around like an annoying salesman to get people to join said instance just to feel better about converting someone else over from one side to the other.
Another reason is that - moderation can be ass. Yeah, some moderators on Lemmy have the mentality and maturity of an edgy 15-year old who spends too much time online for their own good. And we can all see it in plain sight on the modlog so I don’t even need to explain.
217 comments on this in 24 hours says to me that there must at least a few people using lemmy
on reddit it would be 6000.
30K users is small potatoes. even niche subreddits have userbases larger than that.
Yea, once a post is up on reddit for even 3 hours its not worth interacting with because no-one will see what you have to say anyways. Honestly its what makes Lemmy better to me.
This is exactly one of the reasons I like this more. Writing anything of reddit is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean. This comment here might only be read by 10 people, but 10 good, real people will actually read it.
Yeah but thats better than most niche message boards back in their heyday. Probably better than y incubators message board to.
A big chunk of reddit traffic and users are bots. Another large segment are more recent arrivals from India (check out how many Indian topics make the front pages on the weekends when USA/UK traffic is low.) While I can’t prove it I have a hunch that Spez hired a bunch of Indian clickfarms to pump the numbers before the IPO. Maybe he just promoted in India more to get an influx of users for the IPO or maybe they are mostly “social media marketers” hired to sell health/peptide supplements (seriously there are services that do that on Reddit so be careful ever taking any such advice from them.)
But my point is that the quality of users is pretty weak and I’m certain American advertisers have noticed by now. 300ish real, quality users is a better engagement metric than 6000 bots.
the predicted commie red wave revolution are all here in their dozens, actually about 2000 of them
revolution!
I use Lemmy. And you do. And 1000 other people do. So I’d say it’s big enough.
And Reddit was small for years and years when it started. I don’t even think I really started using it till around 2013-2014. Didn’t have a username or anything just came across it through Google searches. All websites take a while to build a userbase.
This I think is the main problem to adoption. It’s very hard to come across Lemmy results on a search engine even if I’m trying to specify Lemmy. (Not that search engines matter for most people these days what with the LLM executive summary pushing out real web pages, who needs resources when you have slop, am I right? \s)
I think its okay the way it is. Too much attention leads to many reposts, karma farmers, bots, now AI bullshit etc.
I think it’s too empty a lot of times. Mainstream topics are nicely populated but a vast amount of specific communities are just one person posting links over and over with a handful of upvotes and zero comments. Sometimes I see posts here and have to go to Reddit to see what the community thinks about it, because on Lemmy the post is completely dead.
I say this in all of these threads: more users does not mean a better experience.
Instead, focus on making our communities the best they can be.
I think that’s only true after a certain amount of users.
I joined Lemmy a couple of years ago and I already notice more user engagement. I would like a little bit more, such that more niche communities can have an ecosystem of posters instead of a single one doing most posts. But not much more indeed
“nobody”, nearly 50k people.
Asking people on mastodon if they use lemmy also doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t use mastodon because it’s not threaded, people on mastodon probably don’t use lemmy for a similar reason. I’m not sure how many people use both threaded and unthreaded platforms, but it feels to me like the two layouts attract different people.
Then there are psychos like me who use both, and Bluesky, and other social media and have a personal blog.
Bag 'm and tag 'm folks, get this psychopath out of here. If we allow this, what’s next? We’ll allow people who use friendica?
Me too! It’s interesting how different they all are.
I haven’t logged into my bluesky account since like ages. Mainly because I’m using my real Identity there, which I’m not comfortable with talking online. I love anonymity. I speak a little more off my mind because I’m anonymous.
I mean, you can make a new/second account.
I don’t use Mastodon or Twitter either. I never understood following specific people and prefer following topics instead.
I don’t generally like the Twitter model and rarely use it, but I will say that one thing that it does do well, better than the Reddit/Threadiverse model, is very rapidly assembling information about a specific, temporary topic.
Like, the Reddit model is about letting a community assemble over time and letting people find their way there and moderators be chosen and all that. That works quite well for a lot of things, and lets people with expertise in the field arise and all that.
But let’s say that there’s a huge natural disaster and people are putting up video clips from their cell phones and stuff like that. They can coalesce around a hashtag or a couple of hashtags pretty quickly. Relevant material from people who have had no contact with each other and maybe no time to assemble a community or anything gets drawn together. Other users retweeting content help highlight it. The topic probably won’t be active for long. It can be really useful for a rapid setup and teardown scenario.
Of course, that’s really mostly following a hashtag, rather than a particular user…
I also dislike the “short comment” model that Twitter uses (though over the years, the comment length has been increased and workarounds added), but one thing that it does help with is to help deal with inexperienced users unfamiliar with quoting etiquette. In email or in traditional forum systems, it’s conventional to quote a bit of relevant text before responding to it. This requires knowing syntax for doing so and when it’s appropriate. Twitter deals with that by forcing everything to be broken up into bite-size chunks as a property of the system, so someone responding to something is forced to respond to only the relevant bit. I think that that probably helps make Twitter more-approachable.
Mastodon allows you to follow hashtags, which would be like following a topic.
Exactly. And with the advanced web interface on Mastodon or an app like Moshidon or Manfred, you can create custom timelines that show just a collection of hashtags.
I use that a lot—exclusively, really.
following people is nice if you know these people personally, like from real life.
People that do actual geolocations for the war in Ukraine are basically the primary sources. They figure out where and when videos were taken and do the actual work. Following the topic gets you to some big account that aggregates them
Exactly! I’d be curious to see the reverse poll, asking Lemmy users “Why does nobody use Mastodon?” (and include Bluesky and Twitter in the poll.)
I use Lemmy (and in the past Reddit) because topic based conversation is what makes sense to me. Anytime I try to use Mastodon or Bluesky I lurk for a bit and then just come back here.
Boiling it down to 3 things:
- Content Scale & Variety - Lemmy has a lot of content but it’s very tech/political heavy. It doesn’t have much to offer outside of that domain. Meanwhile, there’s a whole shitposting subreddit dedicated to an NFL conference – I don’t even closely follow professional American football, but it’s glorious.
- User Experience Friction - You can’t just sign up, you need to pick a server. You’ve already lost a significant amount of people in that step.
- User Base - There’s nice folks on here, but some really sour the experience for the rest of us by being straight up hostile if we don’t agree on every little detail.
Step 2 is dead right. Before you can proceed, we’re going to need you to make an apparently important and irreversible decision that you didn’t even want to make, based on incomplete information.
Not to mention some of them require admin approval so that’s a dealbreaker.
YOU HAVE MADE A BLOOD PACT WITH WORLD.
ML HATES YOU NOW
i feel like it’s usually the opposite. some people just really insist on getting upset about anyone on .ml
I feel like this is an issue of (either accidentally or incidentally) putting focus on something that doesn’t really need it. Picking instances should not matter; not in the sense of “it’s federated blah blah” but more in the sense of “it’s 2026, there’s password managers, noone uses their real identities for everything; having multiple accounts wherever it’s convenient should be normal”.
Number 1 is the reason I rarely visit Lemmy. The choice and wording of political posts and reactions to them create a very negative atmosphere and sometimes it is combined with rather unrational doomerism. Threads just feel angry and hostile too often for me to have fun on here. This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.
This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.
That’s so much extra work
That’s why you are supposed to pick an instance that does most of that work for you: one that will have already blocked what you don’t like.
The banlist is public but is essentially a hassle of an Excel spreadsheet to crawl through, what would be nice would be having some sort of public “moderation trends” (broad-strokes view of what have we been blocking and will continue to do so) and “moderation commitments” (eagle view of what will happen when you report a post to us).
Haha there are in fact 8 different NFL shitposting subreddits, one for each of the 8 different divisions. And each one is as active as just about any Lemmy community.
I agree on the other 2 points as well. Not only is it weird to have to pick an instance, the names and descriptions are off putting as well. You scroll through and several of the top ones are openly Marxist/leninist/leftist. 95% of people see that and are immediately put off. It sends a message that Lemmy is fundamentally for leftist agenda-posting, and a lot of users treat it that way. Click on any completely non-political-sounding community (like Movies or something), sort top all time and you will usually be greeted immediately by posts about Israel/Palestine or Donald Trump. Its exhausting honestly.
Edit: also, why does join-lemmy.org not show .world (one of the largest coms if not the largest) anywhere on the popular instances page? What kind of drama is going on there? This is exactly the kind of shit Im talking about.
User Experience Friction - You can’t just sign up, you need to pick a server. You’ve already lost a significant amount of people in that step.
I think this can be improved if there was a better way to explain the identity of each instance and why you might want to join other than just “generic Lemmy server for everyone to use”
Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they’re not gonna have a good time.
I suggest a map that shows which instances are federated/defederated from eachother and lets you find which one has the closest identity to what you like. And possibly a disclaimer before joining one of the trifecta instances.
Or just say fuck it and join the one literally called “shit just works” like me 😂
Ideally, I think instances ought to be something the casual user can be unaware of. Like the default experience should be instance-independent and the choice of instance should be some trivial thing that you can change on a whim carrying your entire user identity and chat history with you. I don’t really get any functional sense of community from my instance anyway
To expand on 3, there are no (that I’m aware of) official community channels for businesses in the Fediverse compared to Reddit. The default avenues to interact with them are usually Discord, Reddit, and even Twitter.
I kind of like this level of people as lemmy is less saturated and that’s a good thing. Quite often when I was on reddit you’d look at a thread and everything that can be said has been said, so there’s nothing new you can add.
I find myself commenting on lemmy a lot more because it’s not saturated and that pun hasn’t been done, the perspective hasn’t been provided, the counterpoint to another comment hasn’t been commented etc.
Im glad bots dont use lemmy as they do reddit.
It’s because everything that becomes popular starts with people in the 14-20 year range.
Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Tiktok…
The Fediverse will eventually grow once something triggers a snowball effect due the nature of connectivity and federation. Until then, the way to make it grow is to have young people make it popular.
Edit: There also needs to be more “fun” here. I think the Fediverse is a more “serious” place which isn’t what those other social media sites offered. “Serious 24/7” isn’t that enticing for young people.
The other day I was imagining a game or game service that has you make a Fediverse account of some kind. You get people to signup with a username that automatically creates a “@fedi.games” account. That account can have access to Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed etc.
what, you don’t think it’s fun endlessly memeing about doomerism and murder?
There’s not enough politics IMO. No fun at all.
People need to spend more time on lighthearted issues like Palestine and the evils of capitalism
I have to be that guy and point out that the Threadiverse isn’t just Lemmy, and microblog-Fedi isn’t just Mastodon.
Nobody used reddit for a long time as well
Until people did
Lemmy feels like reddit around 2009
A lot of people do use Lemmy. I dont get why so many people think something has to have literally everyone on earth using it or its dead. You see the same thing in games, too. Id rather there not be a singular monolirh even with lemmys fediverse design. The internet was better when it wasnt this way.
Exactly. Be grateful that all of reddit is not here.
Niche and local communities are non-existent here. It’s either politics, furry memes, or anime posts. It would be nice for the other communities to have engagement.
hey don’t forget all the mental health communities here…
And we have cats communities to deal with that one!
sue 2: Users could agree on one community. Or (a functionality Lemmy doesn’t have), similar communities could be grouped or linked together. Instead of choosing between Linux@lemmy.ml and Linux@lemmy.world, users could follow a combined “Linux” topic.
Doesn’t PieFed do exactly that?
Yes, and it consolidates comments from cross-posts. Very neat.
Its very cool.
How does the topic consolidation work, exactly? Does it only consolidate cross-posts, or does it also consolidate all posts from communities that have exactly the same name? The only documentation I can find is at https://join.piefed.social/features/ which just says:
Consolidated Comments – View all comments from multiple related posts on one page (example).
Personally I’m not a fan. Imagine if /r/games and /r/gaming on reddit shared comment sections. That’d be a complete mess.
Different communities should be allowed to nurture their own culture.
Well it doesn’t mix the comments, there’s a divider between
A divider, lol. It’s still the same page and everything. Hardly any separation. We shouldn’t encourage this mono-culture style.
Well you don’t have to use it if you don’t like it. Many people like it, it was a feature with high demand. Even without the feature I always check the crossposts for different comments, so it’s the same thing just more convenient, no difference in “mono-culture”
Lemmy and Reddit usage are relatively low compared to their respective social media siblings. I’ve always believed the reason is in the difference in how they’re structured. Most other social media is wired around people as the primary structural unit. “Who’s saying what?” Reddit and Lemmy are instead wired around topics. “What are people saying about this?” And I assume the difference in popularity is evidence for how most people themselves are wired.
Having seen and experienced the different platforms, I’d say Facebook and Twitter/X have much larger userbases but vulnerable to manipulation, while Reddit is supposedly for people believing themselves to be “smarter” and above those social media platforms, and then Lemmy and Mastadon definitely more niche and heavily on the activist progressive side.
