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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.

  • dance_ninja@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    4 days ago

    Boiling it down to 3 things:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    • bampop@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      4 days ago

      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.

        • Diva (she/her)@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          i feel like it’s usually the opposite. some people just really insist on getting upset about anyone on .ml

      • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        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”.

    • onion_trial@europe.pubEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • dance_ninja@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.

        That’s so much extra work

        • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          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).

    • LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      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 😂

      • bampop@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        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

    • renrenPDX@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      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.