More users to accommodate more active niche communities
Truthfully, Lemmy doesn’t even have enough users for some mainstream interests, like sports. Lemmy leans very tech and selects for a certain type of user. But I’m sure plenty of people here are happy to have a place without daily NFL and NBA news.
active niche and place based communities. the ones i’ve seen for my area are super quiet
more diversity. currently lemmy predominantly has politics, tech, and memes. Anything else is a little rough around the edges or nonexistent
Particularly, I was a huge fan of the Tales from X-style subreddits. It was entertaining to be able to go into them, read some stories about it and see others responses, even if some of them you could totally tell weren’t actually real. there have been communities made for some of the topics, but they’re dead, and unfortunately, those types of communities aren’t really communities that you can do too much with yourself unless you’re actively in that same field.
politics, tech, and memes
And surprisingly Lemmy has very little programming content. The programming and learn_programming communities are almost dead.
As a member of the programming.dev instance, this just isn’t true. Maybe those sublemmies on other instances are, but there’s always posts, questions, and content on programming.dev.
Any amount of positivity and fun. Lemmy users just feel so miserable and argumentative.
I mean sign of the times but damn.
That’s interesting. I feel like my experience has been the opposite. I’ll occasionally post things here, completely expecting some negative response (not looking for it, but I know how people are). For example, I posted a rant about an issue I was having after switching to Linux. Instead of negativity, I typically get responses more like “that’s a valid criticism. Have you considered $x, though?”, and the conversation continues quite pleasantly.
I feel like reddit was far quicker to jump to “no. You’re wrong, and here’s why…”.
Edit: correcting hypothetical redditor’s spelling.
The only time I’ve been dunked on is by tankies when said that RT is pure propaganda.
Otherwise I like vibes here…sometimes the super hard line against Libs and Obama throw me off but an anarchy-socialist so it doesn’t bother me personally. Just a bit confusing when looking at the alternatives at the time.
oh yeah, either infinite Trumpa-lumpa or linux! so much linux! horrible!!
/s
You were having an issue, not posting your opinion. What is there to be mad about? Also Linuxers will froth at any opportunity to do that.
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Reddit is basically facebook at this point.
Edit: this isn’t even really true. I just wanted to say something bad about reddit because they banned me for life for saying that Alex Karp should be yeeted into space and that Donald Trump rapes kids.
I miss being able to make sarcastic comments without someone telling me I’m the sole reason the world went to shit.
could be worse, you could live in a place where people are like that in person.
More users.
And for lemmurs to stop being so binary and assuming every discussion is a war zone. Defend a Jewish person and you’re a fascist. Defend a Palestinian and you’re anti-semetic. Make a ‘whore’ joke and you’re a misogynist. Criticise capitalism and you’re a tankie. Accidentally and innocently misgender someone and you’re transphobic. Defend trans folk and you’re woke. Its all so bloody exhausting.
Oh I see, so you hate Free Software! Fucking typical, unsubscribed, and I will not be returning. 😛
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I am legally blind. I literally cannot use desktop Linux due to lack of accessibility, but somehow that’s my fault.
I understand if it would be a burden, but @shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip could probably give some advice. I think they are legally blind too.
GNOME with the orca screen reader should be at least useable
That sucks, and I’m sorry you had that experience. To provide a viewpoint for your short-circuit, the FOSS software is a tool, yes, but the FOSS movement is politics and philosophy. To them (us, but I like to hope I’m less of a dink) software made unethically is similar to advocating for socialism or unions as a means of empowering the people against forces that would oppress them. For some people, using proprietary software might be like using products made by slave labour.
Some people who are more puritanical than myself might refuse to use anything that they can’t use freely, the equivalent of you obstaining from using a laptop at all if Linux doesn’t work for you. I think most people, myself included, would consider that extreme, but I bet you’ve heard from those extremists.
None of this is meant to excuse the people who’ve been crap to you, you should do whatever you need to. I’m just trying to explain why people get so worked up about it compared to a screwdriver. Or a hammer, say. A hammer and a sickle, even…
😉
agree on the first part, second part is just the modern internet sadly
Its always been this way.
This person just said they would like to be fascist anti-semetic misogynist tankie and transphobic without catching shit for it. In the old days of the internet, we definitely would have told them to shove their head up their ass
A bit, yeah
The sad part is that the centralized platforms that are popping up and adopting anti politic stances are feeling much friendlier. People here complain about centralized platforms, but all the fighting is ironically just pushing people over to those platforms.
I don’t think any of that is Lemmy Official Opinion. it just shows there are all kinds of people here, some of them maybe a bit too sensitive in their topic.
Same with posts. I posted something to TIL and it was instantly tagged as self promoting my channel. That was my last post. Message received.
content
More users in smaller niche communities. Lemmy has less users in general, so smaller niche communities are practically non-existent here.
I don’t can enough to post enough in there canning, but I’m hoping it’s just well, we’re all waiting for fall and the harvests!
Active communities. Some of the comms for my interests technically exist, in that they get one post every third month that gets 2 upvotes. Despite everything, these communities are still thriving on Reddit. Yet for whatever reason, any attempt to replicate them here fails. Smh
They were small on reddit once too. Just a matter of time. Also helps if you post to them.
I’m not sure that it is a matter of time. Maybe I’m just being pessimistic, but I think the fediverse wave has crested already. There’s a reverse migration from Mastodon back to places like X/Twitter under way, and lemmy really never even saw the scale of adoption or attention that Mastodon saw.
I’m not worried that lemmy will go away any time soon, but I’m not sure it’s ever going to be mainstream enough to attract enough users to really support vibrant and diverse communities.
Yes, unfortunately the multiple instance nature of Lemmy is an obstacle for most people. I’ve been here for more than a year and I still struggle to describe what Lemmy is.
I’m not sure that’s the problem. Maybe it is, but from what I see, most people never even get far enough into considering lemmy for its decentralized nature to become the blocker. I don’t think it really even registers as an option for most of them.
The big commercial sites would do things like research studies and marketing campaigns to try to attract new users. Fediverse mostly relies on organic growth, driven by things like word-of-mouth. That’s fine, in that it gives us a core group of users who really want to be here and know why, but I think there’s an upper bound to our ability to attract new users that way.
I’m sure some will prefer that it works this way, but for me, I consider users of Reddit and X/Twitter to be something along the lines of hostages needing to be rescued. We can’t save them all, but I’d love to get more people off of those sites.
Content and the number of users. Good lord there are so many dead boards on lemmy.
A large enough userbase to support more niche topics. On Lemmy, like a lot of small communities, people tend to put the cart before the horse. They make places to share content for very niche topics but there aren’t enough to warrant it. Plus sometimes you have mods in certain relatively niche groups that will remove content from their community because it is off topic, but their volume of posts is nowhere near enough for the occasional, technically off topic post to really matter. I see it in Discord servers too. Some places have more channels than users on the server. People get obsessed with categorization.
Niche communities.
the niche communities over there, replicated here, but without the number of users some are ghost towns on lemmy. with them forcing popup logins piecemeal, we may get a boost.
also people scattered way too much to other similar platforms, when one instance shutsdown which is problematic.
also some politically heavy instances ban like they would on reddit.
More niche communities that I don’t have to manage to enjoy. TBF Reddit is pretty bad as a forum too. Car audio for example or really anything where the majority of the discourse is newbies wanting help gets drowned out by people repping popular brands, showing off pie in the sky builds that wouldn’t sound good, or arguing about whether capacitors do anything.
isn’t that mostly a moderation problem?
Not really imo, it’s mostly because traditional forums “bump” posts back up to the top. That promotes back and forth that’s required in order to help people diagnose a problem to the actual solution, and as a result of not having a bump prioritization feature, a lot of people only ever speak once in the comments.
I would say the old.reddit interface but lemmy actually has that. :)
Interesting, but I don’t think this allows mods to customize a community’s HTML in the way that I have seen done on reddit (custom backgrounds, upvote/downvote icons, etc).
It doesn’t, and due to the way lemmy frontends work, it likely won’t ever natively have that feature. Something that might be possible though is a browser addon that applies custom CSS to communities when visiting them through mlmym? But someone would have to make that, and get moderators to submit custom CSS for their communities…
Lemmy might not support this, but PieFed does (without the need for a browser extension). There are some instructions here on setting it up:
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/developer_docs/09_Theming_Guide.mdThe custom CSS/JS/Jinja needs to be submitted and approved first, but then a moderator could add it to the community as the official theme.
Mbin also supports it, and without needing approval.
Though it’s not currently being federated, is that the same or different on Piefed?
Thank you for sharing, I wasn’t aware of this feature. But to be fair, PieFed has it easier here because it has a ‘main’ frontend (unlike lemmy, where all frontends are third-party as far as the main software is concerned) that you can apply styling to. Even then, it can only work on that main frontend and not any alternate clients.
I really need to follow PieFed more closely, to be honest. It has so much stuff…
edit: actually, I just noticed this:
The custom CSS/JS/Jinja needs to be submitted and approved first, but then a moderator could add it to the community as the official theme.
So I assume an admin has to add it as a possible theme first, right? If that’s good enough, I guess something similar could be done in mlmym too. mlmym should already be very easy to style; it doesn’t have a skins/themes mechanism, but that’s nothing that couldn’t be added.
I think I’m still favorable to the addon approach because it would mean that the custom style could work across every mlmym installation without needing admin involvement, but a theme system is also a reasonable compromise.
I did not know about this, thanks !
Had no idea !
90% of the answers in here boil down to more users.
active users specifically
Searching my username + lemmy in the search bar equals every instance except my own for +90% of searches :p
