To follow-up on the Reddit thread yesterday, here are a few elements that can be interesting to discuss.

Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy

Just quoting “Lemmy” or pointing to join-lemmy.org can lead to a very unintuitive and clunky experience, as people can just end up randomly on a very small and/or outdated instance. Recent post by a new joiner 9 days ago, they had to change server 2 times to get a satisfying experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536.

Using something like

"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users

Feel free if you have any questions"

Can already point them in one direction, and avoid them getting lost in the too many options.

If people want to debate the choice of those two instances, I’ll add my thought process in the comments.

The Lemmy feed looks as depressing as Reddit’s All, and how to mitigate that

Some feedback I received when promoting Lemmy the way above

Just checked out lemmy to see if it’s different from reddit. Im very disappointed lmao.

First post I see is a comic about cultural appropriation with an ifunny watermark. Next are several posts about the proton vpn ceo “going full maga.” And finally a post I saw on Reddit days ago that is ragebait making fun of the cybertruck.

Yikes. It’s the same exact thing.

–

Lemmy still has a pretty obnoxious tankie problem. Even if you block the .ml instance, pretty much every thread about US politics or world news on any major instance gets hijacked by the same handful of trolls and their associated vote bots. Hopefully this will become less of a problem as more sane people join, but just as a word of caution, be aware that you will be called western imperialist scum by a bunch of 14 year olds.

–

Lemmy is utter rubbish, it’s as if their entire userbase consists of the top layer of scum carefully siphoned off from the Reddit cesspool. It got the worst of the annoying political echo chamber and “very smart” argumentative users from Reddit.

I just clicked on half a dozen random Lemmy servers, and all of them had at least one link about Trump in the top 5 posts. Even ones that seem like they’re supposed to be about tech.

Normal humans want the Reddit of 10+ years ago back. We don’t want to use a different site colonized by the same modern day Redditors we loathe interacting with.

–

To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong. Open https://discuss.online/ , by default you’ll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.

What I try to do in such instances is to give something like

"While politics are important, you can still very much block them. Here are an example of some communities that can interest you:

I also wrote a long post about that issue that you can read here https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/

As a side note, I recently started a discussion on !fedigrow@lemm.ee about a potential political-free instance for new joiners, feel free to have a look: https://feddit.org/post/6819084

Lemmy is too small, 42k monthly active users is nothing

Discuit, the centralized alternative to Reddit, currently counts 181 weekly active commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/NlAdOWAp

You can also mention that NodeBB is now federating with Lemmy:

That’s all for now, happy to discuss in the comments.

Note: if you’re not interested in promoting Lemmy, feel free to hide this post, you are able to do this on specific posts if your instance is running 0.19.4 and newer

  • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
    183·
    8 hours ago

    Thought process about discuss.online and sopuli as recommendations

    There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/)

    • Lemmy.world is too big
    • Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )
    • sh.itjust.works names contains “shit”, which can deter users: https://feddit.org/post/4255611/2825351
    • lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric
    • feddit.org, is German-centric (sidebar in German first, Matrix chat is in German, meta community is in German)
    • dbzer0 federates hexbear
    • programming.dev is topic-centric
    • blahaj is queer-focused
    • discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
    • lemmy.sdf.org does not defederate anyone
    • lemmy.zip is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad
    • beehaw is way outdated
    • infosec.pub is topic-centric
    • aussie.zone is country-centric
    • midwest.social is region-centric

    I ended up with discuss.online and sopuli.xyz as they have

    • neutral names
    • long running history
    • good downtime
    • active admins
    • defederate hexbear and lemmygrad

    If people have other suggestions, feel free

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances

      [proceeds to list pretty much all good instances, and complains about hexbear]

      …I’m curious, what is your definition of “generalist”? Because I suspect it involves “not punching nazis”.

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        “generalist”

        Something that is not linked to a country, a theme or a demographic

        Non-generalist:

        Generalist:

        • lemm.ee
        • sopuli.xyz
        • discuss.online

        Not sure what you meant with “not punching nazis”

    • gt24@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 hours ago

      I’ll mention my experience with a server from that list (that I won’t name)…

      The server worked most of the time but federation kept breaking. The server was rather small. Since you use Lemmy from your home instance, this meant that only a few local communities showed any activity and this was a very low amount of activity. This would go on for days or even well over a week before things got better for a while and then everything started to break again.

      It is one thing for a server to just go away. You then clearly know that something is wrong and you can migrate over to another server. It is another thing for the server to generally be online all the time with it just messing up in such a way as to make the whole Lemmy ecosystem seem rather dead.

      Things would have been easier if most of the communities I want to interact with were on the same server as my account. The other server, with federation issues, was only home to 5 % of the communities I was following which left 95 % of the communities I wanted to follow as not updated due to federation issues.

      There isn’t a clear indication of which servers are working great with a proven track record of working great as opposed to “zombie instances” not federating correctly or other instances which are moments away from randomly shutting down. The point is that I feel like my account anywhere will be able to receive and send information throughout the whole Lemmy network or sites. This reduces the concept of federation a bit down towards needing to have an account on a well known working server simply because account migration is such a headache. I can then interact with communities without issues (hosted on well working servers) but I can easily change my community subscriptions as I want to.

      One thing that may help for someone is to try and see what communities they want to participate in. If the communities they primarily find interesting are in Lemmy.world then they likely should have an account there to ease any federation issues. The number of communities I follow here are 3 times larger than communities I follow with any other specific instance. This community subscription list is one I figured out when I was on “that other server” so it guided me here.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      4·
      6 hours ago

      join-lemmy needs to have a better interactive flow to select a server. What they have is difficult and slow to maintain and doesn’t take into account server stability or newness (new servers are more likely to stop working once the admin discovers they don’t like hosting, or they have a terrible mod experience). But the lemmy devs are not interested in either doing things like allowing servers to tag themselves, nor utilize sites like the fediseer which already does that. So we end up with a bad “join” frontpage which people like you end up just avoiding which goes to show how bad things are.

      There used to be a very nice interactive lemmy server selection site at one point which guided you based on interest/subinterest as self-tagged in fediseer, but I can’t remember the domain anymore :(

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        2·
        6 hours ago

        There used to be a very nice interactive lemmy server selection site at one point which guided you based on interest/subinterest as self-tagged in , but I can’t remember the domain anymore :(

        Yes, it rings a bell too but don’t remember it either :(

        But the lemmy devs are not interested in either doing things like allowing servers to tag themselves

        Indeed, that’s probably a whole topic altogether. If people want to try working on a better join-lemmy website, that would be great, but it seems like people are already spread too thin.

    • A Wild Mimic appears!@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      71·
      7 hours ago

      It probably depends on what audience you are talking to. Privacy advocates, Anarchists, AI-Imagegen-Fans and digital pirates are probably a good fit for dbzer0, even with hexbear federated, and a LGBT-positive audience would feel at home on blahaj. So while promoting generalist instances per default is a good move, if the subreddit has a well-defined audience, a recommendation for a “specialized” instance might work better.

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        3·
        7 hours ago

        Indeed, but usually I promote on /r/RedditAlternatives, and don’t have any way to know what the user’s interests are.

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      8 hours ago

      How’s Lemmy.cafe? I believe they defederate the Big 3 Tankie instances. Dunno what their downtime or admins are like.

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        4·
        8 hours ago

        I have my main alt there. It’s pretty good, but there was an issue with the thumbnails that got resolved a few days ago. Also, the instance is much smaller than the two others (64 users per month), so I sometimes have to subscribe to some medium-size communities before nobody did before. Federation can get a bit clunky at times too, and I have to pull myself some posts or comments to “unclog the pipes”.

        Discuss.online has 140 users per month, sopuli 496

    • astro_ray@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      I am not entirely sure how appropriate my reply is since you name lemmy specifically, but since one can subscribe to particular topics in piefed, I am leaning towards it more than lemmy as an alternative to reddit.

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        3·
        6 hours ago

        Once Piefed will get Thunder as well as an iOS app, it will become an alternative. That’s the main blocker I have now recommending it. Besides that, it’s a quite good Lemmy alternative.

        • freamon@community.nodebb.org
          3·
          5 hours ago

          @blaze@feddit.org Thunder is written using Flutter / Dart - meaning that it’s cross-platform. I’ve compiled the version for PieFed for windows, linux and macos, so as long as I’m able to get it working for Android, it should also work for iOS. I’ll need to be someone else who does though, 'cos my mac is too old, and I don’t have an iphone.

          Bonus screenshot: