Hello! Can we normalize a few things?
Hello! Can we normalize a few things?
Don't be a vote connoisseur here please. Redefine how you think about voting and participating.
Do you miss your communities from elsewhere. Well guess what, you are that core community now. If you want it back, the only thing holding you back is you. Don't wait on someone else to start posting. You don't need to worry about the perfect polished quality of your content or if it has been done before elsewhere. The current bar is, umm, poorly defined. No one is judging you. Call it practice. EVERY time you see something interesting, get in the habit of posting it please. Maybe go out of your way to grab a reference or two and post them.
Along these lines, think of how unsure and uncomfortable this may seem to most of us former lurker connoisseurs. You can play hard and thick skinned all you want, but you know exactly what post or comment you posted elsewhere that got the most votes or interaction. Why? Because it matters to you. So upvote everything you can. It matters to someone else too. Don't upvote just for the value or interest you have in the content. Do it just to say "hey, thanks for making the effort to participate and make this place a few lines longer." Please rethink how you handle voting, at least for now, think of a down vote as FU for participating, no votes as I wish you weren't here. We are all likely accustomed to a lot more interaction and validation in our own little niches. This is really an underpinning value of social media, we are here to engage with people, so tell people who are new and unsure about a new and different place, "hey, thanks for participating." You may not know or really appreciate their interests, but you can help us grow a core that can evolve into your favorite niches as the community grows. You are the core community. We can all make it grow if we make it a place people want to be.
I think putting effort into actively participating is also the best way to truly quit reddit.
I mean, now everyone is angry because of what's happening and we're flooding alternatives with enthusiasm because of this particular moment, but will it last?
When you're so angry about something it's because you deeply care, and as long as we care there's always the risk of going back to it when the "anger moment" will pass, because let's be honest, it will pass sooner or later.
So we need to stop caring, and the best way to do it IMO is being involved as much as possible here, find new people, make new connections, create/participate in new communities, so there's no chance we'll miss anything of what's "on the other side".
I've been ready to leave Reddit for a long time. I'm not angry at Reddit... It's more just continued disappointed. The site was built off of effort from the communities but the corporation won't listen to us for guidance and changes.
The only thing I worry about is that most people won't even hear of alternatives like Lemmy and that will impact adoption. I fear that only the degenerates and extremests will be the ones to make the changes. I hope that isn't how it plays out.
most people won’t even hear of alternatives
I'm still active on reddit, a lot of people are worried about the future of the platform, they're asking questions about alternatives and where fellow redditors are going, lemmy and kbin are mentioned everywhere, people are also directed to r/RedditAlternatives.
We're trying to answer questions as best as we can, we're still very new to the fediverse but the little we know is enough to get people started. Some people are even actively reaching out to others to let them know alternatives exist.
And those who don't ask (or don't lurk) most probably don't care, those are probably the ones that would go on using reddit no matter what, and that's ok, each individual has to decide for themselves.
That's the nail on the head, and what has stopped most alternatives in the past. There needs to be a saturation point of usage, what that is for a platform varies.
Not to mention adapting to the new norms and styles. Reddit was fairly open in general, but specific subs had some very ironcald rules about style and usage. old school forums like SpaceBattles are even more 'soft' rule specific simply dictated by the community and the old guard on it.
I’m so excited to see actual people posting real comments and it’s feeling like I’m part of an actual community. This is pretty cool - and I’m going to try and participate a lot more instead of just lurking like I used to.
Instead of bots and trolls right? Yeah me too :)
I'm trying to upvote all that can, mostly because I'm not very good at commenting lol
I think you're fine!
My people!!
E-introverts represent, it has been a change really. I found that in Reddit, the sheer number of participants led me to only contribute meaningfully in smaller subreddits. I think I've made more comments today than in the last year on Reddit.
Keep in mind that this being a much smaller site your voice and opinion does have an impact. Your posts and votes will influence the culture of this site. Put in the effort to shape it into how you'd like it to be.
Yeah, we just need a bit more of a push. I think some people may be a bit too fixated on reaching Reddit's numbers; we really don't need to. I don't care if the top comment has 50 upvotes instead of 50,000, what I want is more comments, more posts, more experts in a field sharing their invaluable opinions.
Obviously it will take some time to reach the level of granularity some subreddits have. Like, we have a design sub, a good design sub, an ashole design sub, a crappy design sub (which is like asshole design, but unintentional), a design design sub (for awful designs that are also somehow aesthetic)... And all this without going into specific design subs (web design, brand design, structure design...). Yeah, we may not have all those for a while, we enthusiasts may all have to interact in a general Lemmy Design community, but guess what? That is how Reddit got where it is now.
Personally, I am enjoying the process. I've been lurking Reddit for years, reading awesome posts, and informing myself on all kinds of topics from people I won't ever begin to compare to. But Lemmy, for the moment, feels more intimate to me, I am starting to recognize specific nametags, to interact with real human beings (not a sentient blob of like-minded thoughts). It feels like being at a bonfire enjoying the moment with a couple of people, and I think that by itself has it's own charm.
Thanks for your thoughts. I hope this continues to develop and becomes a stable and positive community. It will never be reddit. The sooner people realize this as a positive, the better.
The first step to being a part of the community is participation. The smallest form of participation is a vote. With a tiny community, posting without social engagement lacks the positive feedback needed to be self sustainable. Getting past the point of critical mass where we are more than sustainable is absolutely critical right now. The best way to influence this, and lower the critical mass threshold is to encourage people to boost/bolster engagement, especially in niche areas of critical importance to those willing to post. Increasing the volume and categories encourages more specialization and adoption.
So the most important aspect right now is simply getting people to upvote, and as many as possible to post
It will never be reddit.
Thank god, it turned into a chaotic toxic mess.
I kinda like it. Reddit can feel disconnected, comment and move on kind of thing. I'm curious where this is in say a year. I will miss my smaller intimate communities, but this is one general intimate community so it works.
This feels like when you find a really good smaller streamer and can actually talk to people in the chat and make good friends with some and become part of a cool community where every voice is heard... before the streamer hits it big and the chat scroll is so fast you can't even see your message among the omega luls and kappas and pogchamps and kkonas and the streamer can't possibly respond to anything because there's just too much garbage
This moment is beautiful. People are understandably looking forward and hoping that they can recreate all of their niche communities. But I'm just enjoying this moment in time where we have a group of people figuring everything out together and trying to build something better than what we had. Even if Lemmy does get hugely successful, it'll never again feel like it does at this moment, when all of the users care so much about being positive contributors.
Long time reddit lurker, coming out of my shell one uovote at a time.
I'm right there with you!
Yeah. There's a lot of us. I'm trying to break out of that habit. I also feel like I'll get more out of it if I actively participate.
Thanks for the encouragement and normalization words. I’m maybe the lurkiest lurker ever, but I absolutely can and do upvote!
Lurkiest lurker… i like that and laughed ! Up arrow for you!!
Try sorting by new and boosting genuine efforts.
I have noticed that sorting by new is pretty much required here if you want to see something, eh, new.
Heck yeah. As soon as I figure out what all these buttons do I look forward to engaging with some of these communities. Thanks for the advice, hope many take to heart
On that note, does anyone know the difference between upvote and boost?
as I understand it, a "boost" is the fediverse term for a retweet
EDIT: this post has some more information
Well said! Im gonna try doing my part to make this place better one comment and upvote at a time.
Its funny: in my case a few weeks before the current reddit enshittification drive I started feeling like /r/all was turning into facebook or twitter from a 'create engagement by pissing people off' perspective and started checking in on mastodon more regularly and reddit less. I do participate in a bunch of subreddits too, but it seems like the writing is on the wall with reddit.
I don't love the twitter model where you're searching for a hashtag of the day or following some entity yelling stuff. I grew up on usenet news, forums, and bbs'es before Facebook came along and really like threaded discussions, with self/auto moderation for interest and community 'adults' moderating for big stuff.
Today is my first day on a Lemmy instance and so far it seems to be exactly the right model for me: distributed, forum moderated and user moderated, and threaded discussion based. Its awesome the underlying protocols fit many models (this one and the Mastodon one) so you can choose your style.
I was noticing it too over on Reddit. Last couple months I found myself almost unconciously in the comments of threads where there was a misspelling in the title. It happened often enough that I was starting to think they were doing it intentionally.
Y’all, I’ve been on Reddit for 14 years. It has been lowest common denominator garbage aside from the niche communities for over 4 years now. If it wasn’t for RES, RiF, and Apollo I would’ve stopped using it years ago.
The average redditor has been lowering the quality of posts and comments for quite some time. Around a year ago, I noticed people I personally know, using Reddit, whom I assumed never would do so. These individuals spent most of their time on apps such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok. I believe this is Reddits intention, and they want to stabilize to compete with some of the larger social media communities, rather than remain as they were.
I’m glad to see it rot over time, and will recommend no one uses it going forward.
Look at me. I am the 1% now.
Would it be ethical to start saving useful reddit post on lemmy ?
I think if you credit the original poster, it’s a great idea to grab some of the bestof Reddit posts. There is a lot of really incredible content that could disappear. Combined with Imgur removing a lot of anonymous content from the past decade, sadly it seems like there could be a lot of valuable information that gets lost.
Also, this is my first comment after being on Reddit for 15 years! Where did the time go… I’m glad Reddit didn’t track our hours.
Hi, Lemmy!
Just deleted my 10+ years old account, I feel old.
Over 80% of them are reposts anyway, so take solace in that. Regardless, why not curate some content in one corner, it'll help us all out in the long run.
What's difficult is finding this website in the first place, most people don't understand terms like instances and all the server details, it would have been fine to just share this main link and tell people to recreate communities
There is a bit of a learning curve, but it is not terrible. Based on the growth numbers so far over the last few days a small competence filter may be a good thing IMO. Maybe it will be too much for the most negative potential users to overcome.
I know I should read about all this more, but I'm just gonna jump right in and figure out how to comment and post on my own. I still have no idea what an instance is, but atleast I've found communities and I even posted a few comments so I seem to be doing just fine lol
We'll get there, I suspect. The learning curve is good, because it provides a hurdle for trolls and bots and boomer shitposters, which means those of us wanting to actually put some thought in can get a head start before the black hats catch on.
In addition om to what OP said, we should give a thought to how we will handle bots when they inevitably start showing up.
I’m really glad I found this place. I’ll do my best to spread it and be active
Me too, @[email protected]
Never has a user name been more appropriate
I do not see why we should upvote everything we see. If barely anything gets upvoted, content will still be there and will likely be at the top (if all comments have just 1 vote they all have equal chance to be at the top).
The Reddit guidelines looked good to me. Upvote if you think it's relevant. Downvote if you think it does not belong there. Don't do anything if it doesn't fall in these two cases.
I find it hard to see how this site can ever challenge the huge user base of Reddit and how they have a relatively active community for basically every topic in existence. But maybe things will snowball.
It won't. And it doesn't need to. It just needs to grow and become self sufficient. This will never kill reddit. Reddit will not be "killed". The purpose is not to kill but to become a place where people come to as an competitive alternative or at the very least a place where they feel good and where they feel they're getting something out of their participation.
You never know, Reddit was once small and digg was the shit, then digg killed itself. Honestly, I kinda doubt it's gonna happen here as well, social media has been consolidating for years now and it's extremely hard to break into the space, but I'll hold onto hope, this looks like a very cool conecpt.
It doesn't matter. Even if somehow this system fails as well there will always be something else. Go back to yahoo forums lol!
from a tech standpoint... when the core development community departs a project, that project dies - its almost always a given. reddit is such a giant that it may never die and I dont expect its core to be completely gutted. but quality content attracts more of the same and I feel that we are beginning to get quality core people here. the reddit husk can continue to shamble on, I don't care.
In my mind, it only needs to be a fraction of the size of Reddit to be potentially successful. I've been using online forums since the 90s, back in the day there were some forums with great long-lasting communities that had only a couple of dozen regular members. Sometimes a smaller forum is better than a larger one. Granted it's different since forums generally specialised in one topic, but don't forget the days where you didn't need to be a huge all-encompassing platform to be successful, especially when you're not trying to make money from it.
Totally agree. It's called social loafing. From Wikipedia: "In social psychology, social loafing is the phenomenon of a person exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when working alone. It is seen as one of the main reasons groups are sometimes less productive than the combined performance of their members working as individuals."
In large communities like Reddit, users are less likely to participate than in a small community
It was better that way. I in no way feel engaged in reddit comment sections. I don't recognize anyone and don't bother to follow or chat with anyone. I pretty much comment and move on if it's something I care enough about. I don't want to get obsessively invested like I used to back in high school street fighter online forums (some embarrassing discussions) but I'd like to actually be part of a community that sees each other as people and not arguments.
I agree, actually. The people upset about the 3rd party apps unfortunately don’t represent the majority of the users of Reddit. I have several friends on a friends discord I run that never used a 3rd party app at all. They just used the base reddit client like insane people; but they did/do it. For them nothing is changing, and that’s going to be most of the people.
Unless…all the blackouts some how affect enough of them. If their favorite subreddits die out, then maybe they’ll notice. But overall, I feel like it’ll either take a while for Reddit to die out. Or it’ll just continue chugging on, except a lot of the people putting in the work to moderate and post content will maybe have moved on (which may end up eroding the platform there, too).
But we’ll see for sure.
Using the Reddit app... like from Reddit? those animals.
RiF for life. :-)
But how many of them are very active?
It's a common rule that the vast majority of content is created by only a few members. It doesn't matter if 90% of reddit's userbase are happy enough and won't leave if the 10% (or even a sizeable chunk of that 10%) of redditors who are most active and create most of the content on the site leave.
Can we troll and be a dick here too?
The rules for Ruud's Mastodon server apply here until a formal page is written.
That’s the whole point
This is great advice, thanks
Some part of me really just wants this place already to be what reddit was - thriving without my participation. But I am the snowflake and if I want to hope for the avalanche then I have to push! Or...something else that's an effective analogy for wanting a movement without participating. Thank you for this post!
Pioneering work is hard but very rewarding. Definitely a fun time which we all should use to really shape things how we would like them to be
+1, i was comfortable being a lurker as I almost always just browsed top/hot posts and my comments usually just get lost in the sea. not the case here though, i actively want to participate!
edit: also may I add im loving the positivity here in the fediverse, no need to browse through comment threads of people arguing and trolling for downvotes
Nothing exists without effort. This is a wonderful thing to be stating.
Hmmmmmmm I wanna exist without effort.
Nicely written! I’m trying to participate more but it’s gonna take some time for me to get used to it 🥹
No worries, you'll get there when you get there.
I'm going to try right along side you!
Absolutely. Reddit was only as good as the people who posted and commented. Takes all of us to start the new world
Thanks for the guides
I belonged, until recently, in a really lovely private community over on that other place, and ... I'm loving what I'm seeing so far. It's a nice take, and feels a lot more like what I wanted out of those other places.
Trying to do my part here too, looking forward to seeing how this all grows.
Anyone found any good animal gif communities?
If you want me to make this "my new Reddit", then I'm going to treat it like Reddit.
That means down voting the majority of the posts I see.
Why the majority? Why bother? So much effort, so many clicks, for what?
I only downvote stuff I actually dislike, or disagree with.
While I can appreciate wanting to help others feel good about posting, here are my concerns (and some solutions at the end to consider):
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If most posts were upvoted blindly, it would make post ratings meaningless as well as the Hot feature. I prefer "good" posts to rise to the top.
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If we upvote low quality/low effort posts, then that is what we are encouraging users to produce.
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Low quality posts especially from Help Vampires can be a huge drain on the community and moderators. E.g., No one wants to see the same question asked every few posts.
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New users may at first be drawn to seeing the number of posts...but if the first x number of posts are all garbage, we may lose potential users.
Personally, I will not upvote posts just to make new people more confident. However, here are some alternative solutions:
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People can learn to feel comfortable posting in certain communities that are either smaller or where quality is less expected. E.g., if the future Arch Linux community is like their forum, they are very strict and you'll get worse than a down vote if you don't follow the guidelines in How To Ask Questions The Smart Way and had first RTFM (read the manual) and STFW (searched the web) and have put in great effort and be truly stuck before posting.
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Before downvoting, we could look at the user's profile and some of their posts and if they seem very new, we could cut them some slack and/or send them a PM instead of downvoting.
It is hard to see the context of the timeline that this was written in. There were less than 1300 total accounts on this instance and several hundred online at the time. I looked up several communities that only had 1-3 posts and almost no interaction. So I decided to pick an interest and make a couple posts. This felt like a dead end, I wasn't ready to give up, so I wrote this to hopefully help it feel a little more worthwhile grinding out some more posts. I had no way of knowing how much this place would grow in a few days.
Positivity shouldn't be a rare thing. In regular analog life, social accountability to one's peers is a mask people wear to hide who they really are. The anonymity of this place is the only time people take off this mask. This is a perfect mirror, if the person is smart enough to recognize their own reflection. For that reason, everyone should want to be their best self here. This is who you really are when no one else is pressuring you in an otherwise accountable way. Why not make a positive impact with that.
Agreed, being positive shouldn't be a rare thing for sure. However what people view as being positively impactful is different.
To me it is not helpful or desired to essentially lie to people by patting them all on the head with an upvote which is the equivalent of saying 'good post' even if the post added no value or worse sucked. While upvotes may provide a burst of dopamine to each user, it won't do them any favours in the long run. And once they realise everyone is getting upvoted regardless of content, the upvotes will come to be viewed as meaningless anyway.
Furthermore, upvoting is the lowest effort and lowest impact option -- If one wants to be more positively impactful and take more effort than just blindly upvoting every post, they could reply or PM to welcome new members to the community, direct them to helpful FAQs/resources, etc.
Furthermore there will be many communities which will all have their own values and expectations so if I'm in a community where mods put a rule to upvote every post, then sure if I want to participate in that community then I will do that. And if on the other end of the spectrum, if I'm in a community where mods have a rule for no low effort/value posts, if I want to stay in that community I will certainly only upvote posts that meet that rule. And of course those are both extreme cases and most communities will fall somewhere in the middle.
Anyway regardless of everything I've said, in the end how we add value to this platform is based on our unique values and preferences. It sounds like you are more connection-focused and I am more education/knowledge-focused. There is nothing wrong with either as there is nothing wrong with you upvoting all posts and inspiring others to join you. While I may have a different philosophy, I am also a huge fan of the need and benefit of diversity of thought and so I am quite glad you are a part of the community and that you want to make Lemmy a welcoming place -- your kindness and care will help make the community better.
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Sometimes it can be very difficult to create a community and start posting stuff. I'm talking about meme content or comic content, like those in r/polandball, r/funny, etc.
Obviously it's a beginning, and all beginnings can be tough. But lacking creativity is tougher.
Although I appreciate your support, and you're absolutely right. Anything is better than lurking.
Look on the bright side: Now nothing is a repost. That folder of dumb meme PNGs you had? None of them have been posted.
Think of this like your new bookmarks.
Like I have a bunch of stuff saved on Infinity and elsewhere. I just need to weed through what I want to save, extract the reference and post them here.
You could do the same with memes; put together a collection of your favorites and post them here to get started. Don't flood anywhere with a bunch of stuff in a day or self promotion nonsense linking to proprietary sites that pay you when you should post to peertube or odysee, (evil glance at others in a small room).
I assume people are still browsing all of Lemmy from time to time when their subscriptions lack new interesting content. If you post a lot in a short time it will annoy people. Habitually posting 1-3 items a day would be enough to motivate others to eventually follow in kind.
If you think about it like a bookmarking, max-browser-open-tabs-tester type, just keeping up with the latest and saving them here once in awhile, you'll be lurking in your own community creation aftermath in no time.
Very well put, I'm going to cross post this in my community [email protected]
something I have noticed with other socials is that when you first sign up they kind of manipulate things to give you a sense of validation. I had an instagram for about 5 minutes and made a couple of very mediocre posts which got way more attention than made sense. I assumed it was the site promoting me to get me to like it and therefor stay around.
on new reddit it will send you notifications when people upvote any comment you make and other trivial "interactions". I do know that getting upvotes makes me feel more "welcome" and likely to contribute even though it is stupid.
I do appreciate the libre sites not trying to screw around so much but maybe there is some way to apply the same principles to give people a nice feeling. Like one thing I notice here is that new comments/posts have 0 upvotes. I can manually give myself an upvote, but can't I just be assumed to be upvoting anything I say?
Also I really miss keyboard-based controls for upvoting; it is way easier. Is it available?
I was on old.reddit so I didn't know about the upvote notifications. This place seems to have nice active notifications on responses tho. Also, I seem to upvote myself automatically? Maybe it's different across the federate servers.
Don’t know where to put this, but I I’ve been having issues finding communities that I know exist. But I found that searching in “posts” for a keyword instead of “communities” wil often take me to where I want to go. (For instance, searching for “lawn” brings up posts in the “nolawns” community I was looking for.)
I'm not on the same instance as you, so I don't know if the website is configured differently. However, on Lemmy.world u/Ruud has this setup so that I have the option to view/search "Local" or "All." The default is set to local which is limited to the communities (subs) hosted on this instance. If I manually set the option to view/search "All," I see everything in all Lemmy instances (servers). I find the mobile browser works better than the Jerboa app when it comes to local versus all instances. Hope this helps.
This is because due to how federation works, communities have to be "found" by the server before they start appearing in searches if they're not on the same instance. There is no central server that pushes all the known fediverse to instances (although relays do exist for other platforms such as Mastodon which do this to some degree).
If you know a community exists on another server, search it in the search by bar typing:
!community@instance(example: [email protected])https://instance/c/community(example: https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy)
This will cause the server to fetch it - it takes a while and might not show up the first time, but if you come back to it in 5 minutes and try again, it should appear the next time.
I had to use "All" to find some of mine even knowing their exact location. Maybe the default should change from Communities if it needs some adjusting before it works.
You can search for communities across all instances on https://browse.feddit.de
Thanks!
I love this! Thanks for writing this.
Well at least we’re all noobs here and I don’t feel so out of place now.
I’m early to something for once!Hell yeah! Ask questions, introduce yourself, make a post about things you like or seem interesting to you.
Well put, I think the next few weeks are going to be really crucial to drawing in more of a user base.
slow clap
Well said, friendo.
Nah, going to upvote and downvote what ever I sit fit.
That's alright
Please keep in mind this is something I've written in regards to all of these various social platforms, not just kbin...
Hiding Voting Metrics:
Voting metrics inadvertently lead to conformity and discourage users from expressing genuine opinions. Users should feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts and perspectives without fear of judgment or backlash.Removing Emoji-Based Reactions:
The current practice of using emoji reactions as a means of interaction lacks depth and context. These reactions do not provide any insight into why a user liked, disliked, or loved a post... This change would promote more genuine interaction and create a space for nuanced conversations.Discouraging Clout Chasing Behaviors:
Platforms can implement measures that limit the emphasis on popularity metrics. Introduce alternative ways to measure influence and impact (insightful comments, fostering discussions, valuable contributions). By shifting the focus from superficial metrics to meaningful engagement, platforms can create an environment that encourages authentic participation.Promoting Content Quality and Relevance:
Hiding voting metrics and mitigating clout chasing behaviors allows platforms to prioritize quality and relevance. Engagement, interactions, relevance, and authenticity is used to determine the visibility of content. This approach ensures that valuable and meaningful content receives recognition, while reducing the emphasis on arbitrary popularity metrics.Recognizing the Limitations of Memes:
While memes can be entertaining and lighthearted, they often lack the depth. Memes, while humorous, rarely foster in-depth discussions or promote the exchange of diverse perspectives. By highlighting the limitations of relying on meme-based content, platforms can encourage users to move beyond superficial engagement and embrace more substantive interactions.This approach optimizes content organization by utilizing horizontal space before continuing vertically. This method ensures that users can browse through a larger number of posts allowing users to quickly scan and explore popular posts while maintaining a clear overview of the content available. Reorganizing the UX of platforms by adopting a mass display approach for content organization brings numerous benefits. It optimizes content visibility, promotes content diversity, and streamlines content organization. By presenting the most interacted-with content side-by-side (instead of most popular on top) and utilizing horizontal space effectively, platforms create a dynamic and engaging user experience.
This reimagined platform design enhances content discoverability, improves user engagement, and fosters a thriving online community that values quality and relevance.
There are tons of other aspects of this to discuss but I won't bother diving into them (new and unpopular posts receiving recognition, front page content dying off due to less interaction based on time decay, etc etc)