Hey! I'm keeping this as it's targeted at new users from Reddit. However, in future please find another community to post this on, because it is not related to the lemmy.world instance specifically.
I don't lurk just to lurk, I just have nothing to say most of the time. Still waiting on the niche reddit communities I was a part of to make it here, if they ever do.
Be the change you want to see! In one week I've made more comments on here than the last two years on Reddit. If the communities you want don't exist, start them up and post the type of content you'd like to see.
I only lurked on reddir but here saying something feels more impactful somehow. Post some fleeting thoughts to begin with, it helps to pump up our rookie numbers.
Try starting small. Reply more. Little things like that. Everything helps. Remember that we are interested in what you have in your life that you would like to tell us about.
The barrier to entry is way lower in a community this size. You don't have to have the most witty thing to say or the hottest meme to share. Your comments and posts will probably be seen by more people than in the "viral or bust" of a bigger site. It's a totally different kind of usage and definitely makes me feel more engaged
I think we stand a chance of bringing over the best parts of reddit while leaving behind all the negative aspects, I think a lot of people who lurked before (myself included, <4000 karma after 10 years) will be much more willing to engage here.
It's way better participating. I lurked on Reddit and things like it for years before I got the courage to speak up. I was so afraid of saying the wrong thing. Eventually I realized I'm not nearly the dumbest one, who cares lol.
lil fun fact: Participating in social media can actually boost your mental health, while lurking around out of FOMO, doomscrolling , whatever else can make you less happy.
More importantly, talk about stuff besides Reddit!
I tried using Voat 6(?) years ago when there was a similar (but smaller-scale) protest. The fact that a lot of Voat users were those chased out of hate subs was part of the problem, but the other part of the problem was that half the content was "look how much better we are than reddit".
Discussion about reddit is fine (it is still a big site), but we need our own content too.
I'm not interested in maintaining a community (I don't have the time to be a moderator), but I have been trying to comment as much as I can. Also, if you think you have something to post about, just make a post.
Same. What's kinda nice is that unlike reddit there aren't a hundred posts saying what you wanted to say already, so you don't feel like you are being drowned out
Agreed, I want to participate, but I have neither the time, nor the desire to be a moderator. I've subbed to a bunch of communities so far, but there are also lots that I would subscribe to that don't exist yet. Or maybe they exist somewhere, but finding them is not obvious.
I’m on mobile on an iPhone and it really does not like it. I was only able to create an account through my iPad, and the page froze when I tried to comment on my iPhone (it still went through though).
Anyways, as confused as I am about this fediverse stuff, I really like it here and will try to comment and post when I can!
I thought it was working alright in Edge on iphone. It was definitely looking better then old.reddit does on any iphone browser.
But you can get the Mlem app thru the Test Flight app on iphone. It's still being developed so it's a bit rough. But it's showing a whole lot of potential.
That's what I've been trying to do myself. I'm really not an interactive kind of person on these online communities. I'm almost always a lurker, but I'm really trying to push myself to be more active, because I want an open-source and federated Reddit alternative (and ActivityPub in general) to succeed!
Same. I was a long time lurker on Reddit, but hardly posted. Even on alts. Now I'm trying to be more active and upvoting since that helps drive engagement or whatever.
I also want more open source in life, in general so I will be out here attempting to pause my introvertness for the cause.
personally i liked having debates with people in the comments. Sometimes i'd make a dumb joke about the post, but most of the times i'd just be completely silent
I wish I could just share my enthusiasm with everybody, but I get very anxious that what I'd find interesting people will find dull or maybe even troll... that's something I experienced with actual Reddit, I guess, and now it has carried over pretty much everywhere. I'll try my best because I want to contribute to a better experience not just for me but everybody!
People here is so nice I dont know why but the problem is when more people join It will be harder to keep the peace so more mods will join and keep the peace
It's definitely going to be harder when there are more different personalities mingling together. It doesn't help some people just want to see the world burn no matter what the cost... while I want to say, "Enjoy it while it lasts!" I don't want to have that kind of scenario be the default. At the end of the day, we gotta make sure we contribute into making this space the space we want it to be, and that means reporting whatever we can that break the rules, posting quality content, and just being a decent person in general. We got this, internet friend! :)
Dear Faye, thanks for sharing because I feel the same way and have the same type of anxiety when it comes to posting. Many times I finish a draft and then delete it instead of posting because I think "who cares? Someone else said something similar."
But your post has motivated me to contribute more. Thanks!
I spent 12 years of my life reading walls of text on Reddit because I knew they were authentic pieces of someone else's life they were sharing on the internet.
The most interesting posts are the ones that go in depth on some random niche topic that you'd expect no one to care about. Be it an Indie game with 5 players, or a random reptilian species with a cool ability.
So yes, I care! I doubt I'm alone in that regard. Please do post your thoughts 😁
Sidenote: this was before the era of ChatGPT, but I highly doubt a significant number of people are going to intentionally waste others' time by posting ChatGPT generated content.
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I just got into an argument with someone complaining about the blackouts (trolling I guess) on another community. So exhausting. These will always exist, I guess.
Some individuals just get off annoying people, unfortunately. Ignore, report, and engage with somebody else seems to work most of the time! I hope this won't wear us down!
Also...DON'T MAKE TOO MANY COMMUNITIES!!! I know we all have our favorite niche subreddits that we'll miss, but we need to reach a critical mass with a core set...and then organically break out communities into more niche communities.
Yes, for sure we need content, but it's not helping for all us Reddit refugees to start spamming crap. What's needed here is good content.
It will happen as all the new users get settled and comfortable. If Reddit is an example, there will always be fewer people who create posts than people commenting, and fewer people commenting than lurking. It's human nature.
I don't think the hierarchy you described is human nature but the effect of the state of affairs on Reddit. Think of Lemmy as a more chaotic version of Reddit where the status quo has not yet developed. Speak up your mind and help building the Lemmy status quo.
I don't know, I've been a manager for a lot of years, and I see the same dynamic/breakdown on my teams. A small percentage are willing to bring up a topic with the group, no matter how candid and accepting the atmosphere is. Once they do, there are more who will chime in on it to agree or disagree. But half the group will generally stay silent, but might come to me later 1 on 1.
I found some instance settings mean that not all communities in other instances show up in jerboa.
If thats the case then going to your instances home page on the web, searching communities there by url and pasting the full url of the community on the other instance may fix..
That, and please stop talking about reddit so much, dear god. My feed is filled with reddit news, rather than the respective topics of each community I'm subscribed to.
I've already been enjoying posting to Lemmy/etc much more than I ever did Reddit.
Reddit always felt so set-in-stone and unchanging to the point that it made me feel like I arrived "late" to the party even though my first Reddit account was in I think 2015. Once somebody claimed a subreddit with an easy-to-remember name that was largely it, and if you disagreed with their moderating style you had to suck it up or make your own with a more obtuse name.
With Lemmy since everything's decentralized it feels much more... I guess open? If someone makes a !gamedev community that has iffy moderation issues or whatnot, I or someone else can also make a !gamedev comm on another instance without it being a problem at all.
I went from 15 years of lurking to making several communities and modding a couple others. This is definitely the most I've ever been engaged in online communications. I love it!
I think the hardest thing to overcome will be community duplication across instances. When searching for my old subreddit subscriptions' parallels, I had to dive into the duplicated communities a few times to see which one had more posts/were more active.
Of course, the gentlemanly thing to do when creating a community would be to check first, but that's obviously not happening all the time. Then there's what to do if one gets created; should the instance admins get reports and yeet them if it's determined to be a copy?
Yeah, this mirrors my thoughts. There should be a way to combine subreddits with the same name, from the users' perspective. Kind of like making a multireddit for yourself.
I have no idea if the technology allows for an implementation of that multislice with multiple slices with the same name but different instance, but I hope it does because it sounds interesting. At least from a user perspective.
I think the fediverse is inherently different than the "normal" Internet. The way I'm thinking about it now is that each instance is a bit like it's own town, and the activitypub protocol is the road infrastructure connecting each town. There may very well be a group of technologists in Town A, but that shouldn't stop anyone from making their own group in Town B.
That being said, it's very beneficial to be able to gather all of these disparate communities into one place, and going back to the analogy, this would be something like a city center, where many people from smaller communities come together.
Perhaps in the future, we'll be able to create our own feeds (i.e not just subscribed, local, and all). I think that would be a solid way to handle things. Bonus points if those feeds can then be shared with others, so that they don't also need to go through the work of finding and subscribing to the individual communities that make up the greater feed.
But for example, /c/chatgpt community on infosec.pub instance might have different conversations to other /c/chatgpt communities on other instances, as (I presume) there's a lot of industry/tech/infosec heads on that instance. So someone looking for a community can see them all and decide if what instance's community right for them.
Whereas on Reddit, there can be only one /r/chatgpt, so you have to find adjacent subreddits.
I've seen that as well, but that existed on reddit and even IRL - religions and clubs nearly overlapping due to either disagreements or lack of awareness of each other predates the internet by centuries.
Haha, I don't know about dedication, just never found the need to engage over there. Reddit is (was!) a source of entertainment, news and information, not conversation for me. But already from stalking a bit over here I find the conversation more positive and on point, so things might change for me
I've just discovered the app Jerboa. It's available for Android, don't know about Apple. Not shilling but it's a great experience really. I was using Relay for Reddit and I feel right at home. Really have to recommend it!
Finding it challenging to get my head around this federation concept but I have a kbin.social account also. Hopefully someone will make a good YouTube introduction to the whole affair. Happy to be here, and hats off to the Devs.
I have always been a lurker on reddit and most social media, but Lemmy does make me want to contribute with posting and commenting.
One thing I miss and intend to build as I get more time is indexes and big posts I saw in subreddits of my interest, it would be a good thing to start migrating to Lemmy, for example.
I normally lurk, but I feel more comfortable posting here than on Reddit for some reason. On reddit I would mostly just upvote or downvote posts and move on.
This kind of feels like the way reddit did more than a decade ago. It's not nearly as busy as when I joined reddit in 2011, but the comments feel more approachable, more engaging, more human.
I'm not a particularly entertaining or creative person outside of my music (which I don't think anyone would care about), but I do like to post and interact with text posts like AITA/NoStupidQuestions/ChangeMyView/etc, so I look forward to taking part there.
As someone who makes music people don't generally care about, I'd love to hear what you're up to. I also mix/master people's music for free, so if you want something touched up send me a message.
My band is called The Hats, and our most recent release is Breaking Down. I enjoy doing the mixing and mastering myself, but it's certainly time consuming when you have a full time job and several other hobbies, haha.
You're not the boss of me. Lurking has been a tried and true past time of link aggregators since time immemorial. If this community can't function without lurkers, it's DOA.
One un-ironic way to have a boom in content and users is expanding the amount of porn on the fediverse. That had a massive contribution to tumblr and reddit
That's a good point. A lot of time I want to say post something, but someone else said it better or faster. I just end up writing a draft post and then deleting it before I submit.
So now I won't. Your easy goal of say something nice is a great goal to have. I'll keep this rambling and I will say more nice things to people cause of your post. Thanks.
Ive been doing just that, decided to go in at the deep end and make my own Digital Art community, its fun watching it grow, its already coming up on 100 subscribers, and i plan on openeing up submissions at around 200 subs since then people will have a decent size community to see the posts.
It seems the world is indeed what we make of it. Join us!
I've been a lurker on reddit for the most part and it seems easier to talk on Lemmy. I guess because it's a smaller community, or because your instance feels a little more private.
part of it may be that reddit has become so big it's almost like shouting into the void.
Once a post has >300 comments, the only way to have a meaningful conversation is to add to the top-level comments. And soon the top-level comments are all nested with relevant and irrelevant comments.
same! I almost never commented on reddit but I've felt a lot more comfortable being active here. Something about the size of it led me to always be of the opinion that 'whatever I'm thinking, it's already been said'.
I've been lurking on Reddit for years now but now that I've switched to Lemmy, I'll probably participate in discussions more. Plus, the vibe is so much more positive and welcoming here than on Reddit!
Good practice; See a post that might fit a theme sutiable for somewhere else? Cross post it to a place that it suits.
You can go to the community and search for a place like "Facepalm" and crosspost it there.
I have been trying to raise interest for other communities Mildly Infuriating has hit 2.81K members which is staggering, I'm honestly so happy to see it but we still have a way to go. I have every desire to spread the people of the community around as it's a win for Lemmy and a spite to Reddit. It's in our interest for the fediverse to explode and grow with content.
It's why I'm also advocating for communities to partner with each other. You can place links to other communities that may have a similar theming that other people might like. It would be a great way to offer up more content, and give that much needed love to communities starting and growing! <3
I have a broad question. Forgive me if it's dumb as I am not super technically savvy.
Is there a way to put a massive set of common image memes into a pool we can pick from and just have something point to that image? I keep reading that storage space is quickly going to be an issue for instances, and that seems like a good way to reduce some data.
A big pool will go down or encounter copyright issues. In the end the internet is a network of physical devices on which we put stuff. If you have a couple of bucks available, you can rent a vServer and just put your stuff there and make it linkable + tagged. If a bunch of people do it, a lemmy community with a link collection could provide this. But it always needs some person to put it up, otherwise it's just back to the big corporate silos.
I'm trying to do this bit by bit by renting some machine from Hetzner, starting with a blog or sth.
Edit: Just found Pixelfed, a federated image hosting platform :D
The problem is that photos even though they look similar they are different because some people instead of saving the image they take a screenshot. I think what you say is posible but I dont know if it is worth it right now, we need to fix the bugs and then add cool features
IPFS would be perfect for this. Each instance would pin the image, and your instance would be a "gateway", helping to distribute media when its requested. IPFS assigns a CID to every file so the same meme posted twice would have the same CID.
I wish these would be linked somehow. I just spent a couple mins figuring out what to do with that. Ideally it should be tap to see and another tap to subscribe. First I tried to search, then went to communities to search and pick closest match - with more traffic I guess it will include picking the right instance.
I've been tryna make c/football pretty active by posting transfer news haha, used to just read what other people sent instead of going to Twitter myself but now...
You can use the Lemmy Community Browser. On the left you can open a menu and deselect instances where you do not want to look for communities (why, though? xD). It sometimes can take a day or so for new communities to appear in the browser.
Currently I'm in the explore phase where I look left and right and find where I should put myself in, but yes of course after this phase end, I will try to contribute more!
I kept looking for communities and not finding them, so I started making them. Then adding posts to those communities, and to my surprise people do come and upvote and comment.
I have no interest in running a community, does starting the community mean you're responsible for it here? How does it work? Can I start one and not be responsible for it?
This comment is my first contribution to the platform. I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing yet, but I'll figure it out.
My worry is that I only started a year or so ago on that other platform, and most of my contributions are comments and some photos when I can get my garbage podunk internet to let me upload the latest smoked meat or garden haul. I don't think I'm a "laying the groundwork" type of user, honestly. If there are any guides or walkthrough on navigating instances and whatnot, I'm all eyes.
I already reeeeeally miss a couple wonderful communities. But I want the best versions of them here, if at all. I'd love to help expand this place.
I guess there could be worse first comments for an account.
I better start seeing smoked meats posted on this shit.
Got any recommendations for quality beef jerky or anything of the like that will ship in the States? You've got me hungry now.
I guess tonight I learn how to make a smoker instance(?)!
Just did a 10lb Boston butt for a cabin trip this past weekend. May have a few photos...
Also, sorry, but zero idea on beef jerky that ships. Are you meaning like a brand of some that can be purchased online? I'll do some research! Orrrrrr... Once I figure it out, you can post that question in the smoker Instance!
While I only lurked on reddit, looking forward to a fresh start without all the bots. Planning to start contributing and focus more on hobbies than doomscrolling and nonsense
@GatoB I'm trying to make the best effort I can, I started a London community at feddit.uk/c/london and been making content for it and cross posting whatever I come across that could work there. So far I gotten around roughly 50 subscribers and some engagement in my posts. I'm reaching out for engagement so if you want to join in and make this something I'd really appreciate it.
... Or if you want to lurk I'm good with that too, I'd appreciate the eyes more then anything at this point.
First I need to understand how all this works. fedia, lemmy, mastadon, fediverse, etc. I don't really understand what it all is and how it works. Suggestions from one user to another from a different "place" don't translate. Someone told me to look at /all. Like, where is that? I don't see anything like that. It's all a confusing, jumbled mess. It's melting my brain and I don't know if I can stick around. I don't see any kind of notifications either, so if someone responds to me, I probably won't see it unless I remember where I posted and to go manually check.
We need accessibility first, honestly the site is kinda confusing and acts weirdly on mobile and the official app is the same, both of these two need to use simple design, the android app is focusing on material you theme but most of the people here I believe the want usability rather than asthetic, I know it's free and hard work that I'm criticising, but we simple users need to build and make the communities better while the developers working on the site and the accessibilities, together we will break the chain of proprietary.
I was looking for a reddit alternative that was similar to how mastodon works and found lemmy. I don't like mastodon very much, but I thought the mastodon concept works much better when you have smaller communities decentralized over multiple instances. Kind of like all those bb-forums back in the day, but through a single interface/client.
So naturally, I do like Lemmy but it still kind of has the same problems I have with Mastodon. I want to go into detail in a full post at a later time, but in general it comes down to the user experience not being great. I have quite a lot of ideas for improvements
The forest would be quiet if only the best songbirds sang.
You can have a happy medium between quality and quantity. Lemmy is still new enough that we don't have to worry about oversaturation yet. Let's keep growing.
It will come naturally after api change is done. Yesterday we had a chance to testdrive new user influx before the bigger wave after 3rd party apps are cut. Let's see how many users are going to endure reddit's native app.
I haven't not considered opening my own instance of some flavor named "fuck.spez" or "fuck.you" if i dont want to get sued, scrape the front page of reddit by top 100 subreddits and repost them verbatim. The only (and obvious) obstacles are i have no money so no website.
I think what i'd do is make the instance not possible to sign up for and it'd be exclusively for other instances to federate with for free content? I'm not totally sure if that's how it works though.
Well see it this way , when more people join the more is attractive to companies and they will definitely figure how to ruined it. The best example is email , it was federated but if you run your email server they dont like you.
I'm happy to make content again, I was more active before karma mattered, as the bots and reposters took over I (and I think many) stopped.
Fired up my own instance to spam it with all the things, please remember to subscribe to communities on multiple instance's and support small instances!
Sadly I'm really busy with uni right now, but it seems like a good site to spend time with. More like a 2014 and earlier organic kind of spend time rather than a modern algorithm sickness kind of spend time. I'm actively participating in whatever seems interesting.
I would post images first and foremost, but I've veen having troubles doing so. Maybe in a few hours I'll be able to post some OC memes or something of the sort
I think I saw some thread requesting ideas for new communities. I just can't find it again, but it's a great idea.
Less experienced users could just comment what they need and more experienced users could create the communities for the most upvoted ideas and thereby having a userbase from the beginning.
I'll start posting content as soon as the server stops being overloaded ;) My first 3-4 attempts at submitting a post timed out so far. For some reason comments seem to work fine, though.
It was the same for me at Bluesky. I rarely actually post because it was like entering a party that had already begun, and you had those cool guys that already knew each other mingling! But Lemmy World has a different tone to it haha, I'm sure that will help. #WalleyWorld
There's one thing i need to know before trying to make content here. Does this platform have any showstopping issues? Mastodon has one where you can't view older content from other instances without going to that instance first. On mobile you can't even do that. If there's something like that here then I don't have much reason to go all in yet.
I got a buncha communities setup though I'm still debating on the best way to share em, since obviously don't wanna go all on the self promotion stuff and all, but engagement always helps out.
I agree- but, I really wish some of these bugs were ironed out.
If, I was not getting random errors popping up every few minutes, and tons of latency, I would be much more willing to start putting a lot more content here.
Also, still learning how the federated communities works...
I'd love to, but right now I'm still dipping my toes in. I had really started to hone my reddit accounts and found good communities. I happened to find out that r/startrek had permanently moved to Lemmy through my Mastodon account so I've been trying to rebuild my interests from there.
Agreed, I tried to use lemmygrad.ml when my reddit account got banned before but I eventually went back to reddit because there wasn't much activity. I hope people stay and continue adding content.