I get there are still users but it feel empty at times compared “other” platforms.
Why isint lemmy more popular?
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This right here encapsulates exactly what my biggest complaint with this platform is. A news post about a controversial topic in a completely unrelated community. I’m literally on my knees, guys. I just want to talk about drawing fantasy maps and developing conlangs. Worst part is that worldbuilding/conworlding is a perfectly acceptable way to articulate your worldview, and you might even get people to listen to you if you’re creative about it, but nah that’s not blunt enough.
And yeah, it could have been posted in error, but given what I previously described about !mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world, it very well may be on purpose.
Because Reddit exists.
Reddit itself didn’t truly take off to massive scale until some other players were out of the way. It was the underdog for a long time.
It’s a nightmare to even sign up.
Nothing else to it.
People will move en-masse to new platforms if the switch is easy. Nothing easy about using this platform.
Obv the people here are techy enough to surmount the initial hurdles, but don’t kid yourself, the average person doesn’t know a damned thing. Using tech and understanding tech are two vastly different skills. And you actually need to understand tech to even get started here.
Nightmare? It’s so easy to make a world account
nightmare
I love a bit of hyperbole as much as the next bloke, but come on…
“Nightmare”
Provide an email account, answer a logic-based question. Yes, “nightmare” indeed. /s
Cos we’re all losers and no one wants to sit at our table
Because we haven’t any friends in irl, that’s why we are doomed to scroll here without friends too.
That’s interesting. I never saw it that way, before. Now I kind of see it.
I always sat at the “loser” table at lunch, in school.
I changed schools many times and they - multiple different “loser” tables - welcomed me.
It’s also just where all the most interesting people were sitting, so I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Maybe they were just more free to be their real selves together, because no one was trying to prove they fit some official cliche.
Anyway, I would be proud to once again be a member of a loser table.
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Because people still use Reddit (for some reason).
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Because it is fragmented and hard to understand how it works for average person.
- reddit has more larger and niche communties that arnt found anywhere else in such large numbers.
the only useful communties outside of reddit tend towards things like medical questions and drug usage forums. also spam/bot for income too on many SC.
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Same reason star trek and Linux isn’t more popular. It’s for nerds
star wars however is a digested version of trek, it just alot more drama and less “sci-fi” feel to it.
network effect. There’s fewer people here so there’s fewer people here.
That said, I like it just how it is and would caution anyone against wishing for more users.
Don’t focus on getting more users. Focus on making the content here the best it can be.
It’s inevitable that the quality of the experience here will change with more users. Whether it’s a net positive or negative remains to be seen.
To be sure, these are the “good old days” of lemmy.
As long as corporations and states can’t get a foothold with their bribery, dark algorithms, and bots it should remain fairly decent.
federation is supposed to help. we will have to see, when it gets to it.
People aren’t here for Lemmy in particular. They’re here to avoid the others. If all you want is content, you’ll just go to Reddit. If you are here, it’s because you recognized something of the awfulness in corporate reddit but liked the format. Lemmy is Reddit for people who pay attention and care.
not advertised, not run by a for profit company
Network effect. Reddit has more users and more discussion, drawing in more people and discussion. I’m not worried because enshittification and bots will run it into the ground
I’d say because it’s still new and the content is very nerd heavy as you have probably seen from all the Linux posts. Also, most user’s here come from the reddit exodus after the removal of third party apps.
One other thing is that when you link content from Lemmy you can just link the image directly instead of sending a link to Lemmy with a login screen. The adoption rate from people linking will be a lot lower since Lemmy is not sacrificing quality to increase numbers.
Either way, I like the size and it suits me, I can “finish” my Lemmy for the day in a reasonable amount of time and I get my fix of Linux news, memes and shitposts so it’s just a win for me.
The verification aspect of signing up for an instance. People say they’ll leave Reddit but still go back to it. I was one of those until I remembered how they murdered my boy Apollo.
This is a really good question, and I suppose the answer is the same as to why Mastodon is not more popular.
I think it is a combination of several factors:
- Not many people know about it. Really, reddit is one of the most well known websites on the internet. Very few people know lemmy/mastodon.
- UI/UX issues. The more friction there is, the smaller the probability of someone using something. And Lemmy has TONS of friction. And the lemmy devs are not welcome to suggestions. Seriously, every suggestion that is made is probably answered with “I am against this”. If the idea did not come from their heads, they are probably against it. This has been my experience with them, at least.
- Lack of content. On reddit, there is tons of content. On lemmy, not so much. And people are generally not very principled. They want to consume, and completely ignore the ethics/morality of whatever it is they are doing.
I think this is not necessarily bad though. Lemmy DOES need more content and more users. But I hope it never becomes the size of reddit. Because reddit fucking sucks. People are stupid as fuck there now. The amount of low effort and low information content on reddit is astonishing.
Hopefully, Lemmy gets the smart, principled, interesting people and reddit keeps the influencers and onlyfaners.
Lemmy currently feels a lot like reddit used to in the beginning, when posts came from real people who just wanted to share ideas about things they cared about. I’d rather keep it as is than see it grow into the bloated bot farm of garbage and advertising that reddit has become.
somewhat. early reddit was a lot more mainstream. it was mostly a link aggregator for news stories in its early days and subreddits were not really a thing until later. i started using it in 2007 and it was much different by 2010.
the dominant ideology was also libertarian and auti-authoritarian, not extreme leftism of various flavors that are pro authoritarian. there was very much a lack of controlling the narrative and language policing… that didn’t take hold until mid 2010s as the reddit ‘scandals’ caused the admins to start cracking down.
Because there’s still a handful of basic stuff that still hasn’t gotten sorted out yet for some reason.
Like if I wanted to share your post with my friends, I’ll send them this link: https://piefed.ca/c/nostupidquestions/p/377144/why-isint-lemmy-more-popular. If they’re using a mobile app, then it might be fine. But if they’re on desktop and want to comment or vote here but aren’t already on my instance, they need to go back to their home instance, search up this community, and then search for this post. Why isn’t there some sort of native way where I can just click on a button and have it open up in my home instance? Or even better: integrate something like threadiverse.link into Lemmy/PieFed so it immediately redirects me to my home instance’s version on this post.
And before someone suggests using a different front-end or using a browser script, I appreciate you trying to help but my issue is why this isn’t even natively part of Lemmy. And I’m not even sure if it’s in the pipelines for V1.0.
Another issue is that there are still posts that don’t federate properly. And it’s not because an instance was defederated. What posts I see on this account might never be visible from a separate account. What is even more frustrating is that sometimes, I can’t even force my instance to fetch the post. I’ll give it the direct link and it still can’t find the post on my instance.
As long as these basic issues remain unresolved, Lemmy will not become popular. A site can’t be popular if I can’t even share a post to my friends properly. Or if I can’t even see the post, then I wouldn’t be able to share it with anyone!
Edit: added clarification
Popular platforms have big expensive algorithms that monitor user behavior and present content they’re most likely to interact with when they’re most likely to interact with it. Participation in those platforms isn’t a deliberate act anymore.
