I get there are still users but it feel empty at times compared “other” platforms.
Why isint lemmy more popular?
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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.
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.
no startup/angel/vc/pe funds to burn in advertising to capture the market.
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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.
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not advertised, not run by a for profit company
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.
"Because I fucking hate my privacy, and Lemmy and other FOSS media platforms is like veggies on my dinner plate – I don’t want it.
I want people to know when I get my first boner, when I inevitably kick the bucket, and when i announce I got a new position (while users on the platform give context that I was hard the entire interview process). Because why celebrate with family and friends when I got the whole internets asshole comments to read and respond to."
This is my delusional interpretation of why users don’t join Lemmy.
🤔
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.
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
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.
The UI
For an online service to get popular, it has to be either a new, really interesting thing with a lot of advertisement, have the support of some big celebrities (usually through advertisement too), or literally pay people to come en masse to artificially make it popular, so that more people comes organically (so, basically, a large advertisement budget). It also have to be easy because most people can’t read more than a few lines of explanations on why things are different.
No lemmy instance have none of the pre-requisites, and the accessibility is not really there for the general public, due to various things. My main gripe is that federation and local moderation means you’ll have to create multiple account to access content from certain groups of servers, which is a lot to ask to people that can’t be asked to make even one account, but there are other minor things too. The sheer choice of instances and client, seen as an advantage by some, is simply a bothersome annoyance to people used to large platforms doing all the work of deciding what’s good and bad for them.
because at the moment Reddit is now mainstream, and reactionaries are taking over (FU spez). Therefore much of the far left and anarchists deemed “violent” by spez and Phony Stark have moved to Lemmy and Bluesky and made it their safe spaces for mostly politically-charged topics.
