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[–] 160 points 2 months ago (11 children)

More users to accommodate more active niche communities

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    Yeah, there's a few subs that I miss — particularly the ones for my city and my state — but r/twobestfriendsplay is top of the list. It was by far the sub that I most enjoyed interacting with since I joined years ago. Lots of power users who I'd immediately recognize by pfp.

    The actual group that it's named after broke up a decade ago — they've been disbanded longer than they were a thing — but it was still loosely connected to a couple of the guys' ongoing careers, particularly two of them who host a podcast and stream separately. More importantly, it was a hub for discussion on games, movies, shows, comics, whatever, niche or popular, even if the relevance to the group was tenuous; the mods tried to block some topics but lost the battle on vtubers after the guys had Mori Calliope on the podcast, lol. I imagine it's even more lifted now that one of them streams with several vtubers.

    tl;dr yeah I really miss some niche communities I'd been subbed to for years.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Truthfully, Lemmy doesn't even have enough users for some mainstream interests, like sports. Lemmy leans very tech and selects for a certain type of user. But I'm sure plenty of people here are happy to have a place without daily NFL and NBA news.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    More users is not necessarily more better.

    ... but I do agree there are very few active communities.

    The focus should be on making the fediverse the best it can be, rather than focusing on attracting users.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    The issue is without some mass, small communities will likely not prosper. I can’t imagine if someone wants to create a community on spoon collecting that it would do well. We may just have to accept that for the next 5yrs the fediverse may just be larger communities with lots of smaller interests lumped in together.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    Yes but more users doesn't necessarily make a spoon collecting community more viable.

    Am easier pathway is to encourage existing users to visit this type of community.

    Additionally, consider carefully whether the fediverse can support a spoon collecting community, or perhaps you should just post about spoon collecting in the general "cutlery collecting" community.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    More users provides more diversity - More diversity provides the potential for more niche interests to arise - More active niche communities provides more reasons for existing users to stay - More active users staying on the platform inevitably attracts more new users.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    More users also increases the appeal for bots, purveyors of misinformation, trolls, and assholes generally.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    And the Fediverse doesn't have all of those already?

    These are inescapable in the modern age internet unfortunately, however the decentralisation of the Fediverse should help in alleviating those symptoms of an open platform.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 months ago

    Of course we have them, but the ratio will increase as user numbers rise.

    Federation does not protect us from these issues in any way. In fact it's very susceptible to misinformation through federation.

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  • [–] 55 points 2 months ago

    active niche and place based communities. the ones i’ve seen for my area are super quiet

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  • [–] 43 points 2 months ago* (3 children)

    more diversity. currently lemmy predominantly has politics, tech, and memes. Anything else is a little rough around the edges or nonexistent

    Particularly, I was a huge fan of the Tales from X-style subreddits. It was entertaining to be able to go into them, read some stories about it and see others responses, even if some of them you could totally tell weren't actually real. there have been communities made for some of the topics, but they're dead, and unfortunately, those types of communities aren't really communities that you can do too much with yourself unless you're actively in that same field.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    politics, tech, and memes

    And surprisingly Lemmy has very little programming content. The programming and learn_programming communities are almost dead.

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  • [–] 29 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    More users in smaller niche communities. Lemmy has less users in general, so smaller niche communities are practically non-existent here.

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  • [–] 27 points 2 months ago
    [–] 25 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Active communities. Some of the comms for my interests technically exist, in that they get one post every third month that gets 2 upvotes. Despite everything, these communities are still thriving on Reddit. Yet for whatever reason, any attempt to replicate them here fails. Smh

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    They were small on reddit once too. Just a matter of time. Also helps if you post to them.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I’m not sure that it is a matter of time. Maybe I’m just being pessimistic, but I think the fediverse wave has crested already. There’s a reverse migration from Mastodon back to places like X/Twitter under way, and lemmy really never even saw the scale of adoption or attention that Mastodon saw.

    I’m not worried that lemmy will go away any time soon, but I’m not sure it’s ever going to be mainstream enough to attract enough users to really support vibrant and diverse communities.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    Yes, unfortunately the multiple instance nature of Lemmy is an obstacle for most people. I’ve been here for more than a year and I still struggle to describe what Lemmy is.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago*

    I'm not sure that's the problem. Maybe it is, but from what I see, most people never even get far enough into considering lemmy for its decentralized nature to become the blocker. I don't think it really even registers as an option for most of them.

    The big commercial sites would do things like research studies and marketing campaigns to try to attract new users. Fediverse mostly relies on organic growth, driven by things like word-of-mouth. That's fine, in that it gives us a core group of users who really want to be here and know why, but I think there's an upper bound to our ability to attract new users that way.

    I'm sure some will prefer that it works this way, but for me, I consider users of Reddit and X/Twitter to be something along the lines of hostages needing to be rescued. We can't save them all, but I'd love to get more people off of those sites.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 months ago

    Niche communities.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    The actual Apollo app that’s still being developed by community volunteers. That’s all though, can’t think of anything else.

    I mean sure, Lemmy has less content and interaction but that means (for me) that the content that’s shown has more value. Reddit had (and still has) lots of content but more often than not it is the same jokes, memes and questions daily.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago

    a more active and bigger community

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  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    More niche communities that I don't have to manage to enjoy. TBF Reddit is pretty bad as a forum too. Car audio for example or really anything where the majority of the discourse is newbies wanting help gets drowned out by people repping popular brands, showing off pie in the sky builds that wouldn't sound good, or arguing about whether capacitors do anything.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    isn't that mostly a moderation problem?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Not really imo, it's mostly because traditional forums "bump" posts back up to the top. That promotes back and forth that's required in order to help people diagnose a problem to the actual solution, and as a result of not having a bump prioritization feature, a lot of people only ever speak once in the comments.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago

    Content and the number of users. Good lord there are so many dead boards on lemmy.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    A large enough userbase to support more niche topics. On Lemmy, like a lot of small communities, people tend to put the cart before the horse. They make places to share content for very niche topics but there aren't enough to warrant it. Plus sometimes you have mods in certain relatively niche groups that will remove content from their community because it is off topic, but their volume of posts is nowhere near enough for the occasional, technically off topic post to really matter. I see it in Discord servers too. Some places have more channels than users on the server. People get obsessed with categorization.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago*

    the niche communities over there, replicated here, but without the number of users some are ghost towns on lemmy. with them forcing popup logins piecemeal, we may get a boost.

    also people scattered way too much to other similar platforms, when one instance shutsdown which is problematic.

    also some politically heavy instances ban like they would on reddit.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    I would say the old.reddit interface but lemmy actually has that. :)

    https://old.lemmy.world/

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Interesting, but I don't think this allows mods to customize a community's HTML in the way that I have seen done on reddit (custom backgrounds, upvote/downvote icons, etc).

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    It doesn't, and due to the way lemmy frontends work, it likely won't ever natively have that feature. Something that might be possible though is a browser addon that applies custom CSS to communities when visiting them through mlmym? But someone would have to make that, and get moderators to submit custom CSS for their communities…

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Lemmy might not support this, but PieFed does (without the need for a browser extension). There are some instructions here on setting it up:
    https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/developer_docs/09_Theming_Guide.md

    The custom CSS/JS/Jinja needs to be submitted and approved first, but then a moderator could add it to the community as the official theme.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    Thank you for sharing, I wasn't aware of this feature. But to be fair, PieFed has it easier here because it has a ‘main’ frontend (unlike lemmy, where all frontends are third-party as far as the main software is concerned) that you can apply styling to. Even then, it can only work on that main frontend and not any alternate clients.

    I really need to follow PieFed more closely, to be honest. It has so much stuff…

    edit: actually, I just noticed this:

    The custom CSS/JS/Jinja needs to be submitted and approved first, but then a moderator could add it to the community as the official theme.

    So I assume an admin has to add it as a possible theme first, right? If that's good enough, I guess something similar could be done in mlmym too. mlmym should already be very easy to style; it doesn't have a skins/themes mechanism, but that's nothing that couldn't be added.

    I think I'm still favorable to the addon approach because it would mean that the custom style could work across every mlmym installation without needing admin involvement, but a theme system is also a reasonable compromise.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Shareholder value! JK Reddit doesn't have that either. Zing!

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  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    90% of the answers in here boil down to more users.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago

    Larger active sports communities. There's a subreddit for every sport you want to follow, and even for each team. So you can get detailed news specifically for your team, go to game threads for real time discussion for any live game and even go lurk your rival team's subreddit to enjoy all the complaining after your team beats them. All of that only works with a large active user base and Lemmy just isn't there yet.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Support from Nebula creators.

    Nebula doesn't have its own comment system, so it's up to the individual creator where, if at all, they engage their viewers. Most if not all I've seen mentions reddit. Some may be on Bluesky too, but as far as I'm concerned Bluesky is just another proprietary platform that can turn into a monetization driven project.

    I really want to participate in the jetlag discussions, but I don't want to log into my reddit accounts ever again. So I'm left with the nebula community here, which is better than nothing, but we're like 5 accounts that participate monthly.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    This might be something to write to your favourite creators about. They want know if it isn’t brought to their attention, and I would certainly enjoy it too. Change takes time, but also effort by the early adopters.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Yeah, problem is I have no other way of contacting them than reddit, and I'm pretty sure my message will get auto-deleted and my account permabanned for trying. I don't care about the account, but a 10year old account with +80k karma does have some credibility, if I have to use that someday.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    More users. The scalability to accommodate more users.

    Other than that, Lemmy pretty much has everything.

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  • [–] 33 points 2 months ago* (12 children)

    More users.

    And for lemmurs to stop being so binary and assuming every discussion is a war zone. Defend a Jewish person and you're a fascist. Defend a Palestinian and you're anti-semetic. Make a 'whore' joke and you're a misogynist. Criticise capitalism and you're a tankie. Accidentally and innocently misgender someone and you're transphobic. Defend trans folk and you're woke. Its all so bloody exhausting.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Oh I see, so you hate Free Software! Fucking typical, unsubscribed, and I will not be returning. 😛

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  • [+] 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I am legally blind. I literally cannot use desktop Linux due to lack of accessibility, but somehow that's my fault.

    I understand if it would be a burden, but @shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip could probably give some advice. I think they are legally blind too.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    That sucks, and I'm sorry you had that experience. To provide a viewpoint for your short-circuit, the FOSS software is a tool, yes, but the FOSS movement is politics and philosophy. To them (us, but I like to hope I'm less of a dink) software made unethically is similar to advocating for socialism or unions as a means of empowering the people against forces that would oppress them. For some people, using proprietary software might be like using products made by slave labour.

    Some people who are more puritanical than myself might refuse to use anything that they can't use freely, the equivalent of you obstaining from using a laptop at all if Linux doesn't work for you. I think most people, myself included, would consider that extreme, but I bet you've heard from those extremists.

    None of this is meant to excuse the people who've been crap to you, you should do whatever you need to. I'm just trying to explain why people get so worked up about it compared to a screwdriver. Or a hammer, say. A hammer and a sickle, even...

    😉

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    agree on the first part, second part is just the modern internet sadly

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Its always been this way.

    This person just said they would like to be fascist anti-semetic misogynist tankie and transphobic without catching shit for it. In the old days of the internet, we definitely would have told them to shove their head up their ass

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    I was on the cusp of leaving Reddit just before the API fiasco, and Redditors treating every interaction as combat by rhetoric, a contest rather than a discussion, was one of the main reasons.

    Yes, that happens here, but it's, like, the same two or three people every time. For several of your examples, particular usernames come to mind. The background vibe is much more chill, I feel.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    The sad part is that the centralized platforms that are popping up and adopting anti politic stances are feeling much friendlier. People here complain about centralized platforms, but all the fighting is ironically just pushing people over to those platforms.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago*

    Easy way to look at the context of a reply.

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  • [–] 36 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    Any amount of positivity and fun. Lemmy users just feel so miserable and argumentative.

    I mean sign of the times but damn.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

    That's interesting. I feel like my experience has been the opposite. I'll occasionally post things here, completely expecting some negative response (not looking for it, but I know how people are). For example, I posted a rant about an issue I was having after switching to Linux. Instead of negativity, I typically get responses more like "that's a valid criticism. Have you considered $x, though?", and the conversation continues quite pleasantly.

    I feel like reddit was far quicker to jump to "no. You're wrong, and here's why...".

    Edit: correcting hypothetical redditor's spelling.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    The only time I’ve been dunked on is by tankies when said that RT is pure propaganda.

    Otherwise I like vibes here..sometimes the super hard line against Libs and Obama throw me off but an anarchy-socialist so it doesn’t bother me personally. Just a bit confusing when looking at the alternatives at the time.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago

    Better SEO and forum answers. I hate having to search "my question + reddit" just to get an answer from a real person. Especially as reddit becomes botted to all hell

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    More apolitical communities

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    Agreeing with you here.

    Visit popular on reddit and posts will be like:

    • cat pic
    • pic of food and girl complaining
    • video of fight
    • meme about work
    • mandami
    • ice bullshit
    • dog pic
    • kids are fucking stupid
    • cat pic
    • PG video of something funny
    • pic of food of girl complaining
    • cat pic
    • Trump
    • picture of celebs boobs
    • cat pic
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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Ability to turn off inbox replies from comments.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Same, seems like a basic thing to block the noise.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago*

    IMO it directly contributes to the perceived argumentativeness of lemmy. Comments feel a lot more personal and direct when presented in an inbox vs on the actual thread.

    On reddit I turned off replies for everything except the times I was wanting a reply.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago*

    on piefed, you can do this for every comment. there is a little bell on the bottom right of the comment (in the web ui) which let's you turn notifications on/off

    E: also, interstellar has this in the 3 dots menu on the comment

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    [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I miss the Awoo videos. Puppies howling, Huskies going mental.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    Disable inbox replies

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    A way to filter old posts by date. So, old posts in the past 24 hours, or one week, etc.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    On a down note, /r/ukrainewarvideoreport. I liked following the progress of the war.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    Ability to turn off reply notifications on specific posts.

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