• The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.worldEnglish
    35·
    5 months ago

    I think it’s much less intimidating to new users now compared to when I joined last year. The barrier to entry has been reduced significantly.

    There are tons of active communities now, mobile apps that work great (this is a big one), and many more tools to block content that you don’t want to see.

    • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
      131·
      5 months ago

      there is also more diverse content than the crap that was on here six months ago.

      when 50% of the frontpage is linux memes… you’re not going to gain the interest of most new users. now it seems to be down to about 20%

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      5 months ago

      New user here…what? Easy to use? I’ve gotten to the point where I know how to do things, but, it’s still needlessly complicated. Yes there are many active communities, but there are also not very many of them. The ironic thing is, you need to be discussing mainstream topics on the non-mainstream platform. If I wanted to talk about my favorite band? Nobody is here to do that. And if I do find a niche community here, but it’s on another instance? NOW I know what to do. But when I first got here, I was ONLY subscribing to sublemmys on .world because it’s the only way I knew how.

      For this platform to grow, we’re going to have to make it easy. Like, braindead easy.

      Make it so you just click “join”. Make it so you’re logged in across ALL of Lemmy. Your posts may originate from Lemmy.World, but a non-techie wouldn’t know or care about any of that. I see Lemmy making a big deal about the seperate instances. Like it’s a selling point. It’s only a selling point for people smart enough to understand it.

      But imagine Britney. Now Britney is a fictional person I just made up to represent your bottom of the barrel intelligence level of people these days. Britney is just some pretty valley girl. She doesn’t know what RSS is. She’s never heard of Linux, despite having an android phone. Britney is who you cater the site to. Because Britney is America. She wants sublemmys about “The Voice” and “The Masked Singer”. She wants a sublemmy for Taylor Swift. I think you’re starting to get the type of person I’m talking about.

      You can still operate Lemmy almost exactly how it is now. Just make it so even if you know NONE of that stuff, you can still operate it freely. I will use MySpace as an example (for the brief 4 years it was the top social media). There was a default MySpace look. If all you did was sign up, and do nothing else, you still had a myspace account, and you could still customize it to an extent. It’s the basic profile everyone thinks of when you think of a myspace profile. The colors, the layout, the look. It was still usable. Then you had people using CSS and HTML and I think Javascript was available. Now suddenly you have 50 different profiles, all looking completely different. All functioning exactly the same, but you could go as deep or as shallow as you wanted.

      THATS what this site needs. Don’t take away the stuff for the techie people. Let them go nuts. Let them do crazy things with this platform. But also, to increase userbase, make it as shallow as possible unless the user changes things. America wants shallow and not challenging. America doesn’t want to think. Britney just wants a place to type “I LOVE TAYLOR! I LOVE TAYLOR! I LOVE TAYLOR!” over and over. You can keep her happy, and keep yourselves happy. And I’m somewhere in the middle. It needs to be a platform that conforms to the user. Because if the user needs to conform to the platform, they will not join that platform.

    • Got_Bent@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      5 months ago

      I still have no clue how instances work but whatever I’m doing has been working fine for nearly a year

      • A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        5 months ago

        It’s like how there’s loads of different email providers but they can all still email each other.

        Just like Gmail can send mail to Outlook and any other @EmailProvider.com, lemmy.world can populate it’s feed/comments from lemm.ee and any other @LemmyInstance.com

      • Stovetop@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        5 months ago

        From an end user perspective there’s not that much to think about, thankfully.

        Basically, it’s like having two websites that mirror each other’s content. You can sign up for Forum A and be able to read and write posts that users on Forum B can also see. People’s names are tagged with the name of the forum they are registered at, but otherwise everything you do and see happens on your own site of choice and there’s no difference where it comes from.

        If Forum A doesn’t like Forum C, but Forum B doesn’t mind, Forum A can choose to disconnect from Forum C and hide their users and posts, while Forum B can still see both. It only gets tricky when someone from Forum B makes a post that people from both Forums A and C are in, but all of the posts from C users are invisible to A users.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        3·
        5 months ago

        I still have no clue how instances work but whatever I’m doing has been working fine for nearly a year

        You have a user account “Got_Bent”, on an instance (you can think of this as a “server”), lemmy.world. That’s your home instance. Thus, you are @[email protected].

        You can view communities on that instance. This post, in fact, is on a community on the lemmy.world instance, [email protected].

        You can also view communities on any other other instances that lemmy.world is federated with (which is most of them). For example, [email protected]. By-and-large, you can use them the same way you can communities on your home instance.

        Reddit is pretty similar, just that with Reddit, there’s only one “instance”, Reddit.

        Instances might go down (so users with that instance as their home instance can’t log in and communities on that instance aren’t accessible. Some have certain rules about what users who use that instance as their home instance can do. Others have certain rules about what communities on their instance are allowed to do. For example, my home instance, lemmy.today, wants to avoid defederating with other instances (which means that people with that home instance can see all other content). Some instances, like beehaw.org, want to keep some content that might be objectionable to their users out, and will tend to defederate with other instances if they consider them to be problematic. Some instances allow hosting communities that have pornography (like lemmynsfw.com) and some do not (like sh.itjust.works). Same thing for communities dealing with religion or extreme political views, and so on.

        In general, it’s helpful to have a home instance in the same rough part of the world as you, as it’ll make things more-responsive.

      • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        Most often I’ve seen instances use as super communities. Largely revolving around a bigger topic. KDE runs their own with their own subcommunities for instance. They are far from the only ones. Just the one I use the most and a came to mind first. Having your own instance slap server allows you far more control over your communities then just hosting on someone else’s server. But from an end user perspective very largely transparent. not even being noticeable oftentimes.

  • set_secret@lemmy.worldEnglish
    275·
    5 months ago

    I’ve found I’ve been blocked on world news for posting comments againts fascist ideas. I’ve been shadow banned from world news for posting comprehensive evidence of china’s crimes against humans aka their concentration camps. It wasn’t opinion i linked to studies, and it wasn’t inflammatory. My comments were removed and now i can’t like or comment.

    It’s really disturbing ngl. I mean reddit was trash too but i expected some freedom of information here.

    • RBG@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

      This is fucking hilarious.

      The entire time since that announcement last year dropped I have been using the modified Infinity for Reddit client that has my own API code in it.

      I told myself if that stops working, whatever, I will not try to keep the app up to date and I will not switch apps. Lemmy works well enough for me now.

      Up to this day the few times I have been accessing reddit through it I have no issues whatsoever. Amazing. Then again I never tried while they had issues with their official app, I suppose. Unless that is right now as I type this, because right now my app is still working fine.

    • demizerone@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      5 months ago

      They are also using automation to review comments that might harm their advertising partners. After 15 year a joke about Boeing got my account suspended. I deleted my top comments and closed it after that. Fucking trash. Now I only got to the site if Google search takes me there and with ad block enabled. Spez can suck it.

  • dzanno@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    16·
    5 months ago

    I was word of mouthed here yesterday. As someone interested in self hosting and open source i might be the target audience sure, but I am here due to recent news and such

    • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      109·
      5 months ago

      Why?

      I kinda like how I often quickly run out of new interesting posts to comment on, but there is enough that I can have engaging conversations.

      The more people that come the more it gets watered down. Not that I am gatekeeping, people can do as they like. Just I am happy right now.

      Edit: Curious about the downvotes. Considering I explicitly said I’m not trying to gate keep and people can do as they please.

        • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          6·
          5 months ago

          I just subbed to all three of those.

          I find half the battle here is finding new places to sub to. I’ll browse all but always forget to sub to new ones I see.

          I think for sports, it’s difficult as it seems most of us early adopters here are, well let’s say nerdier than the average, and as a rule tend to follow sport less.

          Even me, I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch sport, aside from the olympics. But as an introvert that had a shitty home life I learnt quickly how to be a fake extrovert and thus had a lot of friends and so got surrounded by sport and stuff.

          • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
            1·
            5 months ago

            I find half the battle here is finding new places to sub to.

            At the moment, none of Lemmy – and AFAIK, kbin/mbin/etc – or any of the clients provide a native way to search all of the Threadiverse. Some of that is kind of intrinsic to the distributed design, intended to help it scale, let instances be small if required. An instance doesn’t track all the activity on all the instances out there.

            However, if you go to lemmyverse.net, they have a list of all of the communities across all of the instances on the Threadiverse. You can search and filter by various criteria.

            https://lemmyverse.net/communities

            I really think that that should be the starting point for most users.

              • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
                3·
                5 months ago

                That only shows you the communities that your particular instance knows about. But it’s not even all communities over all federated instances.

                An instance only “knows” about a community on another instance once both (a) it has federated with the other instance and (b) someone has explicitly triggered a search for “!communityname@remoteinstancename” on an instance. Like, that community doesn’t get added to the list of known communities on federated instances just because someone has created it.

                For example, take bbs.9tail.net, a small lemmy instance.

                You can see that that it’s federated with lemmy.world on its instances page:

                https://bbs.9tail.net/instances

                And it’s only blocked a single instance, lemmygrad.ml.

                But (as of this writing, and that could change if someone goes and starts triggering searches for stuff on there), it only has two pages of communities, with 63 (in a quick count) known. There are far more than 63 communities on lemmy.world alone, not to mention on all the other instances that bbs.9tail.net is federated with.

                Lemmyverse.net, on the other hand, crawls all the instances it can find and builds a full index. Currently has over 27,000 communities. Once you get a “!community@instance” name from there, you can trigger a search for it on your home instance, and your home instance will learn about it. But until you or someone else does that, your home instance won’t know about that community.

      • AchtungDrempels@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        5 months ago

        Because almost all niche topic communities that i am interested in have very few people posting. The niche topics were also what made reddit interesting to me, i hardly ever browsed all there.

      • iopq@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        5 months ago

        The hardware communities are not active enough. We need more people who are interested in niche topics

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

      They have bots roaming the site, banning people, seemingly at random. I went from never having been banned on reddit on a 10 year account, to banned for 3 days twice, and then permanently banned all in the span of a month.

      And when did this happen? The week after the IPO went public.

      And what kind of messages got me banned? Well one of them was in /r/Cleveland where a guy posted a security camera picture of the guy who stole his bike. I made the comment that the theif looks like a guy who stole MY bike in the early 90s, and that maybe this was his son. Keeping it in the family business.

      I was banned for that comment for “Harassment and abuse of reddit users”. The action was performed by an AI bot. If I wanted an appeal I could appeal. So I did. It SAID the appeal was handled by a real human. They still sided with the bots decision, which tells me that it wasn’t handled by a real person.

      So now I’m here. Just don’t steal my bike, ok guys?

      • ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        5 months ago

        Hey dude, I’ve been looking for you for so long, since my Dad stole your bike and that was a turning point in my life, since I made a point of stealing your son’s bike.

        It is said that this will continue for generations until the seventh son of a seventh son, who’ll transform into an upside down toothless vampire who likes garlic.

        In order for this prophecy to come true, please ensure all your progeny keeps buying bikes.

        PS Welcome to Lemmy!

      • ripcord@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        Just don’t steal my bike, ok guys?

        I won’t!

        …but what kind of bike and where is it, just so I know what I’m not stealing and where I should avoid stealing it from

      • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        I made the comment that the theif looks like a guy who stole MY bike in the early 90s, and that maybe this was his son. Keeping it in the family business.

        That’s hilarious. They don’t deserve you.

    • mesamune@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      5 months ago

      reddit is about the same in my opintion, but I do see a lot more activity on the lemmy side. I think its a combination of:

      1. Less rules around communities. The barrier of entry is much lower here to post, and things dont get auto-removed because of trigger happy mods.
      2. 2% of users post 90% of content. And a lot of them moved over to lemmy.
      3. Servers can be brought into existence and removed at will. This may seem like a bad thing, but what it means is that the best lemmy servers can evolve and be successful in a way reddit cant. Some have different modifications to make them more user friendly, some have excellent uptime, etc…etc…
      4. People from mastodon/misskey/other fediverse instances can comment/post. Even if that is not what a vast majority of us do, it does help the numbers and will continue to help engagement.

      Also to @[email protected] Do you know if the sats above take into account the generally banned instances of lemmy? I know that a lot of instances earlier this year decided to become de-federated from the general fediverse. Do you happen to know if the website take into account those servers?

      • Blaze@reddthat.comOPEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        Also to @[email protected] Do you know if the sats above take into account the generally banned instances of lemmy? I know that a lot of instances earlier this year decided to become de-federated from the general fediverse. Do you happen to know if the website take into account those servers?

        Not sure about this unfortunately

        • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4·
          5 months ago

          Have you heard of ReVanced? Most commonly known for patching youtube to allow more features, mainly adblocking. Well they have patches for a ton of apps now so if you have a reddit account and say you’re a developer you get your own API key they can be injected into some apps. It didn’t work for me for a while but I eventually got it to work for the random search result from reddit.

        • Remorhaz@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Not all of them, Dystopia for example was allowed to stay as is because of accessibility features that the native app lacks. It was even working just fine during the recent outage.

    • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      The cracked apps using personal API keys stopped working a few days ago. Already fixed now I think.

  • Mountain_Mike_420@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    5 months ago

    Hi I’m new here. My friend has been trying to get me in for ages. The reason I am here is because my Reddit account of 10 years and one of 3 years got permabanned. And it was really for no reason. I tried to make a new account and that also got instantly permabanned. That’s when I found out that my 10year account also got banned. So yeah fuck what happened on Reddit.

    I’m really liking lemmy and my iOS app (mlem) and enjoying the community. The only thing I miss from Reddit is the video integration.

    • PlantJam@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      5 months ago

      What I don’t miss from reddit is the bot comments. Not the novelty bots that reply if your comment is in alphabetical order or something like that, but actual chat gpt responses to regular posts or comments.

      I have no idea what the point of them is, but they’re awful.

      • uhN0id@programming.devEnglish
        6·
        5 months ago

        Those were getting so out of hand.

        u/OP: “What’s a good mouse for a mix of productivity and gaming”

        u/DefinitelyNotABot: “A good mouse for a mix of productivity and gaming is something you should be looking for if you need a mouse that is good for work and play. A good mouse for productivity and gaming will have a good balance of performance and features. Fortunately, finding a good mouse for a mix of productivity and gaming is not difficult due there being plenty of mouse options available to you[…]”

        • PlantJam@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          5 months ago

          What’s the point of those types of bots, though? I guess they’re just trying to have vaguely genuine looking accounts to use for some future purpose, maybe political or advertising related.

          • uhN0id@programming.devEnglish
            6·
            5 months ago

            My best guess is karma farming so they can sell them off. Probably create hundreds of accounts they can sell off. If some brand buys an account that looks reputable for $20-$100 to use it for astroturfing then that’s a pretty good deal for both sides. Shitty deal for everyone else.

            • SeattleRain@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              5 months ago

              That and building convincing personas for propaganda and PR. An account agreeing with pro corporate policies is more convincing if it has a long post history.

      • SomeGuy69@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        They’ll sooner or later appear here too, that’s sadly a reality all social media will suffer from now on. No filter can detect AI replies for long.

        • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Do you think users, moderators, and admins on Lemmy could be more equipped (or at least more incentivized) to combat malicious bots compared to Reddit?

      • mm_maybe@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        Running such a bot with an intentionally underpowered language model that has been trained to mimic a specific Reddit subculture is good clean absurdist parody comedy fun if done up-front and in the open on a sub that allows it, such as r/subsimgpt2interactive, the version of r/subsimulatorgpt2 that is open to user participation.

        But yeah, fuck those ChatGPT bots. I recently posted on r/AITAH and the only response I got was obviously from a large language model… it was infuriating.

      • Mountain_Mike_420@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        5 months ago

        What I said wasn’t zesty at all. The only thing I can think of is someone went to all my comments and reported me. I’ve been temp banned from communities before but never banned from Reddit and would never expect to get permanently banned from Reddit the site along with my other Reddit accounts.

        • demizerone@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          I got suspended for a Boeing joke, but deleted my account after that. I hope the same does not happen to Lemmy bcz the Internet needs a place to discuss links on the Internet.

  • Netrunner@programming.devEnglish
    11·
    5 months ago

    Still hang around both. But I’ve noticed I’ve had more to engage with on Lemmy lately, which is great.

  • yrmp@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    5 months ago

    Fuck reddit.

    Feeding user data to an LLM. Jacking up API costs. Being generally unusable on mobile. Usurping old.reddit.com to try and force me to the official app on “unmoderated” and NSFW threads.

    Now with their IPO and a need to deliver ever increasing subscriber numbers and improved metrics for shareholders every quarter, the writing is on the wall.

    I hope it goes to zero. The only sad thing is all the knowledge that will be lost due to the sky high API pricing when the site eventually does sunset. I’m guilty myself of trying to de-enshittify google somewhat by adding reddit to just about every search. Hopefully people smarter than me have ways to archive that info.

    • Wiz@midwest.socialEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

      Yes, but glue is the surprisingly tasty ingredient on pizza too keep your toppings from falling off.

      Just be sure to use non-toxic glue, because the other kind tastes terrible.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      31·
      5 months ago

      Feeding user data to an LLM.

      I mean, somewhere, even if not now, if the Threadiverse becomes large enough, someone is gonna be using comments here to train an LLM too. That’s just gonna be a given unless you want to use non-public forums, and that kills the searchability and accessbility to everyone that makes most forums valuable. It’s even easier to access here than on Reddit – just set up an instance and federate with and subscribe to everything.

      I guarantee you that people are going back and training LLMs on archives of old Usenet discussions too.

      The rest of it, yeah, I get.

  • Mereo@lemmy.caEnglish
    101·
    5 months ago

    I think we are now in a positive cycle:

    • More and more useful comments are posted,
    • Which means more people get interested,
    • which attracts more and more people to the platform
    • That increases the quality and quantity of posts/comments/etc.
    • etc.
    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      5 months ago

      Hey, ya get what ya pay for. Pay a little money, get a little quality. Pay a LOT of money, get a LOT of quality.

      Well, I didn’t get paid ANYTHING to be here, so you can imagine the quality of MY posts!

      Hey, why did the poop walk into the poop?

      To poop to the other poop! :D

      See? Just zero quality…

  • TIN@feddit.ukEnglish
    8·
    5 months ago

    I’ve been here since the API changes at Reddit and the sub blackouts that followed, and I think it’s becoming more interesting all the time. Back in the early days there was no point in refreshing the /all feed more than once every 4 hours as it just wouldn’t have changed, now it’s much more than that. The number of posts with actual discussions are increasing, and other than a few blocked users, communities and one instance, I like the people I’m sharing space with.

    • barsquid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      5 months ago

      I also greatly prefer the people on Lemmy and I hope that continues even as more and more redditors show up. Without a spez calling the shots, perhaps instances will tend to ban and defederate from far-right radicalization chambers instead of promoting them to the front page.

      • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
        21·
        5 months ago

        Pretty much all of the far-right instances are defederated from the major servers, except lemm.ee, which intentionally lets users block instances they don’t like.

  • Lexam@lemmy.caEnglish
    7·
    5 months ago

    I think more people are coming here for my comments and delusions of grandeur.