How do you feel about the massive influx of users?
I’m a new user but I’d love to see this place explode in popularity!
I’ve been hoping for a shift to decentralized social platforms for ages, so I really hope that’s the direction things are heading.
I like it, but I am part of the massive influx of users so I am admittedly biased.
I think the Redditors joining Lemmy will certainly change the culture, both for the better and for the worse. Comments got pretty toxic on Reddit while I feel like the toxic comments on Lemmy were rare.
BUT, that could be a sample size thing. I’m curious to see if the ratio of toxic comments per active user would have been the same.
More people = more problems I am certain but this is a social network and without people it will fail. We must all make an effort to be the change that we want to see in the world.
I don’t foresee a problem in the immediate future aside from higher server load, but in terms of culture, only people who believe in a new social network will be willing to join.
In 5 years however when this is a great place to be, a large number of people will join who don’t respect the legacy. The departure from Digg to Reddit felt like this too, I hope that the federation aspect will ensure this is longer lived.
remember… federation is your friend. federation gives you the freedeom to change house (instance) and/or look for better communities on any other federated instance from your own instance.
Are you actually able to migrate accounts between instances?
currently, no - but it is on the roadmap. moving house atm means creating a new account on another instance.
not yet on Lemmy, although you can on Mastodon, so it’s doable.
the reddit blackout is for like two days i expect that 90% of them will stick to the two days and business as usual afterwards. their bottom line is to continue running mods of their communities, even if they acknowledge that was is going on with reddit is bad. they shouldnt have announced a scheduled, limited blackout.
i expect some fringe communities to come here and stay but it will always be business as usual on reddit
therefore Lemmy needs to have a reason for people to stick around, communities offering something that isnt otherwise available, even just a refreshing change of community culture
Honestly it’ll probably be closer to 99.999% of users will stick around Reddit. The largest Lemmy instance is smaller than the smallest subreddit I follow and I suspect that’s probably the case for most people.
Here’s what will happen… Reddit blackout starts, people come to Lemmy, 8 out of 10 are confused by the way things work and bail instantly. 2 out of 10 might stick around, try to sign up, but everyone hammers the top 3-4 instances and they have a bad first impression. A few days later everyone is back at Reddit and Lemmy is right back where it was a month ago.
I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt I will be.
I think that there will be people who remain on Lemmy permanently. This group will remain small, and insignificant. But hopefully there will be enough people to prop the instances up with content. At which point Lemmy will begin to grow slowly; this slow growth imo is the most important. But yeah alot of people will go back to Reddit and forget all about Lemmy. And that’s ok.
Small
Insignificant
I see you’ve been talking to my ex
this is the most redditish comment I’ve seen so far.
remains to be seen if that’s a good thing or not, but I did chuckle over the familiar joke
I was about to say the exact same thing! I checked and sure enough that commenter joined in the last few hours.
I’ve purged my account… and passed the Rubicon. I’m on Lemmy now or just reading news sites.
You’re exaggerating, I can definitely see how Twitter users changed the general atmosphere of the Fediverse, at least on the instances that I have used in the past. As for Reddit, I think it will be something similar to that, not everyone is going to migrate but Lemmy is going to be significantly bigger, better and THE place to go if you want to ditch Reddit. Also, it’s not like having a big portion here of social media audience is going to do a lot of good. I have serious doubts about people being able to give value to the community if they can’t even figure out how to register on an instance other than the main one
Yeah Reddit’s core users are pretty technical. At least the ones who joined before the big popularity boom in the last 5 years. The old school redditors will probably end up on lemmy.
lemmy feels more like reddit once did than reddit does now.
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Was originally introduced to reddit by a calculus professor who set up a sub for the class to collaborate - it was a different time.
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Definitely.
You’re talking about ~70% of reddit and you’re probably right. Let’s see. If lemmy gets an app with a better UI, it’s going to be that way for sure. An embeddes image and video viewer is missing, for example
yep. it’s about quality, not quantity - we’ll reach critical mass easily enough, and that’s all that matters for the short term.
You still need a minimum of people for things to work. And a lot of subreddit equivalent are still completely empty.
of course. but Lemmy really does have potential - it’s a more accessible platform than Mastodon and reddit users are more aligned with the strategy of decentralizing via the fediverse. this fits.
we gotta start somewhere.
I just joined Lemmy because someone on reddit mentioned in it a comment on a thread regarding the blackout. It’s kind of cool getting into a community while it’s still relatively small. I’m excited to see how things grow.
I hopped over here permanently tonight. Uninstalled boost on my phone, and I made Lemmy.ml my homepage. Reddit is just too depressing right now to keep it as my default.
When on a Lemmy site on mobile, in Firefox you can go to the three-dots menu and select “install”. You get a shortcut on your phone that will take you to an app like version of Lemmy.
Im using the Jerboa, official Lemmy mobile app on Android
Is Jeroba official? I thought it was third-party
I think it’s supposed to feel that way, since it’s not on the official LemmyNet github org, and located on one of the developers’ accounts instead afaik
Reddit is just too depressing right now to keep it as my default.
It really seems like the front page is just a list of politicians, companies, and people doing terrible things.
Every time I hear ding, it warms my heart. 😁
Ya love to see it.
I just hope that it will be more distributed than Matrix and not everyone registers on lemmy.ml (matrix.org in case of matrix) so the decentralization works for real here instead of 90% (exaggerating, don’t know the numbers) of the user base sitting on one instance :)
with how much .ml is struggling to handle the load I would’ve expected even more to pick different instances, though the situation seems better than how mastodon.social was during the twitter migration
the upcoming centralization issue sounds like it’ll be the communities themselves all being hosted on .ml, not accounts. can’t want to see how that one is gonna play out
they need the communities to be able to sync their posts/mod-team with other communities. That way communities aren’t dependent on one site.
Yeah this is my concern with lemmy overall. Like if a server shutsdown, as far as my understanding goes, the communities and accounts go with it. Like yeah decentralized is great for democracy purposes but the hard line separation makes it a hard ask on time investment. And I’m sure it’s more likely to happen to larger instances than smaller since cost will be the hugest factor. I’m sure remaking your account isn’t a big deal but we’ve seen with Reddit a sub/community can be irreplaceable at times.
The first time a handful of large subs are lost on Lemmy I’m sure it’ll have great affect on how the community views Lemmy.
Yeah definitely. There needs to be migration options between instances if federation is going to work.
I just signed up for my local one, I see that is lemmy.ml.
That’ll do for now. I will look around for alternatives once I got used to the whole federated thing more.
I am one of those influx.
I’m realllllly just hoping we don’t choke the “main” instances completely to death before the lemmy backend can have some developer hours dumped into it to support better per-instance horizontal scaling.
Yeah. It’s gonna be a rough first couple months. App development needs to catch up. Server support needs to catch up. Many subs need to figure out how to move over their communities. I’m tempted to start making communities and just copy-pasting the side bars and pinned threads, but Im not a mod for anything, so it feels like it’d be plagiarism.
It desperately needs lower friction remote community subscribing and a user migration workflow between instances.
Yeah, currently I too frequently end up viewing communities from outside the context of my login, it’s a pain that I hope gets remediated soon
I’m happy for users to join the federated alternative!
A nice website for looking for servers, platforms, and user numbers over time is: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Also handy for getting a picture of how many lemmy servers there are and how big they are.
I joined midwest.social and that site says it’s hosted in Germany. I find that funny that the USA Midwest is hosted overseas.
It was noted here that a German server was chosen due to their better data privacy laws :)
That’s a smart move!
As part of that massive influx, I’m excited!
I’ve known about Lemmy and Tild.es for some time, but both just seemed so immature. I figured I’d give Lemmy a solid chance to show support for the blackout and because I’m likely to quit Reddit entirely if they don’t reverse course (I may quit regardless), and I’m happy to say that this doesn’t feel like a downgrade much.
There are plenty of communities for what I’m looking for, so I’m not giving up a lot switching to Lemmy. I’m going to give it a solid chance over the next week or two and do my best to contribute, and if I’m liking it still after that point, I may be able to contribute dev resources (maybe I’ll help out with a mobile app or something).
Anyway, I’m excited to be part of this community!
I honestly can’t say about the influx. Since I’m part of it.
But man…
This does feel like home.
I was already loving Mastodon.
Honestly, the real question is:
What took us soo long…
I was lurking on Lemmy for a long time now read only mode, not signed up, but never had the urge to actually making an account.
I try not to have so many feeds where I’m active at once, to try and better manage the time I spend on this feeds.
Twitter and Reddit were the ones I engaged the most
Twitter became Mastodon and Reddit became Lemmy on that matter, so that I can focus on being active and helpful whenever possible.
So, what took me so long…?
Definitely something I will be asking myself for a while, since so far the experience here have something that reddit just don’t. The quality over quantity aspect.
Finally…
Thanks for having me here, I hope I can contribute the best I can to maintain Lemmy awesome as it is. I don’t post or reply like a madman, but I like to participate on constructive discussion every now and then.
what took us so long
“Inertia is a property of matter” -Bill Nye the Science guy
What I mean by that is that it takes a force to move a large mass. People behave in much the same way. It takes a push to get people to move in large numbers from one place to another. I personally have been philosophically very pro-fediverse ever since I heard about it, but I was waiting for it to reach a critical mass before really switching over.
That, and for Lemmy specifically, its history of being a tankie forum. Without the Reddit refugee migration, if you joined Lemmy as a single user, you would be alone among communists and eventually get bullied into leaving. Already in 2020-2021, Fediverse users knew about Lemmy, but they avoided promoting it because of its userbase. This Reddit situation provided the push to get many normal users over to Lemmy at once to drown out the communist users.
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Hey man, I’ve felt mostly the same than you migrating to lemmy. A while ago I tried mastodon but it really didn’t click with me, how do you do to find people to follow and so? I was only getting recommended the same like 10 guys. I like gaming and programming if it helps.
For Mastodon?
I use it the same as my Twitter, mainly googling mastodon lists of know profiles there, the I copy/paste in the search and follow them.
On Lemmy it’s easier, just do a search for the communities you’d like to join, for example:
Gaming at beehaw.org is amazing. Subscribe to that if you didn’t already.
Sometimes understanding how to cross instances can still be a bit cumbersome though.
There is pretty cool support for relative links though! As long as your instance knows of a community, they’ll work.
And if your instance doesn’t know a certain instance exists, you just have to paste the url into your search bar to get it working: https://beehaw.org/c/gaming
I think we really need to address the scaling issue, one option could be to use clichhouse instead of postgres
Thats certainly not the right kida of storage system for a site like this.
This gives me MongoDB flashbacks. Postgres, if properly set up, should easily handle thousands of users.
I think probably a pluggable storage backend is the best move. For example, any cloud hosted instance could use a native document storage format such as dynamodb, which is often quite cheap or free for small use-cases.
Bit of a pain to store in Dynamo, though. You’d need to write a bunch of different views, I think.
One comment thread makes sense as a partition, but listing threads is going to be awkward, and search is basically a no-no.
