So, lemmy is a project I have been following since the beggining. With federation here, it seems like everything is aligned for it to become the reddit killer, pardon my expression.
What do you think is missing from lemmy for it to have a massive engaging community?
Just more people knowing about it. No one knows it exists.
Also, more normie subreddits. A lot of people join reddit for specific communities. The most active Lemmy communities are political or tech focused. Art communities like imaginarycityscapes or nosleep and fan communities for shows and movies draw in a lot of people. Lemmy’s userbase is made up largely of people who are able to comprehend what federation is, which is limited to people who understand what a server even is, which has an impact on the type of content.
I did create a video about it at https://youtu.be/5axSUJj0bBY to try help spread awareness, and on Odysee at https://odysee.com/@GadgeteerZA:4/lemmy-an-open-source-decentralised:4?r=A7MvvHF3JLvcGpn8umRYnJ1oybsg3cse.
I’m on lemmy, but I’m still not too sure to still understand what a federation is. Sometimes I feel like I’m missing a lot of content…
This is honest of you and a fair point: federation can sometimes be invisible. The basic idea becomes clear if you think about how you access websites. Think of Facebook. When you go to it, you type “facebook.com” in the address bar. And you go there. Notably, if you want to use Facebook, you can only go to “facebook.com”. This is different with federated systems.
Federated systems make it possible to go to, for example, “fb.com”, which will have its own version of Facebook, different to “facebook.com” or “facebookfed.com” or “333.com” (if someone decides to call their version that). Each one of these websites will have their own servers, their own logins (so you’d have to create different accounts), rules, and mods.
Sometimes, those websites talk to each other so that content is shared between them. That way, you can publish once in fb.com and another person can see your post in facebook.com. Other times, depending on the service and the version/instance, you’ll have a sort of private Facebook.
So federation here means that there are many different servers (‘instances’) that run the same software. These servers talk to each other so that you can see the content of the rest of the instances, in the case of the Fediverse. The Fediverse is a federated (hence the name) network of different services including Lemmy, Mastodon, and PixelFed. I’m not entirely sure, but I think the idea is to be able to share content in between all of those (someone plz correct me or explain this to me? hahahah).
Federation is also tied to certain values, like owning your own data. For example, Facebook’s servers hold all of your Facebook data. But, in the case of Lemmy, if you were to run your own Lemmy instance in your room, you would own your data (assuming no hacks or other shenanigans). This autonomy and privacy goes along well with the values surrounding Free and Libre/Open Source Software, where anyone can copy, modify, and run their own versions of code.
So you get this synnergy of FLOSS and federation that brings a bunch of people who are pumped to share stuff on websites like Lemmy, a FLOSS and federated link aggregator!
Sync for Lemmy
Hey, I’m new to Lemmy and I can tell you about the missing part - clients.
I accidentally found Lemmy client in F-droid (lemmur) it’s pretty good, but lacks a lot of QoL features.
I think, having multiple clients for all platforms will help with userbase and content.
Add Lemmy clients to Google Play, Apple App Store, Amazon App Store, Huawei App Store, etc.
More clients -> more people find out Lemmy -> more users will join Lemmy -> more content will be posted by these users.
Of course it’s my own opinion, not pretending to be the only way
I think there’s a lot of QoL features missing that make it less user-friendly than most sites and the difference is pretty stark when you compare it to reddit especially. Some examples:
-Being able to “view all images” so that you can just scroll down without having to open every image manually
-Being able to open videos from within the site
-More filters/sorting options. You can’t sort by controversial comments, you can’t search by community/post/comment, you can’t view all submitter’s comments
-Being able to hover over an image and have it open (with extensions like imagus, hover zoom, etc)
-Having a preview of your comment below (the preview button doesn’t do that)
-A better search function. Right now it’s not very accurate and sometimes doesn’t yield results.
-Being able to expand the comment box you type in
-Smaller margins. Right now, everything is in the middle. This is fine for individual comments, but once you start getting lots of replies, where everything is inched over slightly, then comments far down the chain are basically thin strips of text.
-a phone app
These are some that stand out to me. I agree with other commenters that the site is still new, and unknown. But if people do discover this site and find it’s functionality to be annoying, then they may be turned off from using it, especially when they’re likely more comfortable on other platforms already.
Thx for these, enhancing search is what I’m working on currently.
An expanded image view isn’t a bad idea either.
Besides being fully finished (it’s not even on version 1.0 yet)? I’d say topic variety. Currently most of lemmy’s content is very techy stuff, which is enough for people like me who are into that, but reddit has active communities for a lot of interests. Lemmy stuff is like, privacy this, linux that, tor this, development that, while reddit is more like, privacy this, conlang that, drawings this, water that, politics that other thing, etc
I think this is the kinda stuff that will come over time as people start using Lemmy, tho. Art nerds, water nerds, bird nerds, etc will come around and create communities for their interests, and people who are interested in those things will come to share their interests too
The one thing i find very strange - people on lemmy aren’t posting about covid all the time. Everyone on reddit, in the news, and in real life, is talking >50% of the time about covid. But here, not a peep.
And that’s very good! I’m tired of covid-related posts, 99% of them are useless and don’t provide any interesting content. When I subscribe to the technology communities I don’t want to read about covid, I want to read about technologies!
Of course, if you interested in covid-related content, just subscribe to specific communities about it, but don’t post it in other communities
It makes me think that the lemmy userbase is really very strange. Maybe I don’t notice because I’m strange too.
There must be a huge divide between popular interests and popular lemmy interests.
Not a good or a bad thing IMO. Might be a shock though for early users, once lemmy gets popular.
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Quality over quantity all the way
