This is not going to be a blogpost about “Why do people still use Reddit instead of everyone moving to Lemmy?”. I noticed that even with Mastodon users, who already understand and like the advantages of decentralized platforms, the usage of Lemmy is extremely small, and more people use Reddit. Most of them haven’t even heard of Lemmy. To be fair, the Reddit usage also seems to be fairly low.
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So, saying ‘nobody uses X’ is a bit of a stretch considering that whenever it’s said, there’s proof to the contrary that people use said thing. People use lemmy at times, but the problem is as it has been pointed out before many times, is that lemmy is still too niche and small when compared to larger platforms.
One of the big reasons I can think of is, is that Lemmy just doesn’t have the span of community as someplace like Reddit does. You’re not going to find a Darts lemmy instance, you’re not going to find a MentalHealth lemmy instance or anything. On Reddit, there’s hundreds of micro-communities that cover a range of interests that anybody can join and talk about.
Lemmy only seems to focus on just a handful of things; Politics, Memes, Games, Piracy, Linux, News, Technology and Asking Questions. That’s great and all but, just about anyone has these in spades. Not everyone wants to cycle through those things on a daily basis, they’ll want something more. But it’s going to turn people off from Lemmy immediately when they migrate from Reddit.
Yeah sure, we can tell them to make an instance to cover that niche itch, but once it’s built, it can be months to even years before it gets attention. And nobody wants to spend time just running around like an annoying salesman to get people to join said instance just to feel better about converting someone else over from one side to the other.
Another reason is that - moderation can be ass. Yeah, some moderators on Lemmy have the mentality and maturity of an edgy 15-year old who spends too much time online for their own good. And we can all see it in plain sight on the modlog so I don’t even need to explain.
217 comments on this in 24 hours says to me that there must at least a few people using lemmy
on reddit it would be 6000.
30K users is small potatoes. even niche subreddits have userbases larger than that.
Yea, once a post is up on reddit for even 3 hours its not worth interacting with because no-one will see what you have to say anyways. Honestly its what makes Lemmy better to me.
This is exactly one of the reasons I like this more. Writing anything of reddit is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean. This comment here might only be read by 10 people, but 10 good, real people will actually read it.
Yeah but thats better than most niche message boards back in their heyday. Probably better than y incubators message board to.
A big chunk of reddit traffic and users are bots. Another large segment are more recent arrivals from India (check out how many Indian topics make the front pages on the weekends when USA/UK traffic is low.) While I can’t prove it I have a hunch that Spez hired a bunch of Indian clickfarms to pump the numbers before the IPO. Maybe he just promoted in India more to get an influx of users for the IPO or maybe they are mostly “social media marketers” hired to sell health/peptide supplements (seriously there are services that do that on Reddit so be careful ever taking any such advice from them.)
But my point is that the quality of users is pretty weak and I’m certain American advertisers have noticed by now. 300ish real, quality users is a better engagement metric than 6000 bots.
I use Lemmy. And you do. And 1000 other people do. So I’d say it’s big enough.
And Reddit was small for years and years when it started. I don’t even think I really started using it till around 2013-2014. Didn’t have a username or anything just came across it through Google searches. All websites take a while to build a userbase.
This I think is the main problem to adoption. It’s very hard to come across Lemmy results on a search engine even if I’m trying to specify Lemmy. (Not that search engines matter for most people these days what with the LLM executive summary pushing out real web pages, who needs resources when you have slop, am I right? \s)
I’m a 31 yr old dude that just found out about this along with what the fediverse is. When I found out, I was researching this stuff so it took me some time to understand it all and I still don’t think I fully understand it all
Part of the problem is there’s a lot less to it than it feels like there is. The analogies we use to teach to non-tech people don’t quite match up.
It’s simply a structured way to log in and send messages back and forth.
You can use it to stitch together forums, link shares, social media, video sharing, or image sharing sites.
But we really don’t bind things together all that tightly. At best you can follow someone on pixelfed or mastodon. Since there’s truly no minimum wiring, a lot of services don’t even really fully communicate with each other. So we end up mostly with mastodon <-> mastodon links and lemmy->piefed<-lemmy links.
activitypub is a protocol. like email.
instances are just what provider you want to use, gmail, hotmail, outlook, etc.
and the ‘platform’ lemmy, piefed, mastroton, pixelfed, is just the aesthetics
Unlike like email the fediverse servers defederating / blocking each other more.
dogmail can send to birdmail but not to catmail.
unlike
Google does a lot of “defederating” (for lack of a better term), it’s one of the reasons why setting up and hosting your own email is one of the nightmare sections of selfhosting communities.
the predicted commie red wave revolution are all here in their dozens, actually about 2000 of them
revolution!
Boiling it down to 3 things:
- Content Scale & Variety - Lemmy has a lot of content but it’s very tech/political heavy. It doesn’t have much to offer outside of that domain. Meanwhile, there’s a whole shitposting subreddit dedicated to an NFL conference – I don’t even closely follow professional American football, but it’s glorious.
- User Experience Friction - You can’t just sign up, you need to pick a server. You’ve already lost a significant amount of people in that step.
- User Base - There’s nice folks on here, but some really sour the experience for the rest of us by being straight up hostile if we don’t agree on every little detail.
Step 2 is dead right. Before you can proceed, we’re going to need you to make an apparently important and irreversible decision that you didn’t even want to make, based on incomplete information.
Not to mention some of them require admin approval so that’s a dealbreaker.
YOU HAVE MADE A BLOOD PACT WITH WORLD.
ML HATES YOU NOW
i feel like it’s usually the opposite. some people just really insist on getting upset about anyone on .ml
I love everyone!
and which instance you start out on… is going to heavily influence your experience/content and get you branded/blocked by a lot of the userbase
I feel like this is an issue of (either accidentally or incidentally) putting focus on something that doesn’t really need it. Picking instances should not matter; not in the sense of “it’s federated blah blah” but more in the sense of “it’s 2026, there’s password managers, noone uses their real identities for everything; having multiple accounts wherever it’s convenient should be normal”.
Number 1 is the reason I rarely visit Lemmy. The choice and wording of political posts and reactions to them create a very negative atmosphere and sometimes it is combined with rather unrational doomerism. Threads just feel angry and hostile too often for me to have fun on here. This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.
This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.
That’s so much extra work
That’s why you are supposed to pick an instance that does most of that work for you: one that will have already blocked what you don’t like.
The banlist is public but is essentially a hassle of an Excel spreadsheet to crawl through, what would be nice would be having some sort of public “moderation trends” (broad-strokes view of what have we been blocking and will continue to do so) and “moderation commitments” (eagle view of what will happen when you report a post to us).
User Experience Friction - You can’t just sign up, you need to pick a server. You’ve already lost a significant amount of people in that step.
I think this can be improved if there was a better way to explain the identity of each instance and why you might want to join other than just “generic Lemmy server for everyone to use”
Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they’re not gonna have a good time.
I suggest a map that shows which instances are federated/defederated from eachother and lets you find which one has the closest identity to what you like. And possibly a disclaimer before joining one of the trifecta instances.
Or just say fuck it and join the one literally called “shit just works” like me 😂
I thought ML was machine learning🥴
Big same lol
Ideally, I think instances ought to be something the casual user can be unaware of. Like the default experience should be instance-independent and the choice of instance should be some trivial thing that you can change on a whim carrying your entire user identity and chat history with you. I don’t really get any functional sense of community from my instance anyway
Being able to migrate an account between instances would help a huge amount. I am almost wishing we could agree on a default instance for all newcomers, but this would work to just centralize the user base so it’s not a good solution. However, if account migration were implemented, there could be a sort of “first steps” or “training ground” instance that accepts all new users by default and only allows accounts to remain there for a set period of time before asking them to find a new instance to call home. This would let users who aren’t interested in the technical details of federation get their feet wet and figure out which instance aligns with them before needing to make the choice.
This scheme would definitely require that new users have the option of signing up to a particular instance right away; no need for the default instance to be the only sign up option.
I really like your idea of “baby’s first instance”. And then they are sent off the nest.
Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they’re not gonna have a good time.
It’s worse than that. Lemmy just as reddit is mostly American. American election results were kinda… interesting. And Lemmy is very-very-very polarised. So there’s likely 33% chance that new American user will get to “politically their” instance, 33% chance they’ll get to the instance on the other side of the spectrum, and 33% chance it doesn’t matter what instance they’ll end up at, they’ll be terrified by both sides. So at best it’s 33% chance for user to find their hivemind, realistically it’s probably much less because even people technically from “your side” might find Lemmy to be way too radical. And that’s just Americans, imagine how the rest 96% of the world react to Lemmy.
some people might get confused for the instance they joined, like world, or ML, instead of another one, they go back to reddit.
Haha there are in fact 8 different NFL shitposting subreddits, one for each of the 8 different divisions. And each one is as active as just about any Lemmy community.
I agree on the other 2 points as well. Not only is it weird to have to pick an instance, the names and descriptions are off putting as well. You scroll through and several of the top ones are openly Marxist/leninist/leftist. 95% of people see that and are immediately put off. It sends a message that Lemmy is fundamentally for leftist agenda-posting, and a lot of users treat it that way. Click on any completely non-political-sounding community (like Movies or something), sort top all time and you will usually be greeted immediately by posts about Israel/Palestine or Donald Trump. Its exhausting honestly.
Edit: also, why does join-lemmy.org not show .world (one of the largest coms if not the largest) anywhere on the popular instances page? What kind of drama is going on there? This is exactly the kind of shit Im talking about.
To expand on 3, there are no (that I’m aware of) official community channels for businesses in the Fediverse compared to Reddit. The default avenues to interact with them are usually Discord, Reddit, and even Twitter.
It took me a long time before I signed up. I think I lucked for at least a year. I didn’t want to join an instance and then regret it. And all instances have their own small novel of rules, that I need to read through to know if I agree with. And even if you do, you have to send an application and get approved as well.
It almost scared me away - I’d imagine the same goes for a lot of people.
It’s because everything that becomes popular starts with people in the 14-20 year range.
Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Tiktok…
The Fediverse will eventually grow once something triggers a snowball effect due the nature of connectivity and federation. Until then, the way to make it grow is to have young people make it popular.
Edit: There also needs to be more “fun” here. I think the Fediverse is a more “serious” place which isn’t what those other social media sites offered. “Serious 24/7” isn’t that enticing for young people.
The other day I was imagining a game or game service that has you make a Fediverse account of some kind. You get people to signup with a username that automatically creates a “@fedi.games” account. That account can have access to Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed etc.
what, you don’t think it’s fun endlessly memeing about doomerism and murder?
There’s not enough politics IMO. No fun at all.
People need to spend more time on lighthearted issues like Palestine and the evils of capitalism
Lemmy as a name is very poor branding. It’s almost as bad as Mastodon.
I think it’s pretty good. Two syllables, easy to say, no similar sounding competing platforms. What do you think’s wrong with it?
Naming something after a famous person means you’re starting off on the back foot in terms of SEO and brand clarity.
Digg worked well because it came out of an era where adding a second G was enough to sound techy, but it also played into the dig/bury aspect of voting. Reddit works because the name is “read it” while also being a unique string you couldn’t mistake for anything else. Both have a lot going for them that Lemmy just doesn’t.
Until I read this post I had never heard of this “famous” Lemmy.
Until I read this post I had never heard of this “famous” AC/DC.
That’s what your post reads like to me.
My experience is the only (valid) one.
That’s what your post reads like to me.
The less snarky version is saying you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000. Though, your musical illiteracy does not impact what I said about branding and SEO.
Eh not that famous, I bet most people dont have any name associations with Lemmy except that it sounds kinda like “lemming”. Which is sort of unfortunate though because lemmings (the de facto name for lemmy users) generally means crowd-following idiots. But as far as factors that inhibit the growth of lemmy go Id put the name way down the list.
It’s this plus onboarding. Reddit is easy to remember. It tells you exactly what you are getting. Lemmy sounds like a new lemmings games. It gives vintage when it should do the opposite.
It’s a bad name and will never become popular because it’s stupid to say outloud and on top of it onboarding is unnecessarily complicated.
Perfect. I’m in the right place.
Disagree. This is a case of the brand actually not meaning much. “Reddit” isn’t great either, but people think it does because it’s well known.
I’m reminded of the person who said Mario was a character designed from the ground up to be marketable, when it was literally created to make a graphic of a person readable in a 16x16 sprite with three colors.
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Few people like to be the first(ish) one on the dance floor.
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It’s slightly harder to sign up for than Reddit, so people interested in this kind of thing usually just sign up for Reddit (or stay there).
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Most people don’t care about the advantages Lemmy affords us; they care about what’s on TV tonight or which celebrity is dating which celebrity.
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I think its okay the way it is. Too much attention leads to many reposts, karma farmers, bots, now AI bullshit etc.
I think it’s too empty a lot of times. Mainstream topics are nicely populated but a vast amount of specific communities are just one person posting links over and over with a handful of upvotes and zero comments. Sometimes I see posts here and have to go to Reddit to see what the community thinks about it, because on Lemmy the post is completely dead.
I say this in all of these threads: more users does not mean a better experience.
Instead, focus on making our communities the best they can be.
I say this in all of these threads: more users does not mean a better experience.
It does when your current amount of users is functionally equivalent to, like, “2”.
I think that’s only true after a certain amount of users.
I joined Lemmy a couple of years ago and I already notice more user engagement. I would like a little bit more, such that more niche communities can have an ecosystem of posters instead of a single one doing most posts. But not much more indeed
To be fair, karma farmers aren’t really possible on Lemmy.
That is what we want people to believe. It’s nice and cosy without the ‘mainstream’ users. ;)
“nobody”, nearly 50k people.
Asking people on mastodon if they use lemmy also doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t use mastodon because it’s not threaded, people on mastodon probably don’t use lemmy for a similar reason. I’m not sure how many people use both threaded and unthreaded platforms, but it feels to me like the two layouts attract different people.
Then there are psychos like me who use both, and Bluesky, and other social media and have a personal blog.
Bag 'm and tag 'm folks, get this psychopath out of here. If we allow this, what’s next? We’ll allow people who use friendica?
I haven’t logged into my bluesky account since like ages. Mainly because I’m using my real Identity there, which I’m not comfortable with talking online. I love anonymity. I speak a little more off my mind because I’m anonymous.
I mean, you can make a new/second account.
Me too! It’s interesting how different they all are.
Where do all those meme posts about “Lemmy is bad name / bad branding” come from? I’ve seen it recurrently enough every time someone launches a FOSS thing that I would normally suspect it’s part of a LLM farm or a scam attempt from some sort of naming / patents agency, but I’ve seen these reactions from long enough (2015-ish).
It’s named after a famous musician that was active for like 30+ years. Half the results when you search “Lemmy” are him, not the platform. Oh, and he had an unfortunate collection of Nazi memorabilia - he claimed it wasn’t because he liked the nazis just that he liked the look of their shit…
FOSS often ends up with bad names unfortunately. People never know what is going to become big when they start a project and they might get a giggle out of the name when it’s a small project. By the time the project becomes big enough that the name might actually start being a problem, it is also known by that name and changing it could significantly impact how many people keep using it. Unfortunately, a name change is often a touchy subject for any project.
Coca-Cola the drink is named after the drug and no one complains. Plus, words can have and acquire more than one meaning during their lifetime (see eg.: “fine” which means all of bad, regular and good).
Coca-Cola literally contained drugs when it was invented… The name wasn’t in conflict, it was extremely descriptive. I feel like that analogy only works if we find out that Lemmy was originally created for the sole purpose of discussing Motorhead.
Like, you asked where these posts complaining about names of Lemmy (and other FOSS projects) comes from and the above is the explanation. Just because you disagree doesn’t mean all the people that do agree are a psyop or bots, lol.
I don’t use Mastodon or Twitter either. I never understood following specific people and prefer following topics instead.
I don’t generally like the Twitter model and rarely use it, but I will say that one thing that it does do well, better than the Reddit/Threadiverse model, is very rapidly assembling information about a specific, temporary topic.
Like, the Reddit model is about letting a community assemble over time and letting people find their way there and moderators be chosen and all that. That works quite well for a lot of things, and lets people with expertise in the field arise and all that.
But let’s say that there’s a huge natural disaster and people are putting up video clips from their cell phones and stuff like that. They can coalesce around a hashtag or a couple of hashtags pretty quickly. Relevant material from people who have had no contact with each other and maybe no time to assemble a community or anything gets drawn together. Other users retweeting content help highlight it. The topic probably won’t be active for long. It can be really useful for a rapid setup and teardown scenario.
Of course, that’s really mostly following a hashtag, rather than a particular user…
I also dislike the “short comment” model that Twitter uses (though over the years, the comment length has been increased and workarounds added), but one thing that it does help with is to help deal with inexperienced users unfamiliar with quoting etiquette. In email or in traditional forum systems, it’s conventional to quote a bit of relevant text before responding to it. This requires knowing syntax for doing so and when it’s appropriate. Twitter deals with that by forcing everything to be broken up into bite-size chunks as a property of the system, so someone responding to something is forced to respond to only the relevant bit. I think that that probably helps make Twitter more-approachable.
Mastodon allows you to follow hashtags, which would be like following a topic.
Exactly. And with the advanced web interface on Mastodon or an app like Moshidon or Manfred, you can create custom timelines that show just a collection of hashtags.
I use that a lot—exclusively, really.
following people is nice if you know these people personally, like from real life.
People that do actual geolocations for the war in Ukraine are basically the primary sources. They figure out where and when videos were taken and do the actual work. Following the topic gets you to some big account that aggregates them
Exactly! I’d be curious to see the reverse poll, asking Lemmy users “Why does nobody use Mastodon?” (and include Bluesky and Twitter in the poll.)
I use Lemmy (and in the past Reddit) because topic based conversation is what makes sense to me. Anytime I try to use Mastodon or Bluesky I lurk for a bit and then just come back here.
