Did Reddit get massive because of Digg users making a beeline towards them or were they already big before that?
I think we should prioritize SEO.
If you get a link to a Lemmy post you can’t see the contents nor the comments of the post until you click a further link. Or at least I can’t.
And that means google can’t either.
We need to get to the point where people are adding “Lemmy” to their search posts like they do for Reddit today.
Doing a google search for “best budget backpack Lemmy” should bring up results like “best budget backpack Reddit” does today.
This isn’t the only answer but it’s a big one. Having both the communities where people can authoritatively answer niche questions and the ability for new people to find those communities/questions is absolutely critical.
It doesn’t help that the thread URLs are some old school “post/4268567”.
I also noticed that the markdown format is included (e.g. the hashmarks for headings, asterisks for bold/italics) in search results while every other site doesn’t look like that.
Yea it’s a shame the URL isn’t
post/5784366/title_formatted_for_url
I think people are forgetting that Reddit didn’t start off with communities (subs), they came later. Reddit got big the same way all sites that don’t have a built in audience (e.g. Threads users basically being Insta users) - time and commitment.
Lemmy is not going to be as big as Reddit for a long, long time. Everyone has fallen into this habit of thinking all Reddit mods are power crazy egomaniacs and some are, no doubt, but the good subs on Reddit required dedicated time and effort to build up. Curating, introducing and constantly readjusting rules and expectations and at some point a good sub reaches a tipping point and it’s popular.
All this will take time with Lemmy. Community mods will need to be as dedicated as Reddit mods were. And, as a side issue, this commitment to making and keeping a community great is what spez and his idiot gremlins have just thrown away. It’s not about user numbers for Reddit, it’s now a priority for them to get mods who are willing and able to put in the amount of work the mods they just alienated had. Subreddit engagement stats are mostly going down take a look at the number of posts and the number of comments for r/askreddit, it’s a steady decline.
Lemmy might not ever get as big as Reddit but it will grow if mods stay committed and users keep posting and commenting. If that happens, that same tipping point will come.
What is most interesting about that site you linked is further down the page - it shows the number of subs still growing - but that graph cuts off at 2022. The post and comments per day plunged in early July and have not recovered. And the top poster and commenter is the same user - u/deleted
And as you say, reddit has alienated a heap of good mods - and they are the true foundation of a site like this, not users
I checked a politics, publicfreakout and trashy, they all had subscribers going through the roof. I think they’re fucking with the sub numbers.
When do the sub number counts finish… if its 2022, like it is with askreddit, thats why. A graph going up to this month would likely show a dropoff
July of this year, hover over the last and it says July 2023. https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
That’s interesting to see this steady decline way before the most controversial changes.
I think that may be stemming from the earlier changes when they shut down a large number of fairly popular but controversial subs, that drove some active commenters away. Plus they started getting very ban happy in the last couple of years, that absolutely has a damping effect
Also, there needs to be an established code of conduct in how to interact with users. For example, if i make a post on reddit that violates a subs rules, it get‘s either removed or put in quarantine and I get a message so I know what happened. In Lemmy, your posts may just vanish without you ever knowing how or why.
I mean I don’t mind the current state of Lemmy right now, in fact I’m actually quite liking how it is right now. It’ll probably take a lot of time to even get on the same level as Reddit if it ever does, however I’m seeing so much users, moderators, and devs who are committed to making this platform work and that in and of itself is amazing to see. Things like this actually show there is a human side to technology and that we can make it work. Anyways that’s my food for thought.
I’m pretty much of the same mind, but I do think a user base increase would be good. Some of the subs are kind of dead right now, and that’s a bit sad. But I think the quality of the average user is WAY higher than reddit it anywhere else I’ve hung out. And that quality is related to the quantity being low. What’s the right size? I have no idea. We’ll see how it goes.
The brand promise of Reddit was pretty simple—it was the “Front page of the Internet”.
It did not get popular because of the sub-communities or that there was a sub for everything ( at least not at first ).
Reddit became a thing because it was a single destination that aggregated and curated interesting content from the web that “interesting” people could comment on. If you were only going to make one stop on the Internet, it could be Reddit. Uses could share the main URL by word of mouth and new users would get the same experience. As content grew, Reddit became high ranking in search results.
Lemmy does not really offer the Reddit experience to a new user. New users do not want an offer to find an instance or create one, they want to experience the content, get addicted, and come back.
The closest Lemmy has right now to early Reddit is Lemmy World but how do new users know that? Actually, I guess old.lemmy.world is the closest. :)
Lemmy does not really offer the Reddit experience to a new user.
I agree with one caveat: yet.
If Lemmy can build up its userbase and content it could offer a similar experience to Reddit
The problem is the lack of a main page. People want to type “lemmy.com” and find what they are looking for.
I take it back!
I just type lemmy.com and got redirected to https://lemm.ee/?src=lemmy.com
I think that won’t be as big of an issue in time. As Lemmy grows, eventually people will be exposed to it and other services on the Fediverse and will be more likely to have an idea on how to get started, or at least find good guides.
Remember that pretty much everything on computers requires some instruction at the beginning. The advantage that Reddit and other software have is that people have (and continually are) already taught how to use them.
It’s a similar situation to Linux vs. Windows. A lot of distros on Linux are actually more user friendly and easier to learn than Windows - the issue with getting people to try Linux is that they already know how to use Windows and most people hate learning new things
The software architect of lemmy is unfortunately doomed. The very concept of how it works means exponential storage and bandwidth needs as it grows in sublemmits and instances. A better design would have been instances being the sublemmits themselves, and leaving it up to the clients to subscribe and aggregate them into a feed. This way scaling is a lot more horizontal, and communities that get too big can scale up individually or purge old data without affecting the rest of the system.
I assume this is a larger theme across the Fediverse?
Could you expand on what causes the massive bandwidth needs? I’m have a vague idea but I’d be very curious to know.
If a user of an instance subscribes to content from another instance, their home instance is pulling, storing and sharing that content. With more and more instances, more time will be spent on sharing that content.
If the design itself is bad, then something will eventually spring up that will replace it. That’s the beauty of nascent platforms; they haven’t completely cornered the market.
Reddit got massive because it had very vibrant communities and lots of them that inspired a loyalty in its uses.
I was brought to Reddit by a previous user, and I brought several of my friends to Reddit.
For lemmy to get there, you need thousands of communities.
Want to know stuff about Rav4? There’s a sub for it.
Want to know about accounting? There’s a sub for it?
Want to know about what’s happening in Oklahoma city? There’s a sub.
Lemmy isn’t anywhere close to this point. In fact most subs are very dead.
Reddit didn’t start out like that either. If Lemmy is to grow, it will take years of dedicated active use from us.
“If you make it, they will come”.
It maight not be fast but there is huge potential from what I have experienced so far.
Almost every subreddit is fun until it grew then it goes downhill. I agree with people not wanting this to grow like Reddit.
As why Reddit grew, Digg is one and another is the format was perfect for the time.
Although growing too large not desired for Lemmy, but theoretically if you want to grow it:
First major issues and outages need to be dealt with.
Developing and deployment best practices should be followed.
Registration must be easy and open
SEO optimization
Securing funds
Getting noticed by the media often which may require some controversy.
Mod tools and supporting brands.
As you see many of these ,at end up be bad for users.
Reddit was big before the Digg migration and got bigger still. It didn’t happen overnight, it took many years. Reddit also benefited from celebrities and other influencers using it to become the default site for this type of content. Lemmy’s problem is there’s no void to fill, Reddit took a hit from the API fiasco but it’s still going strong because 99% of the users didn’t care, or returned soon after. Every subreddit I was in that chose to close down has returned to normal operation, and it’s not even 2 months later.
I like Lemmy, I’m going to keep coming here to see how it grows. Right now, it’s not even close to being a Reddit alternative. It’s barely hanging on, but I wish it the best.
My experience has been the communities are growing and getting more active. I’m seeing a lot of new communities with new posts in my feed as well.
It should try to grow larger than in currently is, but not try to be a top website.
Trying to do the latter will involve clashing with online legal regulations, politicians, and compliance to a much greater extent than is required now. Furthermore, it will be inundated with “normie” culture if it strives to be as popular. If you make it accessible to the lower common denominator, you get the lowest common denominator.
I think you’re right. Having it as big as Reddit or other social media platforms wouldn’t be good. But I would like to have most communities for medium populated hobbies to have a popular enough comminity that I can not use Reddit for it. Right now, even some relatively popular communities have no members and no post generation.
I imagine these things would make Lemmy explode more:
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Influencer influencers influencers. Have Mr Beast mention how he will give half a million dollars to whomever makes the best post on a Lemmy board or something and you have it made.
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Individual users can find a way to profit from it, be it pushing a t-shirt to only fans or whatever and you’ll see an influx in ads, er, posts.
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Search engines, they don’t catalog Fediverse sites properly because of the heavy dependency on domains! :/
Reddit just faked it all until it made it basically. The creators of it are even on the record talking about it.
Lemmy could do the same if it wanted.
Real answer: ease of use
If I wanted to find a particular subreddit for whatever, it was as easy as typing in the name of the show or hobby. And it linked to other similar / related subreddits
Or someone would link to another subreddit in a comment.
Here I’m having to sit and learn what an instance is and if the community I was in transfered over, and if they did where did they go. It’s turning away alot of the less tech savvy people.
Does it need to be as popular as reddit? I don’t think so, anything that grows too big becomes a hassle and a problem. But to grow it would need easier interface or ability to find/interact with other communities.
Nnnnoooooooo! Don’t make Lemmy a top website! The more popular something is, the more vapid and full of spewers it becomes.
