I saw the recent API charge news with Reddit and saw that people were discussing alternatives to Reddit in the event we all have to abandon it.
Joined Lemmy here and noticed one of my favorite subreddits had no Lemmy equivalent — so I created it.
I have no desire to be a mod, so if anyone wants to take on that role just let me know.
I’m just hoping people do post here if they’re checking Lemmy out and seeing what’s available community-wise.
Yeah, unfortunately that’s the hardest part, creating nice alternative is not the most difficult part (even if it still difficult), but to have enough users to make the platform interesting and “self sustaining” enough really is, and I think it is even harder now than the time when there was the same kind of “exodus” from Digg to Reddit (I wasn’t there for that though)
The difference with the Digg to Reddit exodus is that the two communities were rival competitors working in the same space. It wasn’t a case of one being a huge monolith that everyone used and the other being a small unknown, they were more evenly matched and reddit already had plenty of content and community, and neither were household names.
The situation today is very different. If Lemmy takes off, which I hope it does, it will likely still be small compared to reddit. A bit like how young people are fleeing facebook for other platforms, but there’s still no platform actually displacing facebook.
The masses will always use some corporate pushed product ~ Lemmy may be like early days Reddit - a small community of tech ppl , then may grow and get better in the future with volume , but Facebook will probably never die because all ages (old) and non tech/agile ppl are using it now ~~
Does the Lemmy license prevent corporations running nodes? In fact, it doesn’t even have to be Lemmy.
If you think about email, it’s widespread and used by everyone; but it is still mostly ruled by corporations (Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Outlook/Hotmail) for the average personal user. The protocol is open but the servers are run by different corporations each with their own UI. I’d guess there’s probably no reason we won’t end up like that some day, with some corporation creating a big social network with proprietary code, that happens to work well with ActivityPub so they have heaps of content and users on day 1, getting over that common initial social media hurdle (that none of your friends use it).
Honestly a big commercialised Lemmy instance would already be a huge improvement over the current state, because it would still be federated
I don’t think it has to be that way. Like with Linux, I think there’s a set of UI and onboarding and accessibility and features problems that don’t get addressed well enough for it to draw in and work for a lot of people, but those are workable problems if enough people agree they’re problems and work on them.
I tried Linux once. Mint, because it was recommened as the most user friendly and akin to Windows. Installing it at all involved following a detailed walkthrough and checking a hash using cmd. Then it turns out it doesn’t even have a colorblind filter mode - the most basic of accessibility features people can just expect from Windows. And the Linux forums were full of people who wanted to lord it ovee others and make fun of newbies and try to trick them into deleting their OS, rather than helpful peple. Linus Tech Tips did a good video on similar problems trying to use Linux as a newbie.
This obviously isn’t near as bad as Linux in that regard, but still, it puts the fediverse thing forward first, and in a confusing way. It needs a clear, simple, stripped down onboarding just to get people in the gate, then if they want to stick around they can learn more later on.
That said, Tumblr also has a shite onboarding and that’s doing pretty well these days, too.
It’s worth it even if it never becomes the most popular, however. My favorite communities tend to be of middling size anyway. The disadvantage is the lower amount of hyper-specific communities that a giant userbase supports.