I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
After trying to convert a friend who heavily uses reddit, multiple times, I recommended him again the other day to leave the hellsite (reddit).
I didn’t recommend Lemmy but have a while back.
He himself specifically brought up that he ‘didn’t vibe with Lemmy as much as reddit’ and that he believes he would ‘miss stories he would otherwise have liked to see’ by switching to Lemmy.
The other main pain point I’ve encountered is the small and niche community problem, which I’m sure we are all aware of - certain information feels like it can only be found on such small subreddits.
Therefore I have two suggestions:
This would struggle due to reddit API and compute power requirements but the subreddits on request and a specific instance for these posts would eliminate the bot spam problem from earlier attempts at the same thing.
The other suggestion would be:
Finally, my biggest gripe with my Lemmy use is the constant instance wars.
I have had my comments removed for being rightfully critical of Israel by lemmy.world mods. They appear intent on recreating the problems of reddit here.
Posted as a reply because this will certainly upset many but…
On the instance wars:
I constantly see nonsense about the horrors of the ‘.ML’ instance, and ‘hexbear’, primarily from ‘Lemmy.world’ users, but I have never once actually come across these horrors.
Hexbear is just a troll instance, ala ‘cumtown’.
To an outside observer, ‘.world’ users seem to be US propagandists intent on wrecking the platform. “Tankies this, cowbee that”, when I’ve never seen a cowbee post that wasn’t entirely reasonable.
And the vast majority of ‘tankies’ are just people who criticise the US rightfully while not sharing the same breathe to criticize China. Ngl, fuck Russia, the US and Russia are the greatest evils. China is not anywhere near the same level. You can praise elements of a foreign state without being a ‘tankie’.
It’s the same thought terminating cliche cult bullshit that all right wingers do. And it seems to come from Americans being upset their myopic views aren’t babied by people who literally specifically went to an instance to avoid them?
Idk I’m not a user of any of the three, but I’ve only ever had an issue with lemmy.world users in the past, as a UK citizen who is far from a tankie.
Explodingheads was also self-proclaimed a troll instance. Just because they fall back on 'It’s just a joke!" doesn’t make what they say or do okay.
I recommend you check out !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works for a deep look at Tankies and how prevalent they are throughout Lemmy.
Well, you wouldn’t come across hexbear or lemmygrad on pawb.social because it looks like your instance is defederated from them.
Cowbee definitely seems in a sense like a very civil apologist (although with all the trappings of contemporary campism and tankiesm) - and not the worst example by any means, but for every Cowbee there’s a BrainInABox type user.
Lol I like BrainInABox better, and I completely disagree with their worldview.
All they do, quite literally, is hurl abuse.
Maybe I’m insensitive or just foolish but to me there’s comedy in that.
Oh I agree, it’s inherently absurd - and I’m surprised they haven’t been banned from basically everywhere else outside of the trio instances (they have been banned from a lot of instances) - but to a lot of people the main issue ignoring Cowbees apologism is the hostility they encounter on there.
Well I guess you’re right and there is a lot of hostility towards certain thoughts in most instances. Everyone holds something sacred I guess.
If you’ve ever actually discoursed with Cowbee, note how they ignore the large majority of what you say and hyper-focus exclusively on the talking points that they are trying to convey. It’s not a “conversation”, it is evangelism.
I don’t really think this is true, I engage with the entirety of what people say. As far as I know, you have Lemmy.ml blocked on your piefed account, and we haven’t interacted in years, so I’m not sure where you’re getting this idea from.
Thats like 9 out of 10 debates on Lemmy regardless of community. Everyone thinks they are the exception.
A bit ironic from the piefed evangelist.
The reason why you haven’t seen these horrors is because to you they just look like others like you.
Regardless if you agree with this post, for example, it’s propaganda, no different than the american apologists you can accurately identify, the bible thumpling catholics educating the uncivilized people that hadn’t heard the healing words of our lord and saviour jesus christ or those who believe everything should be privatized/converted into a free market due to orthodox economic doctrine.
It is propaganda because it operates under the framework that someone who disagrees with a positive association must have not understood a specific sacred text or heard a sacred doctrine, or if they have they must be morally defficient, leaving no room for debate whatsoever.
It’s extremely difficult to identify propaganda that caters to our own emotional needs and positive associations.
One of the easiest ways to spot propaganda is the “no room for questioning, let alone disagreeing” aspect. In healthy societies with healthy ideologies there is a legitimate space for disagreement and debate. If there wasn’t, power would always remain in the same hands which is one of the aspects most criticize about both capitalism and communism.
And believe it or not, there is more to the world than the right-left west-east dychotomies.
If you look at history, similar ideologigal schisms have happened time and time again in times of shifts in the balance of power, such as when the printing press was invented and the the catholic - lutheran division that came from it. or during the decadence and later fall of the roman republic with the equestrials vs patricians (which originally shared ideological vision).
These largescale violent power struggles always end up boiling down to “you’re either with us or against us” which in my opinion is the true poison.
Feel free to disqualify or label me now and have a nice day.
Oh hey, it’s worth noting that that particular screengrab is taken out of context and was deliberately intended to make me appear that way. I even concede that one can disagree with Marx and Engels, my point was more against those who claim to agree with them but strongly disagree with the socialist market economy of China. I oppose anyone that tries to treat theory like gospel, that’s why I usually don’t reference theory directly unless it’s directly relevent like it was in this case.
That’s the thing, people propagandize about us as well, like the MeanwhileOnGrad crowd that took that snippet out of context. You’re doing the same here, by extrapolating an entire behavior of me from a single, out-of-context snippet hosted in a Nazi bar. What’s important is that we actually pay attention to what others are saying, because everyone is guilty of thinking they are correct.
But you are a tankie, cowbee. Why do you keep denying this?
Fair enough. Just grabbed one of the first images a search threw. Sorry if it was out of context or portrayed you unfairly. And of course people propagandize about you too. Anyone with a strong enough voice will get bad faith critiques thrown against them and many will be with political intent.
I do think this is a fair example to exemplify the point I was trying to make, though. Your quote being out of context does not nullify its dychotomical political intent and makes my point stronger.
Propaganda is hard to identify when you’re predisposed to believe it, it’s everywhere and people propagate it without even noticing.
Don’t let Cowbee propagandise you, that’s what he’s known for, even Tankies celebrate him for it.
He doesn’t argue in good faith, either, don’t believe such nonsense. Just have a look at all the other community posts about his extremism, bigotry and hatred. He’s a Tankie full and through and one of the major reasons why Lemmy is destined to fail.
For example, I humbly ask you to challenge Cowbee on his views of North Korea and Putin. You’ll find he is openly supportive of both.
I know @Cowbee@lemmy.ml doesn’t argue in good faith. You’re not arguing in good faith either. If you wanna internet argument fight the dude, I just pinged him for you, but before you do I suggest both of you consider the words of mustache man: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not himself become a monster.”
Honestly I don’t think there’s such a thing as good faith when it comes to political discussions on the internet. I’m not going to argue with him either, I don’t consider it worthy of my time.
What’s good faith to you? To me, it’s admitting mistakes.
To me, good faith is the genuine will to understand and/or convey ideas fairly and honestly.
Sure, there are a lot of bad-faith critiques going around. I do think that your point using me as an example doesn’t really work if your example is out of context. The thing about propaganda is that anyone pushing a particular view is propagandizing, but that doesn’t mean it’s inherently misinformation. Identifying bias is important, as is developing media literacy to see where people are being less than truthful.
Fair
I guess you were not here during the alien.top debacle…
This is exactly what I was doing with Fediverser, and I was really close to implement full two-way bridging, but instead of supporting the effort the great minds of Lemmy decided that the any sort of automated content was spam and unworthy of attention. Instead of looking how the system for onboarding users would make migration 10x simpler, I had to deal with skeptical admins and users who covered their noses at anything or anyone trying to fight Reddit on their grounds.
The problems regarding Reddit-the-corporation are orthogonal to the problems of Reddit-the-online-space. Which types of problems are you referring to here?
They’re websites, one can use two websites. Such a weird take.
Well yeah, it’s not like I gave the entire context.
The conversation started about how Ghislaine Maxwell is back moderating on Reddit.
IIRC the EU released a law a few months ago that forces big internet communication platforms to open their API to third-party clients.
this applied to whatsapp i think, i’m not sure whether it also applies to reddit but it might be worth investigating if somebody has too much time on their hands :P
Well technically Reddits API is open to third party clients, it just became prohibitively expensive around the exodus…
Does the new ruling include provisions for where the API has been made functionally unusable? It definitely could, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they missed that.
Reddit would probably sooner just lop off their entire EU userbase than comply.
No offense to Europeans because I love y’all, but you are a drop in the bucket for global (English) internet usage.
Then let them, we need to stop bending the rules for US companies, we don’t need them.
I think you would be surprised. Obviously UK (if you include it here) would do some heavy lifting for English-language users in Europe using Reddit, a massive chunk of Europe can communicate perfectly well in English on social media platforms and do - and you wouldn’t know they aren’t American or Anglo unless a topic came up where they would say it, or if you asked them.
To the best of my recollection the last I’ve seen bits of traffic data here and there, it’s large, but not large in comparison to the US and India.
Where does Reddit share data on country of origin for its users?
To moderators. I want to say even to regular users if your comment/post gets enough traction on New Reddit, i.e. hundreds or thousands of views.
Other, similar websites also show such data to those in privileged positions as well. If they’re pretty sure you’re not a bot, they give it freely. Whatever tier above “average user” and especially “a person interested in growing the website out of self-interest” a given website has, it’ll probably be available. I’m sure you can imagine a half dozen that are on the money.
I meant at scale. Yeah I can see who replies to my individual comments or posts based on their country (or VPN) but that doesn’t tell the whole story.
Of course not. That’s why I said “To the best of my recollection the last I’ve seen bits of traffic data here and there, […]”
Here’s my Amateur Coder waving the Wand of Coding idea:
What if we had a FOSS browser extension that scraped Reddit passively, uploading everything you see as you browse (except PII like your username and PMs and such) via bot to Lemmy (on a delay so they can’t pinpoint your identity as easily?)
I can’t be the only one who splits their time between Lemmy and Reddit, and would much rather participate here than there, but there’s much less to comment on here.
My favorite subreddit (/r/tampa) recently perma-banned me for extremely petty reasons, but /c/tampa is a ghost town.
That does sound like a decent idea, that way the content being mirrored would be only that that genuine users accessed.
Perhaps immediately mirroring the content as the browser itself reads it, preventing additional requests that could be flagged.
Only issues are:
Though this does answer some issues and have some clear use cases.
Cheers for the suggestion!
The nice part about my idea is that even with those hurdles in mind, I still proposed it knowing that all it would take is one person to happen upon whichever post or subreddit to auto-scrape and get the discussion on Lemmy going.
Let’s be real; 99% of the reason Lemmy is less popular than Reddit is copy+pasting a link, writing your own title, etc. is more effort than 0, therefore the Lemmy-Reddit hybrids like myself don’t bother.
Hell, even the staunchly anti-Reddit Lemmites who could be parasitically “stealing” posts and comments to steal Reddit’s thunder don’t do it. There are other things they’d rather do, evidently.
Now that I think of it, after using the word “scrape,” it could be that Reddit ToS follows most websites’ in that scraping is explicitly forbidden, so displaying the open source code (or even using it) would incur legal action from Reddit.