Same goes for me!
Why are you asking us, instead of them?
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
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Not enough niche communities. Like, not even close. Example: there are communities for general Android or general gaming, but not one for Android gaming or mobile gaming.
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Harder than Reddit to sign up. There’s an extra step which is instances. So first you gotta understand what instances are, how they work, and which one is suitable for you.
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Reddit is still doing fine, or at least not bad enough for the masses to care about jumping over to Lemmy
Not enough niche communities
Not even just niche communities, either. There are interests with possibly hundreds of millions of English speakers that don’t have good representation on Lemmy (or piefed or Mbin). There’s no critical mass of discussion about sports, much less for specific sports, specific leagues, or specific teams. Same issue with food and cooking, a handful of posts on a handful of communities, but very few discussions. Television and film have seen an uptick in activity (I’m subscribed to television@piefed.social and that’s been getting better), but it’s still not quite at where reddit was in even 2010 or so.
Local city subreddits are still a valuable source of information and discussion around what’s happening in any particular place, and I haven’t seen anything like that on lemmy.
I don’t expect Lemmy to have the same level of discussion around smaller niches, but I hope we can soon hit the point where more mainstream topics can get actual discussion. Lemmy has plenty of great discussion around lots of topics, especially around technology, but it’s still got a long way to go.
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They’re scared of Dessalines
Lack of diversity, imo.
If you’re (edit)NOT(/edit) into Star Trek, Linux, coding, or politics there’s not that much content. Which isn’t gonna attract too many new people, and is probably alienating to many of the new users checking out the fediverse.
I hate the ads & the Reddit app, but Lemmy feels like more of an echo chamber than Reddit does.
It is an echo chamber. Even communities such as /c/christianity@lemmy.world get downvoted to oblivion.
Pretty sure christians get lots of hate on Reddit too. If you want a christian echo chamber just go to a church, not internet social media.
Edit: to be honest, a lot of us are on the internet just to get away from religious people.
The Christian communities on Reddit didn’t appear to be downvote brigaded like they are here
I mean i would have never came here if i didn’t get banned from reddit,not because reddit is better but because it is what everyone uses and is considered the norm.
I didn’t even know Lemmy existed.
Same boat as me
Not going to lie, I prefer it that way. There’s just enough people here that it’s engaging, but not too many that it will turn into a cesspool like reddit did. Let’s just let it attract the right users naturally for as long as possible. We don’t need to mass market it and bring every reddit user over.
A lot of Reddit is LLMs talking to each other now. One very obvious example of this is /r/stories. Nearly every one of them has the hallmarks of AI generation. As you read through the hundreds of comments, many look like AI as well. I’ve been noticing more of it in other subs too. Dead internet theory is coming true.
Exactly, it’s the goldilocks phase right now for lemmy, to be followed by endless ululations for eternal September. This is the shit y’all be nostalgic for soon.
Habits are hard to break.
I’m predominantly here because my habit was tied to a 3rd party app that stopped working with the API changes.
I’m still here because it’s good, but it was the habit being broken that pushed me here in the first place.
I quit cold turkey by dns blocking Reddit everywhere and deleting narwhal. I don’t know how people can quit in any other way. Apps like Reddit are designed to be addictive, so it’s no surprise that people have a hard time giving them up.
like many on reddit, most of us was forced out either due to site-wide banning on all accounts they have been doing. or the sudden shadowbannings they have been doing alot lately. i do checkup on the shadowbanning subreddit , to see how aggressive they are banning people.
I had a pretty bad reddit habit. Sometimes would do the thing of quitting the app and opening it back up quickly after.
I was using boost and it worked for a long time after it was supposed to stop working. The day it actually stopped working I went over to Lemmy.
Reddit is pretty bad with the propaganda, bots, censorship and what not. It was definitely getting worse before I left and isn’t any better.
I have the official reddit app installed because sometimes reddit will have something I need and using the web browser on my phone is somehow worse than their shitty app.
I wish there was more engagement on Lemmy. I understand all the reasons it’s difficult to grow though and honestly there’s a lot of quality conversations going on
reddit is more addicting, and has more communities not found in the fediverse. and likely most cant be replicated easily here. many like some specific niche forums, like school, degrees, specific diseases where peopel share thier experiences and treatment plans ,etc/. whatisthisthing, or reddit drama,etc.
even politics/news dont get as much engagement as on reddit, even if you exclude bots/astroturfers.
This may be something you don’t want to hear so please bear with me. I’ve been here since the reddit drama started.
There isn’t much engagement here. If you compare a post here to a post on reddit, there will be zero comments here and 100 to 1000+ on reddit.
Another issue is each instance has its own version of the same community. This isn’t a bad thing but it separates the comments and increases the reposts. If I’m scrolling all, sometimes I see 5+ of the same post with zero comments on each.
Another problem, it’s not inherently easy to sign up. There are hundreds if not thousands of instances. If the instance you pick shuts down or goes down for a bit, well… you’re SOL. I’ve lost two accounts on two instances that shut down.
Another problem, since it’s not mainstream, there’s not much content in niche communities. A lot of the niche communities that start up post a lot of bot content which no one engages with and then the community dies.
I still advocate moving over but there is a lot of work to be done to get the masses moved over.
The sad part is that all these issues have been known for a while now and none if them have been tackled at all so far.
How amazing would it be if you could just link your account with any instance at any time? My instance is down? No worries, I connect using another.
What if that community you are interested in doesn’t have its’ users split on 4 different instances making it even more niche than before?
What if when I create an account I get a list of suggested instances and a mini description so I don’t have to immediately know what I’m doing and learn about this later? With proper account migration I could change this anytime I want.
On top of all of that I keep hearing the mod tools are atrocious.
When was the last time a major feature was added to lemmy? I think the only hope now is a different competitor on ActivityPub like piefed.
There aren’t much niche topics here, sure. But the fewer engagement makes your engagement more valuable. On reddit I felt that all my comments went unheard unless I browsed new. It was actually a bit stressful to make my comments not be completely useless. On lemmy you’re more likely to be heard and to emgage in actual conversation or discussion with an actual person.
This. Actually launching a community is hard. Launching a decentralized network of communities is damn hard.
I’ve been around for long enough to remember the internet before megasites like Reddit, when every community had their own forums and/or website. Specific mod for a specific game? Unique forum. Specific sub-community of a fandom, like a bunch of tech nerds analyzing the starships in Star Wars? Unique forum.
And like, I don’t deny that losing that hurt. Each site had its own unique little flavor of community, and the great centralization of the internet definitely steamrolled that flat in favor of mainstream appeal. But centralizing did also improve ease of discovery and access. Now we’re trying to build all of those little communities back in what - 2-3 years? In comparison to the 10+ they had to grow in before? It’s not going to be easy.
One PC community, which I’m pretty sure died because I haven’t noticed any content from it in a few months, was using a bot to copy posts from Reddit but it made no sense because 50% of the posts were asking for tech support. Every post had 0 replies because, obviously, who would waste time replying when the OP who needed answers was on a different platform entirely.
…also the toxic out of control leftists
Also, the lack of moderation means communities are just sort of whatever the hell people who are currently posting want them to be. Serious abuse usually gets handled eventually, but posts and comments are frequently off-topic. Lots of communities don’t even have rules.
Idk if this has been a thing or not but why isn’t there a way to “merge” viewing of communities with similar content? Like why can’t I just say show me all posts with the community named “asklemmy” and show all posts regardless of the instance it’s on as long as it’s federated with your instance. If that is a thing, why is that not extremely obvious and easy to do and arguably not just the default behavior when looking for communities? Different instances will probably have different rules but the content will probably be similar and relevant.
The fediverse lacks basically all of my niche communities and the ones that exist have zero engagement. I’m basically only on Lemmy at this point for political stuff. Politics anything is a shitshow on Reddit, but seems decent on Lemmy. But that’s just really not enough.
Though to be fair, Reddit’s ‘suggested’ posts feature is I believe destroying niche communities on Reddit these days, so I’m not sure how much longer those will keep working for me either. Moving away from explicit subscriptions and turning your home feed into just a lesser version of /r/all is a good way to ruin most communities over time I think. I feel eventually Reddit will just become Facebook for millennials where your feed is completely divorced from anything you might actually want to see and is entirely an algorithm instead.
niche, like people are visitng celebrety specific instance, youtube channels specific reddits too.
More content.
Do your part people, post and/or engage.
Network effects, mostly.
Although things are getting better over time. I remember when Lemmy was empty. Now there.s like 3 actively developed servers and tons of instances and actual activity. I haven’t felt the need to go back to reddit except for a vague longing for the more niche communities I’m theoretically missing out on. But for news and tech? Who needs reddit anymore
I scuttled my own account on reddit by intentionally getting banned. That way I had no option to return.
shadowbanning is the best way, much harder to evade than a sitewide ban, just use a vpn and they will ban you eventually
The fediverse requires more effort.
