It's always worth pushing for the fediverse.
Fediverse
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
While I think there's some merit to the idea of talking about the fediverse on corporate legacy social media platforms, I think the best and most effective thing we can do is put in extra effort to engage with the fediverse itself, making posts and comments, building up new communities, and so on.
Reddit is no doubt getting worse and more closed off all the time. They treat their users like shit, or at least, like a resource to be harvested for profit. But at the same time, Reddit users will sit around complaining about the platform until the cows come up, but when it comes time to do anything about it (like, for example, go check out the fediverse...) they don't ever take any action. And this problem isn't unique to Reddit either, people just love to complain about X on X, complain about Facebook on Facebook, complain about Tiktok on Tiktok, etc. It's hard to tell how much of that is just performative internet shit vs genuine addiction to their particular algorithm of choice, but in my view it's a real problem...
In other words, the question is "where we should be spending our energy?"
Should we be spending it on Reddit, trying to convince a bunch of people (who frankly range from ambivalent to straight-up addicted) that Reddit sucks? Or should we spend it here on the fediverse building the communities from the ground up?
I'd guess there is a balance to be struck.
Fun fact, safereddit.com still works perfectly fine as a frontend in my experience! (not the only one out there, just an instance of redlib If you need to bypass the login requirement just add "safe" before "reddit" in the URL and it should let you in :)
We definitely need the 1.0 release of Lemmy now more than ever... Keep up the good work devs btw!
Why bother, if they want a good community they will seek one out. Growth isn’t necessarily good for this place.
we at least need to make sure we don't shrink, which can sneak up on you and be difficult to stop, better to maintain some growth
I'd say the fediverse is somewhat protected against the drawbacks of growth in a way Reddit isn't.
As long as instance owners can handle the traffic, yes.
eh, kinda? Decentralisation means one instance can learn from the failures of another, and there's bo one thing that can bring the entire Fediverse down. But that's a worst case scenario.
What I fear is this: A spike of interest in the fediverse leads to many instances being overwhelmed, and the general newbie experience quickly turns many people away, leading to lots of people leaving with a sour taste. In the meantime, instances successfully adapt and new ones spring up, but most users aren't coming back.
Imo that's a more realistic scenario than some grandiose failure, and you could say it's already happened several times.
Overgrowth certainly would have some drawbacks, but stagnation probably isn't good either
I find the fediverse to be quite lively (more than reddit) even if it doesnt have 5 posts a second. Quality > Quantity. Would rather have 1 good post that gets engagement than 10 shitposts nobody ever sees.
goes back to lemmy where every 10th post is a shitpost about beans
I agree, make the place too big and it will become unmanageable the same way it went for reddit.
Honestly I've given up on encouraging people to do things to better themselves. We've had open source technology for a very long time. The Fediverse has been pretty mature for a good while now. Xitter and Reddit have been through many rounds of appalling enshittification, not to mention Meta.
RSS is as old as the internet but people overwhelmingly choose Apple News and other dumb shit.
Email is as old as the internet but people overwhelmingly choose corporate platforms like Gmail.
Podcasts are ancient but people overwhelmingly choose to use platforms like Spotify, and worse, YouTube.
People just overwhelmingly make bad decisions, and have been for decades so, yeah, I'm exhausted.
I used to ask people to switch and they would ask "why?" and I would be so appalled that they would even ask the question because, how could you not know any of the litany of reasons to get off this fucking platform?
Sometimes they ask and I explain and then the only thing that changes is that they think I'm a weirdo.
They instaban people who talk about Lemmy. It's useless.
Any pushing you can do is probably not going to help. Last time it was some API shit that actually generated a small amount of outrage enough to move a small amount of people. Apathy, habit and lock-in will tend to defeat that, so unless this gets people at least as pissed as whatever the API thing was, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Also, y'know, reddit... maybe it's just as well.
Nope, it's the best secret of the internet.