217 comments on this in 24 hours says to me that there must at least a few people using lemmy
Where do all those meme posts about "Lemmy is bad name / bad branding" come from? I've seen it recurrently enough every time someone launches a FOSS thing that I would normally suspect it's part of a LLM farm or a scam attempt from some sort of naming / patents agency, but I've seen these reactions from long enough (2015-ish).
I’m a 31 yr old dude that just found out about this along with what the fediverse is. When I found out, I was researching this stuff so it took me some time to understand it all and I still don’t think I fully understand it all
Part of the problem is there's a lot less to it than it feels like there is. The analogies we use to teach to non-tech people don't quite match up.
It's simply a structured way to log in and send messages back and forth.
You can use it to stitch together forums, link shares, social media, video sharing, or image sharing sites.
But we really don't bind things together all that tightly. At best you can follow someone on pixelfed or mastodon. Since there's truly no minimum wiring, a lot of services don't even really fully communicate with each other. So we end up mostly with mastodon <-> mastodon links and lemmy->piefed<-lemmy links.
activitypub is a protocol. like email.
instances are just what provider you want to use, gmail, hotmail, outlook, etc.
and the 'platform' lemmy, piefed, mastroton, pixelfed, is just the aesthetics
Lemmy as a name is very poor branding. It's almost as bad as Mastodon.
I think it's pretty good. Two syllables, easy to say, no similar sounding competing platforms. What do you think's wrong with it?
Naming something after a famous person means you're starting off on the back foot in terms of SEO and brand clarity.
Digg worked well because it came out of an era where adding a second G was enough to sound techy, but it also played into the dig/bury aspect of voting. Reddit works because the name is "read it" while also being a unique string you couldn't mistake for anything else. Both have a lot going for them that Lemmy just doesn't.
Disagree. This is a case of the brand actually not meaning much. "Reddit" isn't great either, but people think it does because it's well known.
I'm reminded of the person who said Mario was a character designed from the ground up to be marketable, when it was literally created to make a graphic of a person readable in a 16x16 sprite with three colors.
It’s this plus onboarding. Reddit is easy to remember. It tells you exactly what you are getting. Lemmy sounds like a new lemmings games. It gives vintage when it should do the opposite.
It’s a bad name and will never become popular because it’s stupid to say outloud and on top of it onboarding is unnecessarily complicated.
Perfect. I'm in the right place.
I'm offended now 😱
I think you guys have a great chance to capture Reddit's exodus. I used it for about 16 years and me and all of my friends have realized how awful it's become. People are looking for a new platform. I'm going to try and help by opening PRs against the repos.
Reddit has been exodusing for multiple years now. At some point, people are going to have to stop caring about the gorilla down the road and just be good, and I think Lemmy is good. Posts that make it to the front page often have over 1K reputation! It's far from Reddit big, but it's still big!
It's because everything that becomes popular starts with people in the 14-20 year range.
Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Tiktok...
The Fediverse will eventually grow once something triggers a snowball effect due the nature of connectivity and federation. Until then, the way to make it grow is to have young people make it popular.
Edit: There also needs to be more "fun" here. I think the Fediverse is a more "serious" place which isn't what those other social media sites offered. "Serious 24/7" isn't that enticing for young people.
The other day I was imagining a game or game service that has you make a Fediverse account of some kind. You get people to signup with a username that automatically creates a "@fedi.games" account. That account can have access to Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed etc.
what, you don't think it's fun endlessly memeing about doomerism and murder?
There's not enough politics IMO. No fun at all.
Hey, I’m here! wtf just going to ignore me like that??
Ssh, this is a library.
Boiling it down to 3 things:
Number 1 is the reason I rarely visit Lemmy. The choice and wording of political posts and reactions to them create a very negative atmosphere and sometimes it is combined with rather unrational doomerism. Threads just feel angry and hostile too often for me to have fun on here. This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.
This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.
That's so much extra work
Step 2 is dead right. Before you can proceed, we're going to need you to make an apparently important and irreversible decision that you didn't even want to make, based on incomplete information.
I feel like this is an issue of (either accidentally or incidentally) putting focus on something that doesn't really need it. Picking instances should not matter; not in the sense of "it's federated blah blah" but more in the sense of "it's 2026, there's password managers, noone uses their real identities for everything; having multiple accounts wherever it's convenient should be normal".
and which instance you start out on... is going to heavily influence your experience/content and get you branded/blocked by a lot of the userbase
YOU HAVE MADE A BLOOD PACT WITH WORLD.
ML HATES YOU NOW
i feel like it's usually the opposite. some people just really insist on getting upset about anyone on .ml
User Experience Friction - You can't just sign up, you need to pick a server. You've already lost a significant amount of people in that step.
I think this can be improved if there was a better way to explain the identity of each instance and why you might want to join other than just "generic Lemmy server for everyone to use"
Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they're not gonna have a good time.
I suggest a map that shows which instances are federated/defederated from eachother and lets you find which one has the closest identity to what you like. And possibly a disclaimer before joining one of the trifecta instances.
Or just say fuck it and join the one literally called "shit just works" like me 😂
Ideally, I think instances ought to be something the casual user can be unaware of. Like the default experience should be instance-independent and the choice of instance should be some trivial thing that you can change on a whim carrying your entire user identity and chat history with you. I don't really get any functional sense of community from my instance anyway
Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they're not gonna have a good time.
It's worse than that. Lemmy just as reddit is mostly American. American election results were kinda... interesting. And Lemmy is very-very-very polarised. So there's likely 33% chance that new American user will get to "politically their" instance, 33% chance they'll get to the instance on the other side of the spectrum, and 33% chance it doesn't matter what instance they'll end up at, they'll be terrified by both sides. So at best it's 33% chance for user to find their hivemind, realistically it's probably much less because even people technically from "your side" might find Lemmy to be way too radical. And that's just Americans, imagine how the rest 96% of the world react to Lemmy.
I thought ML was machine learning🥴
Big same lol
some people might get confused for the instance they joined, like world, or ML, instead of another one, they go back to reddit.
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!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)