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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

…also the toxic out of control leftists

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 [email protected] 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.

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 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.

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

It is an echo chamber. Even communities such as /c/[email protected] get downvoted to oblivion.

50% of reddit is bots.

“Just make an account somewhere” is where things go wrong for most people, they want a guided hand or else they’ll stay were they are.

Incompetent? Really?

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.

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.

Why don’t you start a thread ?

Also WhatsApp is from 2009, Signal 2015 (but gained popularity later) as Reddit is from 2005 and the fediverse became “popular” in small niches after the mods exodus a couple of years ago

niche, like people are visitng celebrety specific instance, youtube channels specific reddits too.