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
I’m happy to promote it. I tried to get a few non-technical people to check it out. They felt it was too complicated. I’ve shared it with tech friends and coworkers who use Reddit. They’re aware of Lemmy to varying degrees, and are not enthused about moving to another platform despite hating Reddit.
I think it’s because despite Lemmy being a great alternative, it is more complicated and lacks the user base that users of other social media platforms have.
Bluesky is marginally more complicated than Twitter, but compared to Mastodon it is user friendly. Bluesky worked to create a dedicated, easy to use app that most users use.
Bluesky existed for a while before experiencing explosive growth. This occurred during moments of controversy with X. Bluesky capitalized on these moments, with champions on both platforms that led their followers to change, and there were mechanisms in place to bootstrap a user’s feed with the followers and topics that they had in the other place.
I think Lemmy needs to follow this model. There needs to be a Lemmy app that has a user experience as similar as possible with the Reddit app. It also needs champions that have main stream recognition (George Takei, Mark Hamill, etc.) that can be willing to make noise about switching from Reddit to Lemmy when the next controversy occurs. Repeat with more and more promotion by this evangelists, and Lemmy could grow.
This is an Us problem. Download jerboa. Create an account on world. Done. Simple as Reddit. We make it complicated by explaining federation, options, different instances, etc. None of that matters to the masses.
I followed the directions my instance of choice had posted, also use jerboa. It was a few steps, but the directions given were simple. It didn’t take me long at all to sign up.
I still don’t fully understand federation, but I knew even less when I began here a few years ago. I do like using jerboa
This. So much of this.
I see the same with any federated platform. People are excited to explain how complicated and clever and different services and integrations and… Shut the fuck up.
App, sign-up, post, like, subscribe. Done.
People will learn the rest if it is important enough to them to master
We can make our decentralised network more popular by centralising it feels like an own goal…
If you’re suggesting to your friends you can pick whichever instance you want, but the point is you should choose for them and don’t even tell them that there is a choice
I mean, that is how I recommend linux distros to people :)
It depends what you want. If you want lots of people to join, you need to make it easy to join.
That doesn’t mean we need to get rid of decentralization. You could have a federated joining mechanism that assigned people randomly to any willing instance. Forcing the user to pick is the problem.
The trouble is a random joining procedure will absolutely launch users into unsuitable instances for their personality, political positions.
Yeah, we need defaults to get people signed up. When it’s too difficult for the average user, they’ll go where it’s easier.
I could not find Jerboa in the App Store. I use Voyager. We need Lemmy.
This is such an underrated point. If we want people to join Lemmy, we need an app called Lemmy, on every platform. And if we want to steal users from Reddit, make the UI a clone of the reddit app but better. And allow people to join via the app, not some separate website.
Or maybe people just need to stop saying “Lemmy” and instead say “Voyager”, or “Boost for Lemmy” or whatever app they would suggest to use?
It’s like Linux, I don’t suggest people to install Linux because that’s not a thing, I suggest they install Bazzite or Fedora KDE, or whatever I think will suit them best
If someone were to create a Markhamill@lemmy.world account, someone else can simply spin up a Markhamill@lemmings.world, and a Markhamill@Markhamilllemmy.world, and so on. Nobody is ever going to believe that any of those are actually Mark Hamill (especially since none are:-).
Doesn’t Lemmy have any sort of profile cross-identification like Mastodon has?
Absolutely none. Some users do things like list their own alts, though these can fall out of date, and are entirely optional.
Lemmy (and PieFed) allows you to migrate your blocklists and community subscriptions, and PieFed will even pull in all old posts from a community to help migrate it over, though there is still a disconnection point between the new PieFed account for people vs. their old Lemmy account, which are separated.
Some people, like Blaze, create alts all across the Threadiverse for unrelated reasons - primarily since Lemmy reports do not actually federate (though PieFed ones do, see report) - while other people specifically grab other people’s account names just to troll them (or at least some of those alts claim that much:-P), leading to all manner of confusion as to who is then trolling who.
I was mostly using alts to federate communities before Lemmy-federate got created.
Nowadays thanks to Piefed personal feeds I mostly only use this one’
But then how do you mod communities, specifically Lemmy ones, when those reports do not federate (though PieFed ones reportedly do)?
Nani? It’s 2026, getting an account on some lemmy and start posting is nearly two orders of magnitude easier than trying to sign up to an email account!
That people are brainrotten due to excessive Fortnite and Instagram is,
unfortunately, not our problem. At some point, the answer is “just get better users”.Singing up for a Google account is such a pain, they’ve gotten worse over time
The difference is people think they NEED a Google account, but not a Lemmy account
And answers like this are exactly why non techies don’t join and we get posts like this. You’re the problem