Which wasn’t the case early on, from my experience. Instead, when Lemmy had its first big boom it was filled with people looking for a non-toxic, real conversation. I still find that to be the case in replies, but my front page tends to be filled with stories where commenters are dissimilar to Reddit, less intellectual responses and more edgy hyperbole.

Seriously though, the people responding to political posts with thinly veiled calls to harm or kill political leaders need to be banned on the spot. Absolutely intolerable.

I’ve seen a rise in calls to violence. This is not cool.

I could not find Jerboa in the App Store. I use Voyager. We need Lemmy.

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.

Conversations either continue or they don’t. You shouldn’t be hard on yourself. If someone says something that makes you want to say or ask something else, great. If not, that’s fine too.

I enjoy Lemmy because I tend to get a response. Despite the higher pop at Reddit, I often go ignored. It’s not unusual to have a back and forth chat with another commenter in a given thread here.