!memes
I don't think surpassing or having anything to do with reddit is valuable. I use lemmy because I think reddit sucks but now I can see how it can be better. For example, I want to disable all voting on my instance, I don't believe it helps anything and the only reason lemmy has it is because of reddit, there is no algorithm or anything. That to me seems like the worst reason to have something.
Ok I'm just thinking out loud here...
Part of what makes (made) reddit great is that there are so many niche communities. That you scroll through reddit and find something interesting and new and can just jump in and discuss it.
THAT I think we can all agree would be great to grow in lemmy.
There is no question that lemmy IS the same social media "mode" as reddit, a link aggregator where users can democratically sort news and articles and topics and discuss things. Lemmy is a clone of reddit, this can't be disputed. The question is how to make it better than reddit and avoid the pitfalls. Right now moderation and admins are a bit problematic like e.g. the recent vegan clusterfuck.
And yeah for certain subs like vegan you don't need downvotes since there wouldn't be too many "controversial" topics. I suspect part of what is lacking on reddit is that there isn't enough "tagging" on reddit. Like having ways for users to mark a post "funny/silly" or "unconstructive" or "misinformation" or NSFW, NSFL or hatespeech. Besides upvoting. Maybe I'm wrong with this.
But I think over time reddit degraded because the system didn't support protection against malicious actors. For example tons of meta jokes. Every serious topic has a joke comment on top. You can't filter them out. That might be a great use of AI like chatGPT for this where the AI learns from the tags and then allows to filter out joke comments. Not censor but allows you to filter out things that can be fun and crass but are not good for long term community. Basically to help moderators.
Of course the current problem is that users themselves have become more and more "post-truth", not just the fascists but the "leftists", liberals and centrists too and shout down any dissident opinion because they assume it's bad faith. Nobody wants to engage any more because they've been burned. Maybe that can be reversed if lemmy has the right tools and the community is moderated well enough to "heal". But again, the admins and moderators are currently the problem on lemmy. Lots of power-tripping and radicalism (and I don't just mean the socialists lol).
And voting with your feet is also a problem because it leads to fracturing like mentioned in OP and that does have a negative effect. Like the europe@feddit.de community lost 75% of it's users with the move to feddit.org. I assume similar things will happen to the vegan community now that you moved and people searching for vegan will be confused. Better technical tools are required.
So I think it's not just about surpassing reddit in numbers, even though at least some growth is very curcial for niches to thrive, but to grow the usability of the software.
Anyway, just rambling / thinking out loud 🙂
Just to tone set, I appreciate the rambling and thinking out loud, I'm kind of doing the same and if I don't write this intro people might think im mad or am dwelling but really I just want this to be better
for the record, Vegan Theory Club and Vegan Home Cooks moved off of lemmy.world ahead of this by several months because I don't agree with their philosophy or motivation. Mods and users of my instance were involved but me (tech admin) and Arcane Potato (admin) were not involved at all and to be honest I only sort of know what happened, I'm cooking food and posting about my gardening. To address your last thought first I do not care about fracturing anything, I don't view my instance as a "lemmy" instance, it is its own website with its own content and the rest doesn't matter. I'm trying to grow my local communities with local users and the federation is a bonus. In my experience online active forms don't need hundreds of thousands of people to be fun or interesting, Reddit needs that to sell ads.
There is no question that lemmy IS the same social media “mode” as reddit, a link aggregator where users can democratically sort news and articles and topics and discuss things. Lemmy is a clone of reddit, this can’t be disputed. The question is how to make it better than reddit and avoid the pitfalls. Right now moderation and admins are a bit problematic like e.g. the recent vegan clusterfuck.
Reddit has never been democratic and the votes drive a mystery algorithm with karma scores and the votes themselves live behind a wall of fuzzing that Lemmy does not do. There is also hidden moderation which isn't possible on Lemmy with the modlog. So there is a lot of cogs in making reddit content viable and it isn't simply what people vote on. My thoughts is that this is probably for the best if they're going to have them at all, but makes them kayfabe like WWE Wrestling. Direct democracy as what is occurring now on Lemmy sucks and is basically spam that favors bots and propaganda. In my take moderation and admins are not the problem, it is lack of quality users who are willing to contribute which is the signal and too much noise of douche bags with no ownership or respect shitting all over it. If people want a site to doomscroll while depressed on the toilet, I'm for sure not willing to pay for that. They should just use reddit. One really big and key difference is that I personally own the server it runs on and it is open source software with an open license that I am free to modify.
I think this is important to understand if federated media is going to succeed. We need most people, many of whom already pay subscriptions for spotify and hbo, to pay for and deploy instances. There are already managed service providers that host it for you for reasonable rates. I don't really think instances should have more than a handful of communities (if any) to avoid large centralized hosts like lemmy.world. Each instance is a collection of only the communities subscribed on that instance or created by one of the users and becomes a personal service for that person or small group of people. You're right about the fracturing and we see that now but I think that can be solved with multi-comm tags pretty easily. I think we should do more to promote specific communities than instances. For Vegan Theory Club, I really only want to promote !homecooks@vegantheoryclub.org and getting that entire thing out there is the goal.
To be honest I think 100 people per maximum per instance is probably a sweet spot where people who decide to pay for it can keep an eye on all the users and the costs for any one person won't spiral out of control (~12 usd/month for a hosted container service). I think having smaller instances of accountable users to each other is the end goal and it will take a lot of education, software development and changes to move in that way. To your point I think discoverability for communities is problematic now but this is beta and third party services might come up with something eventually.
Yeah thinking about this, individual servers for specialized topics seems like the way to go. I guess it depends on the type of community. Vegan is large enough but still a specialized community that yeah doesn't need size. It's specialized but not a niche.
But other niche communities, e.g. av1, jpegxl or velomobile, are too niche to work without more people. I think.
But it would still be good if you could at least set a community to automatically "forward" to a new instance. And maybe that a community could "export" the posts from existing instance to a new instance. Then you could move or merge. I believe something like that is needed.
