I’m pretty happy with the experience on Lemmy so far as I joined even before the blackouts started happening. The trigger was the dumpster fire of an AMA with the CEO. I tried kbin first because it’s supposed to be newer and more interoperable with other federated platforms but I found the instance I was on wouldn’t properly load content from Lemmy and I couldn’t find a kbin Android app. So I’ll be here for the time being.
During the shitstorm on Twitter and the exodus to Mastodon, I tried out Mastodon and felt that it was a similarly welcoming experience. But I kept reading comments on Reddit that the Fediverse was too complicated and it was too hard to find people to follow because you needed their username as well as their instance to find them. I hope people have realised that it’s not that much harder during this current Reddit shitshow.
Everyone understands that Reddit/Lemmy/kbin is built on community, and the growth of this community has been fostered by moderators, not Reddit itself. So my question to any subreddit moderators is: Is there something about the Fediverse that would prevent you from moving your community off Reddit? It seems pretty clear that people will try Reddit alternatives even before their favourite subreddits have moved. Users are engaged with the communities that you have built and loyal to the 3rd party app developers and we don’t give a fuck about Reddit as an organisation.
Discussion open to everyone, but curious to know if any moderators are also using Lemmy.
Forgive my comment for being a bit… crass.
Lemmy & the Federation are emerging technologies.
Early tech adopters are never “average people”, they are disproportionately geeky 18-to-35 year old middle-class white males with spare time to tinker around. Or basically… me.
It’s less likely they are ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, disabled individuals, elderly, women and/or other disadvantaged groups. So Lemmy is at a demographic disadvantage right now.
It took a very, very long time for the “average person” to accept Reddit as an accessible & safe online platform for anyone that doesn’t fit the ‘early adopter’ archetype. Heck, I still know folks that think of Reddit as a sort-of ‘radical’ space where Hackers cosplayers use tech-jargon to communicate all day. And it wasn’t that long ago where this was more true than lies.
In any case, there’s a reason why Lemmy’s most popular communities are things like Technology, Gaming, Linux, Piracy. There’s waaaaay less human-interest stuff. Way less stuff that appeals broadly.
An example:
Do you know how many subscribers there are in /c/relationship_advice right now ? There are four. There are zero posts.
Meanwhile, r/relationship_advice has over 9 million. And it’s pretty close to 1:1 ratio for men and women contributors.
Over on Reddit, I help mod a regional community of 65K subscribers. It’s a casual place with casual people. People hop in asking for tourism advice, recommendations for school districts, questions about traffic or local quirks, etc. These people aren’t always tech-literate.
So the thing that prevents me from moving my community off Reddit is… they’re not ready for it yet. I suspect a lot of mods feel the same.
In the meantime - we can focus on making Lemmy into the best space it can be for when those users are ready. We have meaningful dialogue, we respect our differences, we keep the place clear of ads & spam, and clear of bigotry.
Once there are high quality, extremely simple apps that allow everyday users to browse Lemmy without having to explain any advanced tech jargon, I’m hopeful the Federation will take off. The demographics here will shift, and with that - communities will be more eager to move over. We might see things like “Hi Lemmy, I’m an old Korean War survivor. AMA!” instead of “Plex is giving me an unsupported codec notification, did I download the wrong DLLs?”.
Hope that rambling made sense.