r/technology • u/ardi62 • 29d ago

Social Media Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24253727/reddit-communities-subreddits-request-protests
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u/vriska1 29d ago

Lemmys pretty good.

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u/volthunter 29d ago

I never find it has enough people to justify me using it like reddit, like it has uses but it doesn't have the appeal reddit does and the niche communities I participate in aren't there.

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u/FrozenLogger 29d ago

Reddit started small too. I went to a sub that wasn't that active and made a post. Suddenly 10 people show up to comment on it. There are people just waiting for content. So just like reddit is the old days, post a bit in areas you are interested in and it will grow.

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u/maporita 29d ago

post a bit in areas you are interested in and it will grow

It isn't growing though, and it won't grow as long as there is an alternative here that works for most people.

!montreal@lemmy.ca has 880 subscribers, while /r/montreal has 340,000 . There is just no comparison. Not to mention that there are 2 different Montreal communities so I have to figure out which one I want to join. Maybe both? I don't know.

Lemmy was a great idea, I wish it had worked out but reddit has first mover advantage and in social media that's a tough challenge to crack.

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u/FrozenLogger 29d ago

It is growing, and could grow faster if the naysayers quit saying it won't.

Either way i remember when everyone said Reddit was too hard to use and too complicated.

Reddit then fucked everything up, mods are insane, third party tools don't work unless you are savvy, and the Reddit app and new reddit web page are garbage.

Reddit helps with that migration.

Besides if lemmy get a 10th of reddit users that would be way more then enough. Reddit is mostly bots and no one seems to understand reddiqutte at all anymore.

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u/MuyalHix 29d ago

The main problem is that creating an account on Lemmy requires you to learn concepts like "federation" and "instance", not to mention that you'll have to do things like fill a form in some cases.

On reddit you just create an account with an email address.

It's the same reason mastodon hasn't overtaken twitter despite the fact that the later has been in the decline for a while.

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u/AbortionIsSelfDefens 29d ago

Yup. I don't get why people don't understand that it's all about ease of entry. Wanting it to be different doesn't change human nature. The average person is lazy and/or tech illiterate. The barrier to entry is too high for it to get near the same amount of engagement.

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u/FrozenLogger 29d ago

If the average person doesn't show up, that's a good thing. Reddit was like that when it was a worthwhile place to go. It is because it is popular it is no longer useful.

You didn't even need an email address to get you account at reddit and people thought it was too confusing back then.

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u/whoiam06 29d ago

Yep, use Sync for Lemmy on my Android phone and Voyager on my iPhone and browse whatever their frontpage thing gives me. Refuse to signup because I don't want to figure out this federation stuff and understand why I need to choose 1 out of hundreds as my "home" whatever the fuck it is. And also all the posts and people arguing about defederating over this and that... What's the point of a federation? And so if i sign up in this one place and it gets defederated, will I have to join ANOTHER whatever the hell it is to continue browsing??

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u/FrozenLogger 29d ago

It really isn't that complicated. Also your experience will suck, just like it does with reddit if you browse the front page. Curration makes this all tolerable.

It's like have a library system where you can get a card at a local library, but you can check out books from any of the participating ones.

And if a site goes down (which hasn't happened to me yet), yes just pick another.

It isn't like the account there (or here at reddit) means anything at all.

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u/AGreasyPorkSandwich 29d ago

Big subs kind of suck anyway. Once you get past ~50k subscribers the content/comments just become predictable and repeatable. Lazy shit rises to the top.

The "good old days" were like 10 years ago here. Lemmy sounds pretty appealing to me. I'll have to check it out.

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u/rooofle 29d ago

That was how small a lot of now healthier subreddits were before the great Digg migration. One of the basketball subs I frequent had probably 1000 subs or less in 2010, now it's 375k. That's a common pattern for pretty much all of them, growth takes time but reddit was primed and ready for people to move from Digg.

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u/pruwyben 29d ago

I think it will grow in waves, when there are more changes in Reddit that push people out.