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  • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    137·
    9 months ago

    Welcome here!

    Copy pasting from a recent thread on /r/RedditAlternatives trying to address usual criticism against Lemmy.

    Federation is confusing, people want a single website they can go to

    Email has been working on a federation model for decades. People have to remember if they use Gmail or Outlook, but that’s it. It’s similar here.

    Several communities have the same name, it’s confusing, active communities are hard to find

    Reddit has a similar issue: you have /r/games as the main gaming community, but there is also /r/Gaming, /r/videogames /r/gamers, etc.

    How does someone know what the main community is, whatever the platform? Looking at the number of subscribers and active members.

    There was the example of beekeeping: if you search for that topic, the most active one is definitely https://mander.xyz/c/beekeeping with 97 users per month.

    The others have barely 1 user: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=beekeeping

    To find active communities: https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected]. There are regular threads with active communities on topic such as gardening, movies, board games, anime, science, etc.

    Who is going to pay for the server costs?

    Here is a link to this question to Lemmy admins: https://lemm.ee/post/41577902

    Summary of the answers:

    • lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
    • a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
    • some instances are running on infrastructure that the admins would be anyway, so it’s virtually “free”

    Most of the instances costs are paid using donations. They regularly post financial updates such as this one: https://lemm.ee/post/41235568

    Obviously there is a sweet stop where you can minimize the cost by having the maximum number of users on a fixed infrastructure cost.

    If you want to have a look at the number of monthly active user (the “MAU” column): https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/

    Anyway, $ per user is usually meaningless because most of the servers are small enough to be hosted on some random cheap server - adding more users doesn’t cost more because they are still well below server capacity. Only the biggest servers have to worry about $ per user.

    I had posted this earlier this week on this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fiuuo5/how_much_does_it_cost_per_user_to_host_a_lemmy/

    There is too much political content

    You can block entire servers and specific communities.

    Instances to block to avoid political content

    Communities to block

    With those blocked, you are avoiding 95% of the political content. There might be a few other communities that pop up, but blocking them is still one click away.

    Lemmy is developped by hardcore tankies and I don’t want to use their software

    As Lemmy is federated using an open protocol, there are other options to connect to the communities without using Lemmy itself.

    The first one is Piefed: https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]

    The other one is Mbin: https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]

    However, those are stil a bit less mature than Lemmy, so for instance if you want to use mobile apps a lot, Lemmy is a better choice.

    On top of that, every Lemmy server is managed by different people. You can see regular criticism of lemmy.ml (the instance managed by the Lemmy devs) on threads such as this: https://lemm.ee/post/33872586 or even dedicated communities like https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected]

    That shows that even the Lemmy devs are not protected from criticism.

    There isn’t enough people

    Lemmy has 46k monthly active users (https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats) (Mbin and Piefed have around 800 each). Active user is someone who voted, posted or commented.

    In comparison, Discuit, which was praised during the API shutdown as “easier to use as it’s centralized” has 234 active users: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/KdiI1akq. Not 234k, 234 total.

    For obvious reasons, the activity is not going to match Reddit levels, and niche communities aren’t there.

    But it’s not an all or nothing situation. Most people on Lemmy still use Reddit for their niche communities, but are also active on Lemmy. And some niche communities are getting more active on lemmy. https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] ([email protected] ) promotes them.

    Also, having less people provides better interactions, as your comments are less likely to get buried in thousands of others. And bots on Lemmy are quickly spotted and banned, while Reddit doesn’t seem to do much about that: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1fmcelm/askreddit_is_simply_over_run_with_bots/

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    21·
    2 years ago

    [email protected] (alternate link)

    • Promote any community, new or old (limit to 1 post per month per community)
    • Ask about communities you’re looking for
    • There’s a pinned post with related resources, some of which are listed below

    [email protected]

    • specific to new communities, or those that are being rebooted

    Finally, if you are new to Lemmy and/or have similar questions, we have [email protected]

  • WanderingVentra@lemm.ee
    16·
    1 year ago

    Use lemmyverse.net to find interesting communities and instances.

    There are a couple of communities focused in finding other communities, like
    [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

    And general fediverse news:
    [email protected]
    [email protected]

    Contribute to communities you like even if they’re kinda empty. The important part is to get the conversation moving in a lot of these places, and someone has to start that.

    Also remember to play around with different sorting algorithms. If active is getting stale, try hot. If you aren’t seeing enough small communities, try scaled. I also like using Top X Hours, from 6 to 24.