I ditched Reddit 2 years ago and haven't been back. This is a self-solving problem: as more people use and contribute, there will be more content and engagement.

But as a heavy user of Lemmy (and previously of Reddit), there's things you can do. Chief among them is switching from the "Active" list to "Hot" when you want to see new stuff. I pretty much never run out of content, and that's without even dipping into "New"...

Bit of a community question on the OP theme:

I see a lot of yard-sticking with Reddit, and frequent comparisons are 1) more of Reddit should migrate here and 2) not enough content is generated in Lemmy. These are both confusing to me. Anyone else?

1. Reddit is a cesspool. Its users are often toxic. Administration and moderation is burdensome. With self-hosted and decentral-hosted Lemmy instances, why would we want more of Reddit to come here? Other than the philosopher king meme, I don't feel the urge to bring R. communities and users to L. Separation is good, no?

2. Content follows users. Users follow content. Lemmy has less content. Fewer social games and participants who are seeking a dopamine relationship with the internet. If you come to Lemmy seeking dopamine fandom, you will be disappointed (narwhal bacon and my axe this amirite lol). That shite is generally absent, and users aren't constantly jerking themselves off to get a spicy comment in for votes. This is good, no?

I guess I don't understand the attraction to Reddit, or the urge to think of Lemmy as a replacement. It is similar, but shouldn't it be different? If it isn't different, defederated or no, won't it eventually slide into toxicity? I understand why people like things about Reddit, but... There's Reddit for that. This doesn't have to be that.

Thinking of two groceries: one is a little odd spot that is run by an eclectic family, has some stuff you want, some odd German snacks you don't understand. It's cool, but it doesn't have everything.

The other is a giant stucco nightmare warehouse that mostly sells deep fried heroin and also ten extremely useful things. It's run by absolute creeps, and the customers are standing uncomfortably close, and being uncomfortably irritating. Maybe one of them is waiting to follow you home because they didn't like what you bought.

Does the community want to put a sign out front to woo those people over? Does Lemmy perish without them? I'm relatively new here, but my own answer to both is no. IMO, Lemmy does not need to be an engagement addiction machine, and the people who want that might just really be wanting Reddit deep down.

Sorry for the diatribe! I tend to like that it's kinda sleepy here and often more authentic. I like seeing what Germany is doing on a memie wemie from time to time. I've got other shit to do beyond my phone, and don't want to have a pack of digital ultra nicotine with me at all times. Peace, homies.

Reddit is people reposting stuff from Twitter, so what you are saying is that we need to repost more stuff from Twitter.

We do the EXACT same thing here already.

I remember being on reddit and complaining thr everything was political. And holy shit Lemmy is like 10x more political. Like, I get it, they are important issues. But I don't wanna see it for every single post.

Oh, and let's not forget thr .ml users....

It is usually pretty clear when someone is a recent “refugee”, expecting everyone else to hate Reddit as much as they do, like there’s a feud between Reddit and Lemmy. When it seems to me that most folks around here are just content to be our own little space

Different strokes for different folks, as they say. That's precisely one of the things that I value most in social media— exposure to people and ideas outside of my day-to-day experience. I don't understand the femcel memes, or c/ich_iel, for example, but that's what makes them so fascinating. I was thinking of leaving Reddit even before the API fiasco, because the feed changed daily while not changing at all. I didn't find it valuable to see the same breaking news story posted to 15 different subreddits, nor the same "Men of Reddit: Do you pee through the underwear flap, or over the waistband?" question posted (literally! I watched and counted one day!) every 5 minutes. I didn't replace Reddit with Lemmy, I just stopped using the former when Apollo stopped working. Lemmy drew me in over the course of a couple of months. It's quiet, but you can have conversations instead of shouting into the void.

For me, Lemmy is far more successful.

A social network needs enough users to actually function. In the early days, Lemmy/kbin/associates were too quiet to be appealing, so there was a constant push to bring in new users. As this is a Reddit clone social network, inevitably that means hoping that Reddit users will come across.

I would argue that Lemmy et al is already at a high enough number of active users that there's a basic critical mass; that there's enough activity here such that a new user would find plenty to keep them engaged. It could certainly stand to be much bigger still, but the pressure to grow is much less intense.

In theory it really shouldn't matter. You choose your instance, and it's up to the instance admins to make decisions about backend software choices. It's possible that we'll get to a place there it's possible for admins to migrate a server from Lemmy to Piefed or back again without loss of content, in which case all the user would see about it would be a change of default interface.

I'm on Feddit.uk, which has several different web interfaces to choose from, and I mostly browse using a mobile app (Boost). It really makes basically no difference to me whether it's running Lemmy or Piefed.

It shouldn't, and yet. When I joined, I spent non zero amount of time choosing an instance. Then one of the instances I chose shut sown. The second one defederated from a bunch of others and now I couldn't read any comments because if the thread contains a comment from defederated instance the whole thread disappears. Then I moved to .world and then discovered the reason all those instances got defederated so I switched again, and now one of my instances is very slow because money run out, and now there is a new kid on the block so inevitably I will have to move again at some point.
Don't get me wrong, I still believe in all this Fediverse thing, but boy does it make it hard to do sometimes

Private communities will be in 1.0, along with some other visibility modes.

The problem with Lemmy is that the demographic that uses it is too specific: nerdy, atheist, college educated (usually in computers) Gen X and early Millennial left-wing political hobbyists.

Like, there's a reason the one of the only specific media franchises that can sustain an active community here is Star Trek.

Signatures are only used to deliver activities to inboxes. The Activitypub json data of posts is usually available without any auth.

It helps if you block all those communities you don't care about. Or even block some instances.

A lot of servers require signatures on GET requests as well, for private posts and to block specific people/servers.

Legendary.

there isnt enough porn on Lemmy. and despite that there isn't enough porn, theres like 100 specialized sites for specific body parts, with very low activity and the same person posting everything

Is it really though?

Be the change that you want to see

I don't mind the fact that Lemmy changes at a slower pace. Gives me less to scroll through

I only have Lemmy but I consume way less social media since that's all I have... Which is a good thing.