Yesterday me and Blaze had a bit of a back and forth and upon review I had some thoughts.

Let me state first and foremost, I adore Blaze and his contributions to the threadiverse. I think he makes the threadiverse a better place with his presence alone.

That said, when we were arguing I had a few problems. But the biggest and most pertinent was that I felt he was chasing Redditors.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I chose Lemmy. Since I got here, I have put my fair share into making this place everything I want it to be. Whether that’s conducting myself properly or whether it’s trying to engage or provide a platform for engagement.

One thing I really don’t want Lemmy to be is Reddit. I engage on here far more than I ever did on Reddit. I have a perfectly curated timeline which is the perfect mix of news, entertainment, enlightenment and conversation. I want Lemmy to remain Lemmy.

Lemmy works for me and my mental health. The way Lemmy is set-up, I relish the fact that I can discuss popular topics away from the general populus. In general, I have zero interest in participating in the biggest communities with, what is inevitably the bottom of the barrel posters. So for my peace of mind, I stick to strongly moderated instances and away from the catch-all communities.

That’s not to say those communities don’t have their place. They do! In fact they have a special place in my heart because they filter the bad actors away from me.

And ultimately that’s what makes Lemmy beautiful. That there’s different instances, different crowds and different discussions.

One thing that Blaze said yesterday was that, “people from Reddit say it’s a ghost town.” and I said that doesn’t matter. He felt that we need to rectify that to ensure growth, but at what cost? Becoming Reddit? I don’t want to be Reddit. Even at the software level, Lemmy has tried hard to not be Reddit, hence no karma.

I don’t want Lemmy to sell its soul to attract the very people I don’t want to be around. I’m not saying there’s not room to grow or improve, I’m just saying we have to grow and improve while holding on to our values and having some integrity about it.

  • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    13·
    2 days ago

    Tldr: trying to make this platform attractive for other people, so that we can reach 100k monthly active users, isn’t the same as wanting it to be current Reddit, and is compatible with integrity.

    Hello,

    First of all, thank you for the post, I guess it will have a lot of interesting comments (there are already a few).

    For the context, and if people are interested, here is the thread: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46379504/19337654

    he was chasing Redditors.

    Interesting that you thought that. My objective isn’t definitely to chase current Redditors, but just to have a more diverse crowd. I have friends, they are nice people, it would be nice to have them around. Would they ever consider joining Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed in their current state? Definitely not, and one of the main issues is the lack of activity, and community fragmentation.

    (There are others, such as the more or less intuitive interface, but mobile apps like Voyager kind of solved that).

    People don’t like to shout into the void. Posters definitely not (https://lemmy.zip/post/14347368), and even lurkers are just going to leave if everything they see are three communities on the same topic, each one with 3 posts and no comments.

    I would also like to point out that Reddit used to be everything described in the OP. It was a niche place for tech enthusiasts. But it grew out of that phase, and it was “the best” when all hobbies started to move from their isolated forums to Reddit. You could discover things every day, artists, scientific discoveries, history facts, all in the same place.

    This is what I would like Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed to become. But for that, you there needs to be more people. Better moderation tools. Smaller number of communities, with less strict rules (if the first post people do somewhere gets removed because they have to go to a niche community on the same topic which seems much less active, they’ll just leave and never come back).

    We’ve seen yesterday !WomensStuff@lazysoci.al move to !womensstuff@piefed.blahaj.zone , as Piefed offers additional moderation tools (https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/). There’s some hope, but that also shows that as a platform, we aren’t all perfect. Sure, Reddit is crap, but let’s not ignore that we have our own flaws.

    There is a whole range of people who are not tech enthusiast enough for current Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed, but who would still be valuable people to have here. There’s a spectrum between niche and mass adoption, and we could reach 100k monthly active users that it would still pretty much be the same. People who were around in 2023 when everybody moved from Lemmy to here know what is was like to have 65k monthly active users. A bit more active than today, but not that much.

    That’s pretty much it, see you in the comments.