cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19004972
Let’s be honest, the real reason Lemmy build most of its traffic is because of Reddit users. But the thing is, outside of the mass exodus in the west that too from the PC era… people discover and join Reddit not because it’s another social media like Facebook or Twitter that people need to reserve their usernames on like a brand or celebrity but because Google Search is kinda… actually absolute trash by SEO and machine learning crawlers.
Most of the world (I am from India btw, hello~) join or even discover reddit because they’re trying to search for actual solutions, recommendations, advice or even reviews by actual experienced people without having to go through another YouTuber which can stem from troubleshooting a router, finding an actual FOSS option or seeking immediate solutions to the recent CrowdStrike fiasco for example. After having to visit reddit every time whenever using a search engine including for education to career advice, I ended up directly signing up with reddit a decade ago.
Recently, Reddit even restricted its search results to Google only in a business partnership meaning those using Bing, DuckDuckGo to Ecosia or even SearchGPT wouldn’t be able to access Reddit answers anymore. Say, if someone searches for how to block ads on chrome as example - Solutions like uBlock Origin come into existence and continue to exist because of the combined community in Reddit that Lemmy is trying to preserve.
Unlike others, am not saying Lemmy would be dead but it would be pretty much like Discord-Telegram or Tumblr instead of wiping Reddit or correcting Facebook. Reddit is not something you discover from word-of-mouth or join from peer pressure unlike other social media which is even truer for Lemmy but because it actually helps and is useful to people.
Lemmy can’t be taking the path of 𝕏 (Alone Mask’s Twitter) but any of the good platforms were before the Enshittification with Facebook’s way~
You are assuming the point of this is to be famous rather than non profit niche community driven
Lemmy won’t catch on until there are groups of communities you can ban at once. Sports, Linux, German, pervy anime… It’s a very rare user who will put up with the absolute dreck of the initial feed and manually block communities until they have a feed that’s marginally personalized.
Then there’s the fact that any communities that are specific to peoples interests are completely empty.
On Kagi there’s a fediverse lens (basically a filter)
As many others have already said, Lemmy is fully indexable by search engines. In fact, in this very community there have been posts about Lemmy content being above other results from more prominent sites like Reddit for certain topics.
Even if it’s indexed, there’s no single website to search for so even if I add “Lemmy” to help, it won’t look for content where Lemmy isn’t mentioned.
The mistake that was made was making the decentralization something that affects the front end. If the backend was decentralized and the front end was a single default website with people being able to create alternatives (but everyone being guaranteed access to all the content), that wouldn’t be an issue. We could tell new users “Sign up on Lemmy.com and if you decide you don’t like the UI just choose an alternative and use the same credentials to sign in.” No one would know you’re using a different UI, all content would be searchable by adding site:lemmy.com to your query.
There are MANY reasons that Lemmy won’t replace Reddit…the list is almost endless, with each individual reason not being a hurdle on its own that can’t be solved. However the combined number of problems is just mind blowing.
There is one chief problem that sums up all the little problems quite nicely. It’s the Fediverse culture. It’s somehow a platform that is designed to be open and free, but because of the userbase comes off as a walled garden. If you’re not a programmer, or a linux user, or have techie interests, it’s not the platform for you. And in order to even be comparible to reddit, it has to be a platform for everyone.
As it stands though, Lfmmy is a disjointed, unorganized mess that if you aren’t part of their clique, you’re not welcome. If you say anything bad about linux, or star trek, or github, you get downvoted to hell. Ask me how I know.
Oh, and for the record, linux is ALSO a confusing hot mess for the average person. But until linux developers accept this, and make a linux distro that is as easy to understand as windows, it’s userbase will remain something akin to a rounding error for windows userbase numbers. And I’m saying that as someone who’s remaining on Windows 7, because everything since has been hot garbage.
You’re not gonna get many linux users respecting your opinion on tech if youre such an outlier. Windows 7? Cmon, ya gotta expect to get pushback on this right? Not just Linux nerds either… like Who do you tell this bombshell to and they’re like “yeah ok that’s normal?”
Yeah, I think that’s definitely one of the roadblocks Lemmy is facing at the moment. Even though I deleted my Reddit account after the API nonsense, I’m absolutely still appending every DDG or Startpage search with “reddit.” Especially with the flood of AI-generated garbage filling search results, it’s the easiest way to get quick answers from (probably) real people.
However, that also relates to Reddit’s other advantage, in that it actually has a decade and a half of content to be indexed in the first place. The magic of Reddit is that every question has been asked in every way at least 5 times over, Lemmy just doesn’t have that history yet.
I’d rather Lemmy burn to the ground than become famous, seriously watching AND experiencing twitter, reddit, Facebook, MySpace, my-yearbook, and (does Skype count?). I would like to make Lemmy my forever social media. Only time will tell if it lasts though.
Yeah. Last thing I want is to deal with all the anti-environment, anti-EV pro-extremist right wing toxic-macho shit bots.
Quality, not quantity. With too many people, moderation begins to fail
I really don’t want it to become worthwhile for the Russian troll farms that want every discussion to turn into a shitfest.
I don’t think I’ll ever take off while it’s called Lemmy. It’s just not a word that sounds ‘good’ in my opinion.
It’s not really about the name, people are just too lazy to switch app and they don’t care about the greedy Reddit’s CEO trying to make money in every possible way. Last thing I read about him was his idea to put some subreddits behind a paywall.
I was still using the Reddit app but with some tweaks installed on iOS to block ads, otherwise every app that it’s full of ads it’s just unusable.
I tries to pus lemurs, but no one followed.
I don’t understand the Fedievrse objection to search indexing. Search indexing is the most important piece of what makes the internet.
What? There is no “Fediverse objection” to indexing by search engines. Who told you that? Lemmy is actively being indexed and is showing up when you search for posts.
It does suck, that even within the apps or sites themselves, the search only gives communities.
Like, not being able to search for specific issues, people, or any other topic already posted even within your own instance is my biggest issue with Lemmy not being a sufficient replacement.
Like Reddit was the best place on the internet to go when was stuck with a Linux issue for instance. And rarely even having to post. Just searching the issue would generally get you fixed. Then we could start copying all the invaluable information over here from our communities efforts, and could then be truly free of Reddit once and for all!
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Interesting and well written (cross)post. If you hadn’t said you’re from India, I would have never guessed. The only spelling error I spotted is right at the end where you said Mask and not Musk.
All good though, we’re (almost) all human around here. That’s one of the big reasons that more experienced and educated people are switching towards the fediverse…
Fuck Spez
I don’t know OP’s specific background but english is taught in most of the subcontinent and is the primary language for business and formal matters, so I wouldn’t expect any issues with it
Honestly I haven’t studied foreign languages all that much, but I’ve heard the accents that come from a variety of regions and countries.
The last time I got confused about anything spoken in English by an Indian man, I mistook ‘tiles’ as ‘towels’.
I totally lost out on a tile installation job offer over that, because of a misunderstanding over what’s basically the pronunciation of a particular vowel.
Like, in the back of my head, I’m wondering why this hotel owner is telling me he’s updating his towels, when really he said tiles. He was offering me a job…
I didn’t find out until he got others to do all the work ☹️
Vowels can be extremely important in communication…
I’m from Connecticut and once had a serious problem with a person my company insured from North Carolina. He was talking to me about what caused his accident and I kept hearing “tar” instead of “tire.” We were equally qualified as native speakers.
If you’re concerned, you can listen to more Indian English, because familiarity should ease any understanding difficulties in the future.
I had already spent years doing occasional side work with around a dozen if not more folks originally from India. Most, except the oldest of the elders spoke good if not excellent English. But there’s pretty much always gonna be at least a subtle accent, if not a heavy accent with secondary languages.
I thought I understood the fella clearly, but it was both a combination of his accent plus the strange sentence structure context that threw me totally off.
He said he was ‘updating his tiles’, but I misunderstood his vowels, so I heard ‘updating his towels’
And why the hell would he use the word updating, he was literally having all the carpet removed in 44+ rooms and having tiles installed, not ‘updated’.
So even the context clues didn’t add up, I never guessed he was talking about the tile work he had been planning for months.
Sometimes it’s a second (or fifth) language for Indian people, but it’s also a dialect which is just as valid as your dialect and it’s got the second most English speakers in the world. The accent may just be an accent, you definitely shouldn’t assume that it’s a sign someone will have incorrect English. It sounds like you’re not in practice, but that’s definitely how I read your comments
Twitter has been turned into a dumpster fire and people are still using it because of convenience, the same applies to Reddit.
I left Reddit not just because of the CEO but also because of the awful app they forced their users to use full of ads.
Spez (or one of their admin monkeys) perma-banned me from Reddit after like 7 years, for of all stupid things, posting actual facts about Elon Musk and his Boring Company’s “Not A Flamethrower” contraption.
Wasn’t any hate speech. Wasn’t misinformation, I even posted reference links. Wasn’t anything inappropriate or gory. Just straight up facts.
That was not all that long before Elon bought Xhitter.
Gotta love the irony huh? Fuck Spez and Musk.
Maybe OP is fluent and I’ll give the benefit of the doubt but I’ve also seen many developers specifically from India use Grammarly or ChatGPT to correct their writing. Idk, it’s something to consider.
Indeed, and understandable. Modern AI does tend to do fairly well these days, but obviously no system is ever going to be perfect.
Not even our own ears are perfect. That’s why humans have the sense to ask questions sometimes, like “Hold up, I didn’t understand you, what did you just say?”
And if you check my other comments, you’ll catch an interesting story of mine over the misunderstanding of a simple spoken vowel…
You mean other than “it’s content” in the title?
Meh, true that. Hell, I dunno how to properly cross post on Lemmy, nor do I bother doing that anyways so whatever. 🤷♂️
The only spelling error I spotted is right at the end where you said Mask and not Musk
Pretty sure “Alone Mask” is intentional. It seems to be common to misspell his name on purpose. I’ve seen “Elmo Husk”, “Leon Skum”, etc.
Perhaps 🤷♂️
In case you don’t trust TinyURL, which I totally wouldn’t blame you, that’s a short link to a ~1MB low quality archived version of Elon Musk Eating Toilets…
Lemmy will never take off since the whole federated platform is just too complicated …
…Lenny being a huge propaganda platform for violent extremists and nut jobs doesn’t really help much
After the Reddit API fiasco I came to see if Lemmy could replace it. In day two I think I saw a comment seriously suggesting that we must (and will) kill the rich. No satire, no joke. seriously suggesting that. In Reddit or any civilized platform that would have been an instant bannakd post removal.
After that I’ve noticed pure Hamas and Russian propaganda and a whole lot of what I’ve later learned to be “tankies” ranting (and promoting violence)
Lemmy is a cesspool of scum who would be (or already have been) shunned and banned in any other forum.
I’ve seriously thinking of swallowing my pride and going back to Reddit, where at least the users are decent if the company running it, isn’t.
Lemmy will never take off and will remain a fringe platform. Reading the horrible bullshit posted here, that is a good thing.
if you don’t believe me, see that business with c/vegan.
While I guess what you’re saying is true, I haven’t been confronted with such things during my 1-2 years on Lemmy. It also depends on the communities you subscribe to and political ones are probably more subjected to violence than others.
