I’ve been one of the people saying “we don’t need more users. we need quality over quantity” and i was wrong.
the way it’s going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
After trying to convert a friend who heavily uses reddit, multiple times, I recommended him again the other day to leave the hellsite (reddit).
I didn’t recommend Lemmy but have a while back.
He himself specifically brought up that he ‘didn’t vibe with Lemmy as much as reddit’ and that he believes he would ‘miss stories he would otherwise have liked to see’ by switching to Lemmy.
The other main pain point I’ve encountered is the small and niche community problem, which I’m sure we are all aware of - certain information feels like it can only be found on such small subreddits.
Therefore I have two suggestions:
This would struggle due to reddit API and compute power requirements but the subreddits on request and a specific instance for these posts would eliminate the bot spam problem from earlier attempts at the same thing.
The other suggestion would be:
Finally, my biggest gripe with my Lemmy use is the constant instance wars.
I have had my comments removed for being rightfully critical of Israel by lemmy.world mods. They appear intent on recreating the problems of reddit here.
Here’s my Amateur Coder waving the Wand of Coding idea:
What if we had a FOSS browser extension that scraped Reddit passively, uploading everything you see as you browse (except PII like your username and PMs and such) via bot to Lemmy (on a delay so they can’t pinpoint your identity as easily?)
I can’t be the only one who splits their time between Lemmy and Reddit, and would much rather participate here than there, but there’s much less to comment on here.
My favorite subreddit (/r/tampa) recently perma-banned me for extremely petty reasons, but /c/tampa is a ghost town.
That does sound like a decent idea, that way the content being mirrored would be only that that genuine users accessed.
Perhaps immediately mirroring the content as the browser itself reads it, preventing additional requests that could be flagged.
Only issues are:
Though this does answer some issues and have some clear use cases.
Cheers for the suggestion!
The nice part about my idea is that even with those hurdles in mind, I still proposed it knowing that all it would take is one person to happen upon whichever post or subreddit to auto-scrape and get the discussion on Lemmy going.
Let’s be real; 99% of the reason Lemmy is less popular than Reddit is copy+pasting a link, writing your own title, etc. is more effort than 0, therefore the Lemmy-Reddit hybrids like myself don’t bother.
Hell, even the staunchly anti-Reddit Lemmites who could be parasitically “stealing” posts and comments to steal Reddit’s thunder don’t do it. There are other things they’d rather do, evidently.
Now that I think of it, after using the word “scrape,” it could be that Reddit ToS follows most websites’ in that scraping is explicitly forbidden, so displaying the open source code (or even using it) would incur legal action from Reddit.
IIRC the EU released a law a few months ago that forces big internet communication platforms to open their API to third-party clients.
this applied to whatsapp i think, i’m not sure whether it also applies to reddit but it might be worth investigating if somebody has too much time on their hands :P
Reddit would probably sooner just lop off their entire EU userbase than comply.
No offense to Europeans because I love y’all, but you are a drop in the bucket for global (English) internet usage.
I think you would be surprised. Obviously UK (if you include it here) would do some heavy lifting for English-language users in Europe using Reddit, a massive chunk of Europe can communicate perfectly well in English on social media platforms and do - and you wouldn’t know they aren’t American or Anglo unless a topic came up where they would say it, or if you asked them.
To the best of my recollection the last I’ve seen bits of traffic data here and there, it’s large, but not large in comparison to the US and India.
Where does Reddit share data on country of origin for its users?
To moderators. I want to say even to regular users if your comment/post gets enough traction on New Reddit, i.e. hundreds or thousands of views.
Other, similar websites also show such data to those in privileged positions as well. If they’re pretty sure you’re not a bot, they give it freely. Whatever tier above “average user” and especially “a person interested in growing the website out of self-interest” a given website has, it’ll probably be available. I’m sure you can imagine a half dozen that are on the money.
I meant at scale. Yeah I can see who replies to my individual comments or posts based on their country (or VPN) but that doesn’t tell the whole story.
Of course not. That’s why I said “To the best of my recollection the last I’ve seen bits of traffic data here and there, […]”