Anything that gets that big turns into a shithole. Enshitification will find a way. So just don't.
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Asklemmy
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Enshittification is a symptom of capitalism at work. Over time products are laser-focused to be as profitable as possible. Scale isn't the issue, capitalism is.
The catholic church has entered the chat.
Religion is a superstructural element molded by the mode of production and utilized to reinforce it.
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Just look at every single big subreddit lmao. The only way to use that site is to leave every single default and join smaller communities.
I agree somewhat in the context of centralization. But the spread of the fediverse is a good thing. If Lemmy grows, alongside decentralization, then it should stay true to its roots.
- Be friendly to other Lemmites. Encourage them to post and comment.
- Post and comment whenever you can.
- If you have niche hobbies or interests, try posting about them into an appropriate community.
Social networks and message boards get more popular as they get more users. Bring friendly and posting regularly should help us maintain the user base.
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I personally enjoy that Lemmy isn't as popular as Reddit. It feels more home-grown and friendly because it's not as large. That being said, contributing to and engaging with the content you enjoy is a good start. Finding a niche here can be great and there are tons of interesting communities to contribute to!
Porn.
Like any type of media, you win by getting porn on your side. Bring the NSFW content creators over and everyone else will follow.
There's a whole instance dedicated to porn, isn't there? At least there used to be, is it still live? My instance is defederared from it so idk.
Yeah the porn here is kinda lacking.
lemmynsfw dot com is a whole instance dedicated to that
you'll thank me later
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only time and reddit can do that.
Banned my 8 year old account for spam. God damn the account was not even active for 4 months why did you ban it reddit? And no replies from mods either. I liked reddit but lemmy is nice too and niche!
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Network effects are quite difficult to overcome. Lemmy’s largest influxes of users have been when Reddit does something unpopular enough to warrant people looking for other places. Same was true when Reddit became popular because Digg made bad decisions, or Facebook when MySpace did.
The answer is that Lemmy almost assuredly will never be as popular, but at least its future is not dictated by the profits of a company, or censorship imposed by or on that company.
The best we can do is make Lemmy a viable alternative (it is) and ensure it is of a high quality.
There's admittedly some things I miss from Reddit like bigger niche communities, but I would never want this to get as popular as reddit, because then you'll end up just getting the same problems as reddit down the road and we'll all have to migrate again. And who wants that?
If we could somehow keep the bigger Communities the same size they are now, while growing niche Communities, that would be ideal. It's logically impossible though.
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Why would we want to do that? Please don't.
Why would we want to do that?
So that we can discuss more niche hobbies with other people who love that hobby.
if you build it they will come
Factually untrue. There just aren't enough people interested in certain topics who are regular users of Lemmy & Piefed to have those communities be thriving.
There only thing Reddit has over Lemmy is their awesome niche subreddits. Outside of that they have nothing and being more like Reddit is not something we want. With attention comes heavier moderation.
I would say it’s slightly more than this: The vast majority of Lemmy is comprised of only a few things—politics, tech, memes—and it’s hard to find discussions or opinions about almost everything else. The main value of reddit to me is (was?) that you could find a lot of input from people involved in a wide variety of fields, from niche hobbies to more generic areas of interest like history, philosophy, or medicine.
I’ve actually found that there are people on Lemmy with similar levels of expertise, and they’re willing to share it just as well, but they have fewer opportunities to do so, because very few threads get posted outside the 3 main topics. Several times I’ve come across useful and interesting insight, but it was in the comments of posts only vaguely related, so it would have been difficult to find intentionally if I hadn’t run into it.
So, perhaps, this is what could improve Lemmy: starting more discussions about different topics. Perhaps this will attract more people to read them, which might attract more people to post.
+1
Reddit can keep all the gigasubs. Let the niche fandoms trickle over here…
There only thing Reddit has over Lemmy is their awesome niche subreddits I mean, to me at least that's 99% of the point of a platform like this?
But why ?
Why?
I'd say concentrate on quality over quantity.
Exactly. I sort through the top 6 hours or top daily. There’s not a lot of posts, but they are all high quality ones.
Reddit is the opposite. I have to go through trash to reach a few good posts. Bigger =/ better
Keep the light alive as Reddit further enshittifies
money
One thing desperately needed is a method for mods/admins to check for brigading behaviour. This place (the threadiverse, not this community specifically) is crawling with more reactionary toxicity than almost anywhere I've ever seen, but it's mostly cowardly ignorant people silently hammering the downvote button rather than saying out loud the thing that would get them insta-banned.
Also real blocks are needed - all we have right now is a glorified 'mute'. If I block an asshole, not only is it because I don't want to see their BS, but I also don't want them to be able to see my posts & comments, at least not from that account.
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I understand the motive, I too am on some niche communities that sometimes didn't have posts for months. For that i use reddit (but the old interface). Now let's see your question.
No, we can't make lemmy as popular as reddit, but we can turn lemmy into a reddit twin, and make it popular, by pushing only one instance like .world.
The social media that popularised fediverse the most was mastodon, and yet it's because they pushed mastodon.social as the default, making a large part of the userbase think that mastodon is only mastodon.social.
People do not even notice things more complicated than buttons "join", "login", or "post". They are lost on join-lemmy.org because they don't know why they should choose a server, read description, understand whatever is federation, and they'll prefer going back to their comfort zone.
But hey, social media experience enshittifies as the userbase gets bigger, and i came here by fleeing reddit so please don't
People do not even notice things more complicated than buttons “join”, “login”, or “post”. They are lost on join-lemmy.org because >they don’t know why they should choose a server, read description, understand whatever is federation, and they’ll prefer going back >to their comfort zone.
Agree on this 100%. When I first found Lemmy I had no idea what instance to join, why it matter, or.. why it really didn't matter all that much.. It was just confusing.. and the first instance I joined ended up closing.. which was less than an ideal experience as it was without notice and the instance just disappeared. Took me days to even find out why they had closed. Then took me several more days to find the next instance to join.
Federation is both a weakness and a strength in that there may be people who get turned off by that initial complexity.
Then, some people who join may see low volumes on communities they care about and end up not joining.
Ooooh, no thank you.
Have you seen that place? Gives me the icks.
I would rather not. Lemmy is not Reddit.
I don't think the majority of people here would be happy if that happened.
Why do people always go for Reddit as this comparison? It's not even the most popular social media. Is it because the question "How can we make Lemmy as popular as Facebook" makes it clear why that isn't something the users would want?
I imagine it's because Reddit is closer to the format of Lemmy and it's something we're more familiar with. I also wouldn't have known that Facebook was more popular because it's not something that anyone in my circle uses, but a lot of them use Reddit.
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lemmy is better than reddit, popularity will ruin it.
we dont.
Keep bringing it up on Reddit.
When I'm on Reddit, which is only if I fully exhaust myself on Lemmy that day, and I see someone complaining about Reddit, I make a point to let them know about Lemmy.
Our goal is to make Lemmy the best place it can be. Whether that recreates another platform or not