Every time reddit announces something dumb I open Lemmy again. I'd rather be here on principle but the content/users just aren't here yet. Where are the cross post bots?
I was never much of an /r/all user, it's always been niche communities for me. I feel like almost all of my niches have content here now (if not quite as much engagement as I'd like). !retrogaming@lemmy.world in particular has exploded with activity lately and arguably can now serve as a full replacement for its subreddit counterpart.
Thing is, when I try to bring people on Lemmy, it's always "why?" and if I make it that far, "how?" With the how, I've been using the analogy of signing up for email, though it's still not as smooth as it could be. Eyes glaze over when anyone starts asking me about how the Fediverse in general works.
The why is harder. I don't know how much user bleed-over niche Reddit got from /r/all users but I'm guessing it wasn't a trivial amount. I'm sure a lot of Reddit's growth was owed to AMAs, so it's possible Lemmy might need something flashy to draw in users who will then filter into communities waiting for them. Some sort of content unique to the platform. I do think before we get there we need a friendlier way to help new people find communities they may have interest in.
when I try to bring people on Lemmy, it's always "why?" and if I make it that far, "how?" With the how, I've been using the analogy of signing up for email, though it's still not as smooth as it could be.
You don't have to bother with that. Just send them to a single instance to sign up. Stable, general-purpose instances like lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, or lemmy.zip are good recommendations. You don't really need to understand the details of how federation works to start using Lemmy. They can learn as they go.
Thanks for your service. I'm more of a lurker, though I tend to comment more here than on Reddit, and I have so many other things filling my life that I have to tend to. This is just a distraction before bed or filling a dull moment.
That's what I'm doing. I got 2 subs that I frequented on Reddit I'm running, one is a sports one with discussions for the events, and it's literally just me putting commentary into it. But that's what I loved about the Reddit sports subs, so I'll at least have it for when people come here.
Thank you for your service. I have little interest in sports, but love to see Lemmy growth in general. We need a diversity of communities here, not just Linux memes :)
https://lemmit.online/ can be used to crosspost content from Reddit, but you won't get much comments as people tend to prefer content curated by humans
It's only impractical for a small userbase. As the userbase grows, the amount of posts each user needs to contribute in order to maintain an active community drops to a realistic level.
Out of curiosity, what content are you looking for? Discovery on Lemmy can be a problem, but sometimes the communities are there and even active, just buried.
But may I also suggest searching by Top Day/12-hour/6-hour to see the most active posts. Lemmy's scaled algorithm still doesn't get it quite right IMO.
Scaled is intentionally promoting communities with fewer subscribers. It's intentionally demoting the most active posts bt demoting any posts from the communities with more subscribers.
Scaled is amazing for the Subscribed feed, because I'm (obviously) interested in the small communities that I'm subscribed to. But it's not quite the same when browsing All or Local. Usually I do stick to Subscribed though.
Just.. content. I open my Lemmy app once and I've seen everything it will show me for the day, or sometimes for multiple days. I open reddit and I can scroll for hours.
If all you want is "content" you can browse Lemmy by /all, sort by new, and also scroll for hours. That isn't how I use Lemmy (or Reddit) though, and it's not how I would recommend using it.
I open my Lemmy app once and I've seen everything it will show me for the day, or sometimes for multiple days.
I almost exclusively browse by subscribed. When I first came to Lemmy, I kept subscribing to communities until I had too much content in my subscribed feed to keep up with. Over time, I've gradually unsubscribed to communities I'm only tangentially interested in, as communities for my main interests have grown.
Do you think an approach like this would work for you?
No. I already sort by all, and new is generally too low quality and frankly still too slow. I also switch to all on Reddit once I've skimmed over the first couple pages of my feed