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It's time to take advantage of Reddit's decline (mander.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

280 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It's no secret that Lemmy is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Reddit. The issue it faces however is that it's still relatively niche and not many people know about it. I propose that we change this. By contacting the mods of large subreddits and asking them to make and promote relevant Lemmy communities we could substantially increase the amount of people who discover the fediverse. What's more, I don't think this is would be a hard sell considering many mods are already pissed off with Reddit due to their API changes. I believe that this is the time to act, so this is a call to arms, to help grow the fediverse into the future of social media!

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[–] [email protected] 102 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I fully agree with you. And I want to emphasize that the main issue is that if you start advertising Lemmy like OP suggest before it's "fully ready" to give the best experience to this people, they will decide now that lemmy is not for them and after that it's very difficult to make they try again and change their mind.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly the mistake threads just made, trying to capitalize on twitter's rate limiting fiasco. The "general public" is extremely fickle, and Reddit will give us more opportunities.

[–] deweydecibel 8 points 1 year ago

I don't know, I feel like the issue (at least part of it) with Threads wasn't that it needed more time in the oven, but that it was birthed pre-shitified. Remember the steps: good to the users, then good to the advertisers, then good to themselves. Threads basically tried to skip step 1. It felt every bit as manipulative as the Facebook feed, because it effectively was.

It didn't come through feeling like a breath of fresh air from Twitter in any way except (to your point) the lack of rate limiting. But even without that, the mindset and motivation behind Threads makes it dead on arrival. It has nothing to offer except being "not Twitter", and the cold, corporate hand is very evident. Turning off the rate limiting, Twitter got those users back.

The lesson there is you have to have something the entrenched platform doesn't if you want to keep the users. Lemmy is already ahead in that department simply by having 3rd party apps.

[–] deweydecibel 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Should also keep in mind other alternatives have been very, very slowly spreading by word of mouth. None are viable yet (save maybe Tildes if the owner pulls the stick out of their ass), and none are as sizable as Lemmy, but there is competition out there and we should be wary of taking too long. As reddit gets worse, the smaller alternatives will see growth too, and if we don't keep promoting, they may overtake Lemmy as the "main" alternative.

In fact the other sites have the benefit of being centralized platforms. Yes, I said benefit. I know we don't see it that way but we're already here. We're not trying to sell Lemmy to ourselves, we're trying to sell it to redditors that are still on the platform. We have to accept that they're not looking for anything other than population, convenience, and reddit-equivilent features. A simple, centralized platform will look much more attractive to them than Lemmy if we let one catch up to us in size and content.