this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).

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Recently we've seen a spike in PieFed users, a lot of this came form raising awareness of PieFed's existence on Reddit.

Here's some info you'd need if you want to help raise awareness of PieFed on reddit.

Reddit uses AI to make a summary of a users behavior that it shows to mods, and will flag people who seem spammy eg.
image

Steps to make a successful reddit post:

  1. Don’t have a sus account
  2. Make it a image post with a nice catching image (Most important)
  3. Don’t include any links away from reddit in the post, don’t even add it to the comments (have others do that)

Sucesfull posts examples:

  1. https://piefed.social/c/fedibridge/p/1711535/post-with-5k-views-in-1h-promoting-the-fediverse
  2. https://piefed.social/c/fedibridge/p/1727090/post-promoting-the-fedrivers-on-r-degoogle-on-globalswitchday
  3. https://piefed.social/c/fedigrow/p/1720677/post-mentioning-piefed-ca-in-r-buycanadian

These 3 posts got ~500,000 views between them

  • Don't go and spam reddit with low effort content. It can do more harm than good.
  • Don't post to the same sub more than once a month
  • Don't post links in the comments of your own post unless it's already gone viral, instead let others post links or let people figure it out for themselves.

I've tried to promote Lemmy in the past, but Immediately I get comments of people complaining about the UI, UX and tankies which kills all momentum. I've had much better success with PieFed so sticking to that going forward.

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[–] Twoafros@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Your post should have more upvotes! Thanks for testing and sharing the information. I'm going to try it, I don't have a reddit account anymore, so I would fail on step one (don't have a sus account) but I think the general idea is replaceable for getting people to join fedi from any other site

[–] Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 2 points 4 hours ago

You can try without having step 1 in place, but you might get picked up by reddit's filters.

If you have a brand new account you often can't post in most subs or will get flagged for Advertising etc.

[–] Fizz@lemmy.nz 49 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Well done on gaining that much traction. Its pretty hard to get people to actually leave site and look at the alternatives. Also that AI summary is so depressing, reddit is really going to boil and entire person down to a sentence.

[–] Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 30 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Here are some more examples, it's quite interesting

image image image image

[–] MrNobody@quokk.au 26 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Oh boy, I did not know reddit had gotten that bad.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

they have been aggressively upping thier AI/detection og botters and spammers recently. basically people were using anti-detect browsers and mobile proxies on different mobile phones to evade reddits detection temporarily to use hordes of accounts at once. reddit however is going to lowest hanging fruit, it barely makes a dent in the propaganda bots, but target the ones that drives businesses to thier own website.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Why is that one about the WarEra user green?

[–] Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

It's a different subreddit, they set the theme to green

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Are these only visible for users that made comments in the modded subreddit? I wonder if I can make it show a summary for my own account, since I've gotten some weird limitations lately-ish.

Only visible if someone makes a comment in a sub that you mod.

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[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 11 points 4 days ago
[–] Nemo@slrpnk.net 20 points 5 days ago (1 children)

look I like bumping the fediverse as much as the next person but not enough to make an image post for textual content

I have some ethical standards

[–] Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 6 points 5 days ago (2 children)

What's unethical about it?

[–] calcopiritus@lemmy.world 19 points 4 days ago (3 children)

It's a hyperbole. It's not unethical. But many people don't like it/hate it.

  1. An image is just more expensive than text. Text is usually ~1 byte per character. An uncompressed image is ~3bytes per pixel. Of course, most images are compressed, and compression does a lot of heavy lifting. But still. Also, you don't need to uncompress plain text. More amount of bytes means more storage expense, more network expense, and worse user experience due to latency.
  2. We have plenty of tools that work for text. You can copy-paste it. You can easily edit it with just a keyboard. It is easily configurable via fonts and font sizes.
  3. Accessibility: text can be read by screen readers. Images (without alt text) cannot. Maybe there are some fancy screen readers that OCR images, but then it's the case of point 1.
  4. Text is easily indexable. Which means that it's searchable. If the reddit search tool were any good, it could find the post. Not for images. Alternatively, 3rd party search tools such as google and DDG work.

There's probably many more points.

[–] Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The post will get ZERO traction if it's not a image post, I've tried.

Did you read what my post was about?

[–] calcopiritus@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I'm not saying that you shouldn't do what you do. You just asked why someone would be against doing an image post when it could be a text post and I answered.

What you are doing cannot be done with text posts because of reason 2 and 3.

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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 5 points 4 days ago

To be clear, Ek is talking about posting image posts on Reddit who allow video uploads. I don't think this is a problem there. Moreover, the infographics are more successful at getting attention than just plain-text comment-posts. It is what it is.

[–] elephantium@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Also, you don’t need to uncompress plain text.

Content-Encoding: gzip would like a word. :P

Agreed on all points other than that nitpick

[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 4 days ago

Just cringe for us oldheads

[–] toothpaste_sandwich@thebrainbin.org 21 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Wow, the atmosphere really is much more negative on Reddit these days, huh. Lots of "Ew no one uses that, don't bother."

Still—sounds like starter packs for Lemmy/Piefed would be useful. Is anyone working on those?

[–] sneakypersimmon@lemmy.today 5 points 4 days ago

There were starter packs when I made an account on Lemmy.today

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

Afaiu some instances or apps have ‘starter packs’.

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 13 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Sometimes I wonder if they haven't moved over by now, do we really want them? The users I see at Reddit these days are not the sharpest tools in the shed.

[–] Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 35 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (19 children)

The might not be the brightest tools in the shed, but we also don't want the fediverse to be just filled with a bunch of rocket surgeons, we want people from all over creating their own communities etc.

I'm not a fan of gatekeeping decentralized alternatives because people aren't "smart" enough. I don't think people don't switch because they are stupid, but instead because PieFed doesn't yet offer what they need in a replacement.

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Be careful what you wish for: Reddit admins turned VOAT into a right-wing cesspool overnight by banning a few repungent subreddits. They all jumped ship for VOAT, and polluted the community. Of course, this was probably all planned to get rid of an upstart competitor.

[–] elephantium@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago

I heard about voat back in the day and thought "Oh, cool, like reddit without some of the overbearing crap from the admins".

Then I went to voat and read a few posts.

Well, shit. I didn't want to be on a nazi site. So much for that.

I'm pretty sure the Voat admins wanted Voat to be right wing.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 days ago

Are there any equivalent quarantine subs that would have a similar effect on the threadiverse? Right-wing people in particular seem to be convinced it is not what they are looking for, fortunately, judging from comments I saw when I browsed r/RedditAlternatives.

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[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 points 4 days ago

most are likely bots.

[–] mustlovehuskies@lemmy.today 2 points 4 days ago

Reddit hasn’t been an open place for intelligent discussion in ages, it’s slop to draw in the morons plus propaganda to control their ideology. No one with a brain takes a redditor seriously… So yeah, the remaining people/fleshbots can stay there.

[–] Paranoidfactoid@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago

Nice info but I have given up on Reddit.

[–] raman_klogius@ani.social 8 points 5 days ago

Keep on fighting the good fight. 💪

[–] Bazell@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It seems that I have left in time to not catch an AI summary about myself. XD

[–] celticviking@lemmy.today 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

It seems that I have left in time to not catch an AI summary about myself. XD

Don't be too excited. That's been done on here at Lemmy too. I think it was called santabot (on slrpnk instance I think), and it would ban/unban you from some guys community purely based on your upvote/downvote ratio even if you had never heard of his community, without any other input. The mod log was filled with "xxxx banned. xxxx unbanned. xxx banned, etc."

It was controversial, and some called him out on it, but others thought he was doing awesome with it. He mentioned that he was almost done working out the kinks in it and would be offering it to other mods to use.

He's no longer around now, but I was surprised the admins let him keep using that bot the entire time he was here.

[–] Bazell@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Well, there is a difference between having a situation, where some comunities do use automation tools to ban/unban and where the whole platform uses them.

[–] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 4 points 4 days ago

Evangelising the Fediverse on Reddit is not for me, but respect to anyone who does try that (I save my evangelising for my irl folk. I'm wearing them down)

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