Fediverse

Maybe Duck-Duck-Go need to have a !bang search modifier for Lemmy. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

Most likely not feasible, because what the bangs do is passing site:domain.com to the search result. As you know, Lemmy does not have a singular domain name so this won't work for it. As a matter of fact, there is a bang for Mastodon, but it only searches the biggest instance, mastodon.social.

I confidently deleted my 33k karma, 12 year old reddit account yesterday. I agree.

I'm happy to see someone say that. Just made my account a minute ago

I don't need Lemmy to compete with or kill Reddit. All I wanted was any one platform to get enough of an influx of users to be self-sustaining even after the outrage started to die down, which appears to have been successful.

It’s a hard habit to break, because we’ve been trained to think this way for years, but try to remember: we don’t need to attract millions of users to be valuable. This isn’t a commercial enterprise. We don’t sell advertising. We don’t measure success by the number of eyeballs we can promise paying customers.

What matters now is the quality of conversation. In fact, that’s the ONLY measure of any consequence. It’s strange, because in the past, someone’s often tried to use services like this as a way to make money, or as a way to make something else they were selling more attractive. We expected it. It was always in the back of our heads. It even got to the point that if a company did something that wasn’t an effort to increase profitability, we criticized them. Generosity, real generosity, was alien to us.

It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that people volunteer their time and money to build and maintain the fediverse, simply because they want us to be able to communicate. That’s it. There’s no hidden agenda. There’s no quest for profit at our expense.

I’m perfectly fine with the fediverse growing slowly. I don’t want it to be strained beyond what the mods can handle. Bigger isn’t necessarily better.

Personally I don’t care if I’m talking to millions of people vs hundreds of thousands as long as there are enough people to make it feel alive and like a community.

On a user-driven platform, not all users are created equal. Lurkers bring little to no value to the platform beyond clicks. There might be a huge engagement difference on a per user basis.

Moreover... I just want my niche communities to be active. We will never have Reddit's archive of content, but we can get to a point where the Lemmy's corpus of knowledge grows to at the same rate as Reddit's. I don't know how many users it'll take to achieve that; 500k? 1m? 2m? 10m? No one knows that number, but to me that is the number to beat.

A lot of them also restrict content. There are disadvantages to joining smaller instances, depending on the philosophy of the person who runs the instance. There's even an instance that does not allow communities to be created on its own instance. It will accept applications from people who wish to create one, but they mostly reject applications on their own whim. I think the future of Lemmy as a Reddit alternative will rely on larger, freer instances to be supported well so they have room for growth and change. I have my personal preferences. I don't want content from exploding-heads, but I also want to see the content I want to see. Some smaller instances are restricting that content, almost seeming to be like cults in the making. There are small instances from which it is impossible to find and subscribe to communities from lemmy.world. You have to search for them on a larger instance, then copy and paste in the address bar in your browser. I imagine on a dedicated phone app that would not be possible. So, you can advocate for "spreading out" all you want. In the end, if the goal is to have a strong alternative to Reddit, spreading out is kind of pointless for a lot of users.

Ummm. I have a friend that has a 2nd NSFW account too.

Why is that?

I'm just looking forward to the meme subreddits becoming less outdated. Feels like 2017 in here