this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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What is holding lemmy back? I use it almost exclusively for months and find it to be a great replacement.
I think the main thing holding it back is the lack of active niche communities.
This is the big thing. There are multiple niche, and not-so-niche, subreddits that just don't exist here. Or they have nowhere near the presence as on Reddit.
Don't get me wrong, I'm trying to fix that by contributing where I can, but I am just one person.
Yeah a lot of people here pretend like Lemmy and as a side thing Linux are these massive things poised to take over the world but realistically they're just a minority thing that isn't changing much at all.
Will take a new competitor doing something completely different to really stir things up to make moving away from traditional options worthwhile.
Your assessment of Linux is bad. So bad. Laughably bad. Hilariously bad. Ask anybody who works on servers whether or not Linux is "a minority thing that hasn't changed much at all".
It depends upon who are you are, doesn't it? For me, Lemmy hasn't become a total replacement for reddit, but it's replaced it about 90% I would say. The only time I spend on reddit is for those niche communities, and a lot of people don't have those niche communities.
Linux has its uses yes.
Posters here act like the everyday consumer gives a fuck about it though, and they don't. Great for servers, garbage for consumers.
And I'm sure lemmy can be used to replace reddit for most things, but again - the majority of everyday people won't because it's convoluted and not as good for their needs.
They will get created and grow
Lemmy has relatively poor automation and moderation tools compared to Reddit. There is no automatic moderator, for example, and you also don't have usability tools and things that other people have coded, unlike if you were to use Reddit today, or some years ago in its heyday. Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world because the tools at the time meant that anyone can sign up at
.world, and post to beehaw, bypassing their registration restrictions.Federation can also be a bit of a headache to get around if you're a layman. Do you need to go to all of the instances, or risk losing out on content that is hosted on other places? How do you sign up to it, etc. It's a good bit more complicated, and less intuitive compared to a centralised service like Reddit.
The user base also isn't big enough. Lemmy doesn't quite have the critical mass of users to make it into the mainstream, and put it in more direct competition with a place like Reddit. Even busy communities are really quiet compared to a relatively active thread. This community is arguably only as active as it seems to be because of the bot posts.
Finally, Lemmy is still pretty young, and has a fair few teething issues. It wasn't all that long ago that servers that updated to 0.18 couldn't see any posts from older servers, because they didn't Federate properly, and not all that long before that where Lemmy's UI had some serious glitches, such as by seeming to signing you in as someone else's account. People might want something that's a bit more stable, rather than moving over for sure.
It's probably part of why a fair few Subreddits moved to Discord, since it doesn't have a few of those issues, and is relatively mature.
For me it's the lack of interesting communities to browse. Everything active seems to be about, Linux, programming, politics, Star Trek or anime. Some midtier memes. That's basically a list of subreddits I had blocked on reddit. And it's all that exists here.
Edit: I just counted. I'm subscribed to 179 communities. In the first 50 posts on my subscribed feed (basically 2 days worth of content), there are 7 communities featured. The first post that does not mention above topics and isn't a meme is post no 15. In total, there are 4 posts in the first 50 posts that do not mention any of those topics. 2 of those are interesting to me. That's just not a good enough ratio.
The far left view of the community and Linux lovin showing up in nearly all of the threads.