this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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Fediverse
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Reddit seems to be highly algorithmic now, so I think it has more of the “doomscrolling effect” that does accrue a lot of engagement.
Lemmy and Reddit usage are relatively low compared to their respective social media siblings. I've always believed the reason is in the difference in how they're structured. Most other social media is wired around people as the primary structural unit. "Who's saying what?" Reddit and Lemmy are instead wired around topics. "What are people saying about this?" And I assume the difference in popularity is evidence for how most people themselves are wired.
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In my view, people go to the areas where good content is happening, not different communications architecture.
I think its okay the way it is. Too much attention leads to many reposts, karma farmers, bots, now AI bullshit etc.
I think it's too empty a lot of times. Mainstream topics are nicely populated but a vast amount of specific communities are just one person posting links over and over with a handful of upvotes and zero comments. Sometimes I see posts here and have to go to Reddit to see what the community thinks about it, because on Lemmy the post is completely dead.
I say this in all of these threads: more users does not mean a better experience.
Instead, focus on making our communities the best they can be.
I think that’s only true after a certain amount of users.
I joined Lemmy a couple of years ago and I already notice more user engagement. I would like a little bit more, such that more niche communities can have an ecosystem of posters instead of a single one doing most posts. But not much more indeed
Social networks live and die by network effects. People don't use Instagram because it's the best. They use Instagram because that is where their friends are. Either everybody uses a site, or nobody does.
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If you are just a basic prole who wants to use a forum and discuss today's issues, Lemmy seems to be a smaller version Reddit. How does it stand out?
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The name is awful. Twitter grew regardless of the name, so maybe this point is dumb. Also, avatar looks like a rat.
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Rainbow. If you want more users, expand your market. Rainbow in USA means Democrat LGB. Would you like more Christians and Muslims to join? Hindu?
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I'm a moron, not a programmer... but wouldn't a lot more users destroy Lemmy? From my reading of what other smarter people have said, too much growth would lead to exponential costs and isn't really feasible. I am not well read on this topic, so apologies.
I would guess that the founders made these design decisions to exclude normies, maybe that's also why they picked the name and selected the rat icon. In which case, everything is working as designed and all is well.
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sue 2: Users could agree on one community. Or (a functionality Lemmy doesn't have), similar communities could be grouped or linked together. Instead of choosing between Linux@lemmy.ml and Linux@lemmy.world, users could follow a combined “Linux” topic.
Doesn't PieFed do exactly that?
Yes, and it consolidates comments from cross-posts. Very neat.
Its very cool.
Personally I'm not a fan. Imagine if /r/games and /r/gaming on reddit shared comment sections. That'd be a complete mess.
Different communities should be allowed to nurture their own culture.
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I don't use Mastodon or Twitter either. I never understood following specific people and prefer following topics instead.
I don't generally like the Twitter model and rarely use it, but I will say that one thing that it does do well, better than the Reddit/Threadiverse model, is very rapidly assembling information about a specific, temporary topic.
Like, the Reddit model is about letting a community assemble over time and letting people find their way there and moderators be chosen and all that. That works quite well for a lot of things, and lets people with expertise in the field arise and all that.
But let's say that there's a huge natural disaster and people are putting up video clips from their cell phones and stuff like that. They can coalesce around a hashtag or a couple of hashtags pretty quickly. Relevant material from people who have had no contact with each other and maybe no time to assemble a community or anything gets drawn together. Other users retweeting content help highlight it. The topic probably won't be active for long. It can be really useful for a rapid setup and teardown scenario.
Of course, that's really mostly following a hashtag, rather than a particular user...
I also dislike the "short comment" model that Twitter uses (though over the years, the comment length has been increased and workarounds added), but one thing that it does help with is to help deal with inexperienced users unfamiliar with quoting etiquette. In email or in traditional forum systems, it's conventional to quote a bit of relevant text before responding to it. This requires knowing syntax for doing so and when it's appropriate. Twitter deals with that by forcing everything to be broken up into bite-size chunks as a property of the system, so someone responding to something is forced to respond to only the relevant bit. I think that that probably helps make Twitter more-approachable.
following people is nice if you know these people personally, like from real life.
Mastodon allows you to follow hashtags, which would be like following a topic.
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I have to be that guy and point out that the Threadiverse isn't just Lemmy, and microblog-Fedi isn't just Mastodon.
I would say Lemmy has bern growing more rhan pifed. Lemmy is still "new" compared to Reddit. A lot of users like the Reddit UI compared to Lemmy's barebones (like on Voyager).
The UX still has a long way to go.
I'm very tolerant of shitty tech and like a struggle, and even I am often like wtf.
Signed up to piefed.zip the other day, and the default feed is just horrendous
Most users will just quit instead of trying to figure out how to fix it manually.
No proper onboarding
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Finding communities can be confusing: There can be multiple communities about the same topic on different servers: For example: Linux@lemmy.ml and Linux@lemmy.world
I agree that finding communities can be confusing, but I don't think the problem is the naming.
For example on Reddit if you wanted to talk about video games you'd look at /r/gaming. However over time, since that was a "default sub", it became a bit of a mess and instead /r/Games was the community to have real discussion about video games. But of course over time that too became a bit of a mess and /r/TrueGaming was the best place to talk about video games. In fact for a long time /r/True was a common way to find the better community.
Of course the name of a community might be confusing to an outsider. On Reddit if I'm a fan of Game of Thrones there is /r/GameOfThrones, but what if I'm looking for something a bit more meme worthy, well that's /r/freefolk.
And that's true even on Lemmy. What if I want Star Trek memes? Well that's !tenforward@lemmy.world
I think discoverability is something that can be improved. Of course at the moment so many communities are so small, so looking at all of them isn't really much of a problem. You can usually find what you're looking for.
Reddit has like 8 different Dragon Ball communities lol, and 3 for the show "From"
but still something that could be improved in Lemmy, to have an advantage over Reddit
Because it's a carbon copy of reddit and it replicates all of its problems in miniature. Also because everyone in here is extremely exclusionary and hateful of anyone who isn't wholesome 100. Also because it's decentralized but not peer to peer, which means that it's basically feudalism.
I mean the sad explanation is that they simply don't care. They'll complain all the livelong day about the problems but they'll never leave. That much was clear after they killed the API and everyone protested for a whopping 2 days.
And yet here we are 3 years later, still protesting.
The real answer, that we all know but dare not speak, is that it's miserable here.
Once you've blocked the tankies, porn, and militant dweebs, it's wall to wall politics and titty memes.
I'm here because I'm also a miserable asshole.
That's terrible! Outrageous! Where can I find these titty memes so I can block them?
It’s been a thing on !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world for the past days or two..
… but it’s more meme than titty.
to block all the politics communities should be an option at sign-up, or better yet, even when you browse without being signed in.
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Reddit started out small too, you know when it was actually good.
Since a few weeks I actively post lots of news in several mostly already existing communities. But it is frustrating. I do not see much user growth. If it just would be 1-2 new users per week I'd be happy...
I tried to post regularly in a few existing community. View were up, engagement null. I didn't knew what to do either.
The grouping is something that should have been solved long ago. Also removing/merging duplicate posts in the feed, it's crazy it doesn't do this yet.
Also removing/merging duplicate posts in the feed, it's crazy it doesn't do this yet.
This does exist in the default Lemmy UI, it's just a bit inconsistent. Also it's hard to notice when it is working, for obvious reasons lol.
I don't like the title cause there's a decently sized userbase here, but the article is good. If the article was something like "Why don't more people use Lemmy?" then I would share this on Reddit, but as-is most people will just read the headline and skip it.