I think most of us agree that the main problem which Lemmy has today is its lack of users. This is not for technical reasons, as we know it is quite stable and usable. The main cause is that the project is not widely known yet. In this post I will propose what we can do to change that.
First, lets clarify why we should promote Lemmy. Clearly there are many different reasons, and every person prioritizes them differently. So I will just give some common examples:
- Promote open source (and all the benefits that entails)
- No advertising or tracking
- Allow communities to manage themselves, instead of being controlled by corporations
- Making Lemmy more active, particularly if you would like to see more discussions on certain topics
So how can we promote Lemmy?
I think one of the most effective thing we can do at this point is to post about Lemmy in other communities where we are active. This has the benefit that other people already trust us to some degree. Open source projects looking to setup a forum might also be a good target. When doing this, we should consider which aspects of the project would be most important to the target audience, and emphasize those.
Another option is to contact bloggers, video creators, podcasters or others, and suggest that they report about Lemmy. As above, it is important to adjust the message to the target audience. Because Lemmy is quite small, it is unlikely that major tech magazines or professional content creators would care about it. Instead we should focus on smaller creators. This will also lead to more sustainable growth, and give us some legitimacy in the eyes of bigger creators.
In both cases, we should avoid doing anything that might be perceived as spam. It is better to create one or two high-quality messages, which will give a good impression of the project, rather than a dozen generic ones that tarnish the reputation.
It is worth noting that some important features are still missing in Lemmy, particularly mod tools (we are going to implement them in the next ~12 months). There also aren’t many different instances yet.
When promoting Lemmy like this, please avoid linking to lemmy.ml directly. This instance is already too big relative to other instances, and it is not meant to be a “flagship instance” (What is lemmy.ml?). Instead you should try to find an appropriate instance on join-lemmy.org and link to it, or link to the joinlemmy site directly. You can also explicitly encourage the creation of new instances.
On a side note, it might be worth mentioning the many ways that people can contribute to Lemmy (again depending on the audience). There are the obvious ones, like writing code for lemmy and lemmy-ui, writing documentation or translating. There are also multiple interesting options to create new projects, such as:
- Create an alternative frontend: nojs frontend like lemmy-lite, a traditional forum frontend or something like stackoverflow
- Create a new client, be it for mobile, desktop or terminal.
- Gather instance statistics using lemmy-stats-crawler, and build some nice graphs.
By the way, Lemmy is not just a Reddit alternative, so there is no reason to limit the promotion to Reddit.
To help with these promotion efforts, @dessalines and I would be happy to give interviews via email (in English, German or Spanish). For that, they can get in touch by mailing contact@lemmy.ml.
It would be great if you could do an interview or contact Henry from Techlore. The Techlore audience is focused more towards privacy and open source software.
I have never heard about that site so I wouldnt know what to tell them if I contacted them. It would make more sense if you contacted them, explained a bit what Lemmy is and why they should care about it. If they are interested, you can get us in touch with them.
I will see if I can get in touch with them. By the way, Techlore is a youtube/peertube channel and not really a news site. But they do have a website. Official website https://techlore.tech
Channel: https://tube.privacytools.io/video-channels/techlore_channel/videos
Thx for making this post, and you’re right that we could definitely focus on doing interviews: that was one of the things that made mastodon blow up in its early stages.
Besides the things you mentioned, the only other thing I can think of that would help adoption, is more / better mobile apps. Lemmur and Remmel need more development, but I’m convinced that one of the reasons for the popularity of a lot of social media platforms, is having a good mobile app ecosystem.
Yeah, mobile apps are definitely something that should be invested on. Lemmur uses Flutter and so it runs really badly on my devices (I haven’t had a single Flutter app run well) and the UI is a bit meh. I’d love to have a Slide-like application for Lemmy :)
Same. My dream would be to have a lemmy android app using jetpack and kotlin. I’d like to do this myself but I have too many other priorities, and I’d have to learn jetpack.
Yup yup, that would be great! I’ve used Kotlin quite a lot but never in Android, but there’s always a time to learn stuff. If someone were to kickstart it and maintain it I’d probably contribute :P
How about opening onion services of lemmy to get users from Tor network?
Yes it would be interesting to if there was a Lemmy instance available over onion service. But there is no reason why we devs should be the ones to set that up.
That would definitely be great, but I think something that may be problematic is the fact that one needs JS to use Lemmy, since many who use Tor are not really fond of JS. (at least I think it needs JS, since I tried deactivating JS on an instance and it told me it needs JS for actions)
DON’T CALL “Tor” AS Tor Browser! Tor, a standalone software to provide onion services, is independent of JavaScript or something web technology!!! …I was excited too much, so sorry. ;D
It’s worth for me to enable Javascript on lemmy in order to enjoy its UI though I want to disable Javascript on all sites. Lemmy’s UI – chat sort, compact reply look, preview toggle, and auto adding new comments by different color – is good for me.
Btw I use uMatrix to turn ON/OFF JavaScript with Tor Browser.Pardon me. I obviously meant Tor browser and I am aware that «Tor» and «Tor browser» are two different things. I devoured the word «Browser» for the same reason some people say «Photo» rather than «Photograph», but in this case, it had the disadvantage of adding ambiguity, context needing to be taken into account to discern the real meaning.
Running JavaScript when using Tor is a big risk, independently of the software client you use to browse websites you access through Tor.
The problem is not merely that Tor Browser disables it by default, there are reasons inherent to Tor and JavaScript that it is that way.
Hey, don’t frighten me so. How can I enjoy lemmy from now? :D
How do other fediverse services work over onion addresses?
We can add onion addresses for any lemmy instance while it runs with its clearnet address. Onion services won’t impede the other fediverse services in theory.
Federation could still go over clearnet, while it only serves the frontend via tor.
I did do a video about Lemmy at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5axSUJj0bBY intended as a “what is it about if I’m considering it”
It is an important topic for sure.
What many successful projects had in common is a sort of go to market strategy, that is based on defining of an initial group of users (that already use a product) that could be replicated many times. For ex facebook and colleges, snapchat and schools, slack and startups etc.
As for proposal to share an info about lemmy to different social platforms or contact influencers, I doubt it could work well. Of course there is an example of mastodon, that became popular bc of mass coverage by world top tech media in 2016, but I really don’t know a reason for that and how to replicate such buzz.
In my eyes, more natural way to promote lemmy is to replicate audience that have already demonstrated an interest in lemmy. For ex we can see a lot of leftists here, so we just can go country by country, city by city and invite local leftists to create their own instance and invite their crowd. Or if you consider leftists as typical community with shared interests, we can try to get in touch with other communities (community by community) from fishers to ham radio fans and still invite them to launch their own instance.
Gotta think about target audience. Which people are the most likely to want to use Lemmy in its current state? In my view, these are other fediverse users who have not heard of lemmy. These folks already understand how decentralized social media works and have already committed to it. They are the easiest sell to using this platform.
Outside of that audience, it would be hard to convince people to use lemmy. Lemmy doesn’t have a critical mass of users to generate enough interesting new content. So when you try to get “normies” to use this platform, they have multiple obstacles to deal with. They have to figure out what the fediverse is and how it works, and they have to be patient with the current content shortage. You may reach a few people who check out lemmy, but a small fraction will be retained. But if you go to people on platforms like Mastodon and Peertube, a larger share of the people will stay on.
Beyond this, another idea I had was to use influencers. Particularly influencers who have shared about the fediverse before. For example, Shonalika and Non-Compete on YouTube have previously made videos on the Fediverse, and have shared their accounts on there for their viewers to follow. Finding, and contacting people like this as the developer, maybe they would make a lemmy community or instance for themselves, and ask their followers to check that out. I think it could bring in a large wave of people, at least by lemmy standards.
I disagree that we should limit our promotion to the fediverse. I dont think that its much harder to get started with Lemmy compared to getting started with Mastodon etc. Its not necessary to understand federation to use Lemmy, rather they will figure it out after using Lemmy for a while.
And I guess its true that we dont have a critical mass yet, whatever that means. Thats exactly why we should promote it widely, because then it will reach some people who are interested.
These influencers are exactly what i’m talking about, but it doesnt make much sense for me to contact them, because i’m not part of their audience or community, and dont know them well. So it makes much more sense for someone from their audience to contact them, explain what Lemmy is and why they should care about it. If they are interested, you can get us in touch with them.
Don’t think of it as limiting, think of it as focusing your efforts on the people most likely to respond.
Critical mass is a social network term that comes from nuclear physics. Small amounts of uranium will not react without outside pressure, but at a critical mass of uranium, a chain reaction will occur, and the reaction becomes self sustaining and turns into a meltdown.
In social media, small networks of users need effort to keep growing. However, there is a certain number of people where a social network starts growing on its own, independent of promotion.I agree that federation is no harder to understand starting with lemmy than on mastodon. My point is that mastodon has a large user base and lemmy doesn’t. So for a fed newbie, they have two hurdles to jump through at lemmy instead of one at mastodon.
it doesnt make much sense for me to contact them, because i’m not part of their audience or community
I realize you guys have a lot on your plates already, and we are flooding you with ideas. When I get some free time, I can look into that influencer thing myself.
I dont want to limit the promotion at all, in fact I want Lemmy users to spread it in all kinds of places where it makes sense.
Maybe I should have been more explicit that this post is a call to action for Lemmy users, and not something we as developers are planning to do. Writing it like that seemed a bit too direct though.
I dont think that its much harder to get started with Lemmy compared to getting started with Mastodon etc. Its not necessary to understand federation to use Lemmy, rather they will figure it out after using Lemmy for a while.
From my experience, it was actually much easier to start with fediverse and eventually understand the core concepts of fediverse and federation on smaller platforms, where one can, I think, see more clearly when something gets federated across those few existing instances as opposed to larger platforms with many various instances federating with each other in an extensive cobweb of federations.
For example here, it is much easier to spot a federated post, because from a view of the user’s instance, that post is standing out from the mass of other (local) posts much more as it still might be considered somewhat of a curiosity one might rather notice, whereas on, for example, Mastodon, people communicate across multitude of instances and federate with everything, and so the principles itself could be a little hidden and not so clear for the newbie fediverse user to see. That is at least how I experienced my firsts with fediverse.
I would say Lemmy is an excellent example of what I would consider a newbie-friendly fediverse experience. After a while, the new fediverse user can freely explore other platforms as Mastodon, PeerTube etc., as they will already have a little knowledge of how to navigate the fediverse and will be able to notice its elements on larger federated platforms, where nearly every post is federated, and some users could think these features are something specific to the platform instead of common attributes of the whole fediverse.
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Normie here. Just rolled in off the street. I’m going to watch some videos on federation today, but otherwise I know nothing about it. Lemmy seems pretty great though.
For creating and testing a custom frontend, can I use one of the dev instances as backend? Or do I need to set up my own backend?
Yes that works. But running Lemmy locally is also pretty easy, just clone the repo, run
scripts/db-init.shand thencargo run.
Everyone who uses reddit should leave a signature in every single post or comment you make on reddit which says something along the line “Lemmy is the new Reddit” with a link to Lemmy itself. The signature may have to be placed all the time manually but that will spread the word.
I think most of us agree that the main problem which Lemmy has today is its lack of users. This is not for technical reasons, as we know it is quite stable and usable. The main cause is that the project is not widely known yet
No offence intended, but i am not sure that hypothesis is correct, even if it’s working kind of well there are other open source reddit alternatives, it needs to be better then them to really get a lot of users.
On a side note, it might be worth mentioning the many ways that people can contribute to Lemmy (again depending on the audience). There are the obvious ones, like writing code for lemmy and lemmy-ui, writing documentation or translating. There are also multiple interesting options to create new projects, such as:
Do you have any thoughts on addons? something like friendica addons? I think a big part of what made firefox get so much users were the extensions (that allowed hobbyist developers unleash their creativity).
On a more practical note, People can always vote and try to write great persuasive content on alternativeto and slant.co
No offence intended, but i am not sure that hypothesis is correct, even if it’s working kind of well there are other open source reddit alternatives, it needs to be better then them to really get a lot of users.
I disagree, Lemmy is not simply another foss Reddit alternative, it can be many more things with different frontends. Plus federation really sets us apart from any similar projects. And no worries, there is nothing offensive about having disagreements in a discussion.
Lemmy addons would be interesting, but i have no idea how that could be implemented.
I disagree, Lemmy is not simply another foss Reddit alternative, it can be many more things with different frontends. Plus federation really sets us apart from any similar projects. And no worries, there is nothing offensive about having disagreements in a discussion.
Some of these alternatives are also no slackers, e.g. minds and steemit ability to reward with cryptocurrency seems interesting (i haven’t dug into it yet, but having the ability to reward financially writers seems useful), tildes can also show new comments since you last visited, has an “exemplary” tag for showing high quality content and also the ability to tag submission and treat them like some subreddit (view a RSS feed, show highest voted this week/month etc).
To get a significant amount of users, the sum of lemmy attractive qualities need to be higher then the same sum for other social media platforms (even just for a particular subset of people like programmers or people with a preference for FOSS).
Lemmy addons would be interesting, but i have no idea how that could be implemented.
On the technical side Veloren is a rust project that added support for modding using wasm, I think some IPC mechanism is also OK, the ideal would be something like firefox or chrome addon store with reviews but just linking to third party code on joinlemmy or even lemmy itself (like lemmy-lite) could help encourage the start of a community (or even just a github list, something like nix awesome).
That sounds like zero sum thinking, as if there was a fixed pool of users which Reddit, Lemmy, Steemit, Tildes etc compete for. I dont think thats true at all, there are probably many users on these “Reddit alternatives” who would never use Reddit, for one reason or another. Similarly, someone who wants a platform with integrated cryptocurrency wont like Lemmy, and attracting them is not our goal.
Lemmy is unique because it is the only federated link aggregator/forum, and I’m sure that more people would be interested if only they knew about it. You just cant “sum up attractive qualities”, because every person (or group of people) values various features differently.
Edit: I’m reading the veloren issue now, implementing that seems like a huge feature. It would need a lot of careful planning, and some devs that are actually interested to write specific extensions.
That sounds like zero sum thinking, as if there was a fixed pool of users which Reddit, Lemmy, Steemit, Tildes etc compete for. I dont think thats true at all, there are probably many users on these “Reddit alternatives” who would never use Reddit, for one reason or another. Similarly, someone who wants a platform with integrated cryptocurrency wont like Lemmy, and attracting them is not our goal.
The fact that they don’t use it does not mean they didn’t consider it, they could have just thought it was a bad platform or just does not fit their preferences . It is a bit of a simplification but some specific user will do some sort of pros vs cons calculation to decide if to use it. So adding features or qualities that are valued by a large chunk of the “target population” (which could be defined as just high quality commentators) should bring in more users. Maybe a survey or some UX study of a sample of the target population could be useful, I think i read somewhere GNOME did that and was pretty surprised with the result (one part of the UI was completley undiscovered by users and not used at all)
Lemmy is unique because it is the only federated link aggregator/forum, and I’m sure that more people would be interested if only they knew about it. You just cant “sum up attractive qualities”, because every person (or group of people) values various features differently.
It’s not like it is completely unknown, it is listed as the top alternative to reddit on slant and alternativeto . iirc liberapay said they got most of there traffic from alternativeto and they are growing to this day, while lemmy seems to have reached some kind of plateau (at least as measured by 6 month active user count)
Edit: I’m reading the veloren issue now, implementing that seems like a huge feature. It would need a lot of careful planning, and some devs that are actually interested to write specific extensions.
You could probably find a simpler approach, like dbus , a javascript API or just compile time plugins where you give developers the ability to register some callback. this could be a chicken and egg type thing. there is no ability to extend so there are no extension developers, and because there are no extension developers the ability to extend lemmy isn’t developed.
The fact that they don’t use it does not mean they didn’t consider it, they could have just thought it was a bad platform or just does not fit their preferences . It is a bit of a simplification but some specific user will do some sort of pros vs cons calculation to decide if to use it. So adding features or qualities that are valued by a large chunk of the “target population” (which could be defined as just high quality commentators) should bring in more users. Maybe a survey or some UX study of a sample of the target population could be useful, I think i read somewhere GNOME did that and was pretty surprised with the result (one part of the UI was completley undiscovered by users and not used at all)
If we are talking about Lemmy, then the vast majority of potential users probably just never heard of it, especially as its a very new project. But if you have any ideas how to improve the UX of Lemmy (including surveys or whatever), please do tell.
It’s not like it is completely unknown, it is listed as the top alternative to reddit on slant and alternativeto . iirc liberapay said they got most of there traffic from alternativeto and they are growing to this day, while lemmy seems to have reached some kind of plateau (at least as measured by 6 month active user count)
Liberapay and Lemmy are fundamentally different projects, and people join them for different reasons. Donating to a project is something that only needs one person (or two, donor and recipient). But people will only join a discussion forum if their community goes there, or they find a new community they like.
You could probably find a simpler approach, like dbus , a javascript API or just compile time plugins where you give developers the ability to register some callback. this could be a chicken and egg type thing. there is no ability to extend so there are no extension developers, and because there are no extension developers the ability to extend lemmy isn’t developed.
Besides extensions, writing a custom frontend would also give a lot of flexibility. In fact you can probably do the exact same things that way.
If we are talking about Lemmy, then the vast majority of potential users probably just never heard of it, especially as its a very new project. But if you have any ideas how to improve the UX of Lemmy (including surveys or whatever), please do tell.
You could try and do some outreach , going to the subreddit redditalternatives and asking about new features, Or do some UX study , basically you find someone who you think could be the target audience, sit him in front of the software (or the website where he starts his exposure ) and tell him your testing the software and not him, and see how he manages. I have a few ideas for improvements, they have pros and cons and might not be worth it, but for now getting the report functionality working seems like the most important issue, but besides that I have said it before and i still think the user story around following a discussion is too bad, on reddit you can “subscribe” to a post to get new comments (which does not seem to work great but is better then nothing), on lemmy you can’t do that.
Liberapay and Lemmy are fundamentally different projects, and people join them for different reasons. Donating to a project is something that only needs one person (or two, donor and recipient). But people will only join a discussion forum if their community goes there, or they find a new community they like.
Maybe they are that different, it will be interesting to see if there are any stats that support this hypothesis, what are the statistics for new signups? what is the “retention rate” (do these users sign up and then leave).
Besides extensions, writing a custom frontend would also give a lot of flexibility. In fact you can probably do the exact same things that way.
Browser extension are also good (You can look at RES for inspiration, it’s great for power users which are the users that can really make a difference in the adoption of software i think), but people need to find out about them to use them, which could be difficult because some developers would be against putting them in the play store (which could provide exposure).
Paging @gwynne0190@lemmy.ml.
Also, people interested in promoting FOSS/lemmy, check out: c/fedivangelism, c/activism and c/promoting_open_source. If anyone else has relevant communities, on lemmy or else where, reply to me with them please.
Feneas.org has some relevant stuff, but you have to pay a membership/donation fee?
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Feneas.org has some relevant stuff, but you have to pay a membership/donation fee?
last i heard they have some backlog about tasks, so you could probably find some way to help them without donating money (just your time).
I am very new to lemmy (joined lemmy.ml only yesterday) so my knowledge about the software and its community is very limited. I am member of a cooperative that runs a Mastodon instance. Some of our members are clubs which might need a discussion forum for their hobby horse. Installing a forum like discourse or flarum is quite easy – running Lemmy needs a lot more. I would think that it requires as much maintenance like Mastodon or Matrix. So we need good arguments to promote Lemmy.
I think a good way to promote Lemmy would be to outline the benefit of running an instance for the maintaining entity – be it a club, a political party or group, a company, a town or region, a school or any other institution. I think a small list of usecases and benefits for a couple of organisations could be a good start. Maybe we can start here?
I have never hosted any of the software you mention, so I cant compare the administration effort. But if you are using Docker, I would say its very little effort to install and run an instance, moreso if you use our Ansible playbook. What exactly makes you think that Lemmy is hard to run? Maybe you could setup a test instance and see for yourself?
Listing the benefits of Lemmy sounds very useful, I just dont really know what they are (and what to compare it to).
I always look at the instructions to install software from scratch. ;-)
Many organisations want to create a discussion forum for their members. This can be done with Lemmy as it is a forum with federation as add on. They can use local communites for their internal discussions and federated for for discussing things with the whole world. This is much better than having a forum only for members and only for internal use. The Glasgow instances shows what I mean.
Is it possible to restrict account on an instance to members of an organization eg. by using LDAP or invite only registration?
The instructions for installing from scratch are overly complicated, I plan to rewrite them soon. We are also doing some things which will reduce the number of steps needed for installing from scratch (distribution via crates.io, removing iframely).
At the moment you can enable/disable federation only for the whole instance, not per community. But we have an issue for that: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1576
Invite only instances are not supported yet, but are on our roadmap.
I would appreciate a straight forward installation documentation for non docker installs as I am eager to install Lemmy on a managed server.
Is Lemmy stable now? Or is it still alpha/beta software?
Its not 1.0 yet, which means there are still rather frequent breaking changes. Other than that it is quite stable.
I disagree that Lemmy isn’t known as an alternative; it’s mentioned everywhere where Reddit’s current trouble is.
I actually think the issue is just as much about community discovery and fragmentation; combined each community+rest of the fediverse is large. On an individual server there can often be few users and few posts. Being able to subscribe to a batch of fediverse communities in one go would really help. Then the entry point could be these discovery systems and the home of the account a secondary concern.
We can crowdfund actual advertisements/partnerships. I’d much rather see a Lemmy commercial than a NørdVPN or RAIÐ $hadovv Legendş commercial.
It is worth noting that some important features are still missing in Lemmy, particularly mod tools (we are going to implement them in the next ~12 months). There also aren’t many different instances yet.
Do that first, though. We don’t want a flood of spammers and disappointed users because the mods/admins can’t do jack shit about it.
I am really against paid ads for Lemmy. If we receive that amount of donations, there are much better things to spend it on than giving it to youtube or other corporations. For example we could give the money to pay people who are contributing to Lemmy in different ways.
giving it to youtube or other corporations
You don’t have to give it to YouTube. You can give it to a content creator who uploads on YouTube. Sure, the content will be on YouTube and they may add additional ads, although I think content creators have an option to block ads.
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