this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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It's no secret that Lemmy is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Reddit. The issue it faces however is that it's still relatively niche and not many people know about it. I propose that we change this. By contacting the mods of large subreddits and asking them to make and promote relevant Lemmy communities we could substantially increase the amount of people who discover the fediverse. What's more, I don't think this is would be a hard sell considering many mods are already pissed off with Reddit due to their API changes. I believe that this is the time to act, so this is a call to arms, to help grow the fediverse into the future of social media!

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (12 children)

In all honesty, as much as I want non-profit Reddit alternatives to succeed, I think Lemmy is a tough sell to Redditors. Here's roughly how I think that'd go.


Lemmy user: "You should try Lemmy"

Redditor: "Sure, what's its website?"

Lemmy user: "There are many"

Redditor: "Wait what"

Lemmy user: "You have to pick one"

Redditor: "Why?"

Lemmy user: "See, Lemmy is not a website, but a network of federated instan-"

Redditor: "That sounds complicated. I just want a website like Reddit"

Lemmy user: "But don't you care about how Reddit has treated its mods, app devs and the general community?"

Redditor: "Yeah but all this Lemmy and Kbin stuff is confusing. Can I just use a website without reading up on all this Fediverse stuff?"

Lemmy user: "Okay, just go to Lemmy.world"

Redditor: "It seems to be down"

Lemmy user: "Hmm, maybe try Lemmy.ml?"

Redditor: "This website looks a little... hard to wrap my head around"

Lemmy user: "There are alternative frontends"

Redditor: "What now?"

Lemmy user: "Do you know about Alexandrite?"

Redditor: "Nevermind, I'm out"


If we want to convince a wide range of users to use Lemmy, we have to make using Lemmy a no-brainer for everyone.

I'm trying to contribute by building a new opensource web UI that I hope will provide a better UX for the average Redditor. It's not ready to become a daily driver yet, but I'm hoping to get to a point where it's nice enough that instances will want to host it on their domain. Maybe I'm delusional in thinking this web UI will appeal to users that don't like the current ones. But there's only one way to find out, and that is to build it.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy user: "You should try Lemmy"

Redditor: "Sure, what's its website?"

Lemmy user: "there are many, here's a list, just pick one, you can always use a different one later"

Redditor: "ok cool I'm glad you explained it in a simple way that is easy for me to understand I will use lemmy exclusively now"

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

If it was that easy to convince Redditors, we'd already have a very diverse userbase. But by all means, keep spreading the word. We all want Lemmy to succeed.

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