Asklemmy

I don't think there's a need to replace Reddit, Lemmy just needs to serve as an alternative for those that want it. And I think there's plenty of people here for a thriving community. I also think it functions perfectly fine for the most part. The mobile website looks great, and we even have a great mobile app. I'm not sure how reports work with Lemmy, but if you do have any gripes then by all means report them. The one major thing I think is wrong with Lemmy (and honestly the Fediverse in general) is how bad federation is. Communication across instances should be straight-forward and seamless, but it's often just broken.

I don't see anything wrong with the GUI. In fact, I like it.

It'll never replace reddit, but the hope is that it'd have a big enough community that it would be a viable alternative.

Will Mastodon ever replace Twitter? Maybe... But probably not. But the Internet is a huge place and there is space for plenty of alternatives.

I was wondering what the point of lemmy was

What was great in the early days of Mastodon is that, for those who could remember, it recaptured the feel of the "early" internet. You could feel distinct and interesting voices, patience and willingness to get into deepdives, where the payoff was from one to one interactions with personalities deeply interested in interaction itself and passion projects.

That made it have a value in and of itself that didn't depend on competing platforms.

That said, you can feel echoes of typical internet culture all throughout the fediverse now. I don' think you should measure success or failure on replacing reddit, but its great to have a place ready and waiting to absorb communities that become (say) disenchanted with bad mods.

So the model for replacements I think would be looking at how facebook replaced myspace, and how reddit replaced digg. In both cases, there was widespread user disenchantment at substandard designs and redesigns that disregarded interests of users. I think that kind of catastrophic incompetence and disregard for users was unique to a particular era, and there probably have emerged some industry standards and best practices to stop that from happening in our current internet, for better or for worse.

I think with reddits redesign, it has become increasingly frustrating to the user base, and there is a prospect that user disenchantment with reddit could lead to something, but I think its a long shot. The important thing to remember about reddit is that they caught a wave of exponential growth by not fucking things up, and staying more or less consistent with their product.

I think the best thing Lemmy can do is be consistent and keep doing what it is doing, and not try and reinvent itself. I actually think the website's functionality on mobile is truly fantastic, the best I've experienced from using a website in place of a dedicated app, so I wouldn't worry about it. I think so much of Lemmy is right in its current for, and 99% of the issue with fediverse products is that the ui/design is being terrible, and it took Mastodon to kind of teach people that it mattered. So yeah, I think the main thing is to not mess with success.

It's already better than Reddit. If someone doesn't want to use it, that's their problem, not mine...

Good answers. It seems to me that there is no need to replace Reddit, copy it and try to be like it. A copy is always a weak resemblance. As Steve Jobs once said: I don't want to do better, I want to do it differently. Lemmy have strengths, they need to be developed.

There are android apps for lemmy called Lemmur and Jerboa

I dont care as long as reddit dies

Reddit is really good for hobby/niche content. Reddit communities have become the largest online communities for quiet a few different interests where previously the largest communities would be independent forums.

It would be great if some forums decided to use Lemmy. I guess there are barriers to this, e.g. user interface changes might not be wanted and it might be difficult to export/import the forum history.

It'll take time and commitment from its early userbase, but eventually it should pull in enough people to become a self sustaining counterculture community to the swamp that is reddit. People don't come here for the content, but rather the community itself.

What have you done for lemmy? Did you post content, spread it?

reddit isn't a platform, its a people!

No, because its just a copy. Lemmy just takes reddit and slaps decentralization on top of it. Therefore it has the baggage of walled garden philosophy.

Something that would replace reddit is a platform that is willing to embrace the strengths of decentralization and truely design around its strengths. Design around human connectedness, community building, community collaboration, accessability (even for technically illiterate), detoxing.

Honestly I don't really see a need to replace Reddit. This conversation always comes up and open source alternatives. Mastodon was never designed to replace Twitter. It was simply to be an alternative. Linux was never designed to replace windows, etc...

@Owell1984 Not specifically Lemmy, but I do hope that someday the fediverse can replace the proprietary social media. It's biggest strength is that all fedi-platforms are designed to communicate with each other, thereby effectively having a common pool of users (for example, I somehow use Lemmy when commenting on this thread, while I am actually doing it from a Friendica instance) instead of (only/mainly) competing to grab users from each other.

You can't and don't need to replace Reddit. The way Lemmy is built will make it a much more viable and trusted platform for the long term.

!fedivangelism@lemmy.ml - a community to grow the fediverse