It is yours.

I hate to be that guy, but “they” (the people with power to change course) have absolutely listened and understood. They don’t care.

I’m with you. Tiktok is about as “healthy” as vaping. There are other just as bad (if not worse) apps out there, and the reasoning is stupid and has some first amendment concerns. But I won’t die on the protecting Tiktok hill.

Ah I got you, yes I totally agree. And I also do think gifs and shitposts etc can be shared and engaged with in an organic way that doesn’t force out slower content, which is also partly why active moderation is so important.

Clickbait is a push-away factor for me. I’m not here for outrage.

I think most users here would agree with you (I certainly do). There are dozens of apps out there that scroll the same memes endlessly and trying to make Lemmy competitive in the marketplace for attention by imitating that format will fail. I think the best strategy for Lemmy-growers is to lean into the strengths of the Fediverse by hosting discussions and communities that the Reddit algorithm suppresses.

This is a good thought provoking post, but I think most of the methods you describe here actually work against the Fediverse, both in terms of desired outcomes and actual growth.

• If a user comes to Lemmy (for example) and sees the same stale meme feed and engagement bait they see on Reddit, what’s the incentive to switch? What makes Lemmy unique?

• Of the users who are here and understand the reasons for not using commercial social media, most are probably trying to avoid the bulk of the sort of content made by the suggestions you give.

• Growth-for-growth’s-sake puts more burden on instance admins for reasons that don’t involve growing a sense of community (presumably the reason they are investing time in the first place).

My point is that Lemmy can never compete with Reddit in terms of attention and distractability and trying to build “community” around that here will always fail. We should lean into Lemmy’s strengths, focus on growing communities and discussions and the kind of thing the Reddit algorithm suppresses.

For years I had thought I got old and don’t have friends who play games as much anymore but this meme made me realize it’s that I wasn’t making new gaming friends.

I had basically one TF2 server I would play on because that’s the one I knew the people. It was like the community basketball hoop. If people weren’t playing then sometimes I would text a friend and try to get a game going or more often than not just try again later. It felt natural and low-stakes. This meme hits hard.

Bluesky takes advantage of self hosters for more distribution and reliability, but still maintains centralized control over content and user management.

This is what I don’t understand, why would anyone choose to host when there is zero advantage? I sort of feel is by design so they can claim “decentralized” while still having full control over the data.

is decentralized

It’s not.

I assume someone else can just create a server and join the network of BlueSky?

They can’t.

in reality at the moment its controlled by only one big company.

…yep.

My hope is that they will one day cooperate with Fediverse.

ActivityPub existed before BlueSky did and they chose to make their own, incompatible thing. So I don’t have high hopes for this.

That doesn’t mean much unfortunately.

Bitwarden

Q: What’s the difference between Lemmy MAGAs and Lemmy Leftists?

A: Nothing! All they ever post is fantasies about “liberal tears”.

This is not what you want to hear, but even in Star Trek Earth had to go through a third world war, and in the devastation it was really the Vulcans who had to step in and basically played nanny for a generation after they were like “oh fuck no those rednecks have a warp drive?”

How does it work self hosting? Is it querying other search engines or just maintaining a database on your server?

Literally how it was designed! I will never understand the people who think “free speech” means everyone else has to be forced to listen to them.

Hexbear is still online and available to anyone who wants to read the content so I’m confused as to what point you’re trying to make. If you want users to be forced to interact with other users that’s what Reddit is for.

The concept of defederation is literally the single most important core feature differentiating the Fediverse from centralized social media. I find it interesting that you feel employing it to be antithetical to the concept of federated networks.

This could easily be done with AI. For a week or so, that is.