There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites.
Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit, and while you can stumble onto them with my search engine, it is not in a very directed fashion.
It is an unfortunate state of affairs. Even if you do not particularly care for becoming the next big thing, it’s still discouraging to put work into a website and get next to no traffic beyond the usual bots.
i know, right?
if only there was a way to tell other people about these websites in … some kind of an … internet forum. and if the forum was on a nice, not too bot-infested, privacy-respecting, free, distributed and federated platform. that would be cool. one can wish…
Lemmy suffers from the same discoverability issue… so we aren’t exactly the best place to tell others about obscure websites. From the start we’ve inherited an open-source community that leans liberal, and aside one very large recent shift that means that the community also leans mostly Democrat.
What does that have to do with discoverability? Well, one look at a front page can clue you in. (gosh I hope these screenshots shrink in size for display)
IT, Politics, and Star Trek all over the front page of my instance. Possibly worse on others. Imagine if your 80 year old great-grandma landed on this page. All she knows is what Fox News says. Instant close on the website. Not even going to open one discussion. But let’s say she did open the one about the FBI director being missing:
oh my
Now let’s see a competing website:
Oh, new Chinese food place! Remote work isn’t working? Carrying your dog to pick up food? that’s silly! 2.7 million of wine! She must have really hated that job!
So what is my point? How can Lemmy increase it’s discoverability? I feel like community diversity would be the #1 concern. Well… one obvious action is to sanitize the front page of the popular instances. I’m going to assume that’s a highly unpopular opinion, because then it wouldn’t be Lemmy anymore. Maybe perhaps there is a different frontpage for logged out and logged in users? With politics being an opt-in for active sessions? Or maybe we should just post more cute cats.
What do you guys think? Am I completely wrong about community diversity? What changes would you make to Lemmy? It’s not an easy answer.
The people here are the problem. They screech and scare anyone less than social democrats on the spectrum.
Reddit was never close to as an echo chamber.
My experience was that every sub reddit itself was an echo chamber.
Not having the majority opinion of the subreddit meant getting negative scores because of downvoters, which lead to deleted posts because of that stupid karma system.
But yeah, suggesting a permanent solution for both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict on Lemmy by criticizing BOTH sides doesn’t get you sympathy points here either.
Even here, the guy you’re responding to is getting down voted to oblivion (for Lemmy anyways) for an opinion that I have echoed elsewhere and gotten the opposite response.
Not having the majority opinion of this community seems to mean downvotes too. The only real difference is that reddit has enough staying power for people to put up with it.
I don’t think it’s a here or there problem, I think it’s a human nature problem tbh.
I’m on a Lemmy instance that has downvotes disabled. I can only see that the person I replied to has 3 upvotes and that me previous comment has 2. I don’t even see the negativity on Lemmy.
He’s at -5 at the moment. Depending on what instances you have blocked, you’re going to see different amounts. It doesn’t mean those people aren’t there.
Even if the post is true, it was the worst way to present it. It reads like trolling:
Call out people’s politics with grandiose rhetoric, not backing up any claims with links to evidence.
Declare the other side is unbiased.
I mean, Internet 101 would dictate you downvote and disengage. It’s not going to generate a discussion that would change minds or be constructive. Even now we’re not talking about small website discoverability, but instead downvotes.
EDIT: I’m going to put my money where my mouth is. I’ll try the same post.
If you’d like evidence of the toxic or extreme side of Lemmy, it’s not hard to find. Are we really disagreeing that this is a problem with Lemmy? Regardless, you’re misrepresenting OP with the “declare the other side is unbiased”.
This conversation started started with pushing back on the idea of using Lemmy as a solution to small site discoverability. The toxicity and social aspects are perfectly relevant.
right right. Totally agree. The community here hurts it’s discoverability. My criticism is only in the way to the post was worded.
I had this big explanation, but I realized it’s not worth it. I already covered what I wanted to say.
Good that we don’t have karma here…