YSK how we can bring more users to Lemmy

Yesterday I searched a question and for the first time google linked a Lemmy thread with the answer.
Asking and solving questions will bring users.
- How does someone search Google?
  
  Using a browser, navigate to the following URL: www.google.com
  In the search bar, type the query you would like to make and hit ENTER
  Then you're done!
  
  D: demonstrate interest in a topic by communicating it clearly around your phone.
  E: engage with ads in the same vien as the question you're looking for.
  N: NEVER use an AdBlock. This throws off the algorithm as it can't track how long you take before scrolling past an ad.
  N: News. what news do you engage with? Contrary to expected behavior, google actually spends more resources trying to sway dissent from their opinion more than it rewards its supporters! Talk about breaking up monopolies, talk about tax havens, or even bing.
  I: Invest wisely. Have money in the bank. They'll know. The more money you have the bigger fish you are in the pond. The more they'll target you.
  S: Search. Go to google.com, they have a bar you can type in. Put in your question, hit search, and if you follow these steps, you'll get what you were looking for.
- This. The reason I originally joined Reddit was because it solved a problem I had (easily aggregating answers on various topics). That's how we get people on Lemmy.
- Yes it will because I used to search questions and add reddit on the end
  Something that will also help is users sharing knowledge through posts and comments and communities with knowledgeable people migrating here along with subreddits that contain a lot of knowledge because I also loved te community knowledge aspect of reddit and that will bring people as well

I don't think there should be a big push until more polished apps come out that make the whole process as dead simple as possible. No need to know what instances are. Right now this is how imagine the average person would react after trying it out.
- @NightOwl
  More polished apps and more fleshed out features. Lemmy has potential, but there are so many quirks right now it's like a chore to actually utilize.
- Oh my god, lmao. Yes. How is there even a video so perfect for this situation. I joined kbin instead because having a website demand I pick an instance in order to even sign up when I barely understood what that meant or how they worked was quite genuinely making me panic, and taking my time with it was not helping like it was supposed to.
  It's so normal to me now that I almost forget until I have to explain any part of it to someone. "Oh, don't worry about joining this one over that one, you're technically joining every site and also twitter and instagram. That button? It's the reblog button. It functions as an upvote but some people don't have it. Other people don't have a downvote, but it might still be visible on your screen anyway. If there's a site you hate, you can mute the whole thing, or maybe you can't. If there's a site you love, your admin might disappear them and you'll need a second account to see it again. Have fun!"
  Horrible. Why do I love it.
  
  It's never a good idea explaining the whole idea to someone right at the start unless they ask.
  I've always just directed people straight to a big instance with lots of home communities, like lemmy.world or kbin.social. After they jump in and have questions, that's the right time to talk about instances, not before.
  
  The video is from a TV series which is a bit cringe but quite close to reality of IT startups called Silicon Valley https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/ it's a comedy.
  
  Kbin is often treated as a single site, but there are instances here too!
  https://fedia.io/
  https://readit.buzz/
  https://karab.in
  and others.
  You can also create you own, just as with Lemmy, so the two are really "the same" in that way.
  
  There's even a scene talking about decentralized internet which is so perfect for this attempted push to the fediverse too.
  
  Myself, I had no problem with picking and instance. But the one I mostly randomly picked had approvals turned on. Once I realized I wasn't gonna get to use my account immediately, I abandoned it.
  It's utterly critical that manual approval is not part of the sign up. I tried another site, but many users won't. Nor will they necessarily come back when their account gets approved in a week (that's how long mine took).
  
  Sending people to the largest servers is how you bog down the largest servers.
  There has to be a better way than just stuffing everyone onto the same 2 websites. Not only does that create huge loads and increase syncing times, it recreates the same issue that led to everyone coming here: Power over the whole thing in the hands of just a couple of people.
  The network becomes more resilient the more spread out we are, not the more concentrated.
  Plus, if people find the idea of multiple websites existing to be confusing, maybe they shouldn't use the internet?
  
  This is perfectly stated. Lemmy, which I dearly love, is not ready to replace Reddit for the vast majority of users. Which is fine. I won't really miss the vast majority of Reddit users.
- haha. I just got through watching Silicon Valley. Great show. Y'all should check it out
- The video is so perfect for the situation.

I kind of agree, but it needs to be done in a nice way like if you have already written an answer on lemmy to a question which also shows up on reddit then post a link to it instead of copy and pasting it there.
- I like this, sharing when there’s value to share, rather than just sharing
- This is the way. I think of it as offering breadcrumbs to those on other platforms. Since the posts are freely viewable without signing up, it's no different than a news or web link.
  You can also turn this around. If you are still monitoring reddit, consider making a post in the appropriate sub answering the question (assuming it's a generic-ish request) and then link back to it in the community here.

We've got a good "seed community". We need to move on from "anti-Reddit" and towards "Lemmy-community building". This is a hard step forward.
We don't know what each other's interests are, we don't know how many #RedditBlackout communities existed (I mean, we have some ideas. "mtgzone.com" and "programming.dev")... but we don't know if we can create say... an Advance Wars community (Nintendo Game), or if we need to stick to just Nintendo as our topic.
I think keeping to !Newcommunities, and trying to organize ourselves into our different branches of knowledge / discussion is the near term goal. What DO we have as a community? Clearly we're all willing to leave Reddit (and some of us here were willing to leave Reddit last year, long before #RedditBlackout), but for long-term sustainability, we need to get deeper connections than that.
Ideally, we can grow some of these communities to be the best place on the internet for that subject. For example, /r/Factorio was one of the premier places to study Factorio strategies (Video game). But Reddit wasn't the best at say, AVR (AVRFreaks was a better site for that). That's fine, having a 2nd tier or lesser site is still useful for an overall hangout spot that's more casual.
I think Lemmy has a lot of opportunity in community building because of its Reddit-like structure (more similar than Mastodon was to Twitter). With some custom GUIs, we can build new video game communities with custom GUIs (ex: Chess .pgn viewers: https://github.com/mliebelt/PgnViewerJS) to further discussions in ways impossible to the original Reddit (more akin to PhpBB), but still with the advantages of single-sign-on / federation to join up a bunch of other communities.
That's the direction we should be going, IMO anyway.
- Yea we need to all start engaging content we like as if it was reddit. There will probably be another influx of new people come July. As such we need their first impression to be that lemmy has an actual community beyond being burned by reddit.

An iOS and android app would be helpful in making lemmy more accessible
- Lemmy already has a few apps for Android like Jerboa,Connect for Lemmy,and Liftoff. IOS has mlem and probably a few more. They're not yet as good as reddit TPAs but they're there and being actively developed.
  I think it's kbin that needs an app rn as it's growing rapidly and the only app i know for it (Artemis) is still in alpha.
  
  Apollo for Lemmy or kbin, made by the same dev, would be absolutely wonderful. Unfortunately, I think he’s given up on social media apps entirely.
  
  Memmy for iOS feels a lot like Apollo so far and it’s getting at least 2-3 updates per day. It’s still in beta so you need to get it via TestFlight, but once it’s downloaded it feels just like any other app. To me, it has far outpaced Mlem even after just 23 days since its first beta release. Here’s the link once you’ve downloaded TestFlight: https://github.com/gkasdorf/memmy
  Artemis is another one that’s in development and heavily influenced by Apollo (hence the name). I don’t think it’s available yet in beta but the preview images from a few days ago look promising.
  This Beehaw post of useful links seems to maintain a list of apps and their development stages: https://beehaw.org/post/683217
- I’m using Memmy, whose UI is inspired by Apollo. It’s not perfect, but functional and looks great! You can use it through TestFlight
  
  Memmy is so good! New features are being added so quickly it's like opening a present every day I open the app
  
  Memmy is my vote as well. It’s actually wild how quickly it’s come into shape
- Voyager is amazing, and works on both iOS and Android

I think everyone needs to wait and see what kind of migration happens after July 1st. Seems like these places are better suited for slow growth from my observation.

If content is good enough, it will escape containment. Let the system do its thing.

I've been posting to my work slack.
- I hope the three day poop saga didn't get you called into HR
  
  Just sell it as a way to increase productivity.

Could you please add a "Why YSK:"? It's rule #2. :)

I'm happy with the amount of users and activity Lemmy currently has. It doesn't really need go grow though any means other than organically imo.
- Eh, it's still missing a ton of smaller and even medium sized communities. Pick video games and TV shows for example. A bunch don't have a community or only have a dead one with zero or one posts.
  
  It's debatable whether a lot of these smaller communities really provided much value outside the tiny userbase they have.
  Besides, if someone wants to pick up the mantle on Lenny they are more than welcome to as well.
- I dunno if "organic" is enough, but I don't think the fediverse could handle the entire Reddit use base today. I'm also not certain it will ever be as normy-friendly as Reddit has been. For better or worse.

On Android, link people to Sync for Lemmy, and Jerboa which is quite similar to RIF.
And Memmy for Lemmy heavily inspired by Apollo on iOS.
People mad about apps will move; they can't if they don't know where those apps are going.

It would probably be better to just let it ride and see how it goes.

I am kinda missing my favorite communities from Reddit:
vinyljerk
blackmetalvinyl
lolgrindr
vinylreleases
I wish those will receive a counterpart one day or just move here.
- You can be the change you want to see in the world. if you search the communities and can't find the one you're looking for, make it.
- One of the few small communities I’ll be sad to lose is HyruleEngineering. Can’t believe Reddit decided to shit the bed right when I found it.
  
  !hyruleengineering@lemmy.world
  
  Someone recreated that community here!
  
  For what it’s worth, they also have an active discord server
- What I'm missing are the fintech/trading subs that were pretty active. Not just meme-tier junkfood like wallstreetbets, but actual strategy/implementation stuff like ThetaGang and AlgoTrading.
  The thing is, I haven't found that stuff on Mastodon either. AFAICT the Fediverse at large leaning hard leftist/progressive means there's a cultural bias against finance-adjacent topics. Bolstering this, I've encountered on various Discord servers that traders tend to be pretty largely right-wing, which has consistently put me in direct conflict with them.

Sign ups in many instances becoming application-only certainly does not help Lemmy grow.
- Which instances are doing that?
  Also, why would it matter? Lemmy is absolutely going to end up with some domains that are mostly hosting and some domains that are mostly reading / commenting. I don’t see why that’s bad as long as the infrastructure for the hosts can handle it.
- I think that's mostly temporary because v0.18 disables captchas which will only return on v0.18.1
  
  Has this been confirmed yet? I saw some discussion in GH but last I checked they didn't reach a resolution.

Do the google spiders know about lemmy?

Best marketing is the perfect use case that didn't exist in people's lives beforehand. The Reddit threads with nurses helping elderly people do AMAs were extremely endearing.
Young kids being able to shitpost nonsensically was also cool.
Make something original happen and it draws in people that recognise something new. Otherwise it's all cats and homies doing narrative subscription.