More than half redditors doesn’t know this exist.
Edit: Ok damn that’s a lot of stuff, I agree tm people always messes things up and yes we are very outnumbered . I’m not saying we should be hating reddit I want people to know there’s an alternative when the corporate mess shits on reddit after a while. Thanks for the , um, Interesting stuff. Couldn’t help noticing it was more actually useful stuff instead of useless slander which makes up reddit i love you guys.
Mods on /r/Denmark removed my post announcing the creation of Feddit.dk within minutes for self-promotion.
In some ways, I don’t blame them too much. Most instances, including Feddit.dk, have rules against advertisements and self-promotion. It’s kinda difficult to let people know that the Fediverse exists when we are so opposed to advertisements on a principal level (definitely not suggesting using ads, for the record).
We can basically only rely on mouth-to-mouth discovery and that’s very slow.
Yeah, same here for other national subs.
It makes sense that we cannot really promote within Reddit itself, but that leaves us waiting for a specialized blog or website to talk about Lemmy.
… Or hoping that regular users will promote the Fediverse. At least I think mods on /r/Denmark have only considered it self-promotion when I have promoted it.
To be honest, I feel like mods are discouraged from talking about other platforms.
Small example, but we used to have a weekly self-promotion post to talk about projects, this has been stopped for a few months now (I was usually talking about our Lemmy instance there). And even if someone that is not directly related to the project talks about Lemmy, it’s considered “promotion of another social media”. I mean, to be honest, how can you prove you are not related to a project you talk about in any way?
Yea it gets difficult. I also don’t like the idea of artificially trying to insert the Fediverse into discussions whenever possible, just to make people aware. It feels very artificial or forced or like propaganda or something. And then you get into astroturfing as you say.
But what’s the alternative? People aren’t going to discover the wider social internet when they only visit the 5 biggest websites.
Indeed.
Currently people discover Lemmy through a few ways
To improve the second point, if any major tech blog would write about Lemmy, that would give a huge boost of visibility, but usually when they mention the Fediverse, they mostly speak about Mastodon.
You do it by organising and provoking change via the fediverse. There comes the balance where (negatively spun) news media reports of its existence drive curiosity to main stream audience searching it out.