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Recently we’ve seen a spike in PieFed users, a lot of this came form raising awareness of PieFed’s existence on Reddit.

Here’s some info you’d need if you want to help raise awareness of PieFed on reddit.

Reddit uses AI to make a summary of a users behavior that it shows to mods, and will flag people who seem spammy eg.
image:https://media.piefed.social/posts/FV/4n/FV4n6dJz67DskwE.png

Steps to make a successful reddit post:

1. Don’t have a sus account
2. Make it a image post with a nice catching image (Most important)
   
3. Don’t include any links away from reddit in the post, don’t even add it to the comments (have others do that)
   

Sucesfull posts examples:

1. https://piefed.social/c/fedibridge/p/1711535/post-with-5k-views-in-1h-promoting-the-fediverse
   
2. https://piefed.social/c/fedibridge/p/1727090/post-promoting-the-fedrivers-on-r-degoogle-on-globalswitchday
   
3. https://piefed.social/c/fedigrow/p/1720677/post-mentioning-piefed-ca-in-r-buycanadian
   

These 3 posts got ~500,000 views between them

• Don’t go and spam reddit with low effort content. It can do more harm than good.
• Don’t post to the same sub more than once a month
• Don’t post links in the comments of your own post unless it’s already gone viral, instead let others post links or let people figure it out for themselves.

I’ve tried to promote Lemmy in the past, but Immediately I get comments of people complaining about the UI, UX and tankies which kills all momentum. I’ve had much better success with PieFed so sticking to that going forward.

Well done on gaining that much traction. Its pretty hard to get people to actually leave site and look at the alternatives. Also that AI summary is so depressing, reddit is really going to boil and entire person down to a sentence.

Here are some more examples, it’s quite interesting

image:https://media.piefed.social/posts/D9/wC/D9wCpIA1QbLHbz8.png image:https://media.piefed.social/posts/P9/0N/P90Nz5lI2SjNA8A.png image:https://media.piefed.social/posts/1V/1p/1V1pnSjlzLse2cz.png image:https://media.piefed.social/posts/zn/0i/zn0ieEYoJNlugiE.png

Sometimes I wonder if they haven’t moved over by now, do we really want them? The users I see at Reddit these days are not the sharpest tools in the shed.

Keep on fighting the good fight. 💪

The might not be the brightest tools in the shed, but we also don’t want the fediverse filled with a bunch of rocket surgeons, we want people from all over creating their own communities etc.

I’m not a fan of gatekeeping decentralized alternatives because people aren’t “smart” enough. I don’t think people don’t switch because they are stupid, but instead because PieFed doesn’t yet offer what they need in a replacement.

I don’t know, I’m not sure that people who find Reddit in it’s current form to still be a useful/enjoyable experience are people I want to share a community with.

Wow, the atmosphere really is much more negative on Reddit these days, huh. Lots of “Ew no one uses that, don’t bother.”

Still—sounds like starter packs for Lemmy/Piefed would be useful. Is anyone working on those?

So you don’t want to share your community with me?

I still find reddit enjoyable. I use both reddit and PieFed. PieFed lacks niche communities, for that I go to reddit.

Also reddit’s UX is still a lot smoother, I hope PieFed gets there but I’m not going to kid myself and say it’s as good as Reddit just yet.

I really hate the elitism / gatekeeping I so often see on here.

People scoffing at those still using other platforms, thinking they’re better than them etc.

Oh boy, I did not know reddit had gotten that bad.

look I like bumping the fediverse as much as the next person but not enough to make an image post for textual content

I have some ethical standards

What’s unethical about it?

It’s a hyperbole. It’s not unethical. But many people don’t like it/hate it.

1. An image is just more expensive than text. Text is usually ~1 byte per character. An uncompressed image is ~3bytes per pixel. Of course, most images are compressed, and compression does a lot of heavy lifting. But still. Also, you don’t need to uncompress plain text. More amount of bytes means more storage expense, more network expense, and worse user experience due to latency.
2. We have plenty of tools that work for text. You can copy-paste it. You can easily edit it with just a keyboard. It is easily configurable via fonts and font sizes.
3. Accessibility: text can be read by screen readers. Images (without alt text) cannot. Maybe there are some fancy screen readers that OCR images, but then it’s the case of point 1.
4. Text is easily indexable. Which means that it’s searchable. If the reddit search tool were any good, it could find the post. Not for images. Alternatively, 3rd party search tools such as google and DDG work.

There’s probably many more points.

To be clear, Ek is talking about posting image posts on Reddit who allow video uploads. I don’t think this is a problem there. Moreover, the infographics are more successful at getting attention than just plain-text comment-posts. It is what it is.

Be careful what you wish for: Reddit admins turned VOAT into a right-wing cesspool overnight by banning a few repungent subreddits. They all jumped ship for VOAT, and polluted the community. Of course, this was probably all planned to get rid of an upstart competitor.

There were starter packs when I made an account on Lemmy.today

It’s a big ole boys club over here and it’s clear where they want to draw lines.

Reddit is much easier to use and has such a larger user base that one can tailor their experience to align much closer to their own interests. There’s not quite enough people on piefed and Lemmy to have that same experience.

I’m not gatekeeping, I’m just suggesting maybe not to actively recruit them. I think the good ones will make their way here without a bunch of begging and pleading and convincing. And maybe the rest just aren’t really worth having.

I use Alexandrite and Voyager and lemmus.org and find the UI and experience to be superior than at any point in my 15 years at Reddit, so I have to question what’s going on for you to make it that way.

Why is that one about the WarEra user green?

Is Alexandrite for piefed? I’ve been enjoying voyager, but am curious about exploring piefed more.

The post will get ZERO traction if it’s not a image post, I’ve tried.

Did you read what my post was about?

It’s a different community

Unfortunately not yet, at least last I checked. That and some missing Voyager features for piefed are what’s keeping me from using it as my primary account.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do what you do. You just asked why someone would be against doing an image post when it could be a text post and I answered.

What you are doing cannot be done with text posts because of reason 2 and 3.

Nice info but I have given up on Reddit.

Text posts simply don’t get the same message across though, which is why they aren’t as effective.

You can communicate a LOT more info in a short time-span with a image.

How is Reddit easier to use?

PieFed is extremely easy to use. Its searching sucks, but so too does Reddit’s (Lemmy sets an extraordinarily high bar there: Lemmy’s searching is supremely excellent).

Reddit is definitely larger and has more niche communities - I’m not pushing back on that, just questioning why Reddit is easier to use than PieFed.

Or did you mean that Reddit is much easier to use than Lemmy? That I would agree with - Lemmy is extremely lacking, e.g. user polls, user & post flairs, multi-communities, notifications for things, e.g. if you get banned then Lemmy will never tell you but PieFed will, and the list just goes on and on and on and on… but that’s just Lemmy, not all of the Threadiverse.

It’s easier to use than Lemmy. Lemmy was the first I heard about in this whole set up and the first I tried out. Not too hard to pick up on, but I understand why the average Redditor may feel it’s more difficult to get in to.

I need to poke around Piefed more apparently.

I edited my comment before you replied here adding a bit more.

Yeah, I agree, Reddit is much easier to use than Lemmy, but PieFed has most definitely solved that problem, in most if not entirely all of them. You don’t even need to create an account - just visit one of them, like the flagship PieFed.social, and the difference is immediately recognizeable!

For instance, I could in theory unsubscribe from all politics and news communities (or just the largest most controversial of them), but then still have access to all of that content just a click away in the category of communities News & Politics. I can (figuratively) both have my cake and eat it too!

And if you do create an account, the sign-up wizard alone is likely to make you absolutely fall in love. Content discovery is a solved issue in PieFed.

I like how I can control notifications for everything - e.g. for a low-volume community I sign up to be told for every single new post. You could get notified of content from a particular user, or a specific comment - even one that is not yours! - and crucially (even for your own), you can STOP being notified of replies, e.g. when you say something in Chapotraphouse or Lemmygrad.ml and strongly wish that you had not done so…

The UI for Piefed is a bit less polished - it suffers from trying to look different from both Reddit and Lemmy, despite how those layouts simply make a great deal of sense. But its UX is superb! Yeah, check it out - you can always keep using your Lemmy as an alt, though if you are anything like me then you will find yourself doing so increasingly less often until you just use PieFed all the time, because why would you want to use the product with fewer features?

Hey thanks for the info! This was really helpful

Fwiw, PieFed has put all those features into its API, so at this point the burden is on each individual app designer to catch up to using them, if they decide they want to.

There are different parts to Reddit. The largest subs that appear on r/all (or rather pop) are one thing, the small niche subs are another, the interactions with Reddit admins one aspect, the less controversial subjects another, and so on.

The Threadiverse is the same - like if you post the “wrong” thing in a tankie space then you will be brigaded with users following and downvoting you across many communities - they even brag about creating accounts specifically for this purpose, to get around bans (bc “no” means you need to keep pushing, consent be damned!!)

img:https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f5/94/7a/f5947adf808d70b92b80137aa9220466.gif

But even if the maximum experience here can be much worse than on Reddit, the average interaction is far kinder and nicer, imho.

I’m pretty sure the Voat admins wanted Voat to be right wing.

Evangelising the Fediverse on Reddit is not for me, but respect to anyone who does try that (I save my evangelising for my irl folk. I’m wearing them down)

Oh the PROFANITY!

Also, you don’t need to uncompress plain text.

Content-Encoding: gzip would like a word.

I heard about voat back in the day and thought “Oh, cool, like reddit without some of the overbearing crap from the admins”.

Then I went to voat and read a few posts.

Well, shit. I didn’t want to be on a nazi site. So much for that.

Are there any equivalent quarantine subs that would have a similar effect on the threadiverse? Right-wing people in particular seem to be convinced it is not what they are looking for, fortunately, judging from comments I saw when I browsed r/RedditAlternatives.

You are very welcome 🤗

Just cringe for us oldheads

https://piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone/posts/wS/bL/wSbLdvuP6c8T8LX.png

Reddit hasn’t been an open place for intelligent discussion in ages, it’s slop to draw in the morons plus propaganda to control their ideology. No one with a brain takes a redditor seriously… So yeah, the remaining people/fleshbots can stay there.

It seems that I have left in time to not catch an AI summary about myself. XD

seems the same strategy on a forum i been to about evading reddit bans(for people who wants to steer traffic to thier online business)

they have been aggressively upping thier AI/detection og botters and spammers recently. basically people were using anti-detect browsers and mobile proxies on mobile phones to evade reddits detection temporarily to use hordes of accounts at once. reddit however is going to lowest hanging fruit, it barely makes a dent in the propaganda bots, but target the ones that drives businesses to thier own website.

most are likely bots.

Even the narrow specialist subreddits I’m on tend to decay almost exclusively to * I just bought the thing that the community is about * Hey guys, be my free tech support * The same 10 memes over and over again

May someone enlighten me on differences between europe.pub and piefed.europe.pub?

Europe.pub is a lemmy instance. Piefed.europe.pub is a piefed instance.

Are these only visible for users that made comments in the modded subreddit? I wonder if I can make it show a summary for my own account, since I’ve gotten some weird limitations lately-ish.

Afaiu some instances or apps have ‘starter packs’.

Only visible if someone makes a comment in a sub that you mod.

Fortunately, here we are in charge of our blocks (for the most part).

they even brag about creating accounts specifically for this purpose

Yep! I’ve seen it happen me, which is why I created a new identity for myself, so I could get away from those guys.

Don’t be too excited. That’s been done on here at Lemmy too. I think it was called santabot, and it would ban/unban you from some guys community purely based on your upvote/downvote ratio, without any other input. It was controversial, and some called him out on it, but others thought he was doing awesome with it.

He’s no longer around now, but I was surprised the admins let him keep using that bot the entire time he was here.

Well, there is a difference between having a situation, where some comunities udo use automation tools to ban/unban and where the whole platform uses them.

Your post should have more upvotes! Thanks for testing and sharing the information. I’m going to try it, I don’t have a reddit account anymore, so I would fail on step one (don’t have a sus account) but I think the general idea is replaceable for getting people to join fedi from any other site

You can try without having step 1 in place, but you might get picked up by reddit’s filters.

If you have a brand new account you often can’t post in most subs or will get flagged for Advertising etc.

Sure, but this was a little more than an automod, because it was based on what you did outside of the community, and banned you based on how many downvotes you got from other people.

So let’s say you got 1 upvote for your comment yesterday. Then 2 downvotes today. That unrelated comm, would ban you even if you had never been there,. had never posted in the comm, or even heard of the comm.

Well, than this automation tool was a piece of crap software poorly designed to mimic Reddit’s karma system.

Agreed. And like I mentioned earlier, I was a little troubled by how many were ok with it. Luckily I didn’t see it used anywhere else, and haven’t seen it since the guy left.